The Habitual Poet: Judy Z. Kronenfeld
Installment #50
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The Habitual Poet is an ongoing series of contributor interviews. If you are a Poemeleon contributor and would like to participate copy & paste the Q's from below and e-mail your answers to: editor@poemeleon.org.
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Reading
Q: Where do you prefer to get your books?
A: Lately (no more room on the shelves), from the library, but the exception is books of poetry; I like to OWN these.
Q: How many poetry books do you think you own, and what percentage of these have you actually read?
A: Agh—too lazy to count. Maybe 700 or more (including anthologies). 75%.
Q: When, where and how do you usually read? (i.e. at bedtime under the covers, cover to cover, etc.)
A: Books of poems—often as soon as they arrive or soon after. Novels often at bedtime, or, now that I’m retired, in the evenings. Poetry books usually cover to cover for a first read. Novels, memoirs, etc. as much as I feel like at one sitting; sometimes I’m in the middle of two at once.
Q: What books of poetry have you read this month?
A: Well, if we call this month August (because I started “The Habitual Poet” then, and got distracted): Rebecca Foust, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song; Stewart Florsheim, The Short Fall from Grace; Judith Terzi, The Road to Oxnard; Christopher Buckley, Rolling the Bones (still reading that one) and undoubtedly others I can’t remember right now.
Q: What other books/magazines/backs of cereal boxes have you read recently?
A: The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books—some of the mags; Amy Wilentz, Martyrs’ Crossing (excellent novel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by a well-known journalist); Anzia Yezierska, The Bread-Givers (early 20thc. immigrant novel, rough-hewn but powerful, about the conflict between an old world religious father and a new world independent daughter); Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (an Irishman’s heart-breaking novel set in New York about tangentially connected people, all connected in some way as well to Philippe Petit, who walked several times across a wire strung between the two World Trade Center towers); Eric Puchner, Model Home (profound, sad, and funny novel about a disintegrating family who ultimately come to live in a house in an abandoned real estate development in the California desert); Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (moving and disturbing account of the experiences of a Syrian-born contractor and his family during Katrina).
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Writing
Q: When, where, how do you write, and why?(i.e. at dusk on a dock, longhand in a notebook, because...)
A: Mornings are definitely best. Priceless for revision. The first five minutes are probably worth more—for perspective—than the nose-to-the-grindstone hours that might ensue. I almost always write first drafts in longhand. Recently heard something on NPR—an interview with Lynda Barry—on the importance of the mind-hand connection. Which I believe in! (Too bad cursive is being taught less and less in school.) Journals stay in longhand; notes are in longhand first (then, when a bunch have accumulated, I type them up and treat the collected scraps as possible spurs for writing, like my journals).
Q: How many first drafts do you think you complete in a week? A month?
A: Agh. Depends. If I’m lucky, in those exceptional weeks, maybe two or so. I consider a month with four or six really vital first drafts a great month. It may be followed by a month with 0 first drafts.
Q: How long do you wait before revising a poem?
A: Often not very long (days). But then I may revise the revisions for months (or, sometimes, years).
Q: When do you know a poem is “done”?
A: When I’ve revised and revised until nothing is really disturbing me. (But I could change my mind down the road.) Some poems—the lucky ones—only take a little tinkering. I praise the poem-powers-that-be for those.
Q: Have you ever given up an invitation so you could stay home and write?
A: No, but I have gotten up in the middle of the night to work out something in my head.
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Publishing
Q: What is your system for sending out work?
A: I look at calls in Poets and Writers, The Writer’s Chronicle, CRWROPPS, especially for anthologies in which I might place some of my published poems; more often, I just send to some of my favorite journals. And look at newpages.com to be sure of the submission rules. As for bookkeeping: I type up the version of the poem I am submitting (I number the digital versions) in my list by poem titles, and the journal to which I’m submitting and the date in my list by the date and journal name—and staple the pages into a regular lined spiral notebook. When the lists get too messy to read, I retype. As poems get accepted or rejected, I adjust the info on these lists. I also keep a list by poem title of all the places to which I’ve sent individual poems and add to this when I send out.
Q: What have you more recently received: a rejection notice or an acceptance? Was it what you expected?
A: Just got a virtually instantaneous acceptance from New Verse News, an online journal, for a poem called “The Laughing Cure.” I was not entirely surprised (I’ve published there before), but very pleased by the hugely gratifying return-time. I think there wasn’t more than an hour or two between submission and acceptance. Now that’s unusual! (To say the least.)
Q: Where do you generally publish: online, in print, or a mix, and do you have a preference?
A: A mix, for sure. There are things to be said for both print and online publications.
Q: What is the worst (or weirdest, or best) experience you’ve had with a journal/magazine/press & its editor(s)? (No names, please!)
A: Loveliest: an editor (former student) added a heartfelt note of appreciation for my teaching and poetry right there on the page of the online journal he runs, just after my poems. Weirdest experiences I suppose are those poems that just seem to disappear into thin air every once in a while; one submits, one waits, one queries, and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENS.
Q: Have you ever received any fan (or hate) mail? If so, what was that like?
A: A couple of times I’ve received wonderful notes about poems that particularly touched readers. What was it like? Glorious!
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Practical considerations
Q: What is your day job, and how does it affect your writing?
A: I’m retired (lucky me!). On the one hand, I have much more time for writing. On the other hand, I don’t have the schedule I had when I was teaching, which is not necessarily a good thing. Lots of self-imposed schedules these days; some of them have to do with house repair!
Q: How does your significant other’s occupation affect your writing life?
A: He’s retired too. Occasionally that means I can’t count on the utter privacy and (usually) silence I need to write and revise!
Q: Have there been periods in your life when you couldn't write?
A: I don’t write every day (though I have periods in which I write or revise every day), so usually I can do something when I sit down at my desk. But weeks, and very occasionally months can go by in which I am doing something else—reading, working on non-poetry writing projects (criticism, fiction, essays), traveling, visiting my kids. I don’t like to let too much time elapse, however. And even when I’m not writing poems, I may be throwing notes into the pocket of a looseleaf I keep with my typed up-notes, or writing in my journals (I have a separate one for travels).
Q: Do you have a “poetry budget”?
A: Not as such, no. I do spend quite a bit on books of poems and subscriptions, as well as on contests for poetry manuscripts.
Q: Have you ever suffered (or made someone else suffer) in the name of your art? (i.e. picked up your kids late from school so you could finish a poem, forgone lunch to buy a book, left a relationship because the other person just didn't understand, etc.)
A: See above—if getting up at 3 A.M., when your body wants to stay under the covers, counts, YES.
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Random nonsense
Q: Do you have any superhuman abilities? (i.e. can you tie a cherry stem in a knot with your tongue, or write a double sestina with both hands tied behind your back?)
A: I remember exactly where my significant other has left things in the house (keys, bills, slippers, books, etc.) that he is frantically searching for. This is rather like a photographic memory of the page number on which a particular quote appears. Actually, it is rather annoying that I do remember such things; I’d rather use my brain storage for great quotations or poems.
Q: You write a scathing poem about your mother and she learns about it. You:
a.) Move to South America and leave no forwarding address
b.) Delete the poem and insist it never existed
c.) Show it to her (she’s already written you out of the will anyway)
d.) Do none of the above; instead you: publish it anyway, because she died a long time ago, but, you still feel slightly guilty!
A: If the best medical specialists in the world told you that if you didn’t give up your poetry habit today you would die in six months, would you get your affairs in order or would you leave that up to your family?
A: Let the family deal! I’m still writing. (And screaming and not going gentle into that good night.)
Q: If you could be a vowel, which one would you be and why?
A: O. It sums up everything: awe, gratification… But then, in a different tonality, so does long A.
Q: Finally, what piece of advice would you most like to share with our readers? (This can be on writing, the writing life, or anything else...)
A: Get something down. I think this applies to many kinds of writing. One written phrase or sentence or line leads to another. And another. You can junk some or not. You can look back after time has intervened and see something interesting about the discrepancy (similarity, absolute difference, etc.) between your present self and your past self, and that will lead to more phrases or sentences or lines.
Judy Z. Kronenfeld is the author of two books and two chapbooks of poetry. Her most recent collection is Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize (Litchfield Review Press, 2008); and her most recent chapbook is Ghost Nurseries (Finishing Line, 2005). Her poems as well as her short stories and personal essays have appeared in many print and online journals including Calyx, Cimarron Review, The American Poetry Journal, Fox Chase Review, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Natural Bridge, The Hiram Poetry Review, Passager, Poetry International, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Stirring, The Women’s Review of Books and The Pedestal, as well as in a dozen anthologies or text books, including Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California (Greenhouse Review Press/Alcatraz Editions, 2008), Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State University Press, 2009), and Love over 60: An Anthology of Women's Poems (Mayapple Press, 2010). She has poems forthcoming in Cimarron Review and Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, among others, as well as in several anthologies including BEFORE WE HAVE NOWHERE TO STAND Israel/Palestine: Poets Respond to the Struggle, ed. Joan Dobbie (Sandpoint, Idaho: Lost Horse Press, 2011).
Saturday, February 19, 2011 at 07:11PM
Reader Comments (1)
Enjoyed reading the interview. I loved what you said about wishing to be able to retain quotes or poems. A colleague was teaching "The Bread-Givers and encouraged me to read it. Very moving story. Sort of described my maternal grandfather who made my mother leave school at 13 and work in a factory. And thanks for mentioning "The Road to Oxnard!"
Judith