[Tyler Walters] Thank you all for coming. We're starting just a little bit late but we're fine.
These are meant to be very informal gatherings, but welcome to the first
Visible Scholar Initiative gathering of this year.
We did, we initiated this last year and it was really, we all felt, a very rousing success so we wanted to do it
again this year.
We have all slate of speakers for the year already figured out and even some volunteers I've heard,
so we're really thrilled that in its second year this is really coming along.
And today we're here to celebrate the work and publication and writing of Erika Meitner,
associate professor of English.
I can tell you I have her book right here with me, I've been reading it.
For those of you who know me, I'm beginning to dissertate myself now and when I get frustrated writing
problem statements, I've been pulling out Erika's poetry and taking a breath and reading them.
So I'm not a poetry critic, so I won't say a whole lot here, but I'll say that I love the imagery.
It's very visual and just is very enjoyable reading it and I can tell that she really puts her heart and soul
into her writing.
And so, with that, we will hear more from Tom Ewing, Associate Dean.
[Pause]
[Tom Ewing] Thank you very much Tyler.
So I want to thank a number of people who are involved in helping to organize these events:
Leslie Moyo, who's not here for the library, Chris is here, Turner is a college ambassador.
They've been very helpful in setting up these exhibits.
But I especially want to thank Erika Meitner for agreeing to do this and to be the first one on what seemed like
short notice, although I guess was really six weeks ago at the time. The time went very quickly.
This is one of my favorite responsibilities as an Associate Dean for two reasons.
One is it's a great chance for us to recognize scholarship in the Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, and so
any chance I have to do that I will do that.
It's also a challenge for me because I come in and get to talk about something I know almost nothing about,
which, in this case, is creative writing.
And so I always spend a little time trying to figure out what I'm gonna say when I really don't know anything
about what I'm talking about.
But it's interesting for me also as a historian because historians can really get in trouble for writing creatively
or researching creatively.
You know fabricating quotes, making mistakes about dates, attributing actions to the wrong person,
these are really bad things for historians to do.
And any of you who followed the controversy over the Virginia history textbooks over the last couple of years
when they were making up things about who fought in which war and who said what thing, you know,
you can see why this is really a problem for historians.
And yet, if we, you know, go across the quad over to the next building, you know, we have fabulous scholars
who are doing exactly that.
So some of this has to do with the question of, kind of, what's expected in disciplines and what's valued
and so on.
But there's another way that I was thinking about this, and this goes back actually to what was once
the mission statement for our college, although we seem to have gotten rid of it.
But, thanks for the miracle the Internet, it's still out there.
We used to talk about putting together the pieces of the human experience and I think that, in some ways,
writing poetry and writing fiction is really doing that it really is putting together pieces of
the human experience.
And, in that sense, it's a lot like other disciplines, not only in our college but across the university.
And I was reminded of it when I was thinking about this talk, something that that Garrison Keillor from
Prairie Home Companion was talking about a couple weeks ago.
And again, I only kind of came in halfway through the monologue and and then had to, you know,
get out of the car before he was done so I don't remember the exact, the whole context, but what he was
talking about is why the ability to creatively understand and represent human experience is less valued
than other kinds of skills.
And I think the immediate context for the story was some high school kids who are lying about what
they had done, but his argument was while they were telling fiction and we should value the telling of fiction
in ways that effectively represent something that's going on.
And I think the question that this came back to, for me, is: how is the creative scholar engaged in essentially
the same core activity as the chemist, or the robotics engineer, the soil scientist, the sociologists, finding
ways to represent and thus to understand the human condition and the relationship between
humans and their environment.
And I think in our college, the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, creative scholarship is really central
to what we do.
Creative writing and English, performances in Theatre and Cinema, public speaking in the
Department of Communication, fashion design in our Department of Apparel Housing and
Resource Management.
So in our college we really value creative scholarship and I think this opportunity is one way for us to talk
about how this is valued across the university and particularly the connections to the library and
the use of library materials.
And that's why the format of this exhibit, to put on display the library resources used by our faculty is,
I think, especially effective.
So I really appreciate the support that the library provides to this series to continue to support
scholarship across the Liberal Arts and Human Sciences to recognize the differences between the disciplines
but also the continuities both in purpose and admission.
So thank you very much for coming and I hope you will come back to the next events in this series.
We have faculty from the Department of Communication, Department of Foreign Languages,
from Sociology, and from Science Technology Studies, and from English who have all lined up to do this
over the course of the coming year.
So stay tuned and you'll know more about this.
So at this point, I'll turn it over to associate professor Erika Meitner and let her talk about her book work.
Thank you.
[Applause]
[Erika Meitner] Thanks Tom. Can everybody hear me or do I need to be a little louder?
I'm okay? Okay. Sorry to everybody who's actually studying back there.
So I feel really grateful that I got to be part of the Visible Scholarship Initiative for this month because
my students now know that I actually produced scholarship or creative work in this case.
You know it's actually been really interesting they all said I've seen you all over campus, not in person,
on these posters which I think are pretty great.
And I also want to apologize profusely. I don't think there's anybody here from interlibrary loan,
but while I was writing this book I drove them crazy.
I'm paying them back by serving on the library committee this year so and also Connie Stovall,
is she here?
I drove her crazy trying to grow our poetry collection while I was writing this book too.
And she's been promoted as well, so that's great.
And so I'm very grateful to the library and the resources and Tyler and Tom for the series.
And also, I want to thank my husband who's over there because there's no way I would have written this book
without him because we showed up here for two new jobs from Washington DC with a newborn in tow.
My son was three months old when we got here and a lot of the book I'm gonna read from, "Ideal Cities,"
is a motherhood book but I feel really grateful to be at a school, an engineering school, that takes
the creative arts as seriously as engineering.
We have a lot of my MFA students are here from our amazing graduate program and that's very cool too.
[Pause]
I wrote "Ideal Cities," part of it is a manuscript of motherhood and part of it is a manuscript of dislocation.
We were living in Southeast DC and then we moved to Blacksburg, Virginia and losing that urban environment
was something that very much threads its way through this book in addition to motherhood.
The first poem I'm going to read is about a product, and I write a lot about different products in here.
I'm not afraid of the material world. My secondary specialty is material religion.
In my spare time I'm getting my doctorate in religious studies at the University of Virginia so you'll hear
some material from that winding its way through this book too.
But when Steve and I had our son, we got a lot of things in the mail, and one of the things we got were
multiple things called miracle blankets, which were these swaddling blankets that you are meant to
put your baby in.
So I wrote an ode to the miracle blanket.
[Pause]
"Miracle blanket." My mother calls it that straightjacket. Do you still put the baby to sleep in that straitjacket?
she asks, and I say Mom, you mean the miracle blanket? and she says yes, the straitjacket, and I have to
admit she's right, that it looks like a straightjacket for babies, especially in the "natural" color
which resembles a tortilla so when he's wrapped the baby seems like a burrito with a head, and some nights
the straitjacket helps him sleep, but some nights it does not though we follow step-by-step instructions
and we shush and swing the baby wrap tight in his straitjacket, but he screams and won't go down,
which is what we call sleep now- going down, as if he's drowning in his straitjacket at 3 a.m. in our bedroom
and we want him to drown- we'll do anything to make him go down, even pray. Nicholas of Tolentino,
the patron saint of babies, is said to have resurrected over a hundred dead children, including several
who had drowned together. He always told those he helped to say nothing of this. Holy Innocence, my son
in his miracle blanket is sleeping. O faithful and glorious martyr, say nothing of this.
[Pause]
I have a set list.
[Pause]
It's funny, when Steve and I first moved here, one of the things that I think was most surprising was
the first night we turned on the local news after living in DC, the headline was breeze picks up.
[Pause]
And it was actually a Sunday night and what we didn't know is after the normal news here on Sunday nights,
we get Jack Van Impe presents.
I don't know how many of you guys have seen him, where he tells us about the apocalyptic news of the day
and he ties all of the headlines to the end times.
And you're watching it for the first five minutes and you think "oh, more news" and then suddenly you realize
sort of midway through that something's a little bit off and after the profits get called down and their chariots
and other things start to happen, you realize suddenly that we're just headed to the end times.
[Pause]
The other interesting thing when we moved here is that I spent a lot of time in pediatric offices because we
put our kid in daycare and he immediately got sick constantly.
So this is called "Pediatric Eschatology." Eschatology is the study of the end times, just so you know.
[Pause]
"Pediatric Eschatology." The nurse called back and told us to use bleach on anything we touch.
She said wash everything in hot water, insisted we won't treat you if you're asymptomatic, we won't, and made us
an appointment anyway.
So we waited and waited with the dog-eared magazines and recall posters until someone in the waiting room
asked if I knew sweet Jesus and someone else told me a story about their dentist and the rapture.
This waiting room was endless. There was no irony with that dentist and I am obsessed with
stale marshmallow peeps and people who believe in the rapture.
This idea that they'll be sucked from their cars in the middle of the day just saved from things like traffic.
You can learn many things about the rapture online: that the rapture is again postponed, is difficult to evaluate,
is the falling away, is the only valid hope, is your father's business of gathering, is out of harmony with
a doctrine of imminence, is an instantaneous secret event, yet no one wrote in the manual about what to do
if your pediatricians office is in a methadone clinic.
But you like him. The way he cradles your asymptomatic son, explains slowly about developmental milestones,
and is so calm he's one valium from unconscious.
And aren't we all addicts to something like the rapture, which will bring both blessing and sorrow?
My son is growing so quickly.
I still call him the baby but I put away his small clothes, they go to the crawlspace in boxes labeled
with increments of three months.
So isn't childhood like the rapture? If we disappear, if we flee, if we vanish, we are often missed?
[Pause]
I have a lot of weird obsessions and one of my obsessions was writing this book.
I don't know how many of you guys are familiar with the "Prelinger Archives"?
The librarians are all nodding; they're like yeah, yeah, but it's part of the "Prelinger Archives" are this amazing
online archive of what's called like social hygiene films or public service announcements, sex ed films
from the 50s, all kinds.
I actually have another, maybe I'll read my Sex Ed 1957 poem from the movie "As Boys Grow,"
that was a great one.
But this one I found a film online that was geared towards housewives and it was about how,
it was sponsored by the Dry Cleaning Association of America in the 50s.
It was about how not to set yourself on fire, because apparently before dry cleaners people used to clean
their clothes with gasoline at home, like that was home dry cleaning, so it was all these ways it was like a
fire safety film sponsored by the Dry Cleaning Association of America.
[Pause]
And this pun grew out of some of these images from this film, which had people smoking in bed and, like,
putting pennies in their fuse box like all of these things that you really shouldn't do at home,
lest you set yourself on fire.
[Pause]
Incidentally today we got in the email about Shanks Hall, they were like "don't worry if Shanks Hall smells like gas,
we're just changing the gas lines."
So I thought of this poem.
But this poem also grew out of the terror of motherhood and an assignment somebody gave me to write a poem
where all the lines start and stop at the end, which is very hard. It means each line is its own sentence.
So this is called "In Dispraise of Heat."
The baby has a 104 fever this morning. I pump him full of motrin.
Our neighbor Ruth insists on cool washcloths. She tells me to put them in his armpits.
She says she'll pray for him. I say thank you. They were Jewish. She means to ask Jesus for help on our behalf.
My friend from grade school died this week. He had been missing four days before they found him
in a subway.
His mother went to the Bronx one morning. One morning like any other she went to identify his body.
I described my son's fever to strangers. I say he is burning up. A woman leaves an iron on a white shirt.
She is subject to domestic distractions. A woman smokes in bed and her cigarette slips.
While she doses, it lands on white sheets. Her children are subject to unnecessary peril.
All the mothers give me advice. There are alcohol baths, ice baths, alternating medications.
There are stories of undiagnosed pneumonia, of roseola, but even my son's small bare feet are flushed with fever.
They fiddle with each other in his restless sleep. My friend escaped from a locked psych ward.
My friend went out into the city. There are sons huddled in your office buildings.
There are sons busking for change in commuter stations.
When someone escapes like that they call it eloping.
In grade school my father put a chain-link fire ladder under my bed. "Just in case," he said.
So I thought right away of leaving.
But we will implement measures, we will place cool hands on the foreheads of burning sons,
we will return them gently to bed.
A woman warms herself by a wood stove. Her skirt shifts in the heat and it is nearly always fatal.
You can hear it in the whistle of the kettle.
[Pause]
So, I also, I'm one of those people that picks up pamphlets everywhere I go.
So like Jehovah's Witnesses pamphlets, you're going to hell pamphlets, pamphlets everywhere.
And I was at this CVS and I found a pamphlet called preventing teen cough medicine abuse, which I did not
know was a problem, but there's a pamphlet for it, so there it must be a problem clearly.
[Pause]
And I took the language from the pamphlet and made it into a love poem of sorts.
So, "Preventing Teen Cough Medicine Abuse."
And I'm sorry I should have brought the pamphlet actually and donated it to the library collection.
"Preventing Teen Cough Medicine Abuse."
The poem I started with you in a motel plateaued the poem I started with you
in a motel started spending evenings at home with a rapid heartbeat we were not
in a motel with my hair draped across your chest
and something was wet it was unclear what did I mention there was a rapid
heartbeat there was a raw unfinished form there was an out-of-body skittling
with distortions of color and sound which is to say that you were
so beautiful in those dangerous side effects that I couldn't
help it there were no programs I couldn't help it no matter
how many pamphlets I couldn't help it could be abused the
combination we left the bedspread on I just (dextromethorphan) swooned
[Pause]
You don't read my, well I don't usually read this poem and hopefully it'll be okay that I'm saying body parts
in the library.
[Pause]
But this is actually from a film called "As Boys Grow" from 1957 from the "Prelinger Archives" and
it's a collection of, sort of, these mirage dances, a more lyric poem, but it's a conglomeration of these
used images from this poem that was geared specifically toward boys and it actually features
the entire San Francisco Boys Choir as a fake coach and a fake team and the coach talking to the team
about reproduction.
[Pause]
So, "As boys grow (1957)." Inside this film, all the boys are shirtless. Inside this film, a car's motion is internal.
The blank faces of the boys are pebbles. Two boys in the grass repair a mower. They sit. The summer sees them.
There is a wet dream and last night it spoke. It hangs in the air but does not talk assuredly in the light.
When a boy grows, his silence splits and ceases inside the outfield. It spreads out, possibly, and it wants.
It kicks. It talks with a stick in autumn's lower parts.
The boys inside the locker room gather in the surroundings of the bench.
The coach removes his black baseball cap. He talks of the dull season, the hour of change. He talks.
He has a comfortable summary of the penis complete on the board, bitter with chalk. He is a wooden pointer.
The boys are gray hoods in bleachers. Our American cars are knives with one motion of their bodies.
Your body, the coach says, from time to time yet it is a mystery. The coach talks his pencil kicks an ovary.
One boy refers to his portion of the baby. His hand is wild. A dot travels a tube.
The leading American knife has one motion in the water which talks to the car like that.
It is late. Two boys are inside a skirt. They want to go to the lagoon. The girl is a bench.
In the book, something increases. The girl falls and there is cake and a swish. The hoof thing, it agrees.
On Saturday, in the adjacent waters after kicking, a boy hits one thing lightly. The boy means it in order to grow.
[Pause]
And that was an accurate depiction of the movie.
[Pause]
I'll read one more from this book and then I'll read a new poem.
[Pause]
This, when I was writing this book, my grandmother died and my grandmother was 94 when she died and
survived Auschwitz.
And so, when she died, it was like this real kind of force of nature and matriarch in our family had passed.
And she was also the last, my mother still speaks some Yiddish, but she was really the last Yiddish speaker in
the family who spoke it fluently.
So with her went a whole language and even though my mother speaks it, she has no one to speak it with.
[Pause]
So this is an elegy for my grandmother, but it's also in some ways an elegy for the language of Yiddish.
Elegy with construction sounds, water, fish. A nail gun fires into wooden scaffolding up the hill.
The skeleton of a roof unfolding above the trees. Rat-tat-tat, bunk bunk bunk.
There is music and there is music. The tap of a hammer smoothing out a mistake.
Tall hillside grass sways and the houses tucked into the valley don't do anything.
They don't rock like the black shoulders of mourners chirping in the yard, but in Yiddish the skies
are empty of birds.
An air conditioning unit hums. The mountains cup the houses the way a boy might half-moon his hands
together to catch water from a hose that arcs and splats on cement skin of water, skin of pavement.
We spend all night outside staining the deck. The night my grandmother dies we have to do something.
The night my grandmother dies I dream of my dead friend Chris.
He gives me a fish and I skin it, roll up its white flesh, secure it with a toothpick on a basement work table.
There is a dearth of fish in Yiddish.
In my dream, Chris and I go out at sunset, roam the streets of what seems like Queens.
He walks off with his school bag slung sideways across his chest.
Before I can show him the Friday ladies in hats, the Friday candy store.
The whiskered carp slapping the sides of white bathtubs of my childhood while my grandmother bare armed,
wigless, stands over the kitchen sink with a mallet.
Whatever is chirping in the tall hill grass won't quit. Yiddish is a world devoid of trees.
My grandmother is dead. We each took turns burying her with a rounded side of a shovel.
The slowest of earth sliding over metal. The dirt hit her wooden box, each clod and rock.
You've heard the sound before. There is clover in the yard, but Yiddish has almost no flowers.
My aunt will set a white towel, a pitcher of water, on the stoop. We will wash death from our hands before
we enter her house.
There is music and there is music. There is water from a plastic pitcher hitting slate pavers silenced by skin.
There are valleys with houses tucked into them and something trilling in the grass. And there is Yiddish,
my grandmother's accent shorthand for a thumping, resilient, nameless thing that refuses to leave us,
refuses to sing.
[Pause]
And I should have said I was reading Jeffrey Shandler has a book called "Adventures in Yiddish Land"
that I was reviewing while I was writing this for the journal material culture.
And some of the lines about Yiddish from this poem actually come from that book, which is a critical book.
It's an academic book, not a book of poems.
And the other thing I should have said is that Jewish mourning rituals are very strange sometimes to
people who haven't experienced them, but everybody at a Jewish funeral when you go graveside actually
participate in burying somebody and you flip the shovel over to show your reluctance to do it.
[Pause]
So we've got some strange rituals.
[Pause]
I'll read one more and then take questions from people if you have them.
This is a newer poem. I've been working, I've had a long kind of standing thing where I've been working from
the work of Robert Smithson, who's one of the land artists of the 1960's who dealt with kind of
peripheral landscapes of disintegration so industrial sites that he turned into artwork by photographing them
and making walking tours of them and labeling them in different ways.
And so one of my long-term, sort of, broader projects that found me is the idea of how to grapple with
the generic landscape because I went from such an urban landscape to such a different,
kind of more strip mall-y rural landscape.
And I happened upon a series of photos by the photographer Brian Ulrich called Copia of what he calls
"dark stores" and "ghost malls" and "ghost boxes," which are big box stores that no longer are in business.
And it started me thinking about our habits of consumption in general as a society.
And so one of the things that I've been doing is hanging out at our Walmart in Christiansburg and writing poems.
This poem is part of my Walmart series and it has all of the events that happen in the Walmart parking lots
in this poem I found by doing a Google News search for news events in a Walmart parking lot in a 24-hour period,
so everything in here happened in a 24-hour period in Walmart parking lots across America.
[Pause]
So, research skills.
"Walmart Supercenter." God Bless America says the bumper sticker on the racer-red
Rascal scooter that accidentally cuts me off in the Walmart parking lot
after a guy in a tricked-out Jeep with rims like chrome pinwheels tries
to pick me up by honking, all before I make it past the automatic doors
waiting to accept my unwashed hair, my flip-flops, my lounge pants.
The old man on the scooter waves, sports a straw boater banded in blue & white,
and may or may not be the official greeter, but everyone here sure is friendly--
even the faces of plastic bags, which wink yellow and crinkle with kindness
sound like applause when they brushed the legs of shoppers carrying them
to their cars. In Port Charlotte, a woman's body was found in a Jetta
in a Walmart parking lot. In a Walmart parking lot in Springfield,
a macaque monkey named Charlie attacked an eight-year-old girl.
I am a Walmart shopper, a tract-house dweller-- the developments
you can see clearly from every highway in America that's not jammed up
on farmland or pinned in by mountains. I parked my car at a slant in the lot,
hugged tight by my neighbors' pickups. I drive my enormous cart
through the aisles and fill it with Pampers, tube socks, juice boxes, fruit.
In the parking lot of the McAllen Walmart, a woman tried to sell six
Bengal Tiger cubs to a group of Mexican day laborers. A man carjacked
a woman in the parking lot of the West Mifflin Walmart, then ran
under a bridge and disappeared. Which is to say that the world
we expect to see looks hewn from wood, is maybe two lanes wide,
has readily identifiable produce, and the one we've got instead has jackknifed itself
on the side of the interstate and keeps skidding. The one we've got has clouds
traveling so fast across the sky it's like they're tied to an electric current.
But electricity is the same for everybody. It comes in the top of your head
and goes out your shoes, which will walk through these automatic doors.
In the Corbin Walmart parking lot a woman with a small amount of cash
was arrested for getting in and out of trucks. A man stepped out of his car
in the Columbus Walmart parking lot, and shot himself. I get in the checkout line
behind a lighted number on a pole. The man in front of me jangles coins
in his pocket, rocks back and forth on his heels. The girl in front of him
carefully peels four moist dimes from her palm to pay for a small container
of honey-mustard dipping sauce. In the parking lot of the LaFayette Walmart,
grandparents left their disabled 2 year-old grandson sitting in a shopping cart
and drove away. Employees in the parking lot at the La Grange Walmart
found a box containing seven abandoned kittens. I am not a Christian or
prone to idioms, but when the cashier says she is grateful for small mercies,
I nod in assent. Kyrie eleison, Christie eleison. The Latin root of mercy
means price paid, wages, merchandise, though now we use it as
compassion shown to a person in a position of powerlessness,
and sometimes forgiveness towards a person with no right
to claim it. God is merciful and gracious, but not just.
In the Walmart parking lot in Stockton, a man considered armed
and dangerous attacked his wife, beating her unconscious.
A couple tried to sell their 6-month-old for twenty-five bucks
to buy meth in the Salinas Walmart parking lot. We who are in danger,
remember: mercy has a human heart. Mercy with her tender mitigations,
slow to anger and great in lovingkindness, with her blue employees smock
emblazoned with How may I help you? Someone in this place have mercy on us.
Thank you.
[Applause]
And thank you again to everybody who helped make this event happen.
I am happy to take questions if anybody has them about anything and everything.
I don't know that I can answer them all but I'll take them.
[Pause]
[Audience member] When you mention research skills, so I'm curious, do you ever favor one or two approaches
to conducting research before you start writing?
[Erika Meitner]I've actually been writing off a lot of documentary photography, and so I've been getting a lot
of books from the art and architecture library for the last few years, which are quite heavy I will say.
But one of my approaches when working with documentary photographs, which I've been doing
for a while now, is that I read everything that the photographer writes.
In some cases now, those are like interviews on NPR or stuff I can find online that's actual audio interviews that
I end up transcribing bits and pieces from.
But more often than not and actually someone just recalled one of my Vergara books I was working off of,
Camilo Jose Vergara, who does a lot of photography of cities.
[Pause]
And I have a bunch of his stuff out right now, but I read through.
Often photographers write these beautiful essays about their work, and so often I'll read through the essays and
call nomenclature from them for some of the imagery that they're representing to see how I can work with it.
[Pause]
And then I've actually been going out and doing field work, so I've been working with a
documentary photographer who's been going to Martinsville and he has contacts there of people who are
the long-term unemployed, so I've been working with interviews with them that I've done either in person
or that he's done and I've transcribed.
So I'm working with actual kind of fieldwork stuff too.
But stuff like the Google search with the Walmart is basic, I mean that's basic, but it was revolutionary to me
that I could, for example, put in Walmart parking lot hit 24 hours and news and get everything filtered for me
in this kind of amazing way.
So I don't know if that, it's not advanced research skills, but...
[Pause]
Other questions?
[Pause]
[Audience member] Besides your doctorate, what are you working on next?
I just, the manuscript that the Walmart poem is from is from a manuscript I literally just finished
four weeks ago and is currently out, it's being sent out.
My editor has it so I'm terrified. I don't know if they'll take it.
Publishing poetry is actually an arduous process so you usually have to enter your book in contests and
send it out for years and years at a time, so I'm at the beginning of that long slog for this new book
which is called Copia after the project I was talking about by Brian Ulrich.
And I'm just kind of you know fishing around for new projects, the Martinsville one is the new one
that I just started.
[Pause]
And I've been writing, actually, essays lately.
I'm in the middle of doing a giant essay for the Poetry Foundation on a new book of poems
by Brenda Shaughnessy.
That's this beautiful book of poems called "Our Andromeda," so I've been researching the
Andromeda myth and a bunch of other stuff.
And it's not a book review, it's a set of letters I'm writing back and forth with another poet and we've been
bringing in all kinds, it's this huge epic, it's turned into this epic project and we've been bringing in Bishop,
and analyses of Plath, and other things so that's kind of what I'm working on like at this very moment.
But I'm at the beginning of starting a new collection which is always a weird time because I have no idea
what its gonna be about and probably won't know for another year and a half if I had to guess.
[Pause]
[Audience member] How did you become interested in writing poetry? When did you start?
[Erikak Meitner] Probably because my fiction was awful. No, I think I was always one of those like dreamy kids in
high school who had a journal and kept song lyrics in it.
When I got to college, our creative writing classes were application only, so I spent a few semesters
desperately trying to get into a creative writing class, but once I did it felt like I had found my people.
And I kept writing with the knowledge that there was no way I was ever gonna be able to do this for a living,
so I pursued a bazillion other paths and had a bunch of different careers before it turned out that luck was
on my side and I do get to do this for a living.
So that's why I'm sort of still slogging through my doctorate and something else because I started it
thinking "surely I'll never get a job as a poet, I should have a back-up skill" and I'm still working on that
embarrassingly, but also proudly.
[Pause]
[Audience member] How many revisions do your poems typically go through before you actually publish them?
[Erika Meitner] That's a great question. It's so interesting, this "Ideal Cities" was a book I wrote at night and
I wrote most of it in the time between my son's, like he would eat at night and then I would have to wait for him
to do this like late night feeding, so a lot of it was written between 11:00 p.m. and 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. and because
of the nature of this particular book and the time frame I was working in, if the poem didn't get finished
in that time period, it didn't ever get finished.
Although, there's some in here that went through probably 40 or 50 or revisions so really,
like it, really varies.
The way I seem to write now, the poem either gets finished immediately or it goes through, like,
ten zillion revisions and gets hacked up and put in a drawer and I sit on it for a year.
The Walmart, actually, the Walmart poem is a great example.
It was this terrible poem and then I put it in a drawer for a year and sent it to a friend who
gave me some suggestions.
Then, I worked on it some more and finally someone emailed me wanting a poem for this online site and
I thought "I have this Walmart poem, let me finish it."
And I went to Mill Mountain and kind of hacked at it for six hours without moving except to pee and
it got finished, but it was like a two-year poem that poem, it feels like.
And every time I read it I think, oh, it was a two-year poem.
[Pause]
Anything else? Anyone's burning - no? I will answer.
[Pause]
No? Okay. Thank you everybody and thank you for coming and hosting me.
[Applause]