Happy National Poetry Month! All throughout April, we will interview poets about working in this digital age. Recently, we spoke with award-winning writer Linda Gregerson. (Photo Credit: Nina Subin)
Q: How did you publish your first book?
A: I was actually very lucky. Gwen Head, who was at the time launching a new press in Port Townsend, Washington, solicited the manuscript and offered to publish it. I was working on my PhD at the time and, without this incentive, would have been much slower to complete the book.
Q: Has the Internet changed the way you interact with readers?
A: Certainly. I don’t know how many readers encounter my poems for the first time or primarily online, but surely it’s one of the major ways in which we all discover new work these days. I’m still very wedded to the printed page: I like the discipline and the restriction of it; I like the visual architecture of lines and stanzas bounded by material white space. When I discover new poets online or in journals, and find those that most compel me, I want to follow up by buying and holding in my hands and reading and rereading their books. That said, there’s wonderful immediacy to the internet: readers can contact me, and do, electronically; I can respond. The internet chips away at the barriers between solitary writing and solitary reading.
Q: What type of research process do you undergo when you’re writing poems?
A: For me as for most poets, I think, the process of research can mean a thousand things. I found myself two days ago trying to find out what I could about the geometrical structure of robins’ nests. For a series of lyrics in the voice of Dido several years ago, I reread the Aeneid and researched other, later treatments of the Dido narrative. Sometimes I find myself looking up the background to a troubling story I’ve read in the morning paper. Once I called upon a colleague in neurobiology to explain to me the workings of a Nomarski microscope (that colleague was generous beyond all measure). Another time, for a sequence on slate mining in the north of England, I studied an online compendium of interviews with miners, a series of geomorphological maps, and diagrams explaining the construction of slate roofs. Sometimes I simply stare out the window.
Q: Do you have any tips for people who want to read and perform poetry in front of an audience?
A: By all means go to as many poetry readings and performances as you possibly can. The ones in auditoriums and public libraries, the ones in coffee shops and bars, poetry performed to music, poetry performed in slams. You’ll begin to get a feel for what you like and don’t like, mannerisms you want to avoid, forms of audience engagement that appeal to you. Read to your friends; read at open mics. Some of these modes and venues will feel to you like an enlargement of your work, true to what you do. Others may be a poor fit.
Q: What advice can you share for aspiring poets?
A: Read read read. And exchange your work with other writers who are passionate about poetry.
Q: What’s next for you?
A: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is publishing my New and Selected Poems in September. And I’m writing an epithalamion for two dear friends who are getting married later this month.