Interview with Anna EvansWG: Anna, Barefoot Muse is one of the most interesting poetry magazines out online now in that it accepts only formal poetry, and it seems to be quite a success, garnering work from such poets as X. J. Kennedy. Can you talk a little bit about how Barefoot Muse got started? AE: When my youngest daughter began kindergarten in September 2005 I was suddenly able to devote more time to poetry and I began to send submissions to journals in a more focused way. It was then that I realized that there really weren't that many journals or even e-zines that were enthusiastic about poetry using meter and traditional forms. I managed to get poems into one of the last ever issues of both The Formalist and Edge City Review, and then both of those ceased publication. Furthermore, those journals that remained, such as The New Formalist, often tended towards the politically conservative, contrary to my own work. However, I like to think of myself as a woman who sees opportunity in adversity, so rather than sitting around whining about how difficult it was to place formal poems, I decided to begin my own e-zine. I chose the name Barefoot Muse for several reasons: "muse' is the muse of poetry or perhaps my own specific muse; "foot' could, of course, refer to a metrical foot, while "barefoot' is a subtle allusion to the phrase "barefoot and pregnant,' a personal reminder that whereas I had loved my years as a mother of two young children, it was time to move onto fresh challenges. Publishing a poem by X.J. Kennedy was a major coup—I had written a review of his latest books for The Raintown Review, and the editor sent him an advance copy. When the editor forwarded Kennedy's email in which he expressed his pleasure with the review, I was emboldened to email him and request reprint rights on one of the poems. It's always been a matter of seizing the opportunities that present themselves. WG: What is your definition of formal poetry? Does it include forms such as senryu, ghazals or pantoum that originate in non-European languages? AE: That's an issue that merits examination because there are many definitions of form. I've had free verse poets claim that every poem has its own form, and by their argument I should publish free verse, but that's just semantics. For the purposes of the Barefoot Muse, formal poetry is poetry written in accordance with a set of received rules. Those rules can be syllabic, metrical or to do with repetition; complex, or as simple as blank verse; and the poem can adhere rigidly to them or loosely. However the reader needs to be able to perceive the pattern of the rules from the poem. I've published at least one ghazal and pantoum; I've also published a tanka and several cinquains, and I've got one of the newest syllabic forms, the fib, coming up in the June issue. I would publish senryu and haiku, but no one has ever sent me one I've liked enough. Unfortunately, those short syllabic forms are easy to do badly. I'll also admit that I have a sneaking preference for metrical pantoums and sestinas over non-metrical—when these are written without attention to meter, they tend to end up with very long, sprawling lines. I absolutely love some of the delicate French forms such as the triolet and the rondeau. I wish I received more of the exotic forms in submissions, but sonnets still outnumber every other form by far. WG: With respect to haiku, many writers of contemporary haiku in English - Nick Virgilio was a good example - ignore the 5-7-5, asserting that what the syllabication accomplishes in Japanese is lost in English because of the differences in the language. A similar argument is made for use of three lines. How do you feel about that? If a writer submits haiku to Barefoot Muse that did not use the traditional syllabication would that keep you from accepting it? AE: I actually agree with Nick Virgilio on this. I think the syntactic structure of the haiku is much more important, i.e. that it consists of an image phrase juxtaposed with a fragment which illuminates the image in a new way. The weak haiku I receive tend to be image-poor and written in complete sentences with first person pronouns. But I go out of my way to rationalize accepting a good poem even if it doesn't follow all the rules. For example, I recently received a sonnet that I loved, except that the final couplet was tetrameter instead of pentameter. I figured that could be a purposeful choice by the poet, and accepted the poem. WG: I'd like to explore the idea of the impact of a disabilities aesthetic on the concept of form with you. One of the things that disabilities poetry has emphasized very heavily is the role of the body, not just in terms of subject but in terms of perspective and composition. Let me give you an example. In his groundbreaking essay "The Enjambed Body" in the Georgia Review Jim Ferris observes that when the able-bodied person walks, they have a very regular gait which produces a consistent meter that represents a sort of normalcy. Because he has one leg shorter than the other, however, Ferris' gait is very asymmetrical and, therefore, when he writes, he seeks a discordant beat to reflect his own physical existence. What are your thoughts about having form reflect a person's disability as a sort of counterpoint to the assumption that we all operate from a certain accepted expectation of normalcy, a normalcy implied by regularity of form. AE: This is actually a very important question and follows on from my last answer. I love to see poets take risks with established forms so that the form itself is more than just a vehicle but becomes intrinsic to the meaning and perspective of the poem. However, it is essential that, when a poet chooses to alter the form in this way, the reader perceives those choices as deliberate. In other words, there's no point writing a quasi-sonnet in loose meter with lines of varying feet, unless it can be instantly distinguished from a sonnet written by someone who simply isn't very good at iambic pentameter. For this reason I would encourage all poets to work very hard at being able to write perfect and regular examples of a form before they decide to play with the rules. But I would certainly endorse the idea of disabled poets claiming their own aesthetic. It is similar to what happened early last century when some African American poets such as Sterling Brown stopped writing "like' the white poets of the European canon and reclaimed bluesier forms composed in dialect and using real characters of the old South. WG: The comparison of poets with disabilities to African American poets, say of the Harlem Renaissance, in attempting to establish their own aesthetic is an important one, I think, so I was glad to hear you mention that. In looking to contemporary poets who write formal poetry, who would you suggest, that new writers read? AE: That's a difficult one because taste is so subjective. However I like Molly Peacock, Rachel Hadas, A.E. Stallings and Natasha Trethewey. Speaking of African American poets, Major Jackson has done some interesting things with form. The contemporary old guard are also still around—poets like Richard Wilbur, X.J. Kennedy, Rhina Espaillat and Daniel Hoffman. But really, what I would recommend is reading the formal poetry small press journals—Measure, the Raintown Review, and of course the Barefoot Muse. When a poem by a particular writer strikes you deeply, then you can investigate as to whether they have books or chapbooks for sale. WG: Despite the fact that you publish Barefoot Muse, you also write free verse, as your book Swimming attests. Can you elaborate a little on your own approach to writing free verse? AE: Hmm. I rarely sit down and say to myself "Now I'm going to write a sonnet," or "This is going to be a free verse poem." Most poems began with an idea which becomes a line central to the life of the poem. As I develop thoughts around that idea I begin to be able to tell if it is an idea that will derive synergy from additional structure such as meter, rhyme and repetition, or whether it would be hampered by formal elements. I would, however, recommend the use of form for exploring emotionally difficult subjects that one might otherwise find difficult to tackle. Rhyme, for instance, is an extremely powerful tool which gives momentum to expression—it forces the writer to keep composing past the point at which free verse would allow one to draw back. Open ended subjects, on the other hand, are often easier to harness to free verse—an engine that does not need to stop, or even pause, at any particular point. WG: One of my favorite free verse poems of yours is "Fruit Flies." I especially like the last three lines: Above their pale brows swarm Can you walk us thirough the composition of that poem? AE: Certainly. I think most poets have the kind of brain that makes intuitive leaps and so we connect images and concepts that the more literally minded might not. So, in this case, the sight of fruit flies swarming above a pear that I had mistakenly left on a countertop during the summer months, took me back to the Genetics I studied in High School. Fruit flies are useful in Genetics because they display an example of a sex-linked characteristic—eye color—and the gender is easy to determine. Of course the most famous example of a sex-linked characteristic among humans is Hemophilia, and here I admit that I conflated two stories to get this poem, which is a good example of the relationship that first person poetry has to truth. The hemophiliac mentioned in the poem, "Mike," was not a classmate but a friend of my husband's, who contracted Hepatitis C during a routine blood transfusion in the "80s. At the time of this poem's composition we had just learned that his body was rejecting his second liver transplant. Of course the poignancy arises because both his daughters must be carriers of the hemophilia gene, which means the probability is that half their sons will be hemophiliacs. So at the end of the poem with the daughters sitting by the bed, I bring back the fruit flies as a metaphor for probabilities—things we can't know and can't change. That's the story of the poem. Of course what you are looking at is perhaps the twentieth draft! In the early drafts I also had a stanza about the notoriously hemophiliac Russian royal family, which I decided was getting in the way. It was also a challenge with this poem, as it often is with free verse narrative, to avoid it sounding too much like prose. With this in mind I really compressed the action in the middle two stanzas, and made sure there was plenty of rhythmic mirroring, alliteration and internal rhyme going on: pear/air, mottles/speckle, Drosophila/Hemophilia, share/chair, swarm/swat, to name just a few. WG: Tell us a little bit about your two books, Swimming and the audio book Modern Metrics. AE: One of the challenges and delights of putting together a long manuscript is to ensure that the poems have a synergy together such that their energy is greater in combination than as single pieces. With Swimming (available from Maverick Duck Press ), I achieved this by making the poems into a loose narrative, even though the sequence they ended up in is very far from the order in which they were written, and the resultant story bears only a passing resemblance to autobiography. Nevertheless, Swimming is the story of a woman approaching middle age, who is trying to find meaning in her life and metaphorically keep her head above water. An early poem in the book, "Suburban Housewives in Their Forties," is a key poem, examining the frustration of women who have given their best years to childrearing and don't know how to move on once those children begin to need them less. When I read that poem I always preface it by saying: "I wrote this poem, and then I went back to school," because in reality that's how I personally managed to get over that and then I went back to school. Several of the poems are set in water because I enjoy swimming laps as exercise, hence the literal meaning of the title. Modern Metrics came about quite differently, although the thematic link there is that all the poems are formal poems. Modern Metrics Press hosts a reading series in New York, and they invited me to read there last September, which I managed to do despite the fact that I had heart surgery two weeks before! They provided me with a high quality sound recording of the event, and I use my MacBook Pro, which I adore—every writer should have one!—to produce small numbers of CDs which I sell at readings. They have actually been surprisingly popular—I think in this accelerated era more people have time to listen to CDs, typically while driving, than they do to pick up a book. I should add that I have another small chapbook coming out in August, also from Maverick Duck Press. It's called Selected Sonnets, and will comprise fourteen of my best sonnets, including the two Howard Nemerov finalists, and sonnets published by Atlanta Review, Evansville Review and Measure. "The Art of Reading" is also in there, which you had the goodness to publish in Outskirts a few years ago. WG: Before concluding our interview, I'd like to ask you if you could give some tips to potential contributors to Barefoot Muse. I'm sure you find that you have to continually reject poems for the same reasons. What are some of the things that you would caution writers against - some of the "don'ts". On the positive side, what are you looking for? AE: Thank you for asking that! I read over 900 poems for each issue of the Barefoot Muse, and some of them are so off the mark the email was a complete waste of bandwidth! Firstly, I would caution all potential contributors to read an issue of the journal before submitting, and at the very least to read the submission guidelines. Unfortunately the Muse is listed in several directories of publications that accept email submissions, and I swear some people just blanket submit to the entire list! Every reading period I reject maybe 200 poems written in free verse even though I make it very clear that I only publish formal/metrical poetry. Reading the issue will also give poets an idea of the kind of formal/metrical poetry I publish—edgy, contemporary subjects in the language of today. At the first sight of "thou", "didst love" or other archaic language, I tend to stop reading the submission. Some subjects have been done to death also, which means a poem on one of these topics will need to be remarkable—the changing seasons, aging, romantic love and loss, the beauty of nature etc. etc. Plus, I get more sonnets than any other individual form. Every issue I repeat this mantra: you stand a better chance of getting into the journal if you send me anything other than a sonnet. What I love to read are poems in the rarer forms, or nonce forms, which speak to the modern era: political poems (although these are hard to do well) and those which address the cultural issues relevant to our times—technology and its increasing dominance of our leisure hours, the still prevalent social barriers due to gender, class, race and disability, parenthood within and without the nuclear family, and, of course, sex! I also like poems with mythical, historical, literary or ekphrastic themes. WG: Anna, I'd really like to thank you for taking the time to talk to us about your work, both as a poet and an editor. Is there anything else that you would like to add that we may have missed? AE: My New Jersey based Poetry Group, the Quick "n Dirty Poets, is hosting its Hot "n Sticky Summer Reading series in June, July and August.
I do hope some of your readers will come along and say hello. I'm also giving a featured reading for the Last Thursday Series at Middletown Library in Middletown, NJ, on September 25th. All readings start at 7 p.m. Finally, I'm available to teach poetry workshops with an emphasis on form—children and adult—for a small fee. Please feel welcome contact me at evnsanna@comcast.net. Thank YOU! It's been a wonderful experience. |