Tell us a little about how your piece “Bee Envy” came to be.  Did it start with an image, a voice, a concept, a dilemma, or something else?

The origin of “Bee Envy” was complex.  Initially, the poem came into being as a result of watching the bees in our garden swarm the red thyme. Aware of the decline in the bee population, my husband and I kept calling to one another to celebrate how many were there. 

Then, there was my preoccupation with certain existential concerns, including the fact that as a seventy-seven-year-old poet, I am haunted by the passing of time and the implications of this for my writing aspirations. That’s likely the source of the line in the poem: Unlike mine, theirs was never the purpose/to unburden themselves of time. I often think about how the non-human animals of the world are free of our obsession with death and finitude, and how they simply live until they die. This thought played into the final lines of my poem in which I imply that for the bee, death is a casual event in a short life, and not the long-dreaded tragedy it represents for us. 

And my never-ending quest for amplified powers of speech figured directly into envying the bees their natural endowment with the tools they need to achieve their singular goal. 

What life experiences shaped your writing the most?

I was fortunate to grow up in one of the most beautiful parts of this country: the hills of Berkeley, California.  My parents built a home in 1950 on a dead-end street around the corner from Wildcat Canyon, and I walked to my elementary school on a dirt trail that wound around the edge of that canyon with its hawks and eucalyptus trees and wild rosemary and thyme and its silences and its stillness. I came into my identity listening to the call of the quail and the murmurings of the mourning doves and peering at the abandoned snakeskins and inspecting the undersides of stones. I carry the memory of the textures and colors and shapes and smells of these things, as well as the silences and the stillness, into each poem that I write.

How often do you read?

Every day of my life. I think that reading is the single most important means of growing your poetry. It’s from reading other poets that you learn what language can do.

How many hours a day do you write?

Some days I do not write at all, other days I write for five or six hours. Often I’ll write two or three poems, and then I don’t draft any poems for days or even weeks. I seem to need lulls in between intensive bursts of writing in which to pull into myself. 

What are the common traps for aspiring writers?

Trying to write poetry without a commitment to extensive reading ensures that the writer will remain undeveloped. It’s important to tap into the brilliance of earlier poets such as Rilke and Tomas Tranströmer, a Swedish poet whose genius with images exceeds that of any American contemporary poet of whom I can think. Another pitfall is to place publication as a main objective. If you are thinking about the marketability of your work rather than on authenticity of voice and accuracy of image and integrity of structure, your poems will have little, if any, lasting value. 

What is the most difficult part of your artistic process?

I have a strong perfectionistic leaning that serves to keep me from allowing enough disorder into my early drafts. My last mentor created a number of exercises for me to work with to encourage more risk-taking and experimentation. I have managed to find all sorts of reasons not to engage with those exercises yet, like a badly sprained hand. I have promised myself that once my splint comes off, I will tackle them.

What’s next for you?  Any upcoming projects/focus areas?

Where I hope to go from here with my writing has more to do with craft than with subject matter.

Barabara Guest’s idea that everything the writer might have said but didn’t has an ephemeral presence in the poem like a kind of ghost, and is a thought that I want to make a part of my own writing process. 

Bringing this notion into fuller awareness in the act of drafting a poem will, I think, help me to listen harder to the voice of that ghost. And maybe to trick my inner censor into remaining quiet long enough to allow the rich material in my subconscious to at least gesture at itself.

I have ambivalent feelings about narration in poetry. I prefer to keep it to a minimum, but I actually like poems that suggest narrative, and yet thwart it by moving in and out of storytelling, and by moving against expectation. As well as by fragmentation, silences, and by removing material. Also by bringing in material from “left field,” so to speak. 

To the extent possible, I want to minimize any connective tissue between lines that are end-stopped, and to allow for more associative leaps between lines and stanzas. More disjunctions. More surprising juxtapositions. More contradictions. More fragmentation.

The intended step in this direction is not in the interest of creating poems that are gratuitously obscure or opaque, but rather to move closer to Emily Dickinson’s credo of “telling it slant.”

Personally, I like to lean into a poem, to want more from it than is apparent on first reading. I want to be challenged, stretched. Opened. 

Basically, I aspire to write the poems that I want to read, those that resolve nothing, but rather lead to further questions. Poems with endings that move in a slightly different direction, gesturing to something just beyond the parameters of the poem.

A while back, I came upon an author interview in which the editor asked the interviewee to present a writing prompt. The prompt was so frightening that I wrote it down. I recently added it to the risk-taking exercises that I keep postponing:

Draft a poem in which each line contradicts, as thoroughly as possible, the line that precedes it.

When you are done, try to go back and enjamb the lines without removing any of the contradictions.

I would love to hear from anyone brave enough to attempt this prompt.  

Please contact me through my website: lauraannreed.net