{"id":1328,"date":"2009-03-08T23:39:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-09T06:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=1328"},"modified":"2025-02-27T09:54:48","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T17:54:48","slug":"kim-addonizio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/kim-addonizio\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 63: Kim Addonizio"},"content":{"rendered":"
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About Kim Addonizio<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Kim Addonizio is the author of five books of poetry including Tell Me, which was a National Book Award Finalist. She has also published two novels, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street, and a book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure. She co-authored The Poet\u2019s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. With poet Susan Browne, she collaborated on a word\/music CD, Swearing, Smoking, Drinking & Kissing, available from cdbaby.com. Addonizio\u2019s latest book is Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, from W.W. Norton. Norton will also be releasing Lucifer at the Starlite in October 2009. Addonizio is currently at work on new poems and essays.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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A Profile of the Author<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Notes on \u201cLong-Distance\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I wrote this after a guy I\u2019d known many years ago found me on the Internet. He came back from the Vietnam war and then got a black belt in karate with a prosthetic leg. They really were wood back then. For a long time I had a few lines in the poem about the land mine he had stepped on and the guys who had hauled him out of the rice paddy. I kept trying to make a connection between them carrying him and the speaker \u201ccarrying\u201d him in a different sense. Finally I gave up and decided the poem didn\u2019t really need that idea, especially since I couldn\u2019t say it in a way that wasn\u2019t trite. And it focused the poem too much on the speaker. I wanted it to be about this man\u2019s survival. Once I had the thought that the leg had an amputated man, just as the man had an amputated leg, I had a seed for the ending. I\u2019ve never been wholly satisfied with this poem, but it has personal meaning for me. It\u2019s more narrative than a lot of my work these days and I wish it made more surprising moves than it does. I think the ending may be worth it, though, and I really wanted the note the poem sounds to be in my next book, Lucifer at the Starlite, and I had a deadline. So there it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes on Reading<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Everything I\u2019ve read has either excited me as a model, a way of putting language and thought and emotion together\u2013or shown me what I want to avoid. I don\u2019t reread much. A couple of books I have gone back to more than once are Lewis Hyde\u2019s The Gift and Denis Johnson\u2019s first novel, Angels. I\u2019m also reading a lot of Dean Young\u2019s poetry right now. When I read him, I want to write, and odd phrases occur to me\u2013 like \u201cGod is a mental doll.\u201d Words just start floating around my brain, like goldfish. I\u2019m trying to work with that God line right now. It\u2019s hard to strive to write the last book, so I\u2019m usually striving to write the next one, which I always hope is going to be better. With every book, I want it to find its own voice and sense of self. And I want to be proud of it when it grows up.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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\"Issue<\/figure>\n\n\n

Two Poems by Kim Addonizo<\/a><\/h2>\n\n

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