I am reading a bunch of different stuff! I’m reading the AMAZING book, Does Your House Have Lions? by Sonia Sanchez. Somehow I never read it before and I feel so lucky to have been at a lecture given by Sandra Lim (whose new book is also amazing) where she discussed this book.
I’m reading Dana Levin’s new book, Now Do You Know Where You Are. It comes out from Copper Canyon in a few months. I just love the spaciousness of her mind. Her humor and compassion in the face of utter devastation.
I’m reading Tastes Like War by Grace Cho, which I love so far.
And a really great book called The Geography of Childhood by Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble. It came out in the 90’s and is dated in ways that require a bit of a deep breath. But overall there’s a ton of interesting thought and discussion in it. I’m grateful to the writer Vanessa Hua (who also has a new book coming out) for mentioning it in a talk I went to on foraging.
Oh! In the mornings on my electronic reader, before I get out of bed, I’m rereading In Search of Lost Time. Wow has that been a revelation. I think that’s one of those books I originally read to prove I could. This time I’m just reading it slowly for pleasure before the sun comes up. It’s great. And, at the same time, I’m reading The Hare With The Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, which is (to some extent) about his great-great (am I getting all the greats…there are a bunch) uncle who was supposedly the person Swann was based on. It’s so fun to read some of the Proust and then click over to the other book. A rare gift of the electronic reader. That and how it helps with my visual disability.
Um. I don’t think I have many favorites or not favorites in terms of trends. I just love that people keep writing books and that books keep getting published.
So I guess that would be something I don’t like: the ways in which small presses are being eaten up by larger conglomerates and the way that closes off more pathways for books.
I love that no matter what we hear people say about poetry being dead or books being dead, the fact is the trend is always that books keep being written and people still seek them out.
I think I’d say it’s fine not to write everyday. That the essential thing is to get to know yourself and your practice so you know when you’re not being true to it.
I think I’d say it’s okay to get discouraged and also if I just step away from worrying about success and failure in poems or poetry world stuff the same pleasure I felt writing as a little kid is still there and always there waiting for me.
Hm! That’s a tough one.
I think maybe May Sarton’s Journals. Maybe.
Or maybe Great Expectations.
Self-loathing
Self-hatred
Being unkind to oneself and others
Getting (understandably) caught up in other people’s notions of success and failure.
Thinking poetry is any one thing. Or that there’s a right and wrong way to make a poem.
Forgetting to be playful (whatever that means to you) in poems and in life…because play (imho) brings life and poems together in really unexpected ways.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.
