Marjorie L. Manwaring | March/April 2006

Amy Gerstler

Apart from being an award-winning poet, Amy Gerstler is a journalist, teacher, artistic collaborator, and former acting student. Her thoughts on writing and art are wise, often funny with an edge, and informed by the oddities of pop culture-much like the poems that have made their way into the body of work she has published over the past two decades.

Including her newest book, Ghost Girl (2004), Gerstler has published nine books and chapbooks of poetry. Bitter Angel won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990, and Medicine was a finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award in 2001. She lives in Los Angeles and has taught graduate writing at Antioch University Los Angeles and University of California at Irvine. She currently teaches at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and is an alumni of and a teacher at Bennington College's Writing Seminars in Vermont.

Since her early years as a poet, Gerstler has been involved in the visual art scene, writing reviews and articles, as well as essays for exhibition catalogues. In addition, she has collaborated with artists, composers, and choreographers, a testament to her fondness for things hybrid and genre-bending.

With literary influences as varied as the surrealists and Shakespeare, and her own tilt-a-whirl slant on the dramatic monologue, Gerstler's poetry is a language Carnival-poetry concerned as much with delighting in the pleasures of words and sounds as it is with examining the individual sorrows and joys that collide beneath humanity's big top.

Marjorie L. Manwaring: Which came first for you professionally-writing fiction, nonfiction, or poetry? How does writing in one genre inform your work in the other genres?

Amy Gerstler: If by professionally you mean which did I first get paid for, then I think the first writing I was paid for was doing art reviews for ArtForum magazine, which was an opportunity I was really grateful for. I guess that counts as nonfiction. In terms of how writing in one genre informs my writing in another, I am someone who likes the idea of literary genres interpenetrating-it's an appealing notion to me, like the idea of interspecies mating so that perhaps offspring who are new hybrid kinds of animals can result.

Manwaring: When did you start reading and writing poetry? When you started to seriously pursue writing poetry, what did you do to develop your craft?

Gerstler: I think I started reading poetry in elementary school, in first or second grade. At school and at home there were books by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Robert Frost, etc. Then a piano teacher I had (I was terrible at piano and hated the lessons, but my mother is quite musical, and she made well-intentioned attempts to expose me to the glories of music) very kindly gave me an anthology of poems that had Amy Lowell, Poe, E.A. Robinson, and the like, in it. It wasn't a book of kids' poems, and it seemed like a stunning book to me. These serious poems about love, death, rural life, and so on seemed like a marvel. I felt like I'd been given a key to an amazing and previously forbidden city. That made me want to write poems, too, and I started doing that in school, and at home when I couldn't sleep and would wake up in the middle of the night. I'd lie on the floor of the bathroom and write bad poems. In terms of developing craft I think what I mostly did was read as much as I could and, also, take in other art forms as much as I could: painting, other kinds of visual art, theatre, and film, mostly. I listened to my mother's record albums of musical comedies endlessly, over and over, and learned all the songs, mostly because I liked the lyrics. I can still sing (quite poorly in terms of melody) all the songs from shows like Camelot. I also tried, a little later when I began to be serious about writing, to write and rewrite as much as I could. And to show my work to people who seemed smart and discerning to get their critiques.

Manwaring: When did you realize poetry would become your life's work?

Gerstler: I don't think I ever realized it all at once. It's something I wanted very much early on, and still want, to be some kind of writer, but it's an ambition that's complicated, and I feel like even now, in middle age, I wrestle with this intense hope, this ambition, and how to do right by it in various ways. It seems more like a fervent wish than a realization.

Manwaring: James Tate, in an interview in which he was talking about writing prose and poetry, said, "I really can't even mingle the two. I'm either doing one or the other...I'm just in that one mode exploring that form, exploring that genre, as much as I'm capable." Do you tend to work on poems and prose alongside each other, or do you need to separate them-work on them on different days, for example?

Gerstler: Tate is a literary hero of mine, but my relation to the prose/poetry split (if it is a split) is different than his, I think. I think my poems tend to be kind of prosy in some ways, anyway, and then there are times, as I mentioned earlier, individual pieces where I try to combine aspects of both genres. If I've decided that something really is not going to be a consciously hybrid piece, that it really is going to pretty clearly be a poem, or an essay, or something, then I do work on such things separately.

Manwaring: In the catalogue Alexis Smith, a companion to the 91/92 exhibition of the same name (Whitney Museum, NY), you write: "Smith is flesh and blood of the quirky American geniuses she admires, because she carries on work in their tradition." Smith, you say, "can trace her beginnings back to spiritual bonds with artists, like Whitman, who are her relatives in sensibility." This makes me think of something Liam Rector asks of his writing students-to think about who their literary forefathers and foremothers are-to find their place in the "family tree of poetry." Who would you say are your poetic ancestors, your "relatives in sensibility"?

Gerstler: These kinds of questions of claiming literary kinship always make me a bit nervous. This is probably because, while there are people whose work I admire and whose work makes me want to write and write well, I'm not sure I have a rightful claim to assert that we share genealogy. Even when there are writers I want to learn from, be like, model my work on in some ways, I'm not sure I am successful, or even what being successful means in that context, because I think we often learn by mutating what we drink up from the literature we love almost beyond recognition. Also, I like so many writers. Lists like the kind you're soliciting never seem long enough to me. I tend to have certain abiding literary loves and then be in love with some things I am reading at the moment, and then also have passing fancies. And I do love poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. So with that caveat or disclaimer, I can say that I like Kafka, Virginia Woolf, the surrealist poets, Tate as I mentioned, Wislawa Szymborska, Simic, Russell Edson, Tom Clark, Elaine Equi, Rimbaud, Rilke, Evan Connell, Dickens, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, MFK Fisher, Plath, Larkin, Bishop, Moore, there are just so so many! I am reading Robinson Crusoe now and really liking it. I am in awe of the writers I teach with at Bennington. And so many others... I am getting interested in all those ancient Latin writers... and wishing I could read Latin.

Manwaring: In one of his reviews, Tom Clark says that your "most salient gift is (your) awesome capacity for surrendering authorial identification with the voicing of the work." A San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle reviewer comments on your "sly, shifting dramatic voices and identities," and Eileen Myles has called your "knowing voiceovers" a form of "deep TV." Can you talk about whether you think your having written fiction has something to do with your abilities to write such successful dramatic monologues? Also-you studied acting in college. How do you think this might have contributed to your abilities to take on others' voices?

Gerstler: I have written a little not very good fiction, so I don't know so far how much that has been a place where I could "hone" character monologues or learn to write them more effectively. I keep trying, though. I think that your point about studying acting is right on the mark. Part of my interest in dramatic monologues as poems stems from a displacement of some of the same interests that drew me to acting.

Manwaring: Regarding studying acting-are there any specific roles you have played, or plays you have read, that have influenced your creative work, and how?

Gerstler: The times I've had the good fortune to be in Shakespeare plays really had a big effect on me. The beauty of the language makes one drunk, and his incredible sympathetic penetration of every character floors me. And then I think more the idea of trying to get into a character's head, the way actors work to do, is something that fascinates me and has stayed with me as a writing goal, where applicable, more than specific roles I might have had when I acted in college. I like many many playwrights. I have liked Albee and Stoppard a lot, and Stoppard's play Arcadia means a lot to me, and also Wilder's Our Town. I regret that I haven't kept up with new plays very well. I recently saw Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul which knocked me out. Also August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean, which I saw recently, impressed me immensely.

Manwaring: In an interview in Electronic Poetry Review, David Trinidad says, "Dennis (Cooper) created a lively scene at Beyond Baroque, which lasted until he moved to New York, in '83 or '84. He brought a lot of interesting poets from around the country to read at Beyond Baroque....Those were very exciting days. Everyone had their own magazine and/or press, or ran a workshop or reading series. We'd all show each other our new poems. There was a real sense of camaraderie, of mutual support." Dennis Cooper himself also refers to a Beyond Baroque "scene" in several interviews. Can you talk about Beyond Baroque-how you became involved, how it energized your writing, how the other artists involved influenced your work, and whether you still share work with people from this group? What lasting influence did the Beyond Baroque experience have on your writing?

Gerstler: I was really really lucky to have met Dennis in college and then to have had the opportunity to be around the lively and heady writing and art scenes he created through his press Little Caesar and through his work at Beyond Baroque and his gifts for mentoring. He has a genius for, among other things, making things happen art-wise, and for linking up artists in different genres. Knowing him and getting to hang around Beyond Baroque in those days changed my life quite substantially. There was a context for writing and for trying to cobble together a writing life: I went to readings there, worked there, used the library, met other writers there, attended workshops, wrote grants for the organization. Beyond Baroque was at the center of my life in various ways for a long time. Through it and through Dennis, I was exposed to many writers, many kinds of writing, collaboration, literary history, many models of what a writer could do and be. Endlessly valuable for young naive unschooled me back then.

Manwaring: How did you become interested in writing reviews and articles about art (I suspect this might tie in with the above question)?

Gerstler: I was trying to find any way I could to earn money by writing and that was (this actually relates to your very first question), as it happened, the first way I could write and get paid for it. I have always been interested in art, and it seemed like it would push my work further to have to try to think through and articulate my responses to art in writing.

Manwaring: Is there something or someone you've come across in your artistic life-a class, lecture, teacher, reading, or book-that really just shook things up for you, really altered your notions about the art or craft of poetry?

Gerstler: This happens to me in small ways all the time, sort of like aftershocks that follow an earthquake. I'm not one for big revelations usually, the life-changing sudden epiphany, because I think slowly, and it takes me a long time to mull things over. When I was younger and first began reading New York School poets, those were the first contemporary, living (and some sadly not alive any more, like Frank O'Hara) poets I'd ever read. Before that it was just Emily Dickinson, who is amazing, and so on, but when I first read Tom Clark and O'Hara, etc., I did kind of feel like light bulbs popping on in my brain, and I thought, WOW, this is how people are writing now, and it astonished me, the energy, the way it still seemed like poetry and totally gave me what used to be called "a head rush" but could not be mistaken for Keats. The way the New York poets managed to write things that seemed alive, of the moment, of their moment in being and history and seemed also to relate to the history of poetry-this excited me.

Manwaring: In the introduction to his anthology Stand Up Poetry, in which three of your poems appear, Charles Harper Webb says that when he came to teach at California State University, Long Beach in 1984, the type of poems he calls "stand up" (poems characterized by humor, natural language, flights of fancy, a strong individual voice, a close relationship to fiction, and use of urban and popular culture, among other things) were booming-that there seemed to be "a major concentration of this poetry" in southern California. Were you conscious of this at the time, and if so, what kind of role did it play as you developed your poetic style?

Gerstler: I have always liked comic poetry for a number of reasons, but none of them really had to do with California. I think I was kind of raised on humorous poems, having read Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, as many children do. Dr. Seuss seemed mind-bendy and full of language delight and funny, but also about what it was like to be a kid and sometimes to be on a quest of some kind. I also felt as I grew older that poetry had such a bad rap: every one I knew seemed to find it dusty and boring, or to feel that they would be unable to understand it and therefore that it was pointless and un-fun to read. Humor in poetry seemed to be a way of bridging that gap, of showing readers that poetry could be something they could enjoy, relate to, that would make them laugh. Work that fused both comedy and seriousness or darkness seemed to me to be extra affecting, extra fierce. For some reason I just have proclivities as a reader and writer for black humor. It means a lot to me. I think it is a saving grace. That was one thing I loved about Tate's work when I first read it: it was smart, sharp, lyrical, deeply moving, but also often blessedly comic.

Manwaring: In an interview with Electronic Poetry Review, David Trinidad mentions that you, being a writer of haiku yourself, encouraged him to write some as well. Is this still a form you write in regularly? How do you think your poetry did or does benefit by writing haiku? What are some other exercises you find useful, and how do you distinguish between a successfully completed exercise and a good poem?

Gerstler: I went through a period of time during which I wrote a bunch of haiku. Of course they're not real haiku, because I don't know Japanese. They're American haiku, a mutated form. I loved the smallness of the form, the fact that I could work on them in my head as I went about my day, when there were lulls, and I loved working in a set numbers of syllables per line. As to your other question, almost any writing exercise, if it's not too complicated for me, seems useful to try. I have a list of about sixty that I'm always adding to, and that I give to students who are stuck or feeling uninspired, and I use them myself sometimes under the same circumstances. This last part of your question is a hard one: how to distinguish when something works and when something doesn't. I'm still working on that. I try to sit on pieces for a while, after I think they're "done" to see if I notice more flaws, or soggy spots, or if they hold my interest. Sometimes I show them to people I trust. I try to comb through them a lot of times, reading them aloud to myself multiple times as well. In a way, it comes down, for me, to a kind of instinct about whether something works or doesn't. I write a certain number of poems that I either throw away or just save but never publish or show anyone because they don't seem to measure up.

Manwaring: I've noticed sonnets peppered throughout your body of work-most recently "Ode to Toast," "Hymn to the Neck," and three "Buddha Sonnets." What in particular about the sonnet form appeals to you?

Gerstler: I saw the term "inherent forms" in a dictionary of literary terms recently and it seems to me a sonnet is a kind of organic form: small enough to contain a line of thought or feeling. It's like one handful of poetry. For some reason the sonnet seems like the size of the palm of a hand to me. They're relatively easy to memorize, compact, succinct, yet you can really express something in them. When they have a couplet at the end, that's nice too-the challenge of making a "neat" conclusion, yet leaving the poem open-ended in some way too, so that it doesn't close down at the end.

Manwaring: The language that you use in your poems ranges from the scientific and philosophical vocabulary of textbooks to the slang and brand-names of pop culture, and you have a knack for juxtaposing words to create tension, surprising images, and textured lines rich with slant rhyme and sound echoes. To what do you attribute your zeal for words and your incredibly honed poetic ear?

Gerstler: Love of language seems to be something people are born with, or develop early, like love of music or numbers or color. Language always seemed to me powerful and magical. I've liked the idea of puns, rhyme, chanting, spoken spells etc. ever since I was little. I liked their paradoxical nature: that they both seem exact and prey to slippage. I like wandering through the dictionary as though through an archeological dig, seeing what turns up, what's lying around next to what. I love the sounds of other languages, and specialized vocabularies like you referred to above, odd turns of phrase. Feeling this way I think is a cast of mind: partly taste, partly temperament, whether one loves words, or mechanical things, or plants, or race cars.

Manwaring: Reading through your many volumes of poetry, I've noticed that, in addition to the prose poem, you gravitate toward a stanzaless "form" that consists of 2–4 stressed beats per line and left-justified lines that are fairly uniform in length throughout a poem (you have referred to them as "skinny poems"). Can you talk a little bit about this form-do you think there's something in particular about it that "fits" with the subjects you tackle?

Gerstler: For me this form, which is rather like a newspaper column, is often what I start with when writing a poem-it's a basic form that, as I work on a poem, I either later depart from or stick with. It seems kind of readable and no nonsense to me, and a good fundamental way of organizing thoughts and line breaks initially when writing poems.

Manwaring: Even your earliest books include prose poems; Bitter Angel contains eighteen. What kinds of resistance to the form, if any, did you encounter? You've said you are an admirer of James Tate-who are some other prose poets who have influenced your work?

Gerstler: I'm not sure when you say "resistance to the form" if you mean my own inner resistance or other people's resistance to prose poems-the idea that one sometimes hears, that there's no such thing as a prose poem, that it's not a "legitimate form." I love the form-it seems like you can get the best of both worlds with it sometimes. I love Baudelaire's prose poems. Russell Edson's prose poems have been very important to me. I think some of Lydia Davis's very short pieces could be labeled either short stories or prose poems. Kafka has some extremely short pieces that seem to be very prose-poem-like. Bernard Cooper has written some wonderful prose poems. I like prose-poem anthologies and hardly ever meet a prose poem I don't like.

Manwaring: How do you decide if something is a prose poem or a short story (or does it depend on the context?), and, in your opinion, does it really matter?

Gerstler: My idea usually is that if I find a text fascinating and wondrous, then it's interesting to me what the author calls it, but I don't really care much how it's labeled. The important thing for me is that it grabs me and is dizzyingly terrific. I like to see what authors call their pieces, but it's sort of a matter of academic interest in the sense that I don't think I ever like or dislike a piece based on its category. I like pieces that semi-defy or defy categorization or that fall into several categories simultaneously, often, anyway.

Manwaring: You've written that the Passover Seder was your "first conscious introduction to the powerful notion of food as metaphor" and that "when you took such a morsel (such as the "bitter herbs") in your mouth, it was not to satisfy physical hunger, or to get pleasure, but to eat meaning." Can you talk about how you view the relationship between food and poetry? How would you characterize the role of food in your poems?

Gerstler: Food and cooking are such sensual, primal pleasures and the sources of such vivid experiences and associations that I like very much when they are successfully used in poems. I also think food-based sensations and images are kind of democratic in the sense that pretty much every living human can relate to them in some way. And I'm sure that somewhere in my head is some analogy or set of analogies about how cooking and writing are similar in many ways. I love the work of MFK Fisher, who is a queen among food writers.

Manwaring: How closely do you identify with the speaker in your poem "Blur" (from Crown of Weeds), who says:

...I'm not Catholic,
or religious, though I was a cloisterish
child who coveted the gothic costumes
of monks and nuns, who liked to get high
by fasting...

and

...The notion
that a gulp of wine could turn into the blood
of a loved one was beyond erotic. I guess
I felt temperamentally Catholic...

Gerstler: "Blur" is a pretty straightforwardly autobiographical poem. There was a long period of time when I was very drawn to the colorfulness and extremity of Catholic mythology and symbology. I think I'm mostly over it, now, though. And I love the idea of saints: a set of lesser gods who by dint of their past suffering are empowered to grant mortals help and mercy in their exact areas of expertise. Where the saints were hurt most, they are then able to ease those particular pains in the still living. There's something about that idea I find moving and beautiful.

Manwaring: At one of the Bennington residencies, Alicia Ostriker gave a lecture on contemporary midrash-"putting your own spin on a biblical narrative." Ostriker noted that there has been a renaissance in midrash writing by American women. You have quite a few poems that explore Old Testament characters, including the recent "Miriam." What draws you to this particular subject matter?

Gerstler: Because I was sent to Jewish sabbath school for years and years as a kid, and because mostly what we did there was learn Old Testament stories, those characters and narratives got drilled into my head at a time when I think I was hungry for and entranced by dramatic narratives, for tragedy and triumph and memorable images. Those characters suffer and feel and experience so much. And there's so much in the stories about emotion, loss, ethics, faith, and life on earth. Very riveting to a kid who loves stories. And the language is so beautiful, and the strangeness of the settings and way of life, yet the familiarity of the problems and dilemmas was appealing and I guess still is.

Manwaring: I'm intrigued with this line from Medicine's "The Holy Storm (A Secular Snow Sermon)": "Many of us secretly treasure hopes of being reformed." It strikes me that there is an interesting interplay going on in your work-particularly in Medicine-between the "transformed," the "reformed," and the "malformed." Can you comment on this?

Gerstler: Wow. Well that seems right to me, and your question in a way seems more articulate than any attempt at explanation I might make. I guess I could just say that those themes, transformation, reformation, and deformation, and their relationships are abiding obsessions of mine. Maybe they all have to do with spiritual and psychological struggle, if that makes any sense, which is a big part of being human for me-wrestling with oneself about how to change, grow, not stagnate, navigate life gracefully without being harmed or harming or turning into a monster. If that doesn't sound too spacey.

Manwaring: One essay in your MFA thesis is titled Towards a Philosophy of Dolls; in it you include explorations of the significance of dolls to writers such as Freud, Rilke, and Baudelaire. Dolls appear in many of your poems and have starring roles in "Figuren," "Touring the Doll Hospital," and others. Do you think there's something in particular about dolls that draws poets-such as Rilke, Baudelaire, and you-to them?

Gerstler: Dolls are such a great subject, so paradoxical at root-they are both comforting and scary, and because they are arguably little models of us, of humans, they are a very loaded object on which we can endlessly project all kinds of wild thoughts and feelings. Also, toys and especially dolls are so representative of the things of childhood, which can be very redolent and evocative. They are like alter egos and therefore provide a kind of stage on which we can imagine and examine so much.

Manwaring: In an interview you did for Ignition, you mentioned there being a difference between being blocked and being in "intake" mode. How do you know the difference, and what kinds of things do you find yourself doing when you are in intake mode?

Gerstler: By intake mode I guess I just meant those moments or phases, which hopefully are frequent if not constant, when one's language radar is working well, and therefore catchy things people say, amusing words on billboards, or charged phrases that come floating to one's ear from the radio or odd phrases one reads on menus or in advertisements all reach one and are received and noted down as pleasing bits of music which one can later use in composing something.

Manwaring: As part of Ballet Pacifica's "Project Synergy," you, your sister, choreographer Tina Gerstler, and the composer Francis Thumm created the collaborative dance project Blessed Temper, which was performed in October 2003. Can you talk a little bit about this project, and about collaboration in general (of which you've done a lot)? How does the writing process for a project like this differ, if it does, from other writing, and in what ways do your collaborative experiences manifest themselves in your solo work?

Gerstler: This was a dance piece my sister conceived of and created. Francis did the score which used bits of text I wrote. Tina wanted the piece to reflect some ideas and experiences she had having to do with temperament and child rearing. She was reflecting a lot on her young daughter's temperament and how one's disposition colors the way one moves through the world and is reacted to by the world. As a mother, I also think she was grappling with how you help a child to know, accept, and deal with their own temperament. I did a bunch of research and wrote a lot of chunks of text, steered by conversations with her and Francis about these themes, and then she and mostly Francis chose which bits they wanted, and Francis made them part of his score. I like collaboration with other artists when we get along and like each other's work and can communicate well. I've been lucky in that I've had the opportunity to collaborate with some talented and interesting people. It's always a bit of a brain stretcher and a learning experience, and I like getting to relate to or dabble in other mediums. Writing is extremely solitary in some ways, and I sometimes like that collaboration adds a kind of social interactive element to text production that is not ordinarily there for me or is not usually present so overtly.

Manwaring: Do you have a group of people or a person you regularly share work with? How important do you think it is to have a community of writers with whom you can share work and talk about literature, and how necessary is it for you to have people who are in close physical proximity vs. a cybercommunity, such as develops at a low-residency writing program like Bennington?

Gerstler: I am kind of shy about showing work in progress, and don't do it as much as I probably should. Also, because everyone is so busy, I am sometimes reluctant to presume on their time. I do show things sometimes to a few people I am close to, particularly if I feel I have a problem which I can't identify or figure out how to fix. I think that the kind of community you are talking about in your question plays different roles in the lives of different writers. Some people work well having lots of outside input. Some don't seem to need or want nearly as much feedback from others. More than specifically having people read my work while I'm in the thick of it, I think, at least now, I crave the part of literary community where I have access to readings, lectures, and literary discussion, not about my own work but about what people are reading and thinking about, what's new. That kind of exchange seems most valuable to me at this juncture in my life, and that is one reason why Bennington is so precious to me: this very important exposure to what's going on in the field, exposure to other vital literary minds in action, etc.

Manwaring: How do you strike a balance between your teaching obligations, your collaborations with artists, your nonfiction writing, your poetry, and "free time," and what does "free time" look like for you? How do you divide up creative work and the more business-oriented tasks-submitting work to journals, applying for grants, those kinds of things?

Gerstler: I am tempted to answer "very badly" here. Striking this balance is a problem for me, and has been particularly troublesome and unwieldy for the past couple of years. I am very lucky in that I have gainful employment. I am very thankful about that. So many people don't have jobs or don't have enough work to support them. But I have a lot to learn, finesse, and figure out about successfully juggling my four or so part-time jobs from which I make my living at the moment, and my writing and reading life. Especially as I get older and have somewhat less energy. I marvel at people who get a lot done. Balancing these parts of life is an occasion I have to constantly try to rise to and to be flexible in dealing with. I'm not complaining, but it is a real challenge, especially if you more or less feel like you'd like to write all the time. This is a problem every artist deals with, I think, in some way. Free time for me involves playing with my dogs and taking them on field trips, cooking, reading, exercising, social life, movies, museums.

Manwaring: It seems once people graduate with an MFA, there's often a "deer-caught-in-the-headlights" period-"Now what do I do?" It seems like you found your niche in the literary world fairly early on in your artistic life. Do you have any advice for those who still might not know quite "what color their parachute is?"

Gerstler: I think you are right, that there are times in life, and not only when one is fresh out of school, but at other crossroads in life, where one is on the cusp of a transition and feels becalmed. Make yourself work, don't wait for divine inspiration, try lots of different things, be patient with yourself, expose yourself to whatever tends to excite your brain and fill you up with ideas, impose deadlines on yourself if you can't get yourself into a position where you have actual deadlines-these would be suggestions I might offer to a person or to myself who's at such a point. It helps to know what inspires you, and you can find that out by trial and error. Some people get inspired by travel, by seeing lots of films, by solitude, by talking to other writers, by research, by doing journalism, by taking long nature walks, or swimming laps. Try things to find out what gets you going, and ply yourself with those things as needed. And persevere, to the point of absurdity.

Manwaring: What's your secret to being so darned prolific?

Gerstler: I wish I was more prolific. My self-perception is not that I am so prolific, though I'm glad you think so. I've been doing this for a long time. I feel very mentally and physically crummy if I don't write for awhile, so perhaps it has often been simply a survival technique and a necessary way of grounding myself to try to keep going.

Manwaring: Your book Medicine, published in 2000, contains poems infused with illness, loss, and grieving. Some of the threads I see running through your newest book, Ghost Girl, are those of paranormal phenomena, the afterlife, and continuing on in the face of loss. Can you talk a little about the relationship between the poems in Ghost Girl and Medicine, and about Ghost Girl's relationship to these lines from one of its poems, "The Floating Woman": "I let a local magician think / it is all his doing, but in truth I float / under my own power. Sacrifice lightens, / voluntary or not. Loss rids us of ballast. / Then comes the ascensions..."

Gerstler: Most of the poems in Medicine were written while my younger brother was gravely ill, and you are right, many of them have to do, in part or in whole, with illness, and the looming specter of bereavement. Quite a bit of my work in the past has been inflected by an abiding fascination I have with the paranormal, with ghosts, mediums, especially reincarnation, psychics etc., and in Ghost Girl at a certain point I decided to go ahead and freely indulge that interest, so many of the poems touch on those subjects. I was hoping to maybe get some of this obsession out of my system but it doesn't seem to have worked. The lines you quoted, I'm not sure if I can say anything coherent about them. The speaker in the poem is a woman who, as a young girl, lost her mother, and I think that there is an attempt in the lines you cite to address the idea that the speaker's early loss of a parent marked her, not only because it made her suffer, but because, paradoxically, sometimes suffering bestows gifts on the sufferer, and it did so in the case of the speaker. She feels she is able to physically float during the magic act in which she is a magician's assistant partly because her early loss somehow untethered her a little from the earth, or from the limits of physics, or from earthly attachments, or something like that, if that makes any sense.

Manwaring: What projects are you working on now?

Gerstler: I'm 3/4 of the way through a new book of poems. I'm not sure what the title will be yet. I've been working on a book of personal essays, and hope they're quite close to being finished. Last summer I wrote a seven-page collag-y text, I guess it's a long poem, called "Mrs. Frankenstein Pens Her Memoirs." The artist Alexis Smith is taking a look at it to see if it has collaborative book potential. And since I had the good fortune to be given an entire set of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1910, I have been writing a series of encyclopedia poems.

AWP

Marjorie L. Manwaring lives in Seattle, where she is a freelance writer and editor. She is also an associate editor for the DMQ Review (www.dmqreview.com). Her poems have been published in the Seattle Review, 5 AM, Sentence, and elsewhere.