Interview with Erin Belieu
- Writer’s Resist is a movement founded in response to the recent direction of American Democracy. Can you tell us a little bit about its goals, & its accomplishments? What do you see as its main platform(s)?
- You mentioned working to help improve disability access as your next project. Can you elaborate more on this as well, both the need & the actions taken to address the need?
In my experience, as the mother of a physically disabled child, and as someone who struggled through childhood with a profound learning disability, disabled people and their needs, concerns, the ways we as a culture understand disability, well, there’s a ton of work to do in this area in raising people’s consciousness to see disabled people as fully human. Disabled people are the least represented writers on faculties, in programming for reading series and conferences. Their potential accessibility needs are often the last to be accounted for in public spaces. I have seen firsthand many many people’s tendency to treat identifiably disabled people as some frightening “Other.” So this is where I hope to put a lot of my activist energy in the coming years. We rise up together, yes? I’ll also say, it would help if others in the writing community were more willing to own their differences and disabilities more publicly.
- What do you see as poetry’s place in social change? Does it vary across societies & eras, or does it stay relatively similar?
This is a rather humongous epistemological question. My favorite kind! So this will be a little quick and dirty, given that I could write a book in answer. But: What I think about this issue comes mostly from Auden’s great elegy for Yeats--
“…For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth….”
Some people are very discouraged by that line—“Poetry makes nothing happen.” But the way I’ve always read that line is that Auden is saying art is not propaganda, and propaganda is not art. Art is outside of this; it’s as essential as a mouth. We are fed through it. And we then choose what we do with that resulting energy. Most of us, we can speak, we can sing, we can remain silent, we can cuss someone out. We can cause others pain, manipulate, seduce, or sweetly woo them with our words. We can make people laugh just by speaking. It’s up to each person to decide what she or he will do with the soul making poetry offers us.
Is poetry enough to change the world? All by itself, in some capital “A” Art vacuum way? No, I don’t think so. Would that it were that easy. But art has the power to move people in a way that just might lead to some kind of correspondingly essential action. It’s certainly done that for me, given me the kind of inner life that wants to actively promote empathy, social justice, and respect for this excruciatingly beautiful planet. How can I read “Tintern Abbey” and not come to value the natural world more deeply for its astonishing power and healing properties, the gifts it offers we humans? What do I learn about empathy and other creatures’ suffering from reading Robert Hayden, or Marina Tsvetayava, or Richard Hugo, or Sylvia Plath? My own personal philosophical recipe includes Auden—who famously changed his poem from “We must love one another or die,” to, “We must love one another and die—a giant sidebar conversation to be had there, what it means for him to have changed that one word after witnessing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War up close—to Shelley’s notion of poets as “unacknowledged legislators.” I mean, just because we’re unacknowledged generally—that is, my son likes to sweetly point out that even the most pointless TV star is more famous than any “famous” poet—that doesn’t mean we don’t have work to do if we’re the kind of people who feel the need to do it. And I think poetry can help us feel the need to do it, whatever the “it” turns out to be.
- Who are some poets who inspire you in terms of activism & social progress (through their written work &/or through their behaviors)?
Doug Powell, Jillian Weise, Gabriel Calvocoressi, Adrian Matejka, Jason Reynolds, Martin Espada, Robert Pinsky, Cate Marvin, Vievee Francis, Kevin Prufer…I mean, this list could be very very long, as so many poets have really stepped up in the literary world to provide activist leadership on various issues. These are the first names that come to mind. My rabble rousing mentor was Askold Melnyczuk, the great novelist, and founder of AGNI magazine. I learned a lot there as his managing editor when I was in my 20s. I owe a lot to Askold for helping me form and refine my ideas about how I could put my activist inclinations together with my literary ones. And I am immensely grateful for my friend and former student, Keith Kopka, who’s done so much of the work alongside me in recent years. I hope to pass on some of the gifts Askold gave to me to my own students.
- Are there any new writing projects you are working on? Any books/ poems we should be excited to see in the world soon?
Well, I write pretty slowly generally. But it feels like I might be on the trail of a book again just recently. My life got all smashed up a couple years back, and I was writing all these hideously sad, mad poems that were making me feel kind of ill. So I decided to take a break from writing for a while. I gave myself permission to take a vacation because honestly I just couldn’t stand what I was writing. It was genuinely hurting me. Not that I thought the poems were bad—I think I got some good poems out of sitting at the very bottom of the pit—but I just didn’t want to be in that space anymore. The subject ultimately didn’t feel worthy of that effort. I know that’s the opposite advice writers often hear—“You need to write your way through it”—but, to use a phrase I hate that annoyingly has some wisdom to it, “self care” is an actual, necessary thing, even as it repels my Nebraska Protestant “Walk it off!” kind of nature. I can’t afford to die from poetry, I don’t think. I mean, I’m somebody’s mom, you know? I can’t disappear. But yeah, I’ve had a few new poems coming lately. I always feel once I finish a book that I’ll never write another again. And then it just happens eventually. So I trust the process. But in the last year and a half I’ve had new work in The New York Times, and Poetry, and Willow Springs, so I haven’t been an entirely useless git. Just semi useless! Then again, I think of Cate Marvin’s wonderful, smart satirical poem “Poetry Machines,” and I remember it’s not the most poems that wins, it’s the meaningful ones.
- Who should we be reading that we may not be?
I am madly in love with Natalie Shapero’s poems. So smart and intense, and formally unto themselves. The way her mind moves is a thing of beauty. I’m a huge fan of Adrian Matejka’s work—his latest, Maps To The Stars, just out in April, is so sonically rich, and such an intimate portrait of a very particular self. Big, big fan of Airea Matthews work—she’s so fresh both in mind and inventive structures. Josh Bell’s recent Alamo Theory is wonderful. Dana Levin’s Banana Palace blows my mind—NO ONE can even try to imitate Dana. Impossible! Got a peek at some of Carl Phillips’s forthcoming book recently—Wild Is The Wind—and again feel like each and every Carl Phillips book is cause for celebration.
- What poets have shaped you?
Oh, golly. Hmmm. If I have to boil it down, it’d be Auden, Larkin, Plath, Rich, Bishop, Pinsky, Hugo, and Frank O’Hara. If I could somehow be their collective love child, that would make me happy. I came to Robert Hayden’s poetry much much later than I should have, but in recent years his work has been immense to me.
- Finally: tell us about your cats.
I think we need a coffee table book of poetry cats, don’t you, Ruth? I mean, who wouldn’t buy that? Mark Bibbins’s and Matthea Harvey’s? Paul Otrembo’s and Dana Levin’s? I don’t understand how people write poetry without cats around. I mean, I love dogs, too. But not sure if they’re essential familars to our particular witchcraft. Dogs have other virtues. My cats are Winnie and Haggis. Haggis is new to the family, so is still revealing his personality to us as he’s only 5 months old. As I’ve been tapping away at this he has been walking back and forth across the keyboard, writing his own poem in Esperanto, and letting me know my attentions are required elsewhere. He’s a ragdoll cat and is so pretty he’s engendered his own small cult following on social media. I am considering ways to monetize him (as I was sitting next to Doug the Pug and his dog parents on a recent flight and immediately started plotting how Haggis will make me ONE MILLION DOLLARS). Winnie is potentially some kind of Ancient Alien. Every night she selects poetry drafts, scraps of notebook paper, old airplane boarding passes she digs out of my purse, etc. and leaves them in a circular Stonehenge-like arrangement next to my bed. I wake up to these impenetrable messages every morning. Eventually I’ll figure it out.
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Erin Belieu is the author of four poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press. Her most recent, Slant Six (2015) received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year for The New York Times. Belieu is co founder (with poet Cate Marvin) of VIDA: Women In Literary Arts, and founder of Writers Resist/Write Our Democracy. She directs the MFA/Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida State University, and serves as faculty for the Lesley University low residency MFA program in Cambridge, MA.
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