By Kevin Foley Article published September 25, 2002
A blank document on a computer screen, cursor flashing insouciantly, terrifies some writers. But it usually inspires English Lecturer Eve Alexandra. "The page is not one-dimensional for me," she says. "I think of it as a physical space, a stage, a place for performance."
Her manuscript, The Drowned Girl, was selected by the poet C.K. Williams for the 2002 Wick Poetry Prize and will be published next fall. The honor was hugely meaningful for Alexandra — both for the rare and precious opportunity to publish a book of poems, and for the fact that the judge, C.K. Williams, was himself championed by Anne Sexton, a writer who strongly influenced Alexandra's work.
the view sat down with Alexandra, a former stage actor, to discuss her writing, creative antecedents and the peculiar perception of female poets.
THE VIEW: How did you begin writing poems? Do you remember your first efforts?
EVE ALEXANDRA: I didn't get serious about writing until I was an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence. I started working with Mark Doty, who is now a prestigious poet, but who was just starting out then. Before that, I had always been a theater student and had worked as an actress in New York. But that form began to feel limiting. I started doing some creative writing for a theater company… and then poetry sort of chose me. I never set out to become a poet. I didn't go to school to start writing. But then something clicked.
Where does your work come from?
I don't write a lot of poems from personal experience. I don't have a broken heart and go out and write about it. I'm not drawn to conventional narrative poems about a tortured childhood. A lot of poets operate in a very confessional mode, like Sexton and Lowell and Plath did in the 1960s. That was revolutionary and exciting then, but I'm not sure those tricks work as well now.
But of course I'm drawn to certain subjects for personal reasons. There are seeds in my mind that I mull over. For example, my poem "Heroine." Some of that comes from Chekhov, whose plays I loved as an actress. And Adrienne Rich: the notion of diving into the wreck, exploring the self, is powerful and personally resonant. I have a constant awareness of what has been said before me. Every time I write as a female speaker in a poem I have to wade through what has been written before me. The heroine in that poem has got to go through Chekhov, Sylvia Plath, Anna Karenina; she has to eat all those heroines that are part of herself before she can speak authentically. It's a problem for female poets generally and me personally. While in grad school, I wrote a sexually charged poem called "Poetess Carnivorous." When people spoke to me about it, they kept calling it the "Erotic Poetess," even though that wasn't the title. I felt a little like they couldn't see and hear me because of what came before me.
Your work often concerns sexual themes. How problematic is that?
It's hard to find an interesting and new language to talk about sex in a way that is not gratuitous. I'm interested in how we talk about sex and the problems of it — I'm not interested in the act per se. More how do you talk about it as a female speaker? I have a figure in a lot of my poems, the girl, who is not a human child but more of an archetype, the girl is struggling to be sexually empowered but also protect her sexuality. It's a hard lesson for women, anyone really, but women especially. For women, too often being sexually empowered is translated into being exploited. A lot of my poems are about the girl trying to navigate those waters.
Your work tends toward these solid blocks of text — prose poems. Why does that form appeal to you?
Some of it goes back to the idea of "the wreck." The prose poem to me is a body of water, in that water are some beautiful fish, but you also might have garbage and old shoes, everything's in there. There's more space in a prose poem, I think; you can pack more into them. At some point, I started feeling like line breaks and more formally constructed poems weren't right for me. They seemed precious to me, a little too decorative. I spend a lot of time focusing on beauty and sensuality in my language, and I feel like I need the solidity of a prose poem because it doesn't play into that. Perhaps that language, in a poem with more conventional line breaks, or an elegant form like a villanelle, would seem too beautiful, almost sugary. I also like the form because I feel like I can build momentum in them. I tend to write in fragmented language, not complete sentences. Prose poems put the fragments into context; the poem becomes almost a kind of film, with each sentence fragment being an individual frame. Obviously, being a film junkie and former actor has had a huge influence on my life and work. There's a performance quality to it.
Do you think much about your audience as you write?
Yes. I'm always shocked when writers say they don't. I feel like as women we don't have that luxury, I'm always very aware of my audience and the way that the poems will be received. I'm also very interested in the writer-reader relationship, which is often taken for granted. So yes, I'm aware of what the reader is thinking. But I'm not catering the poem to them, just recognizing that the work does not exist in a vacuum. When you write the poem and send it out into the world, it has a life of its own.
How big is that audience? Is there space for poetry in our culture?
One of my "Introduction to Poetry" students said the audience for poetry was, "Other poets." There's some truth to that, but people are saying that poetry has undergone a renaissance in the United States over the past seven years, and I think there's some truth to that. I found it gratifying that people turned to poems after September 11. People recognized that poetry has something to say. Some poets, like the poet laureate Billy Collins, now have mass appeal. I'm not sure that my writing is that kind of writing. It's pricklier.
Alexandra photo by Sylvia Parker.
This poem first appeared in the Journal of the Academy of American Poets.
