Moira Egan is the author of Cleave.
1. What poet should be in Obama’s cabinet, and in what role?
**Michele Kotler, Department of Education: Task Force on Poetic Expression/Self-Actualization among Underserved Youth (And I’ll happily be her Assistant)
2. If you could send Obama one poem or book of poems (not your own), what would it be and why?
**I’m not gonna presume; I think he can find them on his own, and I’m delighted that he can and will actually read some.
5. What’s the funniest poem you’ve read lately? What was the last poem that made you cry?
***laugh: Thoughts of a Young Girl by John Ashbery
***cry: The Shampoo by Elizabeth Bishop. What a complicatedly concrete, utterly sweet love poem.
6. William or Dorothy? Robert or Elizabeth Barrett? Moore or Bishop? Dunbar or Cullen? “Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully” or “No ideas but in things”? Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or Tender Buttons?
***Robert or EBB: EBB: let’s put our heart into it.
*** Moore or Bishop: Both. two great aesthetics that work great together. Moore’s “jeweler’s loupe of an eye” transmogrified into Bishop’s mad skills in expressing deep emotion thereby.
*** No ideas but in things: hit me with your best solar-plexus punch, but make it a smart one.
9. What lines from a poem you first read years ago still haunt you now?
***from “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold:
“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
Which, of course, I can’t think about without then recalling Anthony Hecht’s “Dover Bitch”:
“So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'…”
and then
“To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.”
10. What poem do you love, love, love, but don’t understand?
*** I honestly don’t think I can love a poem without some level of understanding. Otherwise, why am I reading it? Why would I want to pursue a relationship with a poem that has no interest in pursuing a relationship with me?
11. If the official organ of the AWP were not the Chronicle but were the Enquirer, what would some of the headlines be?
*** Let’s not go there.
12. If you were making a scandal rag for poetry in the grocery store checkout stands, what fictitious poetry love triangle would you make up to outsell that tired Hollywood story of Angelina and Brad and Jen?
*** Let’s not go there either. Too many heads end up in ovens.
13. This is the Best American Poetry blog. What’s the best non-American poetry you’ve read lately?
*** Antonella Anedda. Franco Buffoni. Daniele Cavicchia. Franca Grisoni. Vivian LaMarque. Valerio Magrelli. Fabio Pusterla.
16. Do you have a (clean) joke involving poetry you’d like to share?
*** What did Shakespeare say when his dog peed on the rug?
— Out, damn'd Spot! out, I say!
18. Can you name every teacher you had in elementary school? Did any of them make you memorize a poem? What poem(s)?
***Sadly, yes.
Sadly, no.