AWP is a lot of things to a lot of people. Part of what it is to me is an opportunity to have coffee and English muffins with my brother Mike and my sister in law Sarah Rose, both of whom are wonderful poets. As for the conference – this, here is all you really need to know:
SARAH ROSE NORDGREN reads at MONSTER MAGS of the MIDWEST III
Wednesday 6 – 9
Back Bay Social Club
Boston, MA
https://www.facebook.com/events/582878865061625/
MIKE PETERSON and KATIE PETERSON THINKING TOGETHER
IN BETWEEN: THE ART OF LYRIC TRANSITIONS:
with David Roderick, Shara Lessley, and Gregory Fraser
Saturday 1:30 PM
Room 104, Hynes Convention Center
Boston, MA
https://www.facebook.com/events/213540505455216/
KATIE PETERSON reads at STOP, COLLABORATE and LISTEN
COLLABORATIVE POETRY AND POETICS from LIKE STARTLINGS
with Jennifer Moxley & Jessica Murray, Richard Siken & Brian Blanchfield, Caryl Page & Michelle Taransky, and Megan Kaminski
Saturday, 4- 6
Boston Playwrights Theatre
https://www.facebook.com/events/169347556546574/
PS I would tell you to go to the New Issues Poetry and Prose table to buy my book, but it’s sold out! If you see me around the conference, ask me for a beautiful postcard with a poem from one of my forthcoming books (Fall 2013) and a photo by Youngsuk Suh on the back.
I have some new work up on the terrific web magazine Free Verse: all three of these poems appear in my forthcoming collection The Accounts.
I am only just starting out in this website / blog / tumblr thing. But it seems like a good start to post Peter Campion’s answers for The Next Big Thing. Peter’s tagged Tomas Q. Morin, who can be found here: http://www.tomasqmorin.com/ Peter himself can be found on Facebook, at the University of Minnesota, and at University of Chicago Press. And other places too, like AWP. His work is awesome. Here’s his interview:
1. What is the working title of your book?
El Dorado
2. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
I don’t know, but you can dance to it.
3. Where did the idea come from for your book?
I try to stay away from ideas.
4. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I began writing poems for this book in February, 2008, and finished the last one in November, 2012. I put the binder clip on a first full draft in the spring of 2010, at the American Academy in Rome. But that ms. is very different than the final version. The published book will be sixty-something pages—about average for a poetry collection these days. But I wrote at least as many pages that aren’t in the book. I just kept scratching away until it felt right.
5. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
More and more, inspiration and hard work feel mutually entailing. I work harder and more often than I used to, including when I’m uninspired, and somehow this leads me to be inspired more often. My teacher in graduate school, Robert Pinsky, liked to quote Ben Jonson’s lines about Shakespeare’s revisions:
Yet must I not give Nature all ; thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet’s matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion : and, that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses’ anvil ; turn the same,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame ;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn ;
For a good poet’s made, as well as born.
That metaphor of the “second heat/Upon the Muses’ anvil” feels true to me. Labor can do terrible things to poems, when guided by will alone—but can also uncover the core where they originate.
So, Jonson and Shakespeare themselves are certainly inspirations. Others include all sorts of art that has moved me. A short, nearly random sample: the be-bop guitar of Grant Green, the photography of Joel Sternfeld, the paragraph construction of Virginia Woolf, the harmonies of Wayne Shorter, the paintings of Mitchell Johnson.
6. What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry.
7. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Contemporary poets I admire include Rosanna Warren, Tom Sleigh, Alan Shapiro, C.K. Williams, James McMichael, David Wojahn, Michael Collier, Tomás Morín, Jericho Brown, Matt Donovan, Daisy Fried, Josh Weiner, and Anne Winters. And the list goes on.
8. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
El Dorado comes out in October 2013, with the University of Chicago Press
9.Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
The cast of Wim Wenders Paris, Texas.
10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Sex and violence.
This is The Next Big Thing. I was tagged by TJ Jarrett. http://www.tjjarrett.com/. And I’m tagging Peter Campion. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/peter-campion. I’ll be posting Peter’s answers here next week – come back soon!
1. What is the working title of your book?
The title of one book is Permission. The title of the other is The Accounts.
2. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Permission: It’s a girl-meets-desert story: they stay together at the end, but it’s always going to be a long distance relationship.
The Accounts: Life is a whodunit where the culprit’s never caught and the investigation goes on forever.
3. Where did the idea come from for your book?
“The best way out is always through.” - Robert Frost
4. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Permission: The first poems in the manuscript were written in 2002, and the last one was finished in 2009. I thought I had a draft in 2008, and then something happened in my life that changed the way everything looked. New poems had to accommodate that. Revision ensued. Finally, in the winter of last year, I spent January being Switzerland and making sure it was as precise and sweet as I could make its messy self. Ten years stem to stern for the final.
The Accounts: I began writing the poems of the book in February 2010, and by the following November I had a draft. The book is about the last days of my mother’s life and the aftermath of grief, so I suspect the narrative at the heart of the book resulted in a quicker compositional process – a sense of beginning, middle, and end – that the other book never would have had. Grief wants to exhaust itself (though it also wants to be kept).
5. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
My mother and my family inspired me to write The Accounts. It’s not their narrative – it’s mine – but without them, it wouldn’t be an account of anything. We’re all verbal people – my sister is a radio journalist, my brother is a poet, my sister in law is a poet, and my father is a lawyer. My mother was one of the best talkers ever – an amazing storyteller, fantastic describer, stunning practitioner of idiom and slang, salty and sweet. The philosophical issues of the book – the persistent questions – owe a huge debt to my friend David Neidorf, who continues to teach me everything I need to know about Greek philosophy. Like how to live the examined life without losing my mind.
Permission owes its greatest debt to the desert and to Deep Springs College, where I made friends so good they became family. They are too many to name. But in a way, the whole book is about conversation, debate, argument, and figuring things out. The difficult people I loved to read in those years were Plato, Emerson, Nietzsche, Dickinson, Hopkins, Jeffers. But I wanted to be a thinker in my own voice. (Formerly) Boston poet Corbett’s poems and person guide me towards the voice. So, the book’s dedication is both to Deep Springs and to William and Beverly Corbett, tutelary spirits of hospitality, generosity, poetry, and dinner.
6. What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry.
7. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Hopkins’ journals. More recently, Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog.
8. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
The Accounts comes out in September 2013, and University of Chicago Press is publishing it.
Permission comes out in September 2013 as well, and New Issues / Western Michigan University Press is publishing it.
9.Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
It’s more like reality TV. I’m just trying not to get eliminated.
10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
It’s totally full of California, even the poems that happen in Massachusetts.
Katie Peterson is a writer. She was born in California and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
She is the author of a book of poems, This One Tree, published by New Issues / Western Michigan University Press in 2006. Her second book, Permission, is forthcoming from New Issues in September, 2013. Her other second book, The Accounts, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press that same month.
She reviews poetry regularly, and most recently, she wrote an essay on women poets and mourning for the Boston Review. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2006). In 2011, her long poem “The Accounts” won first prize in the Memorious Art Song competition and was set to music for soprano and ensemble.
She has been awarded fellowships from the Summer Literary Seminars, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Yaddo. She spent the year 2009 – 2010 as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and in 2010, she won an Individual Artist Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York City.
She received a doctorate in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University. Her dissertation on selflessness and Emily Dickinson won the Howard Mumford Jones Prize. From 2006 – 2009 Peterson taught the humanities at Deep Springs College in rural Inyo County, California. She taught at Bennington College, where her courses ranged from Feminism to the Literature and Philosophy of Innocence. Currently, she is Professor of the Practice of Poetry at Tufts University, where she teaches creative writing.
Adam and Eve in the Evening, and At the Very Beginning, at Kicking Wind
Adam Waking, at the Poetry Foundation
Design, at The Walrus
Elegy, at the Foundation for Contemporary Arts
Enough, at Guernica (new!)
Sore Throat, at Boston Review
Strange Litany, at Poetry 365
The Accounts, at Memorious
The Conversation, at New Issues
The Tree, at New Issues
The Truth is Concrete, at the American Poetry Review
