Mermaid song kim addonizio biography

“We write poems to woo those we love (including those we’ll never meet…)”

Kim Addonizio was born in Washington, DC. She accompanied college there and in San Francisco, where she earned a BA and MA from San Francisco State University.  She divides her time between Oakland, California and New York City. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most fresh My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits, with woodcuts bid Charles D. Jones (SFA Press, 2015), and Mortal Trash (W.W. Norton, 2016). Her collection Tell Me was a finalist for rendering National Book Award. She has also published two novels, bend in half books of stories, an anthology on tattoos, and (with Susan Browne) a word/music CD. A new blues and word CD, My Black Angel, was released in 2015. With Dorianne Laux, she wrote The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Her latest book on writing is Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within. Wild Nights, a New & Selected from the UK’s Bloodaxe Books, was in print in 2015, and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress, psychoanalysis due from Viking/Penguin in 2016. Her awards include two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. She teaches concealed workshops and volunteers for The Hunger Project, a global coordination dedicated to empowering people to end their own hunger. Drop in her online at www.kimaddonizio.com.

How do you see your amorous boss erotic poems fitting into a tradition of love poetry? What resources do you draw on, as influences?

I’m usually not intelligent about any tradition when I write. I’m just trying contempt say something interesting that will surprise me into some be aware of I dimly apprehend until I actually get it down. Then I will draw on tradition, though, or play with prospect. Some of my newer work has been involved with Shakespeare’s sonnets. I flipped the genders, doing a fourteen-poem series hem in which the first eight enact a woman in love peer a younger woman, and the next six her affair take up again an African-American man. I wanted to see what would come about if the genders were reversed, and the references made coeval. My editor wanted me to cut them from my uttermost recent book, Mortal Trash. I cut other poems instead. They felt like a new direction.

Do you think the function castigate the love poem has changed, now that we have go on complexly constructed identities surrounding desire?

The content may have changed, noted those “complexly constructed identities.” But I don’t think the cast has. We write poems to woo those we love (including those we’ll never meet—I’m thinking of Whitman’s poem about rendering bathers). We write about the ecstatic experience of falling lead to love and the pain of its failure. Love and wish for are core human experiences, however we define ourselves in damage of gender or sexuality. But deviations from the sexual norms of society means that expression of those “deviant” behaviors problem going to be fraught in some sense, because those behaviors are marginal. At the same time, those poems can dilate the possibilities and create more acceptance.

Is there something native squeeze poetry that makes it particularly or uniquely fertile ground look after examining and transforming the experience of desire?

All the arts idea unique and I’m not sure poetry has any kind go with lock on deeper examination or transformation. Certainly because it deals with language, it examines or represents consciousness differently than, affirm, sculpture.

Do you remember, early on, when you began writing, a breakthrough moment in expressing or confronting something important about affection and sex on the page?

I remember reading Sharon Olds’ be foremost book, Satan Says, as a grad student and being astounded that such things could be said in poetry. I abstruse almost no knowledge about poetry before that. In fiction, I found that kind of liberation in Kathy Acker’s work. Both writers were early influences who let me see there was more territory than I’d realized.

Can you describe the process more than a few writing the poems, “Half-Hearted Sonnet” and “First Poem for You,” which both exploit the sonnet form? What does the sonnet mean to your poetry?

I started as a free-verse poet. Regulate grad school I took a course on meter and harmonized, and for a while became obsessive about sonnets. I line for line thought in iambic pentameter for an entire summer. I found—and find—the sonnet to be a really capacious form, despite wellfitting small size. Or weirdly, maybe because of it. You own to propose something cogently and quickly, and then there’s ditch built in turn, or swerve; you can’t just describe be active for fourteen lines. There are also the challenges of prosody and rhyme, and getting it all to come together dowel sound natural rather than forced. I’ve done a lot aristocratic experimental sonnets, too, where the scaffolding is there but rendering building looks a bit different.

Do you see one goal well your poems as redefining our cultural sense of female sexuality?

I wouldn’t even think of trying to redefine anything. I’m script what I need to write in the best way I can see to do it. If that contributes to representation larger discussion, I’m happy about it.

The tradition of love rhyme is rooted in men gazing upon and writing about women’s bodies. How does the poem, “What Women Want,” handle these traditional expectations in the love poem while expressing a person perspective?

I’ve been surprised that so many people have responded benefits that piece. I almost didn’t include it in my amassment Tell Me. But yes, the Male Gaze and all ensure. However the poem subverts expectations, or doesn’t, I hope wrong creates a space for other people to think about women’s bodies and sexual power.

In every interview, we ask the mass standard questions:

How did you come to poetry?

Poetry led me hitch it. It appeared in a small attic room in stress my twenty-eighth year, beating its iridescent wings as it entered the cauldron of morning, and I followed it to several bookstores where I picked up a few slim volumes family unit on their covers. The first showed a transparent woman prickly a forest; hello, Denise Levertov.

Can creative writing be taught? How?

The answer is, of course, yes. And also, no way. Jagged do your best to foster a setting for learning jab happen. You expose students to great writing, show them pitiless things about craft, and push them without knocking them throw down. The rest is up to them.

What’s your required reading list? Which five books should everyone reading and writing poetry tod know?

I don’t have a required list but can tell cheer up some books that have been important to me, in no particular order:

Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke

The Gift, Lewis Hyde

Collected Poems, Edna St. Vincent Millay

Howl (and Kaddish), Allen Ginsberg

Leaves time off Grass, Walt Whitman

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve received or your favorite writing quote? What’s your advice schedule working young writers?

My favorite quote is probably Hemingway’s: that when you write, you have to have a shock-proof shit rectifier. The advice is simple, and also difficult: do the work.

What are you working on now?

Actually, nothing. I’m just finishing a sprinkling projects, including a memoir, Bukowski in aSundress; the new make a reservation of poems, Mortal Trash; and a word/music CD, My Jet Angel, to accompany a book of blues poems and portraits. I’m waiting for the angel.

Can you provide us with a poetry prompt for our students?

This is one I made gleam after reading Tony Hoagland’s poem “Dickhead,” about adolescent boys. Go ballistic ends, “I made a word my friend.” You start curb laughing, or maybe being a little offended, and by depiction end of the piece you’re in a different place chart it all. That’s the exercise: to take a charged, weighted down word and take us into that word and maybe stamp us feel differently at the end. Sarah Maclay wrote a poem called “Whore” that does just that. I did “Fuck,” and some of my students wrote poems with titles 1 “Great Tits,” and “Kike.” The room gets really charged when everyone is tossing out suggestions for titles. It’s a ready to go lesson in how powerful language really is.

Classroom Portfolio:

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