[If you are a poet and would like to participate in this "Poetry and Money" Series, go HERE for information.]
A 3-Question Interview, A Sample Poem, and Book List Featuring
Donna Fleischer
1) You
are a poet. How do you make money to survive?
A family tragedy forced me to leave university my third year. It would
take 15 years to constellate a job that would allow for return to my bachelor
of arts studies, which surprisingly, would culminate in a teaching
assistantship that, sadly, I declined for lack of sufficient funds to live on. A
master of arts degree, at that time would have lifted me into work very
different from being a master journeyman four-color process stripper in
commercial and publications offset printing, a trade for which I apprenticed
four years, paid well, and in which I would work for over 25 years. The
frequent shift hours changes and mandatory overtime left me exhausted. That’s
when and where poetry fully came into my life. I have now developed a freelance
copy editing practice with tremendous support from my spouse. We pay our taxes,
visit family and friends in Germany, and get by. The work schedule is vastly
different from the years of production work.
I have time to submit poems for publication, for access to those who
would read poetry. The writing of poems is vastly different these days, with
far more time to read, walk, and correspond with other poets.
2) How
does your choice affect your process of making your poems?
When I thought about answering these three questions, the ever present
headline behind my eyes was ‘poetry and money’. Instead, I see it is ‘Money . .
. and Poetry.’ At 16 a high school teacher forced me to write my first poem, in
iambic pentameter, of course. I found my self reveling in that making. I’d
studied the classic and modern world poets but was eager to know what
contemporary poets were writing. Allen Ginsberg was prominent at the time, and
Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It encouraged me that my first Ginsberg poem wasn’t
nearly his best, “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear”, but I loved his voice, cadence,
outrage, and love for justice and song.
I began writing poetry. For the next few university years I concentrated on Shakespeare,
the Restoration poets, Shelley, Keats, Yeats, Dickinson, Theodore Roethke,
Wallace Stephens, and Edward Field. In the mid- seventies I discovered Gertrude
Stein, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Muriel Rukeyser, Monique Wittig. Over the
years I’ve read lots of Lew Welch, Kenneth Patchen, Lorine Niedecker, Frank
Bidart, the classic haiku poets Basho, Buson, Issa, and Chiyo-ni, the first
modern, Shiki, Santoka, and Takahashi, and contemporary haiku poets Michael
McClintock, Jim Kacian, Alan Summers, marlene mountain, Bruce Ross, Merrill Gonzales,
Tom Clausen, Johannes H. S. Berg, Taro Kunugi, and Tyrone McDonald. Through the
Internet I continue to discover contemporary poets important to me, like Amy
King, Trace Peterson, Noelle Kocot, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Jared Stanley, Anny
Ballardini, Sabine Miller, Brenda Iijima, Katie Yates, Nada Gordon, Sueyeun
Juliette Lee, Ariana Reines, Ana Božičević, Lynn Behrendt, Dionne Brand,
Charlie Mehrhoff, Bob Arnold, Scott Watson, CA Conrad, john martone, Anne
Gorick, Bhanu Kapil, Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Rachel Blau DuPlessis,
James Finnegan, Don Wentworth, and Aditya
Bahl. (One is bound to overlook or
temporarily forget the names of others in list-making but one must try.) And,
there’s music, all kinds, and the visual arts without which there’d be lots
less poetry from me.
As a printer, finding work was relatively easy for many years, so my focus
was making time to write, sort of like cramming for exams, often on the fly, on
scraps of paper at work, during lunch. Prior to printing I’d co-managed a cash
and carry drycleaning store with a coin-operated laundry next door, in the city
where I lived. Every day I spoke with, listened to, many voices — people of
different ethnicities, ages, income levels, and that gave me energy to write,
in contrast with the mostly, solitary tedious work in a darkened room at a
light table waiting up ahead for me as a printer. One constant has been some
words given me by a psychotherapist years ago: “Work with what you have.” My
work choices were defined by the necessity of making a livelihood. Those five
words shaped what I had been doing all along, and cued me to respect my efforts
and my failures. Work and early life tragedies left me with a feeling of
emptiness and fear. Making poems gave me something that could not be taken
away, gave shape and continuity to my life, and brought me a kind of joy I
hadn’t experienced since childhood.
In 1987 my poetry was awarded a major university prize by two
distinguished professors, and it included a sizeable amount of money. This
encouraged me to take my work more seriously, to take a long look at what I’d
written to date. In 1991 I compiled my poems into a self-produced,
perfect-bound volume titled “Intimate Boundaries.” I designed the layout and
impositions, set the type, stripped the film negatives, plated them, and
watched it run on press. The experience gave me momentum to write, including
what would be a 16pp lyric narrative poem begun in 1974 and completed by 1996.
In 1999 I began studying Japanese-derived forms, haiku, haibun. They grew
experimental in my hands, becoming more like collage. During the past three
years I’ve been using the Internet to read mostly contemporary journals and
younger poets’ blogs and poetry, which has further opened up how I write, to
include more voices, fragments, notes, even a kind of breathlessness at times,
while still holding to some splintered lyric sense. Adrienne Rich once said
that a way to keep poetry in our every day lives as a country, is to embed it
into other things. Recently I placed a poem as an endnote to an essay; embed
more from daily life — scraps of poems by others, conversations, menus, URLs,
headlines, song titles, machine age noises, art works. In this respect I’m back
to those scraps from which I began writing poems, except now these are life
scraps inside whole poems. The world of work introduces planning, schedules, a
type of moving inertia. It’s difficult to stay sensate, aware, politic. Poetry
enlivens in many ways, and I write poems with or without the threat of money.
3) What
would you consider to be the pros and cons of how you have earned your
income?
No doubt there were probably poems never written and some that bore the
strain of overwork. Yet the poems I did write are original and imaginative, and
those qualities came from my work environment. Imagination appeased drudgery.
When I couldn’t write words down because I was using both my hands to strip
fast as I could 32 negatives to an acetate substrate for plating, I invented a
rhythm as mnemonic, until I could get it down on paper when I’d arrive home
after the end of my shift. When the digital revolution put me in front of a
screen, it became far easier to let my mouse hand wander over to a pen and
paper. Less poems died on the table. The world’s pace accelerated; I began to
write longhand sloppily, unable to discern what I’d written; advertising and
politics coopted words, to entertain, deceive, and persuade. I wrote poems to
countermand. The printing occupation helped me develop eyes for extreme detail,
a mind for organization. The Internet for me emphasizes chaos, less control,
and with that, less fear. Yet, it brings news of daily suffering of all
sentient beings who make and adapt their habitats, their life cycles in this
biosphere; a suffering induced by the capitalist corporate drive for more
money, from radiation, fracking, aphrodisiacs, circuses, zoos, better
cosmetics, research; it brings news of the publication of “Google, King Zog’s
Volume 1” — the first dictionary of Google images for every word entry in the
condensed Oxford dictionary; and my poem begins, / what is the image, / for
love / for extinction /?
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A Sample Poem
A
Back-To-Work Manual
–
for Lew Welch
a
year searching for a job. finding my senses with the seasons. as one. mind and
body so happy together.
in
48 hours i will return to the man-made world of only my species, of alienation from
our own labor.
to
prepare i must control the hair under my arms, cover most of my skin, devise a
smile and deodorize.
and
most of all remember the do-not list:
Do Not
1. gaze out the window
2. talk above a whisper to your
self
or other beings
3. drink water too frequently
4. be curious about things
unrelated to the job
5. work at your own pace
6. laugh whole-heartedly
7. expel gas naturally
8. be open
9. be still
10. stop blaming the rats
a honey bee –
at break we love an apple
to its core
(First published in Artis Magazine, July 2005)
+++++
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SOME BOOKS BY Donna Fleischer:
Intimate Boundaries (self-produced, 1991)
indra’s net (bottle rockets press, 2003)
Twinkle, Twinkle (Longhouse Publishers, 2010)
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