Dear Amy Newman: An Exchange
Persea Books, 2011, 64 pages,
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Dear Amy Newman,
Your newest book, Dear Editor, has the most brilliant hook I’ve come across in a poetry book since Denise Duhamel’s Kinky or Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane by Nin Andrews. I love the fact that each of its thirty-five prose poems is formatted as a cover letter to the editor of a literary journal, ostensibly accompanying a poetry submission. A large portion of any poetry collection’s likely readers are themselves poets, and any poet can identify with the speaker’s exasperated tone as she mocks the editor for his imperious silence:
“I know you won’t respond, preferring the justice of silence, the
instruction of meditative thought, and I have to agree. You know this and
this, for you have the instructor’s edition and are the maker of this earth
encompassed by strings of road like a ball of yarn” (“30 March”).
When you submitted these poems to editors of journals such as Georgia Review, Seneca Review, and West Branch, did you bother to attach actual cover letters, or did you just send your batch of poems by themselves? Your book reminds me of Michael Martone’s book, Michael Martone, written in the form of contributor notes. Do you know that book? Some sections of it were published in the back of literary journals, with the contributor notes. Others were published in the body of the journals, as brevities. In some cases, Martone recounts that he got a two-fer when the editors asked for a contributor’s note to accompany the brevity in the form of a contributor’s note.
Poets who read this book will also relate to the various descriptions of writing workshops in the book:
“Because beautiful is a word that my workshop class says is ineffective, that it doesn’t contain how this sight captures my attention and convinces me, absorbs and converts me away from the yard, so that the closest kin might be diverting, which the class might find archaic, and if that’s true, then I don’t know how to say that everything in the backyard might be pretending to be lovely in order that we can all get up in the morning” (“1 January”).
Your speaker seems so solitary, stymied simultaneously by the workshop’s pedantic chatter and the editor’s absolute silence, yet driven to press on and find the words she needs to express her personal vision.
Readers who have never attached a SASE or forced a grin and thanked workshop classmates for worthless feedback will find plenty to appreciate here, if they can get past the structure of the poems. My colleague who plays competitive chess enjoyed the various allusions to your fictional poetry manuscript, X=Pawn Capture, and the way you use chess to explore family relationships. Catholics and anyone else interested in divine mysteries will find much to admire in your various meditations on saints. Anyone who has navigated the minefields of adolescence will be moved by the descriptions of awkward teenage trysts, “such as when the boy from the football team tries to rearrange my blouse with his chin as I am pinned in his arms on those nights I walk home from a meeting, and I have been so embarrassed I can’t say no” (“18 January”).
What prompted you to write these poems formatted as letters to the editor? Were you inspired by epistolary novels such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula? By the published correspondence of literary figures? By other epistolary poems? I would also like to know what you’re working on now. What’s next for Amy Newman?
Yours Faithfully,
Tom C. Hunley
Book Review Editor, Poemeleon
Dear Tom C. Hunley:
Thanks for your kind words about the book!
Here’s how Dear Editor began: I’m always wondering about what makes a poem a poem. It’s not just line breaks; there’s an energy, a wondering, what R. P. Blackmur calls poetry’s “animating presence.” When we write poetry, we use our minds in a different way, dimensionally, extravagant in the first definition, “wandering beyond one's bounds.” We don’t use the poetry mind in the cover letter; in fact, we restrain it. One day I thought: what if, when she turns to compose the submission letter, the poet can’t turn off that part of the mind that’s involved in writing poems?
As I began these exercises, I signed my name and I thought “There’s no way I’m ever going to be able to send any of these out, with my name on it.” But eventually I got bold. I did include a short cover letter with the submissions, and I love Martone’s work; it’s a blast.
To answer your question about influences I’d have to go on for a while. Like the Amy Newman of Dear Editor, I have an adhesive mind, and everything’s a possibility—for example, the duality of confessional that Frank Bidart uses regarding Lowell’s Life Studies: confessional in terms of Saint Augustine, exploring details of one’s life as spiritual autobiography, as penitence and/or the search for faith. Everything is an instrument in our experience, even if it doesn’t seem that way at the moment, like Saint Bibiana who was treated so unkindly that you’d think she’d had enough and couldn’t take anymore, but everyone was surprised when a garden of aromatics and balms that soothe the flayed spirit grew on her grave, as if she had been thinking about it all along. You can tell, on her holy card, that she’s relieved, almost joyous now in her red and gold, holding out her sheaf of weeds for anyone who might be there.
In the process of drafting the manuscript, I noticed that there’s something artful about sending work out to that silence. Poetry is in many ways a practice, as prayer is a practice: obsessive, repetitive, moving from repetition into reverberation and resonance, into, the Amy Newman of Dear Editor hopes, into a sound driven back, a sound returned. On the other hand, I’m also hearing a lot from readers about her humor, which is great. There’s something about the way she snaps back to the template that tickles me, as though she needs the stations of the letter to get wherever she’s going that day.
My new project is a series that blends biography and history in a lyric dramatization of the lives of the mid-20th Century American poets, a kind of Google map of American poetry coming into being; I’m studying those fine, dramatic practitioners with their “pathological enthusiasms,” as Lowell puts it. I’m still trying to figure out what makes a poem a poem.
Thank you for reading, Tom.
Sincerely,
Amy Newman
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Tom C. Hunley is Poemeleon's Book Review Editor