Nicole Krauss, author of the bestselling novel The History of Love, used to write poetry. You can listen to her read "Valparaiso" and "The Idea of Helen" at The Paris Review's website. "Your Watch" was published in 2000 in a Ploughshares issue guest edited by Paul Muldoon. "Becoming Domestic" is linked to on Krauss's Random House author page, which also features an interview. Krauss was asked to describe the transition from poetry to fiction. Her reply:
For a long time I only wanted to write poetry. But it's hard—a hard life, I mean. There's that thing Auden said, about how a poet only believes himself to be a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. "The moment before, he was still only a potential poet: the moment after he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever." With a novel it's somehow easier: the duration of the writing is so much longer, and the unhappiness of the in-between less frequent.
In a 2005 interview, Krauss remarked that at one point for her poetry felt like "the great goal of the language" but quit soon after completing a research project on Joseph Cornell (connection?). According to the interviewer, poetry represented for Krauss "an impossible quest for precision." She refused to show him her poems. This part of the interview intrigued me so I set off looking for her poetry on line and found the four poems I link to above.
I'm glad that it was with Corey Mead and not Nicole Krauss that I raised my "poet identity anxieties" about three years ago. I met Corey at a poetry reading that featured Jorie Graham and--Stingy Kids favorite--Laura Sims. Corey is married to Laura and, at the time, was a couple of years into a grad program. He asked me if I wrote poetry and I went into this long explanation about how graduate school took time away from writing and how difficult it was to balance competing identities (academic, creative, blah blah blah), etc. Corey's response: "It's just poetry." Not long after that conversation, I started writing poems again.
Corey has been working on a fantastic series of poems titled "The Book of Edgar," parts of which have appeared in print. The only poem from this series that I could find on line was "Barn Songs," which was published in 3rd bed.
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Kottke recently linked to a post on the Virginia Quarterly Review's website that tracked the correlation between cliché usage and publication. It turns out that clichés are very publishable.
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I came across this wonderful Flickr image:
The artist is the daughter of poet Anne Boyer. I looked up some of Boyer's work and was immediately dazzled. "A Romance of Happy Workers" and "Larks" were published in different of issues of Typo. She also has a chapbook out with Effing Press (which can purchase via the Effing Press blog) and a crazy website.
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More from Flickr: paper_wings(butterf ly), "coexisting" (photography and Alice Notley's "In the Circuit")
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Belladonna* has a new website. This probably happened months ago but I just noticed. I love it!
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Sarah Horowitz makes gorgeous books. Poetry, nature and personal memories inspired her work on Paper Towers and Mohn, which include poems (in English translation) by Kadya Molodowsky and Paul Celan respectively.
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"Like, the more they talk/ never having"--Corey Mead, "Barn Songs"
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