Interview with Kim Addonizio
RSP: Sharon Olds mentioned in an interview with Dwight Garner of Salon
Magazine that it's important to get out of art's way, that poems have their
own centrifugal force that brings them into being. As a facilitator of
poetry workshops in the Bay Area, would you agree with this statement? If
poems tend to will themselves into being, what is the significance and
responsibility of your role in the workshops?
KA: Getting out of the poem's way is certainly a crucial part of the process.
So is conscious crafting. It's the mix of the two that is at work in the
labor--and the joy--of making any piece of art. I've usually seen my role as
a workshop teacher as being craft-oriented: helping students see where the
meaning is murky, discussing their imagery or word choice or line breaks or
metaphors. I'm often trying to get them to discern a means of understanding
their own intent, or the intent of the poem, as a way towards possibilities
of how to structure the piece at hand. Of course, once they leave the
workshop with various peoples' suggestions, dissatisfactions, and
appreciations, they always have to grapple with how to integrate that
feedback and make their own choices and discoveries.
RSP: You seem to be equally fascinated and repelled by the various faces of
prostitution in America, from phone sex to peep shows. Knowing that you're a
feminist, the compassion with which you render the men in these poems both
surprises and delights me. "The Call", for instance, follows a sleepy mother
through her apartment as she is performing phone sex. Only later in the poem
is it brought to light that the man caller is confined to a wheelchair. This
poem brings to light that there are many lonely people out there who would
have no sexual life, no substitutes for intimacy at all, if not for the
paltry offerings of prostitution. What are your opinions about this
controversial subject matter, and have you encountered any negative feedback
in response to your empathetic treatment of this subject?
KA: I wouldn't call phone sex or peep shows prostitution, but I take your
point in terms of a broader sense of how women are viewed, and view
themselves, and in terms of commodity. It's a complicated knot I can't
untangle. I'm just trying to look at what is.
There's a sort of simple transactional agreement in the setups--phone sex,
peep show--and then there are the individuals involved, and that's what
makes the transactions interesting. I should point out, by the way, that in
the other poem you're referring to, "Physics," the person watching the nude
dancer is not necessarily a man. It's a "you" who could be male or female.
The fantasy of fucking her could be a woman's, as well. If you take the
"you" as a second-person narrator, then it's potentially the writer, who is
female.
On the other hand, if you start to feel like the "you" is you, the
reader, on some level--which I hope happens-- the reader is the viewer in a
couple of senses. He or she is drawn into the peep show booth, the page, the
poem, and goes through the imaginative experience of having the tables
turned. That is, the watcher gets watched, too. As for negative feedback, do
you mean from other women? I get all kinds of negative feedback from various
quarters, about being too confessional or personal or whatever ax someone's
got to grind. I'm sure there are some people who are offended by my work.
There are certainly some who are dismissive of my subject matter. Any time
you put yourself out there, you can't control what people are going to think
or how they're going to react.
RSP: Being a mother and a poet, do you find it difficult to strike a balance
between responsibility to your child and honesty in your writing? Many
writers have worried what impact, if any, their words might later have on
their children and their children's peers. Has your daughter ever taken
issue with the licentious subject matter of some of your poems, and if so,
is there anything you wish you would have done differently? Are there any
topics that you can explore more fully now that your daughter is older?
KA: This is really a non-issue for me. I'm more worried about what my mother
thinks. I pulled a poem from my most recent book because it was about her
Parkinson's and I was concerned she'd feel bad reading those descriptions of
herself. My daughter, Aya, called me the other night from college and said,
"Mom, I've been reading your book. It's amazing." She's so cool. I've never
even known how much of my stuff she has read--I just give her the books &
tell her, Whenever you're ready, go ahead and see what I'm up to, if you
want.
I never showed my mother my book of stories, IN THE BOX CALLED PLEASURE,
because it's so out there. She's proud of me, though, that I've made my way
as a poet. I send her my poetry books & we never talk about anything that's
in them, so I'm not sure she's read them. Although "What Do Women Want," a
poem I wrote about a woman wanting a red dress--she loved that. I showed her
a broadside I'd made and she wanted copies for all her friends, and she had
it framed in 3 places in her condo.
RSP: Your poetry has been called gritty, ingenious, and confessional, while
other poets' work, such as Denise Levertov's, has been lauded for its deep
spirituality. Has it ever bothered you that fans and critics alike seem to
comment largely upon the triggers and byproducts of pain in your work
(addiction, broken relationships, etc.), while overlooking the deeply
sacred, centered tone of your poems? Do your poems reflect your personal spiritual beliefs?
KA: Yeah, sure, it bothers me sometimes that people tend to focus on one
thing. I'm supposedly a confessional poet, but my second book was a novel in
verse--no Kim anywhere!-- and every book of poems has taken up the issue of
the suffering in the world, the problem of evil, and the human coming to
terms with death, along with the subjects you mention. My spirituality is
not religious, but I was raised Catholic and so those metaphors and symbols
are a useful and familiar way to explore my existential questions.
RSP: Did you encounter any discrimination when you first began
writing as a single mother? At what point in your
career spectrum did you earn your college degrees at San Francisco State,
and how do you think they helped legitimize you as a writer, despite people's
prejudices?
KA: I never felt stigmatized by anybody, though I've often
felt like a freak or an alien--a common enough experience for writers and
artists. As for my education, I got my BA when I was twenty-eight, the same
year I had Aya. Then I spent four years earning a Master's, going part-time
so I could work and raise her. Then more school, some teaching of
composition and other work, and eight years after I got my Master's, my
first book was published, when I was forty. I never felt the need to
legitimize myself in the eyes of anyone except, maybe, my mother--who
thought I should be writing romance novels because they, at least, sold, and
people actually read them. People she knew, anyway.
RSP: What was the first big-name print publisher to take your work when you
were still unknown in the industry, and how did you react to that first
success? Have you found that each success makes the next easier to attain?
KA: The industry...Interesting assumption. I've never seen the poetry world as
such. Poetry, after all, is not writing that makes money. Poets don't make
much money, either. I know I don't. It has been a real financial struggle
over the years. I am only now, at nearly fifty, in a place where I can more
or less pay the bills. Though I don't teach in a university, I have to teach
to survive, and I need the paying readings that universities offer. I say
this because some people have a real misconception about the economics of
all this. Bottom line: don't quit your day job unless you have another
source of support. I had day jobs for many, many years--cook, secretary,
waitress, office worker. I've traded a certain amount of economic security
for the freedom of freelancing.
...As for a big-name print publisher, I'm not sure what you're asking. My
books have been published with small presses, except for the tattoo book,
and that wasn't my own work but a compilation I co-edited. Maybe Norton
counts, now that it has brought out my latest poetry collection. I was
encouraged, earlier, by being published a number of times in my school
literary journal, TRANSFER. Then there were occasional acceptances or
encouraging scribbles of "Sorry"--little rafts I could cling to amid the sea
of rejection slips.
I got an NEA grant in 1990 and that was a huge feeling
of validation, not to mention a lot of money. As for each success, well, my
sense that I will succeed at the next thing has grown somewhat. I've always
been pretty driven and focused about my writing, and while I've had an
enormous amount of self-doubt, and a more general sense of despair over how
little this kind of work seems to matter to the larger culture, those things
have never kept me from it for too long.
RSP: You've mentioned in interviews that you love to be your own boss. Was
this ideal at all compromised during the creation of your two
collaborations, The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing
Poetry with Dorianne Laux (W.W. Norton) and Dorothy Parker's Elbow with
Cheryl Dumesnil (Warner Books)? How were you all able to set your own
boundaries and decide who is responsible for what aspects of the books'
creation?
KA: I love collaborating with other creative women. I'm just finishing up a
word/music CD with another poet, Susan Browne, whose first book, BUDDHA'S
DOGS, is coming out this spring. Our CD is called SWEARING, SMOKING,
DRINKING, & KISSING. It's been a blast making it. Working with Dorianne was
great, because we'd been fledgling poets together and showed each other all
our work, and then we taught some workshops together, and it fell into place
very naturally. We would finish each other's sentences all the time. Then,
editing the tattoo book (DOROTHY PARKER'S ELBOW) with Cheryl was also a
natural thing. Cheryl had the idea for the book and we tossed around ideas
and got to work on it, and on the days I felt overwhelmed she'd carry it
forward, and vice-versa. There were moments when each of us was ready to
quit, but luckily not at the same time. Because there were two of us, the
book ended up happening.
RSP: In your online writing journal Writing/Life you wrote a "personal note"
to your stalkers, that reads, "To all versions of ARE YOU REALLY THAT GOOD
LOOKING OR IS IT JUST A GOOD PICTURE? And YOU SURE ARE A PRETTY GAL, I WOULD LIKE TO HANG OUT WITH YOU SOMETIME: Get a life, you sexist losers. Quit sending me your pathetic porn fantasies in the form of shitty poems."I find it very interesting that you address the problem of stalkers because
I've always thought that this sort of negative attention was reserved for
music, film, and sports celebrities. With your online journal and intimate
writing style, you put more of your personal life out there than most
writers do, which makes you an attractive target for voyeurs. The popularity
of webcams, blogs, and reality TV testifies to our nation's love of spying
and cozying up to people who don't know we exist. Can you describe some of
the unwanted attention you've received, and how it has affected your life?
KA: Anyone can have a stalker. If you work in an office it might be someone at
the office. I've been thinking a lot about the whole reality thing you're
talking about. It's like this voluntary relinquishing of privacy, and it
bothers me. Sometimes I've thought about discontinuing my online journal.
But that doesn't mean there wouldn't still be someone out there reading my
poems and imagining that we share some deep personal bond.
I once heard someone say, "Watch out for people who want to fuck your poetry." Obviously stalkers are people who have, shall we say, boundary issues. It's best not
to feed their fantasies, because that makes them feel more connected to you.
So I really shouldn't have written that. I was just bugged. It's like spam.
Some people write me wanting to carry on lengthy correspondences, or asking
for critiques of their poetry. They don't understand that most writers
prefer to correspond with their friends, not strangers, and that most
writers, if they evaluate work, are professionals offering a professional
opinion, and are therefore paid for their time.
I'm happy when my writing has been meaningful for someone and they write to let me know, and I write back telling them I'm glad my work mattered to them. That should be the end of it, but people, especially people who want to be writers, can be very
needy. They think a published writer has some secret and should hand it
over. They sometimes think they are undiscovered geniuses. It's ridiculous.
On the other hand, I have compassion for those who just don't know any
better, who are naive or young. I write back to everyone who emails me, even
if briefly. Unless, of course, they're clearly crazy, or insulting.
RSP: A quote from your online journal (December 2003) reads: "To see the truth of the power of art, the necessity of it--why is that so difficult for the politicians & budget slashers & self-appointed moral guardians of the culture to grasp? It is what we have--all we have--against all this violence and horror.That, and love. It's so laughably simple that virtually no one gets it." In many of your journal entries you defend government funding of the arts and aid to the unemployed. Why are your journal entries more overtly
political than your poems? Do you feel that it is a writer's responsibility to tackle
perceived injustices?
KA: I've written a number of political poems. I'm not interested in writing a
poem arguing for or against government funding or a political candidate.
"Garbage" and "Target," to name two poems from TELL ME, are overtly
political poems. I feel it's everyone's responsibility to tackle injustice,
one way or another. How we do that is up to the individual. I believe that
writing is one way, but I also believe it's easy to say, "I write about it,
so I don't need to do anything"--it's easy to be self-righteous without
actually confronting the question of what you can do in more concrete terms.
I don't do nearly enough, personally. I give money when I can, to a couple
of literary organizations, to Amnesty International, to firefighters. For
years I volunteered in various ways, but I haven't in some time now. I've
been wanting to do some literacy volunteering at the library, but I'm
traveling too much, and you have to make a weekly commitment. That's what
I'd like to do next, though, teach adults to read. Some of the most
rewarding teaching I ever did was when I taught remedial English at SF State
to people who hadn't gotten the basics, who were eager for that information
because they knew it was their ticket to something better.
RSP: You once spoke of poetry as being a sort of parallel universe, and that
there are open doors between the worlds to let certain people, such as
poets, slip through. This idea of being an ambassador from one world or paradigm to
another can be applied to the fusion of opposites that gives your work such
unpredictability. Many writers suffer the compulsiveness that leads to
excess, but you balance each force with a counter-force: sonnets and
free-verse, motherhood and addiction, feminism and pornography, academic and free
agent. Do you feel that you're bridging many worlds with your writing, and
bringing a greater understanding to a highly polarized readership?
KA: I have no idea, really, about that last part. I know I've always
experienced an intense duality in my own nature, so of course it can't be
helped that that comes out in my writing and my way of being in the world.
I'm always feeling like I don't fit. But, you know, I'm not that unique.
I'm just trying to let all those parts have their say. I'm trying to be
honest. And maybe that's what people who like my work have responded to.
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Read poems by Kim Addonizio in this issue of Rock Salt Plum.
