The prolific and versatile Miriam N. Kotzin’s most recent book is Weights & Measures, a volume of poetry just out from Star Cloud Press. Reclaiming the Dead, from New American Press, was released last year (2008). She’s founding editor of Per Contra and a contributing editor for Boulevard. In the following interview, she discusses in detail her writing and her writing process. She starts out by discussing how she got started as a writer.

Valerie Fox: Most fiction writers don’t write much poetry and most poets don’t make the leap to fiction. D.H. Lawrence, Sherman Alexie—there are great writers who did or do, but it is still pretty uncommon. How did you get started writing fiction? Could you talk a little about the differences between writing in the different modes (poetry and fiction)?

Miriam N. Kotzin: I’ve been writing fiction since I was in high school—for some time I wrote a bit of a long story every night in one of those black and white bound notebooks with wide lines. I’m sure that someday I’ll find the notebook in the bottom of a carton. And I wrote some fiction in college and graduate school, but I concentrated on poetry. I tried my hand at fiction again in the mid-seventies, and I took several workshops in fiction. The first one with William Kittredge taught me about structure. And I took other helpful fiction workshops with Debra Monroe, Pamela Painter, and Anne Bernays.

In 2004 I became interested in flash fiction. The compression of the form was akin to poetry. And lots of the poetry that I wrote included dialogue. I like to write poems in series that tell—or suggest—the narrative of a life.

Since then, I’ve written about seventy stories, both flash and short stories; Star Cloud Press, which just put out Weights & Measures, also will publish a collection of my flash fiction, Just Desserts, early in 2010. I’ve also written a blog-novel. I’m delighted that Don Gastwirth is the literary representative for my novel, Cutter’s Vision.

As you know, I write both free verse and formal poetry. It’s a paradox in that writing a sonnet means I don’t have to think about form. If I’m writing in meter, I murmur the meter to myself for a while before I start to write. That helps. Although I don’t do anything like that before I write fiction, Heaven help me, I sometimes scan closing sentences in my stories.

I see more similarities than differences: in both I want economy of language. I want to choose the sensory detail to create an emotional moment in the physical world. And I want it to sound right. The actual writing process for me is similar in that in both I try to get the image and/or sound clear and then find the words. In writing fiction, if it’s going well, it’s a matter of taking dictation of the words the characters are saying.

VF: You have a lot of arresting imagery in your poems.  There’s this stanza in “Ritual,” which appeared last year in Press 1:

The men unroll mats on the floor
and lay out your suits and your coats.
These they cart unceremoniously
like inconvenient corpses
from a garden party.
I want to be wearing hat and gloves.

This stanza reinforces the idea of the title, of the departure as ritual. But in addition, without you seeming to go off in a new direction totally, you broaden the scene—you make me wonder about the movers, what they think. I think, also, why specifically does the narrator want to wear hat and gloves?   Is the person departing also an inconvenient corpse?  Was the narrator an accomplice here in his departure/demise, even though it is not indicated in the poem that he isn’t leaving voluntarily? I like how these questions emerge as we read your work.  Edward Hopper and his wife, evidently, named the figures in his paintings and made up stories about them.  Something about your style makes me do this, in poems like “Ritual.”  Do you intend any of this?

MK: In any scene like this—the breaking up of a household or a burial—workmen facilitate it. I suppose they’d have some thoughts about what’s going on, but I hadn’t until you asked, wondered about what they were thinking in this scene.

The narrator wants to be wearing hat and gloves to be properly attired for a garden party—a garden party from another time period. The inspiration for that imagery and the association of a death and a garden party comes from the Katherine Mansfield story “The Garden Party.”

Another stanza in “Ritual” might indicate that the narrator is an accomplice, though she wants “...to be free / from reproaches.” And, of course, that suggests that she does not feel herself to be beyond reproach.

You can’t get the keys out of the case,
and hand it to me to break
my nails, cursing our incompetence.
We both know
you'll never return
but I want to lock you out.
The movers haul away what’s left.
Everything of value you
carried off long ago.

As I re-read the poem, the overwhelming emotion for me is the feeling of loss. In the emptiness that’s left the narrator says:

VF: You’re a devoted teacher. What are some of your principles of teaching? What drives you? Are there times when writing and teaching come into conflict?

MK: Like a doctor, I start with “Do no harm.” What drives me is the knowledge that someone may be sitting in my class, one among many, who’s going to be a great writer. And maybe I can help through what I do. I’ve been fortunate in having taught Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Wadzanai Mhute, and Anthony Pirnot among others.

I try to build on what the student knows. A good example of my principle is that if a student doesn’t understand a poem or has a question about whatever it is we read in the literature class, that’s fine. (It’s not fine if he hasn’t taken the time to look up a word in the dictionary—or to do a quick online search for a reference.)

Ideally I’d like grades not to be a factor, especially in creative writing. I want my students to take risks: not to be afraid of writing something awful. And to re-write, revise. How many times did Hemingway rewrite the end of Farewell to Arms? Was it thirty-nine?

You ask whether there are times when writing and teaching come into conflict—you mean demands on time? In that respect teaching and writing are no more in conflict than the rest of life in which we have a multiplicity of demands on our time. And by demands, I’m not only including what we have to do, but what we want to do.

I think that having taught writing for decades has made me a better editor of my own work—and a better editor in general, of Per Contra, for example. And it may be that as a writer I have more empathy with a student writer who’s working to get it right.

VF: In “Mystery Lovers” (in Reclaiming the Dead) the ending is quite amazing in its ambiguity. In the poem, you distinguish between the world and the world of books (of fiction), yet in your conclusion there is a kind of mirrored effect in which true “mystery lovers” don’t boast and give away their crimes and identities—and they feel like people in the world, not characters in a story.

What kind of love is this mystery love?  How do you manage to maintain this balance in the voice between intimacy and something like a report?

MK: What type of love? It’s a mystery!

This poem seems to me to be different from many of my poems in that, as you mention, the voice is purposely distanced. The distance makes the narrator one of those about whom she speaks. As for how I created the balance, I think it’s partly the use of vocabulary [“ancestries”, “endure”, “niggling”, “ambiguities”, “vanquished”, “exigencies”, and “obliquely”].

“Mystery Lovers” is an argument. Each stanza starts with an end-stopped line, something like a topic sentence. In the first stanza I don’t use subordination in the sentence structure, but I do use parallel structure “unspeakable passions” and “shameful ancestries”. In this first stanza, the mystery lovers are active: they “imagine” and they “whisper.”

In the second stanza the sentence structure becomes more complex and distanced as the focus shifts to “habits of perception.” Did you notice the subliminal word-play with “niggling wrongs”? When you lift a rock “motives squirm”—which sends the reader back to the “niggling wrongs” and invites a re-reading/mis-reading in which “wr” from “wrongs” gets carried back to “niggling” to become “wriggling”. But this stanza centers on the negative consequences of thinking like someone who’s looking for crimes and criminals, descending into pettiness and nasty over-analysis of the other.

In the concluding stanza, the first three words of the opening line signal the contrast between the world of books and the other reality in which we live, and promise that, even if “only in books,” at least in books, “ambiguities are resolved.” It’s a false promise.

I play with the effects of line breaks and enjambment: for example, “Characters align themselves with evil” is clear enough, but the sentence doesn’t end with the line, so the choice continues “or good.” We have the pleasure of knowing that “Wickedness is vanquished,” but then, on the next line learn that’s so “granting the exigencies of plot.” These lines are immediately followed by a question. Ending a line with “Who” emphasizes the question, which shifts the relationship between the author and the reader. This is the first time the reader is required to participate, the first time that answers aren’t given. Are these mystery lovers in the last stanza people who read, or characters in a book, or people who direct attention away from themselves because they have something to hide?

In answering your question, I’ve just repeated the pattern of the poem! But I think that answers the second question of how I maintain the balance between the two types of voices.

VF: “Dancers” (in Reclaiming the Dead) is an answer, in part, to Eliot’s characterization of women in “Prufrock.”  It’s a portrait of women who are quite happy to be cultured and content, without the implied (though ironic) snobbishness of the museum ladies in Eliot. Once I get it into my head that you are answering Eliot in this way I can see better how in your work you are able to synthesize the lessons of Eliot AND Williams, or substitute other pairings here to represent the “symbolical” or “imagistic,” or “objectivst,” and so on.  Fast forward to now (or say 1980 and beyond), do you feel any affinities for the recent experimentalists, or for any in particular? And if so, can you describe these affinities?

MK: I haven’t felt close affinities to the experimentalists as you may mean it, although I was interested in concrete poetry. And, a bit influenced by surrealists, writing “orange corner” in which the words formed a corner, but, limited by typography, the words were in black on white paper. I also had a “blue corner” and “yellow corner” and “green corner”—but no “red square”.

I’ve also played around with form and language, such as in this poem in Shampoo:

crowd
word
hoard
hearth
heard
herd
bulls
eye
said

or this one:

girls
night
out
law
talk
fest
schrift

And you have “I’m Sorry, Sister,” which was a response to the print by Judith Barbour Osborne. We collaborated in a show at the Philadelphia Print Club, in which artists responded to a poem, and poets wrote, based on a work of art.

Not to be too sappy about it, but for me every poem is an experiment, even when I decide to write a sonnet. I’ve been writing free verse since I started writing. Then in the early seventies I started writing in forms, mostly as an exercise. My colleague at Drexel, William Hollis, gave me Lewis Turco’s Book of Forms, and I followed the assignments that Hollis gave his students. But if you’d asked me, even then, I would have said that I write free verse. That’s changed. Weights & Measures, for example, starts off with a crown of sonnets—and most of the poems are also in forms.

Thank you for asking such provocative questions.

VF: You’re welcome. We appreciate your sharing these insights and are thrilled to be presenting your views here, alongside the poems, to our readers.