ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Hermine Meinhard
General Questions
1) 1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I grew up in New Jersey, the first ten years in Newark, and the next several in a suburb called Maplewood - the writer of class poems and plays and, in high school, of short stories. But I took a circuitous path, through more academic pursuits, meditation and travel before I was able to seriously commit to writing.
2) 2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
Growing up, fairy tales and fables. As a young woman, Virginia Woolf. Reading her was as easy as breathing. Early on, the poetry of Sappho and Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of the Chinese poets, which I go back to again and again. Robert Creeley – So There was cool and fresh water. It helped me connect poetry to the world. I’ve always been such an interior poet. Brenda Hillman – Loose Sugar taught me about working with fragments. Tomaz Salamun – consistently and always. The Russians: Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. The inscrutable W. G. Sebald.
3) When did you 'become' a poet when did poet become part of your everyday life?
In New York in the mid-eighties…..I started out trying to write fiction. One day I brought my teacher a piece I’d written down in the middle of the night. I didn’t know what to make of it. She said, “That’s a poem.” It was a prose poem….. a little surreal story. That was the beginning of finding my voice as a writer.
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
I was an English major at Douglass College. The curriculum was rigorous, I read deeply. I am grateful for the courses I was required to take, for having read Beowulf and Chaucer, Melville, Hawthorne and Poe. The music and language of those works are part of me as a poet. Much later, I returned for an MFA at Sarah Lawrence and that’s where my life opened up as a writer. I focused intensively, I met many more people who were seriously pursuing writing; and the atmosphere at Sarah Lawrence was welcoming in that I was totally encouraged to explore my own idiosyncrasies and passions.
5) Do you find New York provincial?
I find New York City not provincial, but international. Among the people I know here there is a deep connection to the city but also a probing and vivid curiosity about others and the way the world is put together. Maybe I’m lucky in my friends. Yet, the feeling I have here is one of inclusiveness, not exclusiveness.
5.1) You are a prolific writer and editor 3rd Bed Poetry who are the younger writers who you admire and think are important?
Andrea Baker, Laura Sims and Eric Baus for their ability to use language for its material and suggestive properties while staying exquisitely attuned to emotion. Brenda Coultas: the poems in A Handmade Museum have the quality of made things like no other poetry I’ve read recently. … physical, constructed, with great integrity and love of the world. Rachel Zucker for her combination of sheer beauty and ferocious honesty.
7) Sports Team?
When I was growing up, my father watched baseball and I like going to baseball games if it’s in the daytime and sunny though I’ve never followed a team but I’m most likely to go to a Yankees game. I like the games as spectacle and sensory pleasure.
8) Vacation Spot?
Fire Island. People carry home their groceries in little red wagons.
9) Curse Word?
#&!(^)$$@!+-*&
10) What is your opinion of Avant garde American writing in comparison to other avant gardes from other places in the world?
I am drawn to the experimental writing of Eastern Europe. There is something about having had the society ripped open, and having to re-build with all the wounds still showing that speaks to me spiritually in a way that American innovative writing does not always. Some of the experimentation here feels overly intellectual. Perhaps this is my limitation, but something in the viscera of the piece, in the music and play of the language has to move me. Our contribution, on the other hand, has been keeping the pure sensory nature of the language foregrounded. The insistence on the primacy of the stuff we make poems from and the many forms it takes has been a source of continual refreshment.
Craft Questions
1) 1) How do you form a poem?
Everything I do is to help find my way to the unconscious. I am always working to accumulate language in my notebook. The sources may be dreams, jottings of experiences, found material and notes from books and guides (i.e. a field guide to insects), lines from other writers, mis-readings (I have terrible handwriting and get a lot from mis-reading it). Looking over the pages with a loose and dreamy mind, I locate correspondences and connections.
2) Do you use collage, parataxis cut ups or other tools?
Collage, in the sense that pieces of the poems are pulled together from different places in my notebook. I use a lot of props in my teaching which I also adapt for my own writing……toothpicks, blocks, assemblages of objects. These work as spurs to writing.
3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
It all feels organic. Even if I trick myself into some of it through a technical exercise, i.e. writing backwards – writing someone else’s lines backwards. My process is slow. It’s as if the material has to become part of my body before I can understand or “see” it. On the one hand, it becomes a part of me and, on the other, time has given me the perspective to see it more objectively.
4) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
I like to write in bed, and sleep is part of the process. I like to feel enclosed. My bedroom is cave-like. I write in spurts. I like having the sounds of the day, voices, a car door slamming, but at some distance. The distance works something like memory and creates resonances in consciousness. I like to read a lot, especially prose. I like it if my cats visit sometimes. I need to run downstairs and get snacks. I like to write if I wake up in the middle of the night or very early in the morning. I used to like to write mostly at dusk but that is changing because I like daylight more now.
5) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?
I seem to work in cycles. At the moment I am working off foreign language texts which has an element of artificiality about it. But when I was finishing my book, I drew on a storehouse of language from dreams, images from child-and young-adulthood and a more recent love affair. I am happy to know that I can go back and forth, that I do not have to always draw from the “deep well of my being” as I heard another poet once say, but that when it’s available to me, I can.
Link:
http://www.herminemeinhard.net