On discovery—discovery is one of the most important parts of poetry to me and one of the things that keeps me continually engaged is what can the poem teach us, and what can we discover throughout it and how can we use the poem as a point of reflection?
There is pain in both wanting to have a baby and not wanting to have one, in both being and not being pregnant. This is not to say women are defined by motherhood by any means, but like ballet, it provides a lens through which to see the pressures of womanhood in one small slice: our bodies are public, commented on when they take up space, subject to scrutiny and criticism, and there is not enough structure or support around womanhood.
“As a writer, I’m just endlessly fascinated by the slippery ways in which the body and mind affect each other. The body is its own mysterious and partially inaccessible region, and the mind can run into all sorts of trouble in trying to decipher what the body feels and experiences….”
There’s so much and I don’t think there is one area. Gaps are everywhere. The more you learn, the more you know you don’t know. The Middle East, for example, is not well studied. There are other gaps topically. Even in areas where lots of people have worked on, the work just brings more things for people to study.
The Jane Kenyon Prize for UM undergraduates serves two primary purposes: to create a space for UM undergrads to publish their work to a larger audience and to facilitate dialogue between the different spheres of writers in Ann Arbor. This year’s prize is the inaugural