What:
Since the earliest days, I’ve been drawn to language, the sound of consonant, vowel, syllable. My parents made a recording of me at three reciting nursery rhyme after nursery rhyme in an impossibly high, piping, precocious little voice. Later I became thrilled with the sense of “knowing” something of an author and another time from the writing. Even so, it seems too great a claim for me to say, “I’m a poet.” But whether you call it passion or compulsion or calling, I can say that I’m most myself when writing. The process is organic, the poem moving ahead with hope but without expectation, leaving room for the unexpected, for discovery in the process of writing. The best poems seem to come through me, not from me. As inexplicable as that is, the process is both exciting and humbling.
Why:
The intensity, compression, metaphor, and sheer passion of poetry amaze and fully engage me. A fine poem is like a compact time capsule or an electrical jolt or a sensory cornucopia or a leap into memory, collective or personal. Or all those things. The heritage is thrilling but also daunting and so I have to remind myself to write with courage and to go into territory I might prefer to avoid.
A mentor of mine, Deborah Digges, said “Mary Jo, you have to put on your leather jacket and go into the cave.” I think women writers, especially, have a sense that they are not good enough, somehow not legitimate, not capable. It’s then that I wear my Shakespeare shirt, “Be Not Afraid of Greatness.” Thanks, Will.
Writing is not my hobby or pastime but a focus in my life. I’m not a dabbler. It’s my nature to be “all in,” 100% engaged if I’m interested in something. However, I don’t have a predetermined time when I write. And although you can’t ever know the value of what you’ve written, what I do know is that when I write I am my happiest and most complete self.
How:
Primarily, I write from a place I call the “muddle.” What’s vital for me is to write without an agenda, to be open to whatever comes, silencing the editing voice which must wait until later, until revision. The process is bodily and so I need to feel the pen or pencil on paper. I write in a spiral notebook and don’t transfer the work to a computer until it’s been through several drafts and is at a place that seems promising.
A poem can be sparked by anything (see Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town)—art, conversation, memory, something I’ve read (though not necessarily poetry), a cartoon, etc.. Because I have a wide range of interests, almost anything might angle its away into a poem. Humor is appreciated. I am innately a sprinter, not a long-distance runner so my poems are lyrics or short narratives, mostly free verse, occasionally in a form.
Bio:
Soluble Fish, Mary Jo Firth Gillett’s first collection of poetry, won the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award (Southern Illinois University Press). Four award-winning chapbooks have also been published, most recently Dance Like a Flame (Hill-Stead Sunken Gardens Poetry Award). Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Third Coast, The Green Mountains Review, The MacGuffin, Salamander, The Ohio Review, Witness, Michigan Quarterly Review, Passages North, and other literary journals, as well as the Poetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. Her work has been anthologized and nominated for the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She’s won the N.Y. Open Voice Award and a Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts and has facilitated advanced poetry workshops for several nonprofits in “the company of an amazingly talented and generous group of men and women.” Her MFA is from Vermont College.
Links:
Website
Amazon
Soluble Fish, Southern Illinois University Press
Poem of the Week
Kresge Award Literary Arts Fellow
Zombie Preparedness Plan on Verse Daily