Welcome to my new poetry blog, where I’ll be participating in GloPoWriMo 2023.
I describe myself right now as a “lapsed but reforming” poet. The daughter of a librarian, I’ve always been a bookish person, and started seriously engaging with poetry as a teenager. I began my adult life following a familiar path for those with literary ambitions: a BA in English, stints in the NYC publishing world, an MFA , and time as a writing teacher (adjunct and tutor) mainly for high school and undergraduate students. After grad school, my life as a poet gradually began to fizzle amid the typical struggles many of us face in our 20s and 30s as we try to make a living and start a family in the 21st century. At graduation, pursuing a tenure-track position in academia didn’t seem appealing, and I got lost on the path of exploring alternatives. Then, almost 15 years after finishing my MFA, the urge to make time for poetry again came back with a vengeance (kindled, both knowingly and unknowingly, by three kind people who uncannily thought to check in around the same time). I have a more detailed poetry bio up here.
This poetry blog is somewhat of a big step for me, as I haven’t shared my work very much beyond small communities. As I set up this blog, there are alarm bells going off in my head about publishing work too freely. Still, I’ve come to believe that the best way forward for a poet is to keep generating new poems, and pieces worth keeping will gradually emerge.
I gravitate heavily towards the experimental, find myself asking “why not” when I encounter poetry “shoulds,” and often delight in the nonsensical. An instructor once shared with my workshop her maxim of “revise towards strangeness,” and that’s a phrase I keep coming back to (as well as thoughts about diving into the strangeness from the beginning to insure that the poem comes from a productive place). As a poet, my major influences are H.D., William Carlos Williams, the Oulipians, Barbara Guest, Gertrude Stein, Jorge Luis Borges, and Federico García Lorca.
As a mother of a toddler who gets less adult conversation now, I welcome friendly hellos. If you’re so inclined don’t hesitate to reach out. I also have comments enabled. They do need to be moderated before appearing, so don’t fret when it doesn’t go through right away.