years of this cen-tury that changed

all of this—my writing process, my relationship to language, and my self as a writer. I was living in NYC with my husband and baby daughter when 9/11 oc-curred, and four years later, when Hurricane Katrina devastated my native city of

New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, I was a mother of two young daughters. During Katrina, my parents had remained in the city as it fl ooded. It strikes me now that my experience as a mother is defi ned by witnessing these disasters from afar. But perhaps moreimportantly, 9/11 and Katrina forever changed my relationship to poetry. I began to think about poetry very diff erently—to think about the kind of cultural work it could do in the world.

AJB: Adrienne Rich says, “In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.” Does this statement resonate for you when considering the physicality inherent in the poems of Milk Dress?

COOLEY: Milk Dress is a book about the body—the female body in particular. I was interested in writing about the languages used to talk about mothering and birthing and child-raising. I thought about this in structuring the book, for example. � e poems about the Harry Harlow wire-mother experiments work as fragments that break and connect the other poems. I was very compelled by the scientifi c language of that experiment.

AJB: How has your experience as a professor of writing (not to mention an administrator of a writing program) informed your own writing?

COOLEY: My experience as a teacher has been crucial to the writing of my poems. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have co-founded an MFA program with my beloved colleagues at Queens College in 2007 and to be running that program with them now. Our program is truly a collaborative venture, one which has given all of us invaluable chances to talk about creative writing, pedagogy,

and the teaching of writing. I love teaching, and I love directing the MFA program. To me, it is all about risk and taking chances with your work, and what could be more fun? And more terrifying. I always tell my students: you should always be trying to write the poem you don’t think you can write, the poem you are afraid of writing. And I am trying to do that in my own work.

AJB: Who and what are your infl uences?

COOLEY: My greatest infl uence in Milk Dress is Muriel Rukeyser. I discovered her as an undergraduate, but her work has meant so much to me in my adult life beyond college. � e Life of Poetry, her book on poetics, is fantastic, and all of her poems blend history and personal experience with a call for social justice. Her work is of the world in the very best way. Her long poem, “� e Book of the Dead,” contains my favorite lines of all time: “What three things can never be done? / Forget. Be Silent. Stand alone.”

AJB: Milk Dress and much of your work focus on specifi c subjects:pregnancy and motherhood in Milk Dress, the Salem witch trials in � e Affl icted Girls, Hurricane Katrina in Breach, the personae poems of Resurrection. What is your process for cracking open a subject, for entering it and making it truly your own? And if research is involved, how do you then turn such research into something that sings?

COOLEY: � at is a very interesting question. I love research—as I discovered while getting my PhD—and in particular, I aminterested in archival work. Many poems in my fi rst book were, in their fi rst incarnations, PhD seminar papers!

AJB: Subject matter poetry can be a controversial topic for contemporary poets. What is your take on the benefi ts and risks inherent in writing toward a specifi c subject?

COOLEY: But subject matter can only be a way into the work not the work itself. Otherwise the poem will become an exercise in “Isn’t that interesting?” I use subject matter to fi nd a new language, to discover a new lexicon. In my book on the Salem Witch Trials, [this new lexicon] was the language of trial transcripts where most people could not sign their names and the courts spoke for them. In Milk Dress, I am interested in the language of mothering and the language of disaster and how those two discourses shape experiences.

h, fi xed form is endlessly f a s c i n a t i n g . . . m o s t interesting to me when it is rebellious...

author interview (continued)5N

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AJB: What is your personal experience with writing in received forms?

COOLEY: Oh, fi xed form is endlessly fascinating! I think it is most interesting to me when it is rebellious—as in, say, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” that fabulous villanelle. Or in the work of Marilyn Hacker. In Milk Dress, I wanted to set received fi xed forms alongside open prose-like forms, to show that there is no one single truth or way of getting at the truth of what I was writing about.

AJB: � ere are so many diff erent schools, movements, and monikers in the poetry world today. How do you position yourself within these? Are there any particular schools or styles to which you subscribe?

COOLEY: In terms of schools of poetry, I follow my other favorite poet, CD Wright, in her book, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil, when she writes, “� ere is not much poetry from which I feel barred, whether it is arcane or open in the extreme. I attempt to run the gamut...” I think it is important to read poems you don’t love—even poems you hate—not just work you are immediately drawn to.

AJB: Milk Dress is your fourth published poetry collection, and you have published a novel as well. How do you feel your writing has evolved over the years? Where do you see it going?

COOLEY: My writing has evolved since my fi rst book, Resurrection, was published in 1996. I go back to what Frank Bidart says in an interview at the back of his book In the Western Night. He talks about “fi nding the necessary subject for me at that time.” I think we are all doing that, at every moment we are writing, fi nding that subject matter that we need now. And it is always changing. After I wrote � e Affl icted Girls, my book about Salem, I thought, “What will it be like to return to more personal subject matter now, and see how it is infl ected by this work on history I’ve done?” I wanted to challenge myself, as I do with each book I write, to write something diff erent, to push myself in a new direction.

AJB: What do you think the future holds for emerging poets, and poetry, in this country? What do we have to look forward to?

COOLEY: I believe it’s a great time for American poetry. I have a lot of hope for its future and believe that the internet, the growth of MFA programs, and all the magazines out there are wonderful! I often hear all of those things disparaged, as if we could return to some kind of pure poetry. I don’t believe that at all. More and more, I think we are discovering the ways in which poetry can become a larger part of the world and how much we need poetry to be citizens of that world.

author interview (continued) 6

THE 2011 BEATRICE HAWLEY AWARD

Open to emerging and established poets residing in the United States for an

unpublished, book-length manuscript of poems

~The winner recieves $2000, publication, and distribution through Consortium

~Submission deadline is December 1st, 2010

~For complete guidelines or to submit your manuscript electronically, please visit our

website: www.alicejamesbooks.org

Congratulations to our

2010 Kundiman Poetry Prize Winner

for her book

Pier

forthcoming from AJB in fall 2011

The next contest deadline is February 11th, 2011. Visit www.kundiman.org or our website for details & guidelines.

Janine Oshiro

discovering the ways in which poetry can become a larger part of the