Award winning poet and essayist Jane Satterfield will be reading on Thursday, April 30, 2015 at 7:30pm in the Lewis J. Ort Library located on the Frostburg State University campus. This reading is free and open to the public. Satterfield is a tenured professor of writing at Loyola College in Maryland. She also serves as Literary Editor for the Journal of Association for Research on Mothering. Her books of poetry include Shepherdess with an Automatic (2000), Assignation at Vanishing Point (2003), and Her Familiars (2013). Jane Satterfield was kind enough to answer my interview questions with original and interesting answers.
Who is your favorite poet? Why does this person
inspire you?
What is your favorite poem that you’ve written?
Why?
But “Elegy with Trench Art and Asanas,” a poem from a
recently completed manuscript, is among my favorites because it begins in a
yoga studio and moves through different scenes and historical eras. The poem
gave me the chance to think through the ways we memorialize war and how much we
struggle to conceptualize peace, however much we hope to do so.
As a professor, what is the best method you use
to improve your students writing? What do you feel is the most important thing
that you can teach your students about writing?
Jane Satterfield: Writers are very different, and I don’t believe there’s a
“magic bullet” that works for everyone. Aside from creating an encouraging
community of writers in the classroom, I like to stress the value of tradition
and innovation. Artists have always forged conversations across communities and
historical eras, and I encourage my students to pull up a chair and join in.
Whether they’re working on poetry or essays, I invite my students to practice different
forms—from experimental essays to traditional poetic forms and genres—so they
can explore both time-honored techniques and develop new ways of seeing. Not
all experiments yield a perfect piece, of course, but the process of trying
something new is fun. And it fosters the flexibility you need to evolve as a
writer.
What is your most successful revision strategy?
Cutting out deadwood or severing links between lines to
disrupt overtly logical connections can open up a poem in surprising ways—new
themes emerge, syntax is tightened, there’s a bit of levity created through
unexpected juxtapositions of diction or image. A new energy, if you will.
But most of the time, speaking poems out loud while
composing is my key to revision. I collect images and phrases in a notebook
long before finding a title and first line that sets the music of a given
piece. Once that’s in place, I speak the poem out loud as I write, revising
words and lines along the way as needed to make sure meaning and music are
working in tandem.
Do you have a preferred location you like to
write your poems? In your home? At a coffee shop? Outside?
In the summer and early fall, I sometimes
work under an umbrella out on the back deck. Coffee shops make a nice change of
scene, especially if the music’s good and not too loud.
Michael Schussler