In addition to "A Statement of My Teaching Philosophy" (which I shared yesterday), the job application I'm working on requires "A Statement of My Creative Interests"--another easier-said-than-done assignment. As you can see, the following version leaves out baking, gardening, romance, dogs, boys, Sam Cooke, Harpo Marx, Loretta Lynn, baseball, 70s cop shows, and the Ramones.

I consider myself to be primarily a narrative poet, but I also write memoir and personal essays, often about literature. As a reader, I have a particular interest in pre-twentieth-century canonical poetry, although I have been significantly influenced by twentieth-century writers such as Wislawa Szymborska, Hayden Carruth, and Joe Bolton. In addition, both my poetry and my prose owe a great deal to nineteenth-century British and Russian classics as well the work of modernists such as Woolf, Bowen, Compton-Burnett, and Green. It has been important to me, as a woman poet, to deal forthrightly with ways in which my work has been shaped, for better or worse, by the work of “famous men”; that, among other things, was the impetus behind the writing of my memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton.More recently I have found myself turning to history as a trigger, and presently I am in the midst of writing a history in verse of the Chestnut Ridge region of southwestern Pennsylvania, site of numerous battles during the French and Indian War and later the center of industrialist Henry Clay Frick’s coking operations. I have also completed a manuscript of essays about books I obsessively reread as well as an anthology of writings about poetry, which as I explain in the book’s introduction is “neither a craft handbook nor a theory manual, . . . merely one reader’s record of the long human need to make poetry.”

For no matter how distant in time those individuals have become, reading about that need, in both their own words and the words of others, keeps our relationship with them intimate and immediate. Suetonius explains Virgil’s revision process; Sir Philip Sidney argues with Aristotle; Emily Brontë peels potatoes and creates an imaginary country; Phillis Wheatley tries on John Milton’s syntax for size; Walt Whitman invents a manifesto for a poetic tribe that doesn’t yet exist; Audre Lorde sings the body electric; Jack Wiler rants about high school; ten-year-old Ethan Richard complains that poetry “always spouts the truth you don’t want other people to hear in public.”

            In addition to being a writer, I’ve played the violin since the age of six, and that long relationship with music has been integral to how I compose sentences and lines, which is essentially by ear—that is, I hear the sound of the next word before I know what the word might be. Lately I’ve begun writing more intensely about music and memory, and next spring the Beloit Poetry Journal will be featuring a long poem about my violin teacher, Henryk Kowalski, whose bizarre history (there’s a Wikipedia article, if you want the bare-bones tale) intersected my teenage struggles to reconcile art with failure and fear.