Better Than Starbucks!

Vera: How were you inspired to write poetry?

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Anna: My father was a big lover of poetry, particularly Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and was always quoting his favorite poems as I was growing up. It seemed natural for me to try my hand at writing it. Later on I discovered my own inspirations in first T.S. Eliot, and later Sylvia Plath. I fell in love with the sprawling canvas of "The Wasteland,” which I felt showed the potential of a flexible iambic pentameter based line, and I loved the brutal honesty of Plath on love, depression, and motherhood.

 

​Vera: Your favorite Plath poems?

 

​Anna: It’s hard to choose. I love “Elm,” “Daddy,” “Cut,” “Lady Lazarus”…  The following poem was inspired by Sylvia:

 

Tap Root

 

After you poured the milk, and set the tray

down, and opened the window to the night,

and stuffed the gap with washcloths, did you pray

or did you kiss them and turn out the light?

Tell me, Sylvia, and I'll forgive

your cowardice in choosing not to live.

 

When I was a teen you were my idol.

I carried a dog-eared Ariel around school,

learned "Elm" by heart, wore a suicidal

amount of black, thought it the height of cool

you'd killed yourself. But after my two were born,

for years I hated you like kiddy porn.

 

This guilty art of ours is NOT for mothers:

the sticky hands and mouths, the constant tugs

of war with words—don't do that to your brother's

hair!—the tender scolding, the fierce hugs,

the times I watched my perfect babies sleep,

too tired to write, and far too tired to weep.

 

Yet the older they get, the more the steel

trap of me closes on my selfish core—

I do what I want and don't ask how they feel

each time they watch me vanish out the door.

So, Saint Sylvia, tell me: when you set the tray

down, did you kiss your babies? Did you pray?

 

First Published in Courier Post

 

Vera: Beautiful. I read that you studied sciences; is that correct?

 

Anna: Yes, my first degree was in Chemical Engineering (from Imperial College, London.) I do think that scientific training contributed to my joy in complex repeating forms like the sestina and the villanelle, as these are much like algorithms.

 

Vera: What led you to writing female historical persona poems?

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Anna: the female historical persona poems arose out of my work as the essay co-ordinator for the Mezzo Cammin Women Poets’ Timeline (http://www.mezzocammin.com/timeline/timeline.php?vol=timeline&iss=1&cat=essays&page=home). Collecting those essays showed me that before Anne Bradstreet there were no “housewife” poets, as that life was not conducive to poetry writing. Most earlier women poets were either noblewomen, cloistered nuns, or women who were otherwise outside the norms of society (actresses, courtesans etc.) I decided it would be interesting to look at history through the lens of the voices of those women.