Interview with Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio was born in Washington, D.C. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University. She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Lucifer at the Starlite, published in 2009 by W.W. Norton. She has also published two novels, a collection of short stories, and two manuals for poets. Among her honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award. Her 2000 collection Tell Me was nominated for the National Book Award.
(Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Sanderson)

Interviewer: Lee Rossi


LR: When you came to the Bay Area in the 1970s, you weren’t yet a writer. What tipped you in the direction of writing?

KA: Discovering a writer. Reading some poetry. I didn’t grow up with poetry.

LR: Who particularly?

KA: I always tell people it was Plath, but I’m not quite sure who it was. I just remember the feeling I had when I began to read poems. I felt that I was struck by lightning, and so I wanted to write poetry, and I set about trying to figure out what poetry was.

LR: One of my friends says that you remind him of Billy Collins, especially your more recent poems, in their openness and sense of humor. It seems to me, for instance, that the poem “Ex-Boyfriends,” in your next-to-last poetry collection, What Is This Thing Called Love, is in that vein. The only qualification he makes is that there’s a kind of darkness in your work that he doesn’t often see in Collins’s work.

KA: There’s a darkness in Billy’s work too, actually.

LR: Do you like Billy’s work. Do you feel an affinity for it?

KA: I haven’t read his newest book, Ballistics, but I think there’s a definite darkness, an awareness of mortality in his work. It’s part of his humor.

LR: Who did you learn the most about the craft of writing from?

KA: I try to learn from everybody I read. There’s not any particular writer who stands out as teaching me a particularly important lesson. I think I’ve learned from all kinds of writers.

LR: In an interview you did ten years ago for Poetry Flash, you mention Keats and Whitman, Jack Gilbert, Elizabeth Bishop, C.K. Williams. It was an extremely various list. I thought it interesting that you mentioned Williams, because in Tell Me, your breakthrough book, many of the poems have very long lines, as is the case with many of Williams’s poems. Was Williams a model?

KA: Absolutely. He’s all over that book. You can see I was processing C.K. Williams at that time, trying to learn what I could from him about his long lines, his use of syntax and sentence.

LR: I have many poetry friends, and another one likens you to various “dark ladies” of poetry.

KA: Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady?”

LR: There’s a long history, isn’t there, from Shakespeare to “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and into the present. But I guess she was thinking mainly about the American context, writers like Sexton and Plath, and before them someone like Millay. Do you feel any affinity with those writers?

KA: I don’t really want to be stuck in the “woman poet” slot, let alone the “dark woman poet” slot. I think all writers are dark. We’re all acquainted with the night. For good reason. Part of what it means to be a poet or an artist is to look at the dark side of life, along with all its other aspects, to acknowledge all of life. I don’t consider that I have any particular affinity with Plath or Sexton.

Of course, I have joked that I am the reincarnation of Millay. I like her work a lot. In her time, she was considered very traditional. The modernists came along, and there she was, this woman writing sonnets. But if you read her sonnets, you realize that she was really ahead of her time in terms of her sensibility.

So I admire all those women as writers, but I wouldn’t necessarily put them at the top of my list. In fact, I haven’t read Sexton since college. I did my orals on Colette, Willa Cather, and Sylvia Plath, so I got very familiar with Plath’s work. But I don’t feel any great affinity for her.

LR: There’s an edginess about your writing that I really admire, and when I think about edginess, I think about writers like Ai and Nikki Giovanni. Do you respond to their work in any particular way?

KA: I really don’t know much Nikki Giovanni. I’m a little more familiar with Ai, because of her persona poems, which I use in my classes. I don’t really understand the term “edgy” either, because all art is edgy in the sense that all art is about human experience.

So I don’t understand that poetry is supposed to be, what? Middle of the road as opposed to edgy? It doesn’t make sense to me. Art traffics in the human. I guess it’s edgy to be human. We’re always on the edge of death.

Whenever anyone tells you constantly that your work is one way, you want to say, no, it isn’t. You want to say, what about the other ways the work is? What about changing the dialogue about the work instead of always talking about how edgy it is, about how confessional the writer is? I want to change the terms of the discussion sometimes, and say, is that the only way we can have a discussion?

Unfortunately, that’s what we do when we talk about poetry. We categorize people. This is the edgy poet. This is the drinking poet. This is the Zen poet. This is the nature poet. I guess that’s true to an extent, in terms of the subject matter. But it’s limiting too, because then you don’t really look at the totality of anybody’s work. Billy Collins, for instance, is the funny poet. And he definitely is funny, but he’s also darkly ironic. But people don’t talk about the other things because he’s “the popular poet.”

LR: And that’s a thing that grates for a lot of other poets.

KA: But good for him. We should all be so lucky.

LR: How about Bukowski? There’s a wonderful scene in your novel, My Dreams Out in the Streets, where you have a couple characters at an open mic, one of whom reads an awful piece of doggerel, and there’s some Japanese tourists in the background saying, “I love America…Bukowski rules!” So I’m wondering, what’s the tone of that? Is it a send-up of Bukowski or a tacit acknowledgement of the great master?

KA: I think my scene just bows to the fact that he’s very well known. Of course, he has a big following here, but he has a rabid following in Europe. It seemed to me that Japanese tourists who were coming to a little bar for an open mic might be acquainted with Bukowski.

LR: What personal fact is more important to your career as a writer, the fact that your father was a sports writer or that your mother was a champion tennis player?

KA: Even though both my parents did write books—my mother wrote an autobiography and my dad wrote a memoir about being a sportswriter after he retired from the Washington Post—I grew up in a sports family. Writing literature was not part of my background or education. In a way, it’s really odd that I became a writer. But then again, I read books when I was a kid to get away from my family, which is the story of a lot of people. You either read because you grow up with books and literature, or it’s not in your environment, and you discover it somehow, and then you gravitate toward it because it’s so different from the way you were raised. It’s an escape route into some other kind of world.

LR: And for you, it was the latter?

KA: For me, it was. I don’t think my parents had anything to do with my becoming a writer. Except, perhaps, that from my mother I got a sense of drive. My mother was a very driven person, very successful. She rose to the top in her field, won Wimbledon, but on the other hand, not only did she not push any of us in tennis, she didn’t even encourage us. It was there, but I don’t think any of us felt that we were being groomed to be athletic and become a tennis star. My parents were fairly absent from my upbringing. In fact, we weren’t even encouraged to go to college, which is very odd in a middle-class family.

LR: Did they go to college?

KA: Yes, they both did. But there wasn’t a lot of concern about our education or what we would do with our lives.

LR: As to the process of writing, do you start with an idea or a story or a particular form that you want to write in? How does it work?

KA: No matter what happens in your head before you start, something different happens when you write. I might start with anything, a journal entry, a line, a rhythm. And then, in the process of writing, something happens. It doesn’t come from outside.

LR: Do you write every day? Do you keep a journal?

KA: Not very often anymore. I don’t keep a journal very much.

LR: When do you decide it’s time to sit down and write?

KA: Usually just when I feel like it, which is pretty often. I don’t keep a schedule. If I’m working on a piece of prose, I will tend to put the word “write” in my date book on certain days. Otherwise life gets in the way, and I run out of time. So I mark out certain writing days. Or I’ll say to myself, well, tomorrow I’ll just get up and write. It’s not a discipline, because I want to write. I don’t really need to keep a schedule because I make the time.

LR: Has that changed in the course of the twenty or thirty years that you’ve been writing?

KA: Yes, there’ve been times when I really had to find the time, carve it out, after working nine to five. I used to work seven days a week. I had a daughter. I was going to graduate school. I’ve gradually reorganized my life so that I have more time, and now that I have more time, I’m very jealous of that time. I try not to let things get in the way.

Of course, there are still a lot of conflicts. I do a lot of teaching, and there is a glut of emails every day. If I have a teaching gig somewhere, even for a few days, there are a million emails back and forth about getting plane tickets, what my responsibilities are going to be, am I going to give a talk, am I going to do this, am I going to do that, who’s going to pick me up at the airport? There are endless bureaucratic emails for just a speaking engagement, and since I don’t have an agent for lectures and readings, I have to do all that myself. People think that I have all this time to write, but that’s not true. I’m pretty busy a lot of the time.

I try to limit things like writing blurbs and giving literary papers because I’d just be overwhelmed. I get emails constantly from people wanting blurbs or wanting me to look at their work. I have to say, no, no, I’m sorry, no. Because it just eats away at your time.  And then you find that you have nothing left for your own work.

LR: How long does it take you to write a poem, how many revisions do you go through, and how much does the poem change in the course of the revisions?

KA: What’s a revision? If you change one word, is that a revision? So do I go through a thousand drafts? I can’t really say. It’s all the process of writing the poem. Sometimes it feels like it comes together in a week. Or it may sit around for six months.

I’ll put it away to the point where I’ve forgotten that I’ve written it. I have a folder, and I’ll go through it every now and then, and I’ll think, wow, look at that, I forgot I wrote that. And then I’ll know if it’s any good and worth working on because I’m far enough away from it. That’s my usual process, write it and put it away.

LR: I’ve been reading your work for a number of years, and I think I can recognize a Kim Addonizio poem, but as I was rereading your work I realized that there are a number of quite distinct Kim Addonizio poems. There’s not just the one. There’s the spare narrative poem ala Jimmy and Rita, the dramatic monologues in Tell Me, and then there’s a more meditative poem, especially in the last two books. How do you see your development as a writer?

KA: I’m just trying to keep growing. I need to write, and I just keep trying to do it better and not do exactly what I’ve already done—to write the next poem and do it in a way that’s interesting to me, first of all. I’m trying to get to something about being alive. I haven’t yet run out of things to say or things that strike me about being alive. So I’m still writing.

LR: Do you ever go back and revise a poem after you’ve tested it out on an audience?

KA: Yes, because I’ll sometimes read poems that aren’t finished yet, because they’re new, and I’m more interested in them than in poems I’ve already written. I figured out what I needed to figure out inside of those poems, and now I’m trying to figure out the next poem, and that’s much more interesting to me than going back and reading something from my second book.

LR: I read George Meredith’s “Lucifer in Starlight” the other day, then put it side by side with your poem “Lucifer at the Starlite.” I thought it was a very interesting choice. I can’t think of anybody who reads Meredith. I was wondering how you came across that poem, and why it inspired you to write your poem?

KA: I don’t remember how I came across it. Somewhere on the internet. As soon as I read it, I realized that it spoke to what has been one of my ongoing themes, good and evil, the nature of evil, and the reason for suffering. I immediately reacted to the argument of that sonnet, and so I wanted to write my rebuttal.

LR: In the previously mentioned interview you did for Poetry Flash, you mentioned that the constraints of poetic form help you to counteract the chaos of your inner life. Do you think that the discipline of form is helpful for every kind of temperament?

KA: All art has form, or it’s not art. The constraint of putting something chaotic into a form, into a poem, whether free verse or a traditional form, is—what did Frost call it—“a momentary stay against confusion?”

LR: You’ve done a lot of writing about writing, and you’ve taught writing for a long time. What do you think is your best writing exercise? Do you give writing exercises to your students?

KA: I do give my students exercises, and I make them up every week, despite having two books of them. My students have read those books so they need something new. I never require them, unless I’m teaching at a conference. Then I make the students do them as homework. I like making students do exercises because they’re designed to teach something. And if it’s just do it or don’t do it, then they never grapple with the problem I’m trying to help them grapple with.

I do have specific kinds of craft exercises that I think are very useful. I think one of the most useful is about syntax. I have students copy the syntax of other writers, which forces them to look at the structure of the sentences and confront what is usually the impoverishment of their own syntax. One of the biggest things keeping back would-be writers is that insufficient command of syntax. It’s crucial, yet a lot of people who are aspiring poets do not have that basic grasp of the sentence. And if you don’t have that, how can you get anywhere?

I did a workshop one year where we copied the syntax of Louise Glück, Lucille Clifton, Jack Gilbert, and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was by far the most difficult. The students had to copy the opening of “Howl.” He does amazing things in that poem. Amazing things you don’t even realize until you break down what’s going on. That opening blew people’s minds. So much of the energy of “Howl” is embedded in the syntax. Even if you leave aside phrases like “Mohammaden angels staggering across tenement rooftops illuminated”—but even there you’ve got the adjective after the noun—“who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high.” What!? “Hollow-eyed and high,” that makes sense, those are adjectives that modify the subject of the clause “who.” But “poverty and tatters,” throwing those nouns in there? You don’t realize he’s doing things like that until you sit down and study the poem.

And what they wrote, especially based on “Howl,” was a revelation for a lot of people. I think that’s probably one of the best exercises that writers can do. Of course, they resist it, maybe because it takes a lot of thinking.

Sometimes people get a little lazy, and they don’t want to work hard. They want it to just spring forth, and of course, it doesn’t just spring forth. The people who become writers are the ones who work very hard and struggle with those kinds of issues.

LR: Have you seen Ellen Voigt’s book on syntax?

KA: No, I love her. What’s it called?

LR: It’s called The Art of Syntax. She breaks down the way different poets use all the forms and varieties of syntax to nuance their poems. She’s wonderfully subtle and intelligent about it and makes a really compelling case for complex syntax, how it adds strength and subtlety to a poem’s argument. But you’re right. People are so used to—I don’t want to take Gary Snyder’s name in vain—but they’re so used to simple declarative sentences—phrase, phrase, phrase, phrase—rather than mixing it up and building larger, more complicated structures, which you can do with syntax.

KA: And, of course, that’s a sign of good writing, poetry or prose: knowing how to write a good sentence.

LR: You talked about the difference between people who just want to magically be writers and people who suck it up and do the hard work. You have a wonderful poem, “The Revered Poet Instructs Her Students on the Importance of Revision,” which touches on that theme. The persona in the poem says, for instance, “I explained already about suffering// and about each one of you, destined to be isolate and alone/ because writing is lonely work.” How long does it take people to realize that it’s hard and lonely work, and how many of them survive that realization?

KA: I think people get it early on that it’s hard, lonely work. But it depends on what you want from your writing. Not everybody wants to be published in the New Yorker.

LR: They don’t?

KA: No, they really don’t. I have this wonderful student who says, “I write because it takes me to a room in my head where I wouldn’t ordinarily go.” That’s a beautiful reason for writing. She’s not necessarily trying to publish or be a great writer. She wants to learn as much as she can, and she wants to explore that room in her head. And in order to do that, she wants to learn the craft.

Look at music. Not everybody’s trying to be a concert musician or a rock star. People enjoy playing music, and they love to play. And they like getting a little better when they can and practicing when they can. But it’s not their be-all-and-end-all in life. There are a lot of people for whom poetry is the same. Why not? It’s a great thing to do.

LR: Why didn’t I think of that?

KA: It’s fun, and it’s interesting, and it’s creative. Of course, there are also people who are ambitious as poets and who entertain writerly ambitions to publish, or to publish well, to have books, and all the rest of it. But it’s the same process. Even if you just want to be an amateur and enjoy this, you still enjoy getting better and gaining mastery over the tools. This is true whether you’re taking singing lessons for fun because you want to improve your voice or getting out on the bunny slope and learning to ski at the age of fifty so you can say, “This is great. I can stem Christie now. Before I couldn’t do that.” We all enjoy learning and getting a little farther along whatever we’re doing. A lot of people are writing poetry in just that way.

And if you’re aiming towards writing as a profession, you have to treat it as such, and you have to work very hard for a very long time, as with any other endeavor.

LR: There’s a poem in What Is This Thing Called Love called “In Dreams,” which I really admire. It seems to explore the connection between your life as a writer and your father. It’s not a direct connection certainly, but in the poem there’s a dreamer, who’s chasing a piece of blank paper (that thing that we as writers are constantly faced with), and the dreamer is “desperate to reach it/ as it’s lifted in the wake of trucks/ or flattened and marked by passing cars.” But then the dreamer wakes “with a sense of loss, wondering who// or what I had to mourn besides/ my father, whom I no longer mourn.”

That’s a very complicated scenario, but one of the suggestions is that the speaker is trying to escape the influence of the father. I’m wondering if you think a writer faces that kind of anxiety whenever he or she tries to establish a unique voice? What is it that makes a person finally a writer?

KA: I don’t know. What makes you a writer is that you keep doing it. And yes, there is a lot of attendant anxiety, because every time you face the blank page, you don’t know. Someone said, “Our only obligation is to improve on the blank page.” And you never know if you’re going to improve on the blank page. It’s always a crap shoot. It’s pristine and pure and full of possibilities as long as there’s nothing on it. As soon as you’ve put something on it, you’ve failed in a way to produce some better possibility that it held out. So there is a lot of anxiety in that process. But if you’re a writer, you keep facing that and trying to do something with it.

LR: Your poem “Generations” in Tell Me is a very important American story. The father’s success—at least as I read the poem—the father’s success and assimilation into American society is predicated on his rejection of the grandfather, the grandfather’s life and values. The poem seems to say that that situation is a tragedy not just for the father and the grandfather, but also for succeeding generations, who lose touch with, in our case, our Italian heritage. Has it been important to you that you recover some of that lost Italian heritage?

KA: I try to. It’s been very hard to do because my father talked so little about his past. But I’ve always been interested in it. Thanks to the internet I’ve connected with some other Addonizios and learned a few things here and there, but there’s a lot I still don’t know about my family. I felt that as a big loss, and that’s why I wrote that poem.

But beyond that, it sketches the outlines of the immigrant story. There’s often a big difference between the first generation that’s born in America, that tries to be “American,” which generally means erasure of cultural differences and the old country, and then the next generation. I’m second generation, and my dad was barely first; most of his family was born in Italy; then they came over, and he was born here. That desire of the next generation to get back and learn something of the history is fairly common. Hopefully that poem is universal as well as personal.

LR: Let me ask you about “One Nation Under God.” What I like about it is how it takes the dramatic monologue and transforms it into a vehicle of satire and sarcasm. From the beginning of the poem, the tone is extreme. You write, “Certain parts of your body,/ don’t you just want/ to cut them off, they’re so disgusting.” And then it goes on from there into a litany of complaints, which are social and political, but not identified with any particular political stance. The speaker hates junkies, Italians, natural blondes, tree huggers, opponents of capital punishment, to name just a few. And then the poem ends in a swell of Biblical acrimony: “We’ve got problems in this country I tell you./ If thy right eye offend thee/ you know what to do./ And thy left eye, too.” I don’t know who that poem was pointed at, besides Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but do you sense that in this country it’s the blind leading the blind?

KA: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” I think of that poem as my “Modest Proposal,” a homage to Swift. Let’s round everybody up and put them all in a concentration camp. But of course, the speaker, as you say, is all over the map, just crazed, against everything for ridiculous reasons. And I guess it speaks to the ridiculousness of the so-called political discourse in this country. It’s pretty low level, at least in the mainstream media.

LR: So are you hopeful for the country as a whole, if even its political discourse is hopeless?

KA: I’m not very hopeful for the future of the species, let alone this country.

LR: We don’t deserve what we have. That’s been clear for a long time.

KA: There’s a big correction coming. There has to be. But I think it was Auden who said, “In the meantime/ There are bills to be paid/…the Time Being to redeem/ From insignificance.”

LR: One of the things I noticed about your last two books is how funny they are.

KA: Interesting you should say that. A lot of people have talked about Lucifer as being a very dark book.

LR: Well, it is dark, but it’s also funny.

KA: If you have a certain sense of humor.

LR: I see it as a kind of sardonic, postmodern comedy. I’m thinking especially of those wonderful list poems. “Forms of Love,” which I’ve heard you read a couple of times, is a classic. But “The Matter,” where all the lines begin with “Some men,” is also wonderful. There are gems like “Some men you’ve reduced to ashes are finally dusting themselves off” and “Some men, let’s face it, really are too small./ Some men are too large, but it’s not usually a deal breaker.” That’s so funny the way it bounces all over the place. Was that move toward humor conscious and deliberate or something that just happened in the course of writing?

KA: It wasn’t conscious. It was just writing the poems. There have been things in earlier books too. It’s part of the stream.

LR: It seemed to me that you got into a certain vein, and then you kept getting into it, because it was so much fun.

KA: I love anaphora. It allows you to go a lot of different places but still hold the poem together.

LR: Another wonderful poem in that same collection is “The First Line Is the Deepest.” This time it’s not anaphora, but collage. You’re pulling things from all over. Normally collage is the darling of the avant-garde. “The Wasteland” is a collage poem.

KA: Eliot’s in my poem a couple of times.

LR: Of course. But Eliot uses collage to illustrate how terrible things are, and you use it to make fun of people who say how terrible things are. How bad can it be, when you say things such as, “I have been one acquainted with the spatula.” You lift from Eliot and the Beverly Hillbillies and Tennyson and Ginsberg. But for all its jokiness, the poem ends up being surprisingly deep and serious: “Whose world this is I think I know.”

KA: It’s meant to be serious.

LR: That’s a wonderful turn at the end.

KA: There were some women from a retirement community who wrote to Poetry magazine about that poem. They disliked it intensely. They said I had the audacity to steal from Frost. I think that was the only quote they recognized. The editors of Poetry called up the women at the community, where they had this reading group, and had a conversation with them. It’s posted on the Poetry website as a podcast. They tried to discuss with these women what they found in the poem and why. It raises the question always about the relationship between what you’re saying and what people are perceiving. About what’s accessible and what isn’t. All really interesting questions, with no answers. But it was very illuminating to hear what they thought of this poem. They didn’t have the equipment to understand all of it, the sensibility or the cultural background to understand what the hell I was doing. I guess you speak to the people you can speak to, and that’s not everybody. And that’s all right. It shouldn’t be everybody.

LR: Another interesting poem from Lucifer is “You Were.” In that poem, the speaker looks back on the self she has created. “You were the bride of gin,” you write, “longing to be anything other than yourself.” But now that she’s ready to move on to something else, she notices, “faces turned toward you now, as you recite from the myth you have made, all of them listening to you.”

KA: “Of all flowers: you.”

LR: Is it a problem for you personally, that your readers think they know you, when all they know is the myth they’ve concocted out of your poems?

KA: I guess so. But of course, that poem isn’t necessarily about me. You could read it as a poem about the self, or simply as a poem about a person who’s reached that point in her development. On the other hand, I think people often equate me with the personas in my poems. And again, you can’t know how people are going to react to your poems. A lot of people interpret my poems pretty naively. It’s great that they’re responding to the work, but sometimes they’re responding on a level that’s pretty basic, given what the poem is trying to do.

I get a lot of emails from people who want to strike up a conversation and a correspondence and think they know me. Now I have to ignore them because I get too many of them. I used to write back to everybody, but I don’t anymore because I get too many of them.

LR: Especially poetry written in the first person as dramatic monologues.

KA: I think of it as a persona, an aspect, a drama. I’ll ramp it up if it sounds more interesting. I don’t think about me being vulnerable in my work. I’m just trying to write a good poem and show a state of mind. But it is disturbing when people assume that familiarity.

LR: Let’s talk for a moment about your novels. I loved Little Beauties; it’s so sweet. The infant character, especially. She starts talking to the reader while she’s still in the womb.

KA: People either love it or hate it.

LR: I loved it.

KA: Not a talking baby, but a baby with a consciousness.

LR: A very advanced consciousness. She has a sweetness about her that I don’t recognize in any of the other things that you’ve written. I’m wondering how difficult that was. Was that a big stretch for you or a giant relief? Did you have any trouble writing that character?

KA: No. She just wanted to be in the book. I didn’t think I was going to have her. I thought I was just going to have one character, one main character whose story I follow.

LR: The obsessive-compulsive?

KA: Yes, her.

LR: I like the portrayal of all three of the main characters, but the infant was a total surprise.

KA: It turned out that the teenager had to tell her story, and the baby had to tell hers as well. And then, of course, I had to figure out why the baby had to tell her story, which turned out to be very important. But I didn’t know that when I first started writing her. I just knew she seemed to have something to say, but then I had to figure out why she had to have a voice in the novel. Otherwise I would’ve had to get rid of her.

LR: What is your new book, your memoir going to be called?

KA: Catch Me: Falling Through Midlife. That’s the title right now.

LR: Does it have an arc, a novelistic arc?

KA: Yes, it covers a three-and-a-half-year period in my life, leaving an important relationship and what happened after that. And it’s about my mother getting Parkinson’s and going downhill. I have a grown daughter too. So it’s about that middle period where you have kids that are grown and parents who are dying, and you’re somewhere in between trying to figure out life, noticing your mortality and the opportunities still there for you. So it’s about a little bit of everything. And it’s funny.

LR: Was it different for you, writing a memoir, as opposed to writing novels or poems?

KA: Yes.

LR: What was the challenge there?

KA: The challenge is that you have a lot of material so you have to figure out what’s important and how to shape it. With a novel, you think, what the hell can happen next? What am I going to do with them now that’s going to be interesting and further the plot? With a memoir you have all the events, but you don’t have the plot. You have to figure out the arc and the structure of the book.

And it’s also hard from an emotional standpoint. I don’t feel very vulnerable when I’m writing a poem. I’m just writing a poem. If I’m saying outrageous things, I say to myself, that’s just the voice of the poem. I don’t really think about what people are going to think of me. Memoir feels much more like, oh, this is me. Now people are going to know this about me.

I’m actually confused sometimes by people’s reactions. After my daughter read Lucifer at the Starlite, she said, “Are you okay?” And so I’m thinking, let’s see, what did I write that might have led her to think that I wasn’t okay? I’m that far removed from the poems. Whereas with memoir I feel very vulnerable, and I don’t really want anybody I know to read this book, to know these things about me. But I had to write it anyway. And I hope to feel more distant when it comes out.

But for all that, the I in the book is still a character. You do have to make yourself a character in order for the book to work. Even in memoir. That discovery was very freeing for me because then I could write it more like fiction. Even though it’s true. I felt a lot freer once I realized that this was a character, and I can invent in places. I can’t remember every scrap of conversation from twenty or thirty years ago. I have to make it up. So I can make it up a certain way, and I can give the book a certain tone, and that’s not totally me, as it turns out. But it’s closer.

LR: What propelled you to write memoir, to change horses midstream as it were?

KA: I’m still basically a poet, but I was asked to write some essays here and there. One was for an anthology on bad girls. And somebody else said, do you have something about women of a certain age? And then I wanted to write a memoir about my mother. That was the real impulse. But I found I couldn’t do that just by itself, so I started combining things. So it ended up being a memoir that is about my mother in a lot of ways. That’s a very strong thread, but not the only thread. It’s also about me.

LR: Great. I’m looking forward to reading it. How soon will it be out?

KA: I don’t know; I’m just getting it ready to give to my agent.

LR: Thanks, Kim, it’s been great talking with you. I know the readers of Pedestal will find all your experiences and insights from the writing life as fascinating as I have.

KA: You’re very welcome.