Interview with Anna Journey

A year and a half ago, I worked as an editorial assistant at The New Criterion. One of my jobs was to send the famously irascible poetry critic, William Logan, books for possible review. New books would come in from publishers all over the place. In this case, it was an act akin to leaving your baby out in the Savannah, with lions and cheetahs and hyenas running around searching for pink soft chewy things to eat. I liked going through the new books, for obvious reasons. Usually though, I'd peruse the book and feel uninspired, place it back down, and that would be that. I had been trying to work on a series of poems called "Quarry is a Place for Nesting" (it didn't work out) when what book should arrive but a book called If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting by Anna Journey. There was a feeling of almost sisterhood, with our similarly felt utliziation of a word like 'nesting'; so much of a wry conflation of maternity and a post-modern age's sensibility. I did my usual dance of opening the book in order to scan it for possibly exciting language. I read the first poem, "Adorable Siren, Do You Love the Damned?" I read the first poem. I read the first poem. I read the first poem. Almost immediately, my poem, which had instantly seemed so kith on the surface, became wildly inferior to the beauty, control, and wile of Journey's work. I remember being most drawn to the closure's sex-and-violence grace, which made me feel like something in me was slipping off into a crag:

...I'm drunk

though I won't wear heels, honey, or I'd fall

for anyone. I'd fall devil

over heels over edge over oleander

over open mouth

over birthmark over forked

tongue over forked tongue

that turns on mine.

The experience of reading this book made me want to trade in my diction for arcane tools and demented flowers. I remember wanting very badly to know this person, or at least make myself known to them. After I got into the contact with her, her name started popping up everywhere, whether in the literary journal Parnassus, or on random websites lauding the book as part of a best summer reading list. She's a poet of decadence, flare, trickery, and come-hither, someone with whom music and character are on equally intense lyric plains. I knew that speaking with her would be fun as hell, and all of its sexy devils. And with all of the sharp, irresistible language in her poems, this interview revealed to me the very level balance between her attention to language and her intellectual prowess in Contemporary Poetry, which are also earnest and smart as hell to say the least.

News! Wow!

The Generative will be interviewing poet and essayist Anna Journey!!!

Anna Journey, whom I made note of rather meritoriously in my last post about ballin' titles, is stellar and I'm very excited to pick her brain.

Here's a sample of her work, from the collection If Birds Gather Your Hair For Nesting:

A Rose By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet

I have been seriously slacking with you, blog. I've been treating you like that dear friend I so badly want to get together with, but then cannot pierce the membrane of fatigue and blase enough to heed to my social urges. I've also been working on my poetry collection, and as it sits on my escritoire nameless (and yes, I have an escritoire), I've been thinking about the titles of successful collections that have come out in the past twenty years. It seems I can't escape the urge to be precious, even when I make a conscious effort to avoid it. I at first thought to name my collection something bold, something wild, something wholly subject and definitive; naturally then, a title with a definite article would allude to that occult panache, that surrounding talisman, that American gothic that so defines a book about haunting artifacts and desiccated kingdoms. However, upon turning it into my thesis class, I felt immediately self conscious and knew that my title (which will not be disclosed here or anywhere ever unless I make it in this world and it then becomes a thing I and all of my cohort can chortle at with retrospective ceremony and understanding for the next generation of writers) would carry little more than the lifespan of an inside joke.

Titles that successfully descry the mysteries of their books with "The ______" are rare gems in this world. Let's play around with those successful poets who in kind have successful titles that earn this construction.