Be Kind Rewind: Where Poetry Meets Proust
Interview Series by L.J. Sysko
“Be Kind Rewind: Where Poetry Meets Proust,” an interview Series by L.J. Sysko
Poetry writing is a holistic proposition, and I believe we ought to talk about craft granularly while we discuss the psychological growth and wellbeing (or lack thereof) that drove it. Since high school, we’ve rightly been New Critically conditioned to separate the speaker from the poet, but I want to restore unity for the sake of this discussion about art making. While we’re feeling retrospective, let’s admit old-school pop cultural influences, personal milestones, relational drama, and makeover montages into the record.
L.J.’s rules of the game:
“The Proustian Questionnaire” is a parlor game lauded by Marcel Proust, the French writer, for its revealing power. To poet-guests, I present all 35 original quiz questions with the Be Kind Rewind version riding parenthetical sidecar—like a madeleine beside the tea. My poet-guests select six from the list to answer: two from The Now, two from The Then, and two from The Way Back When.
Let’s get started:
Erin Belieu’s Cocklebur: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Books, 2026)levitates along the timeline of the poet’s now-six-book oeuvre, sampling from the full range of her trademark kinetic expression. From debut Infanta (1995) to the newest Cocklebur (2026), the 176-page New & Selected displays Belieu’s imagistic buoyancy, evincing equal parts richly textured narrative and pithy lyricism. Gravity abounds: in the form of midwestern heritage paean “Plainsong” (“For her his mud/ heart tumbled like the tufted// weeds that wheel along the plains,/ that sea of mammoth bones,/ that state all made of sky—/ they married in July.”) or wizened-woman wish list “Rose Red” (“What she wanted, of course, was her own place in the forest, // where she would take the flowering trees / that grew outside her mother’s bedroom window— / one white, buxom with albino blossoms, / one red, smaller, with delicate, hooked thorns— / and plant them on opposite sides of her cottage, / watching each bloom fall as summer spoiled them.”). Either way–”buxom” or “delicate”–Belieu mentors us across the dramatic geography of her cultivated dreamscape. From section VI of “Nocturne: My Sister Life”:
“The/ dragonfly stuck in a knickknack’s liquid glass. Sometimes/ you drive a yellow Karmann Ghia through your dream / scapes, clownmobile with transparent, cardboard windows./ Through shopping malls, bordellos, your cousins’ basement,/ you always ferry a passenger. Wake and something else is/ waking: your familiar at the window, stalking what moves / on the ledge.”
Formal poems occasionally curl from the mists, but it’s the voice-driven, image-first lines from Black Box (2006) like “Below Zero,” “Shooting Range,” and “In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral” in which the Nebraska of Belieu’s roots unfurls across a broader map, going west, young ma’am, east, and south, too, before hying off into wry reverie, a territory in which Belieu’s speaker was always native. There are ahhh-inspiring pyrotechnic blooms aplenty in this New and Selected, and so I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention “When at a Certain Party in NYC” from Slant Six (2014) or electric openers from Come Hither, Honeycomb (2026) like this one from “Your Failure”: “was mostly predictable/ and daily.” “Loser Bait” begins, “Some of us/ are chum.// Some of us/ are the come-hither/ honeycomb// gleamy in the middle/ of the trap’s busted smile.” But then, that sound shifts with the new work–hushing, stripping down–intimate with an acoustically humble strum, as in “As for the Heart”: “It’s always been/ this joke the old ones know—/ in such a state/ of nearly doneness,// the world grows sweeter,/ as if our later days/ were underscored with music/ from a nocturne’s saddest/ oboe hidden in the trees.” Oddball metaphors and zinging truth statements give this curated greatest hits album an addictive quality–if you like marvel, cry, laugh, and...in the end, sigh.
I interviewed Erin about her book, her writing life, and the truth of how she got Here.
LJS: What is your idea of a perfect happiness? (BKR version: We’re all chasing THE BIG POEM. Tell us your dream of writing a viral poem. Or, if you’ve already written a poem you think deserves to contend for icon status, which one is it and why?)
EB: I can’t imagine a perfect kind of happiness because perfection is a boringly static state. It’s got no light or heat left in it; it’s a happiness that’s stopped growing. Humans aren’t built for perfection. Better leave that to the gods. But a kind of happiness I’m always chasing is that moment when you’re deep in the flow of a poem, one you’ve grabbed by the tail, and you know it can’t slither away at that point. Those moments when time grows strange and when you finally look up, hours have blinked past in what truly felt like minutes. The house is wrecked, chores ignored, phone calls unreturned, other deadlines blown, nothing to make for dinner. And yet, you don’t regret it. So incredibly satisfying.
LJS: I see in in this collection a kind of a virtuosic capacity to enact both lyric and narrative well. There are poems that are incredibly spare and then poems that feel much more maximal and rooted in temporality, with the reader permitted a greater specificity in locating the persona of the speaker, whereas in the lyric ones, the speaker is abstracted and made more elliptical. In other words, I felt in reading Cocklebur, that I was covering a tremendous territory–geographically, from New York to Nebraska to Texas and elsewhere–but aesthetically, too.
EB: When my first books were being reviewed, the reviewers took a lot of interest in the idea of a poet working in numerous modes, “She does This, she does That.” There was a lot of reportage concerning the different structural, tonal, and formal devices I have always used. I didn’t realize that was considered unusual until reviewers kept pointing it out. But if enough people tell you, “That’s odd and interesting, that’s a distinctive way of being on the page,” then I guess it’s probably a distinctive thing. I’m very invested in listening to what the poem is telling me that it wants as opposed to me coming into a poem with a preconceived idea of what kind of shape or persona or speaker or landscape or whatever. It’s very much me just being in the passenger seat with a kind of “Jesus take the wheel” attitude. I’ve had my toes in a lot of different aesthetic scenes throughout my life. Especially when I was younger, I consciously sought out and befriended writers whose work was more experimental than where I started from, wanting to know about all the shades, shapes, approaches and tones a poem can make. I want every possible tool for my toolbox.
Though I made a point of only applying to one school for graduate school. That was BU because I wanted to work with Robert Pinsky and Derek Walcott. Because I knew I was faking it in terms of understanding the foundational history and forms of poetry with any kind of depth. I was the undergrad who won the little awards and stuff, so I was a tiny fish in a tiny pond who could occasionally land something above average through instinct. But I knew that if I really wanted to have a long life in poetry that I needed to learn what I was afraid to learn. The idea of learning form was secretly scary to me because it sounded like the math part of poetry. Math was never my strongest subject.
LJS: Me neither.
EB: And then it turns out it’s not really about math at all.
LJS: [Laughs.] Yeah, what is it? What did you learn? Please.
EB: Form is the art of listening to a poem. And listening to the shape that it wants, and listening to the patterns that it wants–whether it’s in traditional received form or free verse. A lot of free verse poems, for me, don’t achieve everything they could achieve because they don’t have any kind of pleasing, apprehensible structure. Free verse should be called “kinda sorta freer on a relative scale” verse or something like, because there’s nothing truly “free” about making poetry. The word art comes from artifice. It’s an arrangement, consciously, unconsciously, mostly a combination of both. And so, you can either take responsibility for what’s moving in a free verse poem, or you can just let it sort of schlump around with no posture. Or you can hope you get lucky and randomly arrive at something meaningful and pleasing. But I don’t think that happens frequently.
Pattern is something that people have always loved about poetry. And not just in Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson, the canonical chestnuts. Because humans are smart little monkeys, and we love our patterns, right? We surround and bedazzle ourselves with the patterns we like. Some musical patterns make us tap or toes, some make us weep. I’m open to a lot of different structural approaches. In the same way if you were a master cabinet maker, you’d want to be able to make everything with your tools depending on what’s being asked of you, though there might be a style you return to more often simply because it feels true to you. It pleases you.
More recently, I see a trend for poems that seem to be borrowing the feathers of traditional received form by calling themselves a This or a That form, and I’m like, but…I see zero relationship structurally, conceptually, historically between this form and what you’re calling it. And again, that’s not a crime. Poets can do whatever they want. You can call it whatever you want. I’m not about lodging complaints with the poetry HOA.
In my New and Selected, there are all kinds of rhyme and meter handled with various levels of looseness or formality. My last book, Come Hither Honeycomb, starts with a proper villanelle [“Instructions for the Hostage”]. It’s not “villanelle-esque” or only conceptually villanelle-y. Because, for me, I like the strict incantation of a villanelle when it’s done well.
LJS: ALL the rules.
EB: In that case, yes. I like how the structures pull me off my bullshit, my preconceived boringness. I like strictures that force me to be inventive, to think about new ways to think about the poem, to reach for things that wouldn’t be in the poem if I hadn’t set up these boundaries for myself. I mean, some people might just get way luckier than I do. They might just have this kind of natural intuitive, inventive sense that allows them to wander into something really dynamic and interesting through a kind of instinctive process. I just don’t think most poets can count on that leading to something memorable and moving for the reader.
Every generation sets up various ideas for what they think a good poem is. Embracing some things, reacting against what the poets who came before seemed to be more interested in collectively. I’m a teacher who’s taught workshops for three decades now; I’m always trying to get us out of groupthink because I think that’s the biggest problem that we have with the corporate, professionalizing mentality that’s sort of taken over MFA/PhD programs: the fashionable poem by consensus. Is there a way to have the workshop honor what is peculiar and odd and maybe outside the moment? I think it’s very normal for human beings to see something different and first take it amiss. As opposed to thinking, “Oh. Interesting. What’s going on with that?” I’m often stopping the group and asking, “Is there really a “problem” with this? Or is it just something you haven’t encountered before?”
LJS: When you know that you’re about to embark on a kind of formal endeavor, like, “Damnit, I’m writing a villanelle,” is there any ceremony that accompanies that to get you ready? Are you lining things up on your desk at right angles?
EB: No, no, no, no. I’m just flopped on my couch with my wide landscape legal pad (the wide format is very handy for drafting) and my favorite pencil—presently the Blackwing limited edition “Independent Bookstore” model which my friend Kay gave me as a present recently. I do love a beautiful pencil. I typically carry poems around in my head, working them for a long time before that pencil ever gets to the page.
I mean, I’m always reading, like the rest of us are; that’s not unusual. The biggest part of my diet is very contemporary, free verse work. But I always return to reading the canonical poems I love just to keep those rhythms in my bones so I’m always in a state of readiness for whatever comes into my web. Not that my poems are going to come out in organized meters as a result—typically they don’t—but rather carrying that unconscious sense of musicality and compression inside myself so that it’s there without consciously reaching for it.
Recently I’ve been reading Jonathan Galassi’s The Vineyard. Oh, it’s so good. There’s such a companionable grace and ease to that book, compression and pacing that are expert but not showy at all. A whole and beautiful world with its people and landscape. It’s both comforting and heart wrenchingly elegiac, with such a palpable sense of time’s movement. It’s an extended poem, which I’ve been savoring 10 pages at a time before bedtime. I enjoy reading most when I’m slightly sleepy so that I don’t fight a poem with my professional critic head, just letting poems wash over me for the pleasure of them. Or sometimes, I’ll pick up one of those books that’s always next to my bed–Columbia University Press’ Top 500 Poems, for example–and read someone like John Donne or Ben Jonson before I fall asleep.
LJS: What is your greatest extravagance? (BKR version: Describe The Zone—your most luxurious and extravagant minutes or hours spent writing a poem, a book, a line, a rhyme.)
EB: My greatest extravagance is my writing space. For most of my adulthood, I was always somebody’s wife and had to figure out places to perch to do my work. My dedicated space for working was something of an afterthought inside my family life. Which, you know, some other women may recognize this dynamic we slip into without being conscious of it at the time—Mom always gives herself the burnt piece at supper, right? Husband really needs the office room. (Thanks, Patriarchy!) So, when I moved to Houston five years ago, my son off at college, and blessedly single, I was able to really think about how I wanted to live without negotiating anyone else’s desires. No shade to the happily married, but given how deeply interiors affect me, being able to make a space that is exactly the way I alone want it to be was an incredible gift. My design brief to myself was “Medieval library hidden in the Forest of Dean” (since I am always happiest in a forest). I’m a ruthless flea marketer and eBay haggler, and have filled my space with beautifully made, vintage and antique things, each with its own story and provenance. The bonus is it’s typically much more affordable and much better for the environment to repurpose than to buy the disposable, plastic-filled garbage that’s made today. In any case, my writing space is an oasis for me now. The one splurge I allowed myself is a huge cathedral wall of Morris’s “The Brook” wallpaper that flanks the bay window in my living room. Giant Boston ferns filter the sunlight coming through. So, I brought the forest I love inside. It’s lavishly moody and peaceful (except for when the leaf blowers show up, a scourge that should be outlawed). It’s so heartening to finally have a writing space I love.
LJS: When you knew that you were embarking on the project of Cocklebur: New and Selected Poems, did you have a hard time selecting from among your published work? Because I think a lot of people are really terrible self-assessors. In judging what my “A-sides” vs. “B-sides” are, I’m often walking around with my skirt on backwards. How much was your experience over a long career with readings and garnering both audience and critical reception in your ear? Or were you kind of like, “Well, nobody’s ever really given a shit about this poem, but I know that it’s successful, so I’m including it”?
EB: I already know that my picker–where I stand in relationship to my poems–isn’t always the audience favorite. Poets have their own odd relationships to their poems necessarily. Carl Phillips is one of my best friends, so he very kindly worked with me on the selections for Cocklebur so that I benefited greatly from his perspective. Having someone of his caliber who knows my work as thoroughly over time as Carl does... because we’ve shared our poems with each other while drafting them for thirty some years... that’s a marvelous piece of luck, to have such a generous friend who would give their time to that process, and for that friend to be one of the greatest poets writing in America today.
I mean this genuinely–not just one of those things you say for interviews–I’m grateful for any amount of attention my poems have gotten. At the same time, I think if there were a misperception, which is too big a word for this, but if there were something that I wanted to try to focus on a little bit more in choosing the poems for Cocklebur, it’s that I get a bit tired of being labeled “wisecracking” because I’m not actually a comedy act, which the poems over time make quite clear. And because I also don’t live in a 1940s screwball comedy. I’m not a “wisecracking gal.”
LJS: [Laughs.] You’re a helluva broad.
EB: Ha! “Helluva.” Exactly. When you look at my work over time, it’s sometimes felt maybe a bit easy as a hook, “Oh, she’s so funny!” Or, “She’s sardonic/satirical/sarcastic.” Those things are not completely untrue about my poems; I do believe in all the different flavors of comedy that help us truthfully explore and register what it is specifically to be human: there’s a portion of my work that does have this outward facing wryness and socio-critical perspective, but it’s a smaller part of my work.
And so, there was part of me that had to really think about the poems that might be crowd pleasers vs. what’s genuinely essential to my work. For instance, “When at a Certain Party in NYC” has been widely anthologized and very successful and turned into a little film.
LJS: I didn’t know that!
EB: Yes, Motion Poems turned it into an animated film; there’s an animated me (or my speaker) going through New York. It was fun to see the poem morph into a different art form and all the different ways they interpreted it. So, some of those outward facing, more voice-driven poems stayed, but some of them, I thought, “I don’t know that this is really essential.”
LJS: Well, a poem in Erin Belieu’s poetic landscape I really do want to talk about is “Plainsong,” which is the poem that has rolled around in my head post-Cocklebur reading. There’s something so beautiful in it–in how hard it is to engender pathos using such plain diction and seemingly simple, repeating imagery: “he was generous as sand. The kind// of man who drifted/ like the yellow hills that lifted/ their sloping shoulders to the bad/ lands. For her his mud/ heart tumbled like the tufted// weeds that wheel along the plains,/ that sea of mammoth bones,/ that state all made of sky–/ they married in July.”
I wonder about this poem’s composition. It almost looks like it came out so easily. But it also seems–and I would absolutely believe you if you said this–you might have tortured over its edits for years. Which was it? I’m curious.
EB: It’s lovely that you noted that poem as I have a very soft spot for it. If you asked me to narrow down three poems I’ve written that are closest to my heart personally–”Plainsong” is one of the closest.
LJS: Good! I kind of knew it, I just knew it, you know, it feels like...not to interrupt you, but what you were saying about being called “wisecracking”…I think there’s something inherently comedic in how imagistic you are and associative. You remind me of Gerald Stern in that way, where the natural associativeness is joyful with a buoyancy in being generous to that “pattern-making monkey Reader,” who is kind of like, “She trusts me to go along, keep up, and get it!” And so, there’s something about that–creating the bouncing ball and then inviting readers to follow–that even if the subject isn’t meant to be humorous, it feels optimistic in terms of providing a mechanism for inducing a harmony or community within the poem.
EB: That’s a very nice compliment. I recognize my poems in how you’ve described that sense of leaping imagistic buoyancy. Frank O’Hara is the greatest of this particular poetic ilk, I think. There’s most often an exuberance, an enthusiasm and hunger for experience in the way he moves, even when he’s heart broken or he’s turned the volume down on his signature enthusiasms and deep interest in the world. I, too, am deeply interested in the world. I feel like he and I would have been good friends. But then, I think most poets wish they’d been friends with Frank O’Hara.
LJS: ...so then when, as in “Plainsong,” that impulse is quieted–the images are less metaphorical than frank, and we’re not bouncing buoyantly atop, but we’ve settled into a kind of earthen place instead–it reminds me of, say, watching a comedic actor like Jim Carrey or Robin Williams be sad and straight and pathetic, you know? In a way, your speaker has that persona, so that when you are reading across a grand scope of your work as in this New & Selected, you’re accustomed to that buoyancy, and then a poem like “Plainsong” comes in, it’s, “Shhhh. We’re gonna sit down in this grass and be still.”
EB: Yes. There are a number of poems in Cocklebur that work within that register, but perhaps “Plainsong” more notably than most. I was conscious of shaping that sound and texture for the poem concerning my family as I come from a long line of Nebraskan Presbyterians for whom performative plainness and emotional stealth are part of our DNA (though I’m a poor specimen in this regard).
I remember exactly when that poem was written because it felt like such a gift. It was when I was working at AGNI and my boss wasn’t there that day (sorry, Askold). So, I locked the door and the poem came out almost completely in one piece.
I’d been thinking a lot about the difficulty of writing the “family poem” and the difficulty of writing the “grandparent poem.” I talk with my undergrads about this, given it’s subject matter they’re frequently drawn to: for a lot of Americans, or maybe this is true worldwide, one of our first profound encounters with mortality is often the death of a grandparent. And it’s such a difficult subject, to get up and out of the cliches it begs for, and not just cliches and expected images, but the kinds of things you’re even allowed to think about your grandparents.
The fix is in. You can only think these things about your children [makes gesture counting on just a few fingers]. You can only think these things about your husband or wife, and you can only think these things about your parents and grandparents. Because otherwise you’re a terrible, unnatural human being. Or at least you think that about yourself. Though a good poet knows they have to fight through the fix on any subject matter. And so thinking about the kind of life my grandparents lived was really interesting to me after my grandfather had just died, maybe the year before. The POV is pulled far back, particularly in the beginning of the poem, to give myself license to treat my grandparents as characters. The “I” only makes a single brief appearance in the end. So yeah, I’d been chewing on that poem for quite a while. But it all came out in one piece. The rhyming structure came out naturally that way. It was just...”Oh, wow. Thank you, Muses.”
LJS: When you put the pen down, you must have had the sense of...damnnnn!
EB: I was pleasantly shocked. And I’d been writing long enough then to know not to expect it again anytime soon. And that poem has gotten lesser commentary compared to others, which I find...I don’t know. Well, maybe not odd. Most poems don’t get singled out for commentary. It was published in The Atlantic, so, you know, it didn’t remain entirely obscure. But in terms of form, structure, feeling, subject handled with surprise, I think it’s one of my best poems.
LJS: I think it is.
EB: I’m just tickled that you noticed it. You’ve made my year.
LJS: When and where were you happiest? (BKR version: When you think about poems as compared to the discrete units produced in other art forms—songs, paintings, dances, novels, etc.—, what is it that makes you happiest about a poem?)
EB: In terms of poetry happiness, I suppose the day I discovered my first book, Infanta, had won the National Poetry Series. Again, I was the managing editor at AGNI magazine at the time, having graduated from the Boston University poetry program two years before. I’d been informed months earlier that my book was one of their fifty finalists, so I wasn’t consciously putting a lot of big hopes into making it through to the final five for publication.
Then I heard others had already been informed they’d won and I was feeling sour in the way one does when you come close-ish but don’t win something you’d secretly still had hope for. I was sitting at my desk at the AGNI office one afternoon, surrounded by my interns, when I got a call from the organizer at NPS. She introduced herself on the phone, and I’m thinking, “Great. Now I get to sit through the ‘so sorry you didn’t win’ phone call and have to be gracious about it when actually I’m feeling painfully rejected and fairly stank.”
So when she told me I’d actually won, that something happened with my forms, they’d had to track me down through some impressive sleuthing, I was already in crusty rejection mode and wasn’t really listening. She had to repeat herself twice to get it across, ‘No, no. You won. Hayden Carruth selected your book and Copper Canyon Press will be publishing it next year…”I was so stunned, I burst into tears. Like, big, air gulping sobs. My interns told me later they were sure one of my parents had died and this was the dreaded phone call. But yes, after the sobbing, a moment of complete happiness. That sensation that maybe this whole writing life thing might go somewhere. That my dreams weren’t a complete folly. And that it should be Copper Canyon that chose it? They’d always been my absolute dream press, since I was about 17 years old. And they still are, now six books later with them. Once again, talk about the greatest good luck.
LJS: What is your greatest regret? (BKR version: I have lost poem ideas because I was lying in bed too lazy (or overconfident about my memory) to jot the note. Have you? ...spent months (years!) lacking confidence in your craft, or lost faith in art’s capacity to effect meaning, or aspired to a simple hobby when you ought to have snapped out of your self-induced funk and written instead? Sorry, I know there’s a question here somewhere. Ahem. Please discuss some of your poetry regrets.)
EB: My greatest regret is all the time I’ve wasted not writing. In having not learned to be a little more usefully self-preservational earlier in my professional life. In saying yes when I really wanted to say no. Or needed to say no but felt like I couldn’t. I’m always telling younger women this about life in a professional setting—YOU MUST LEARN TO SAY NO. For instance, because I am a woman who is also a full professor (which is statistically still rarer than it should be), I am asked constantly to write for people’s tenure cases (and for full professors who are women of color, they get asked even more often, a truly outlandish number of requests). For those who don’t know, agreeing to write a tenure letter for someone is a huge, time consuming, typically unpaid labor. I finally asked another Chair who had written to me last year, “Am I on some secret list somewhere that says, ‘Ask Erin, she’ll do it.’” And the Chair’s candid answer was, “We typically ask women first because they are much more likely to say yes than the male professors we contact.”
LJS: Speaking of labor and heavy lifts: how do you track your edits?
EB: You know, the document file names get more and more absurd, like “Done.” “No, Really, This One.” “Ok, Hold On A Sec.” “Absolutely DONE!”
[Laughter.]
Or one–pardon my language–recent one is called “Jesus F**k!” My computer gets mad if the file titles are too close together, so, of course I start forgetting what preposterous thing I’ve called the file and I have to search around recent dates and everything. I’ve gotten better about not drafting into oblivion, but if you just leave me to my own devices, I will keep making things slicker and slicker. And again—this seems to be a theme emerging—I am the luckiest person on the planet because I have this little group of people who look at my poems, who just happen to be brilliant poets: Dana Levin, Kevin Prufer, Carl Phillips, Adrian Matejka, Keith Kopka. I mean, how wonderful is that? They’ll let me know if I’m starting to beat a poem to death.
I polish and polish. Even in the voicey, more loosely structured poems, I’m prone to rubbing everything to a high sheen. Though, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that working everything to this patent leather brightness isn’t always....well, not everything should be shiny. Being able to say, “Number four was better than number 40” is something I’ve learned over time. I’ve had people stage interventions on me when they’ll take the shoeshine cloth away from me and be like, “Stop it!” I find that kind of friend essential.
LJS: Erin, the rocks are polished! This is a preoccupation of mine right now: how much “impasto” rough to leave in. Didn’t Rodin say something about leaving rough stone as part of a finished sculpture to prioritize expressiveness rather than the notion of finish?
EB: It’s art itself, of every kind. Though imagine how awful that must be with something like sculpture—stepping back and going, “Oh, no! I ruined it!” For writers, at least paper’s cheap and hopefully life is long. Starting over isn’t so costly. I’m a big fan of simply starting a poem over.
LJS: Which living person do you most admire? (BKR version: Is there a hero you want to shout out? Could be your 8th grade Band Director (requisite Jason Kelce retirement speech allusion) or a poet mentor or...?)
EB: My greatest heroes are K-12 English teachers and librarians. My father was a public school administrator in charge of special education and gifted programs and he chose to focus on schools in lower income neighborhoods especially. He put enormous energy into bringing the arts to kids who were typically not offered that kind of essential exposure. I have seen first-hand and many times the impact that such teachers have in hugely expanding a child’s sense of what’s possible for them, offering the kinds of enrichment one needs to imagine one’s life in 3-D Technicolor. I have tried to follow his model, volunteering in the public schools wherever I’ve lived, bringing poetry to kids anywhere from 3rd grade to seniors in high school. I started a reading series for my son’s high school when I lived in Tallahassee, working with the librarians there to get copies of books by major writers like Carl and Brad Watson into the hands of 40-50 kids. at a time. Those librarians would shake the publishers down good! I watched how hard they fought for resources; how much they gave to their students. When writers came to visit at the reading series I directed at FSU, I’d often ask, “Hey you got two hours to volunteer to do this?” Every single writer I asked said yes without hesitation. Makes me feel good about our literary tribe.
LJS: Earlier, you said, “The fix is in,” about granting self-permission to write about family. I was thinking about how often poets then redirect their most savage critical attention upon themselves, turning the camera around and going, “Well the one person I really target is me! Cannonball!” For this reason, I admire the poem at the end of this collection, the one featuring a lone swimmer. The poem is titled, “She Returns to the Water,” and it’s an introspective acknowledgement of the aging body, but it’s not a gratuitous dissection. Nothing dramatic happens. Did you have to pare back from a longer (perhaps meaner) draft?
EB: I took that sort of self-dissection as far as it can possibly go in Black Box (2006). But even when the speaker is really far out there in terms of vulnerability and awareness of one’s complicity in whatever is causing the pain, I think great Confessional poetics have a correspondingly great amount of discipline. Because nobody wants to listen to me rant and scream. That’s not a poem. I always remember that there’s an audience, that a poem is a form of communication, and me howling about my personal problems isn’t inherently interesting to anyone.
“She Returns to the Water” centers this naked woman in a pool thinking about her body’s history over time, thinking about the way middle-aged women’s bodies are perceived and rendered in culture...and the corresponding invisibility expected of us...how we contain every version of ourselves that we’ve been over time, and how the dive still lives inside this woman, a champion springboard diver in her youth. I hope there’s a sense of the hard-won generosity that she has toward herself in that poem.
For me, that character is inside a shame-free state as she’s contemplating those versions of herself. Patriarchy works very, very hard to make sure that we absolutely despise ourselves, right? Because then we’ll consume a lot more stuff to fix what’s “wrong” with us. But in that moment, she’s finally come to the other side of seeing her own body as “a nemesis without a zipper for escape…”
Being on the other side of that is beautiful: I’m fine with me. I’m fine with my body. I’m fine with my face. I’m genuinely fine with all of it. It’s what I earned, it’s one map of my life, and I’m kind of proud of me. That doesn’t mean I don’t buy too many lipsticks occasionally. It just means there is incredible grace and strength in women’s aging and taking the hook out of our own mouths.
It was first published on the Academy’s Poem-A-Day—meaning many folks read it—and people out of the blue wrote to me, women specifically wrote to me, about that poem; a lot of women felt fully seen by that poem. I was deeply touched by the response, that my sister tribe felt recognized and lifted up by something I’d written. That’s what I hope for–that my poems will go out there and find a place in somebody’s heart and mind. And just knowing that is so lovely.
LJS: Where would you most like to live? (BKR version: In Poetlandia, who would you most want as your next door neighbors? Why?)
EB: Well, obviously, we’re living in my house, given what I’ve said about it. Or, wait, I don’t have enough bedrooms, so we can buy a ramshackle old agriturismo in Italy’s Aosta Valley with room for many and where we can have an enormous garden and maybe a small vineyard (I’d like to try growing a chalky dry and minerally Riesling there). But I will be in charge of the interior design. This planned community must include Dana Levin, Kevin Prufer, Adrian Matejka, Cate Marvin, Laurie Foos, Mark Bibbins and Keith Kopka (and all their delightful spouses/partners too). Carl and his partner Reston have a permanently dedicated space there, which they probably won’t use—Carl is generally hermit-y, like I am—but I will try to coax them for occasional visits. Every one of these poets is also a good choice for a zombie apocalypse survival hut. They collectively contain many skills we’d need under such circumstances. That’s the core of the community, but once a month, we’ll hold lavish dinner parties for the other writers and artists we love, family and any others who will put up with us, after hiking all day in the Alps to work up a good appetite.
LJS: Reader, to close, I leave you with an excerpt of Erin Belieu’s “She Returns to the Water”:
“It’s three a.m.// which seemed/ the safest time for/ this experiment,// in which she’s turned/ her strange and aging/ body loose....// But this night she’s/ dropped her robe,/ come here to be// the kind of woman/ who swims naked// without asking/ permission, risking/ a stray neighbor// getting the full gander,/ buoyed by salt water,/ all the tough and sag/ of her softened by// this moonlight’s near-/ sighted courtesy.// Look at her: how/ the woman is floating,// while trying to recall/ the exact last/ moment of her girlhood–//...How clean and weightless// the dive returns/ to the woman now;// climbing the high/ metal ladder, then// launching herself,/ no fear, no notion// of self-preservation,// the arc of her/ trajectory pretty/ as any arrow’s// in Saint Sebastian’s/ side. How keen/ that girl, and sleek,// tumbling more/ gorgeous than two/ hawks courting// in a dead drop.”