Please tell us about the making of “At the Florence Nightingale Museum.”
In trying to write about my mother’s recent death, I could not address the subject directly. But thinking it through the lens of the museum changed my way into the difficult subject matter. To refresh my language, I go to as many museums as I can—not art museums but museums about a person like Nightingale or a thing (locks, hair, carousels). I find that these museums full of objects both take me out of myself and yet at the same time bring me back to my deepest self and my obsessions.
How do you handle creative blocks?
I don't believe in them! I tell myself, I can always write a bad poem. I can always write toward a poem. I open a dictionary app. I study an old photograph. I read a recipe from the fifties. There is always something that will spark my thinking that I can find. Basically, I trick myself into writing all the time. I use objects and old books and pieces of text.
If you weren’t a poet, what other type of art form would you be pursuing?
I wish I were a photographer but I am terrible at taking pictures. However, I love looking at photography and reading about it and thinking about its philosophical and ethical and practical underpinnings.
What are you working on now?
I am working on poems about my mother for a poetry/hybrid project called Mother Water Ash. and her death which take up questions of the New Orleans landscape—which is in such peril—where she lived and died.
Who has been your most impactful poetry teacher? Why was this person so influential for you?
Two poetry teachers: Philip Levine and C.D. Wright. Both when I was an undergraduate. Both wonderful poets and human beings, now gone. I teach their work to my students as often as I can. Both are permission-giving writers in terms of form and subject matter. And both were so generous and kind. To me, they are models of how to live and write in the world.
In trying to write about my mother’s recent death, I could not address the subject directly. But thinking it through the lens of the museum changed my way into the difficult subject matter. To refresh my language, I go to as many museums as I can—not art museums but museums about a person like Nightingale or a thing (locks, hair, carousels). I find that these museums full of objects both take me out of myself and yet at the same time bring me back to my deepest self and my obsessions.
How do you handle creative blocks?
I don't believe in them! I tell myself, I can always write a bad poem. I can always write toward a poem. I open a dictionary app. I study an old photograph. I read a recipe from the fifties. There is always something that will spark my thinking that I can find. Basically, I trick myself into writing all the time. I use objects and old books and pieces of text.
If you weren’t a poet, what other type of art form would you be pursuing?
I wish I were a photographer but I am terrible at taking pictures. However, I love looking at photography and reading about it and thinking about its philosophical and ethical and practical underpinnings.
What are you working on now?
I am working on poems about my mother for a poetry/hybrid project called Mother Water Ash. and her death which take up questions of the New Orleans landscape—which is in such peril—where she lived and died.
Who has been your most impactful poetry teacher? Why was this person so influential for you?
Two poetry teachers: Philip Levine and C.D. Wright. Both when I was an undergraduate. Both wonderful poets and human beings, now gone. I teach their work to my students as often as I can. Both are permission-giving writers in terms of form and subject matter. And both were so generous and kind. To me, they are models of how to live and write in the world.