The Kiln Project's Interview with Poet Jennifer Moxley
Jennifer Moxley is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is, most recently, the author of Clampdown, a volume of poetry, and There Are Things We Live Among: Essays on the Object World. In The Nation, Ange Mlinko describes Clampdown as "poems that spill over with terror and bitterness, high lyricism and lust . . . The figure she cuts is as erect and austere as a gnomon; the shadow she casts will be long." Born and raised in San Diego, Moxley teaches at the University of Maine in Orono. She gave a reading at SLU on September 17, 2013, as part of the English Department’s 2013-14 Sheila Nolan Whalen Reading Series.
Kiln: From where do you draw your subject matter?
Moxley: From the River Styx. I’m lead there by your metaphor, “to draw,” which evokes water. Though my response is not entirely ironic, insofar as I am repeatedly drawn to thresholds. Such is this mythical river, a threshold between life and death. The existential paradox of poetry is that meaning is found through representation of the struggle to live meaningful life, while this latter goal, if distracted by representation, may escape us.
Kiln: Who has influenced you (other writers, celebrities, family, friends, etc.)?
Moxley: Whitman, Hopkins, Crane, Yeats, H. D., Loy, Williams, Duncan, Spicer, Wieners, Notley, Waldrop, most of my contemporaries, and many of the younger poets I meet, my students too. Poetry is a large company (Creeley).
Celebrities: As far as being a writer is concerned, none.
Kiln: When did you decide to pursue poetry as a career? When did you know you wanted to be a poet?
Moxley: Poetry is not a career but a vocation. A calling. You don’t pursue poetry, poetry pursues you. So far I haven’t been able to outrun it.
Kiln: Do you have any passions, other than poetry?
Moxley: I love nonfiction literary forms: diaries, letters, and essays. I also love what M. F. K. Fisher called “good honest food.”
Kiln: Do you have a set process for writing? Do some poems take longer/require more edits? Are there any one-shots?
Moxley: When I poem shows up, I like to invite it in, but as of late my house is too full of trivial things—“getting and spending”—to do so. Advice: carefully arrange your talismans, open a book and the window, let the mind err. A poem may show up. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of work to do. Yeats put it best: “ . . . A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”
Kiln: It seemed that your journal, Impercipient, was a very focused voice for political commentary within a small community. It had a specific purpose. Would you say that purpose (your reason for writing poetry) has changed for you now?
Moxley: The Impercipient (though I don’t know why you say a focused voice for “political commentary” since it was a poetry magazine dedicated to lyric utterance), was for a moment in time and a particular group. It was a salon. Even back then, however, it wasn’t my sole purpose for writing. For that, see my answer to question one.
THE KILN PROJECT'S INTERVIEW WITH Fiction Writer Naama Goldstein
Naama Goldstein is the Jean Drahmann writer-in-residence at Saint Louis University for 2013. She is the author ofThe Place Will Comfort You, a collection of short stories. A girlhood spent in Israel's Zionist-Orthodox milieu inspires her fiction, in which visions of extremism and disconnection often play out to the rhythms of modern and Biblical Hebrew. Religious fundamentalism, rock and roll fandom, and teenage anorexia are all given a lyrical, tragi-comic voice, which Grace Paley has hailed as "a caustic new Hebrew melody." She lives in Boston. She gave a reading on October 8, 2013, and a craft talk on October 15, 2013, at SLU as part of the English Department’s 2013-14 Sheila Nolan Whalen Reading Series.
Kiln: From where do you draw your subject matter?
Goldstein: Mostly from my upbringing in Israel, and more specifically from my experience within the Dati-Leumi (Religious-Nationalist) sector of Israeli society.
Kiln: Who has influenced you?
Goldstein: I remember hearing Iggy Pop attesting to the influence of vacuum-cleaner noise on his music. If I remember correctly, he was talking about the prevalence of that noise in his childhood. Maybe he mentioned other sorts of industrial sound, I'm not sure. And maybe he said that he draws not only on the textures of that native soundscape, but on the meaning of being steeped in that soundscape. That's what I gathered, in any case. My native soundscape, and wordscape, was Hebrew liturgy. I grew up in prayer. I would have been hearing it before I was verbal, let alone literate. Later, as a very young person with some command of language, I would have plopped right into the lap of rapturous ancient verse, would have absorbed all of its concerns and all of its extraordinary and mesmerizing patterns of speech. In parallel, of course, you had your everyday speech. But your elevated language, the language of prayer, with a profundity of purpose and form, was also everyday language. We prayed every day. We prayed even more on the Sabbath. I think this daily admixture of language is a stuff that comes through in my work.
Kiln: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Goldstein: I knew clearly that I wanted to be a writer when I began writing fiction in college, in the States. I had always thought of myself as an artist by nature, but had never considered words my medium. I was pegged as an artist, by others and by myself, because I was strong at drawing and drew a lot, from an early age. Due to a combination of circumstances and choices I never developed that art all that far beyond a native bent. By the time I was in college it seemed increasingly clear to me that my future was not as that sort of artist. Then suddenly I found words and that was my art.
Kiln: Do you have any passions other than writing?
Goldstein: I love to sing.
Kiln: Do you have a set process for writing? Do some stories take longer/require more edits? Are there any one-shots?
Goldstein: I don't have a set process. Yes, some stories take longer to emerge, all require revisions. As a matter of fact, if I absolutely had to declare a process, revision would be it. There are no one-shots.