Interview: Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet is the author of The Greenhouse, selected by David Baker for the Frost Place Poetry Chapbook Prize. Tulips, Water, Ash was selected by Jean Valentine for the Morse Poetry Prize and published by University Press of New England. Her poems have appeared in Cream City Review, At Length, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, 32 Poems, Quarterly West, and many other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded a Javits fellowship and a Phelan Award and received fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. (bio from www.lisagluskinstonestreet.com)
TCJWW: I love the title The Greenhouse. It seems to be a metaphor for a chapbook: it creates an enclosed space. What does the title stand for? What does it mean to you? Stonestreet: I don’t know what it “stands for,” per se, but the image, for me, calls up that close, bounded feeling of the early caretaker-child dyad - everything magnified, humid, both beautifully and frustratingly myopic, a perspective at once blurred and sharpened. (I say caretaker, because of course that person need not be the child’s biological mother, but it’s definitely something I experienced as the primary caretaker/sole source of nourishment in my son’s first year.) The chapbook format turned out to be a good one for these poems, which talk back and forth among themselves in this limited, intense space.
TCJWW: The poems in this chapbook seem to employ several voices. Who is speaking? Stonestreet: Well, they’re not multivocal in a literal sense; everything’s going on inside the speaker, though she contains multitudes – all the outer voices that become inner, all the inner voices that intertwine and reflect each other. I should admit that these are largely autobiographical poems, as unfashionable as that admission may be. The I is the I. Mostly, except when it’s not.
TCJWW: Some poems stretch across the page (“Flowers, Doggies, the Moon”), and others stay narrow and small (“Chimera”). What do you consider when working on form? Stonestreet: I’m a bit mystical about this. I feel like one of my roles as a poet is to ingest craft, including options for form, and to integrate them in a kind of fermentation process, so that I’m ready when a poem tells me what it wants to be. “FDTM” wanted, needed, to be big and rangy and digressive, to weave itself across the loom of the page. “Chimera” is a wrestling with issues of control and boundary, so it’s woven much more tightly. This is, of course, postgame analysis – in the moment, it’s a much more intuitive thing.
TCJWW: The Greenhouse is a book of motherhood. How do you find the balance between raising a child and writing? Stonestreet: I find it difficult. (Though not as difficult as the balance among raising a child, earning a living, teaching, maintaining a marriage and a household, and writing.) Somebody always gets the short end of the stick; more often than not, it’s the poem. I’m trying to be OK with that. Mostly, I chip away where I can, and I don’t quit.
TCJWW: What books/authors inspire your work? Who are you reading now? Stonestreet: Inspiration is a weird thing; for me it’s never direct. Right now, I’m reading Andrea Cohen’s Furs Not Mine, Rebecca Foust’s Paradise Drive, Brian Teare’s Pleasure (again!), and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. All brilliant, each in the shape it needs to take to do what it needs to do.
TCJWW: What’s next for you? What are you working on? Stonestreet: I had a burst of writing right after The Greenhouse came out, then several months of banging my head against the wall, plus ordinary not-writing due to life intruding. Then a few weeks ago, I got a flash of how the poems I’d been working on, mostly not-so-successfully, might alter themselves to start talking to each other. Too soon to say anything beyond that, but it’s a similar feeling to the one I had when the poems that became The Greenhouse started to coalesce, so I’m hopeful.
Photo credit:
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet from www.lisagluskinstonestreet.com
