Poly eBriefs

Jean Gallagher, Poet & Associate Professor of EnglishIf you didn’t know already, Jean Gallagher, Associate Professor of English, is an award-winning poet who has published two collections, Stubborn (2006) and This Minute (2005). Of her first collection, poet Jean Valentine said, “This Minute is brilliant and surprising, full of history, invention, wit, humor, motion, [and] stillness.” Poet Bruce Beasley has said, “Jean Gallagher majestically conducts a history of approaches to the sacred in Christian art, scripture, mysticism, theology. She rewrites the Bible as she re-sees the ‘gravities, necessities, haphazard plots’ behind the frozen sacramental moments of religious art.”

What does Jean have to say about her poetry? eBriefs asked Jean a few questions to find out. Continue reading after the jump for her insights on topics such as getting published, the “elemental questions” poets and artists try to answer and how we’re “hard-wired to make art.”

Q. How long have you been at Poly?
A. I’ve been at Poly since 1994, when I earned my doctorate.

Q. When did you start to write poetry?
A. Probably about when I started to write at all! I’ve always been a writer: I was one of those kids who had a diary with a little lock and key as soon as I could put sentences together. However, I didn’t start really writing poetry as my primary, daily mode until about six or seven years ago; up until then, my writing life was more bound up in scholarly writing and research and in literary criticism, and I always found it difficult to work full-tilt in both modes — I’m a very bad multi-tasker, a fact which actually helps me with writing, which requires and rewards concentrated attention and focus.

Q. When did you first publish your work and how did you get it published?
A. My first book was a scholarly one, a revision of my dissertation. But the two books of poems came out in 2005 (This Minute) and 2006 (Stubborn). If I had to use one word or phrase to describe how poetry books get published, I would say, and sorry for the violence of the metaphor: “carpet-bomb.” I can’t even count how many copies of these manuscripts I mailed and mailed and mailed. And mailed.

Although some large commercial presses (like Norton, Farrar Straus and Giroux, and Knopf) do publish poetry, most poetry publishing in America these days is done by university presses and smaller independent (often non-profit) presses. Because poetry doesn’t tend to sell big (an initial print run of a first book of poetry is typically around 1500 or 2000 copies), many of these presses hold annual contests, in which writers submit their manuscripts along with a small fee, usually around $20. The press then usually asks a fairly prominent poet to serve as a judge to choose a manuscript from among the entries, or the editorial board of the press itself chooses a manuscript. These entrance fees help to subvent the cost of publishing the books.

Poems also get published in journals or magazines (both in print and online). Again, the carpet-bomb approach seems to me the way to go: I send out four or five poems at a time. And send them. And then send them some more. The magazine Poets and Writers is a great source of information for presses looking for manuscripts and journals looking for poems.

Q. How do you put together a collection? Do you write poems with a collection in mind or assemble it afterward?
A. I like to have it both ways. First, it’s important for poets to allow themselves to be surprised by what emerges in their writing. If I start with some Big Idea and try to impose that on my writing, I usually end up with a corpse on the page. But if I start writing with no particular agenda, and trust the power of language itself, then something alive usually begins to emerge. However, I also personally like to write series of connected poems, so once something surprising and alive emerges — that crucial first step — I then try to see if it might be explored in multiple ways.

Q. Are there themes or connections to your work?
A. I do often find that I have a question that I want to try and answer in poems, and that question often arises out of my reading or out of engaging with somebody else’s art. Here’s an example: a couple of year ago, I started re-reading the New Testament, with all its puzzling and beautiful and astonishing narratives, and then found myself also looking at lots and lots of equally beautiful and puzzling 14th-century Italian paintings that were based on those stories. I found a question emerging as I kept reading and looking: what kind of language can I find to let the voices of these characters and their experiences emerge in ways that make sense to me, here, now, in the early 21st century, in America? I didn’t really know that was going to be an absorbing question until I had already written a couple of poems about this, but once I had written them, I saw that it might be a fruitful question with multiple answers. And it turned out that every poem in Stubborn is some kind of answer to that question.

Beyond that kind of question, I would say that most poets, and most artists, have just a few elemental questions that they ask and try to answer in their work. One of those elemental questions is: “What do I know about how it feels to be human, alive, right now?” Another is: “Is what I’ve made true to that knowledge?” The great philosopher of art, Susanne K. Langer, has taught me a great deal about these elemental questions; she shows how all art is the projected image of the artist’s knowledge of human feeling or sentience. That strikes me not only a great observation of what art does but also as a great yardstick artists can use to test their own work.

Q. What’s your writing process like? Do you have a set number of hours you try to write each day or are you less structured?
A. My teacher and mentor Marie Ponsot, a great poet who’s now in her mid-eighties and writing some of the best poems of her life, told me that if you can’t do anything else, you can write for ten minutes a day. So even during the semester, when I’m up to my sinuses in my own students’ writing, I write nonstop for at least ten minutes, usually in the morning, before all the other work of the day begins to kick in. During periods when I have more flexible time, like between semesters, I write and read (these activities are like the two sides of coin) for a few hours every morning, and then get out and walk around (and maybe look at some pictures — it’s good for writers to get away from language for a little while every day, and we are so lucky to have so much to look at in the city), and then write and read again in the afternoon. It’s a wonderful life, for which I am very grateful.

Q. Does working in a tech and science environment contribute at all to your poetry, directly or indirectly?
A. Only in the way that every experience potentially contributes in some way to the poetry. That’s actually one of the things that I found so thrilling when I began to move away from scholarly and critical writing to poems: every single experience, every book I read, every dog I see on the street, every subway ride, every conversation, is a potential trigger for something that may find its way into a poem. There’s no “right” source of inspiration; it’s just a matter of paying attention and seeing what arises and surprises.

Q. How do you see poetry, English literature and the arts in general related to students at Poly?
A. It’s a fact, borne out by the research of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, that even in the toughest cultures — cultures where there is nothing we’d recognize as “leisure time,” cultures where sheer survival is a continual struggle, cultures where people have next to nothing in the way of material goods — songs, dancing, poems, visual art not only exist but thrive. It’s hard to draw any conclusion other than that we are hard-wired to make art — that it’s not just a fancy luxury for the expensively-educated, but rather a human necessity. And a highly pleasurable one at that.

Q. Who are some of your favorite poets?
A. There are so many, and I keep meeting new ones-often my students will introduce me to poems and poets I hadn’t known before. Among folks writing poetry now, I’m always interested in and surprised by what Anne Carson does, and I find myself often re-reading poems by Les Murray, Marie Ponsot, Jean Valentine, Bruce Beasley, Marianne Boruch, Linda Gregerson. My students introduced me to Saul Williams’ work — he does a lot of performance-based poetry as well as poetry on the page. I just read a new book called Here, Bullet by a veteran of the Iraq war, Brian Turner, that is really something. But that’s just a scratch on the surface of all the really good poems getting made right now — when I surf around online literary magazines (like failbetter) or browse around a bookstore like St. Mark’s Books, with a good-sized poetry section, I’m always amazed at how much good work is coming out. There are also the poets of earlier periods — like John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins — who are, to my mind, the Einsteins of the language — they saw and knew and found out things about our language that nobody else at the time saw or knew, and everything we write now owes something to them.