The Habitual Poet: Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Installment #51

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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:  Targets of opportunity:  poetry readings, actual bookstores, on-line.  I still regret not stealing a book of heartfelt bad poetry left in a Big Sur cabin, containing the deathless line, “I often wonder where my taxes go.”

Q: How many poetry books do you think you own, and what percentage of these have you actually read?

A: Approximately 200; I’ve read at least portions of maybe 80%.

Q: When, where and how do you usually read? (i.e. at bedtime under the covers, cover to cover, etc.)

A: Bed, bathroom, bath, dining room table, couches desk, patio, and sofa.  Usually in bits, although at bath- and bedtime I can get in some substantial portions.  I read, variously: really fast so as not to let the taste linger in my mind; mindfully and with resonance;  receptively while considering how the poet did that; aggrievedly while considering why the writer said it wrong.  The things I read cover to cover are not books of poetry.

Q: What books of poetry have you read this month?

A: Miracle Fair, a newish and newly translated Wislawa Zymborska anthology. Russell Salamon’s Ascent from Cleveland. Kate Ryan on-line. And counting.

Q: What other books/magazines/backs of cereal boxes have you read recently?

A: I recently re-read the first Harry Potter, and Laurie King’s Justice Hall. A coupla New Yorkers and TLSs. The history and origins of Uncle Sam’s cereal. Van Bourgondien’s fall bulb catalog.  Daniel Pinkwater’s The Muffin Fiend.  (HIGHLY recommended.) Die Brüder Löwenherz (must keep up my Deutsch).

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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:  I try to seize the moment, or at least to scribble down the moment, so, on the fly, because, if I do not, something in me seems to say, “Oh.  If you’re not interested…” and that’s it for a few days at least. First drafts longhand, on a clipboard with a wide-lined legal pad in pencil, whether at my desk or in the sofa. Lately, that’s been a good spot.  Must be longhand if it is to escape professional tropes and glibness.  Lately, it works best if I’m not sitting somewhere I usually sit; seems to move the mental furniture around.

Q: How many first drafts do you think you complete in a week? A month?

A: Anywhere from none to ten.

Q: How long do you wait before revising a poem?

A: Ten seconds to ten years, depending.  I’m not being cute about this.  There have been times when I’ve realized that I found the solution to a line, or a turn, from years back, when I certainly did not know that I was working on it.

Q: When do you know a poem is “done”?

A: Rings right, feels ‘tuned’, nothing clunks, not self-indulgent.

Q: Have you ever given up an invitation so you could stay home and write?

A:  We don’t get all that many invitations, so it’s not often an issue. Even so, sometimes I wish I

had called the thing off instead of spending my time as I did.

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Publishing

Q: What is your system for sending out work?

A: I tend to send submissions out when I can’t write.  I find the details of submitting arduous—cover letter and bio and printing/creating document and the right postage or the right subject line heading.  I wish I had more of a system.  I use Duotrope for tracking, as well as my own grid.

Q: What have you more recently received: a rejection notice or an acceptance? Was it what you expected?

A: Excellent timing here:  I just got two poems accepted by Sow’s Ear Poetry Review.  I think they are some of the better things I’ve written, but I sent them on a venture, so…no. 

Q: Where do you generally publish: online, in print, or a mix, and do you have a preference?

A:  I like the idea of print better, so as to have the actual paper in my hand, but I’ll submit to either, and publish wherever I get accepted.

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:  Ah.  Well, since you ask.  I got a form rejection letter that seemed downright snippy to me, so I wrote a co-axial poem off it, using the letter verbatim as the first axis.  Inexplicably, no other editor so far has yet wanted to publish it.

Co-axial Response to a Snippy Form Rejection Letter

Since poetry is                        sparks against darkness, conceived

in general                               in private, so easily snuffed by

such a subjective                    random draft, made yet not made.  Seek

art, I’ve found                        no solace; try to wait, go make a place,

it better not                             be here.  Fear makes us hasty;

to comment                            too soon is like cursing the unborn,

…poems simply do not         like locking up fledglings in a wooden prison

suit                                          that forbids turning to see.  But never mind

my personal                           limits.  Sparks transform wood

taste                                        Only what results, what emerges—nothing else concerns us.

Q: Have you ever received any fan (or hate) mail? If so, what was that like?

A:  A writing friend once told me that she had read one of my poems, “Birdie…” to another friend, who cried.  That meant a lot to me.  No hate mail, for what that’s worth.

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Practical considerations

Q: What is your day job, and how does it affect your writing?

A:  Clinical psychologist.  I’ve retired from doing psychotherapy, but I still do neuropsychological evaluations, which are very interesting, but kind of take up all my mental room when I’ve got one going.  I can write on that, or I can write on my poems, in a given day, but not both.  Learning to do psychotherapy was a lot like learning a language, and the ear that I tuned as a clinician serves me well as a writer.

Q: How does your significant other’s occupation affect your writing life?

A: My sweetie is a retired professor of organic chemistry, but he is gracious about my disappearing for hours at a time.  He is entirely supportive, literally and figuratively, and feels put out if I have forgotten to show him new poems.

Q: Have there been periods in your life when you couldn't write?

A: Oh, only a dry spell of 18 years.  It started when I was diagnosed with a serious life-threatening chronic illness (not exaggerating here), and ended on a vacation in San Francisco after a lawsuit had been settled.

Q: Do you have a “poetry budget”?

A: Not really. 

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:  Only in the sense of disappearing for hours at a time, and being preoccupied with what I’m working on.  Otherwise, I’m just not that important.

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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: Yes.  I can read minds, but only those of people who don’t want me to read their minds.  Also, I can burn up the dance floor, which always astounds people who look at me and see a large middle-aged lady. 

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: 

A: d)…wonder why that nasty old neighbor had to go out of her way and mail it to my mother.  Then I write a poem about that.  Got written out of the will years ago.  Who has to make stuff up?

Q: 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: Not to be tedious, but I keep my affairs pretty much in order, and several times I’ve thought I had a lot less than six months, so….

Q: If you could be a vowel, which one would you be and why?

A: â, because it’s got its history written right in it, and it contains more than it shows.

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:  Belle parole non pascon it gatti.  (Italian proverb:  Beautiful words don’t feed the cats.)  Also, stay friends with your dreams, for your psyche’s sake as well as for your writing.

Now is the time to be doing what only you can do. W.S. Merwin

Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a clinical psychologist in Claremont, California. She has been writing since she was nine, but didn’t start sending out her work until a few years ago.  In another life, she was a German Lit major so that she could read poetry for credit.  For five years, she reviewed restaurants for the local newspaper; sometimes in heroic couplets, sometimes in anapest, sometimes imitating Hemingway. Her poems and photos have appeared or will soon appear in Poemeleon, Off the Coast, qarrtsiluni, The Dirty Napkin, Umbrella Journal, New Verse News, Lilliput Review, Off the Coast, Abyss & Apex, Tiger’s Eye, In Posse Review, Right Hand Pointing, Red Lion Square, and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. She was nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. She may be emailed KarenGM.poetry@yahoo.com or followed.