{"id":36076,"date":"2010-04-10T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-10T19:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=36076"},"modified":"2025-02-18T10:05:29","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T18:05:29","slug":"issue-67-a-conversation-with-prageeta-sharma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-67-a-conversation-with-prageeta-sharma\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 67: A Conversation with Prageeta Sharma"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Found in\u00a0Willow Springs\u00a0<\/em>67<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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APRIL 10, 2010<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

SHIRA RICHMAN & AMANDA MAULE<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A TALK WITH PRAGEETA SHARMA<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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\"Prageeta<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit: poetryfoundation.org<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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PRAGEETA SHARMA IS THE DIRECTOR<\/strong> of the MFA program at the University of Montana and author of three poetry collections, Bliss to Fill<\/em>, The Opening Question, <\/em>and Infamous Landscapes<\/em>. When asked about a guiding notion for The Opening Question<\/em>, she answered, \u201cI started with the idea of a kind of unabashed confrontation with disappointment and worked towards a way of reeling it in with a hopeful lyrical edge.\u201d Her work takes on topics to which many may have aversions \u2013 philosophy and feminism \u2013 with humor and insight as seen in poems such as \u201cEverywhere:\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was crafting crafts, I had needles, I was sewing butterflies<\/p>\n\n\n\n

like women do \u2013 but only in terms of thoughts,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

not in terms of doing. Or I thought, alas,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

lightness is part of the commune of despair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The scene of a woman doing needlework becomes increasingly strange when we realize she is embroidering thoughts. The thoughts open passageways that lead into communes in which despair surprises with its lightness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poems, Sharma asserts, are \u201cplaces in which you can actually take ideas on, and figure out how they can be inhabited.\u201d Her poems, Major Jackson writes, reveal \u201c\u2019the posture of the life of the mind.\u2019 ascending, where humor is unabashedly handsome and an enormous intellect alluring even to the most cynical pedestrian.\u201d While Jackson points out the ascendant movement of Sharma\u2019s poems, Lisa Jarno takes us to their transcendence: \u201cPrageeta Sharma\u2019s poems are as ever imbued with a crafty playfulness by which the appearances of the \u2018I,\u2019 the \u2018You,\u2019 and the \u2018We\u2019 transcend tricks of the trade.\u201d Thomas Sayers Ellis also notes the expansiveness and profundity of Sharma\u2019s poems that, as he puts it, \u201cseem to live everywhere we\u2019ve lived without wallowing in identity or judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sharma was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, to Hindu parents. \u201cBeing raised a Hindu,\u201d she says, \u201cI was taught to honor knowledge and books like a religion and so for me poetry keeps this relationship close, true, active.\u201d She earned an MFA at Brown University in 1995 and an MA in media studies at the New School in 2001. In 2010 she received a Howard Foundation Grant. We met with her at the Hyatt in Denver during the Association of Writing Programs Conference where we discussed escaping the institution, poets are creative consultants, and limits of the image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIRA RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your poetry addresses feminism in a playful, humorous way. Does humor feel like a way to be taken seriously when discussing feminism?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PRAGEETA SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I always felt like I had this split personality culturally \u2013 I was very quiet, but in my poetry I felt conscious of what a dramatic voice and a dramatic \u201cI\u201d sounded like. It felt melodramatic to me at times. I wanted to construct a voice that was closest to my personality in speaking, in the way that Frank O\u2019Hara had that kind of conversational tone or Kenneth Koch. It was natural to think about a feminine voice that could be conversational and informal, or intimate in ways that weren\u2019t exaggerating the terms of intimacy, but were playful. It is<\/em> a kind of feminist position to feel comfortable with your voice and engage the reader without putting on airs or trying to construct an over-determined identity for the poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was beginning to write, a lot of Indian poets were educating the reader about their identity. I wanted to present my personality rather than educate the reader. I\u2019m interested in how we can be, not our best self, but our quirkiest self in the poem, because we have to be this other self all the time. Our artistic self, or the need to be an individual, should be in the poem. That\u2019s a feminist act: to not be one-dimensional in the poem. But I do think a lot of Indian women, culturally, are set up to not have anything to say \u2013 except to explain, or to mediate, or to be a messenger of something \u201cmore important\u201d than their inner lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such as what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I went to grad school \u2013 I graduated in 1995 \u2013 there was a lot of \u201csalvation\u201d fiction about the first-generation immigrants and immigrant experience. The subject matter was also very domestic, and I was sort of rallying against that passive \u201cI,\u201d where the character was examined through an omniscient narrator reporting on the culture the characters were immersed in, but never having an opinion about it. You were basically writing for a white reader, who would learn about your culture through you. You<\/em> were learning nothing about it. You were just putting it on display.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t want to create poems that merely educated the non-Indian reader. I wanted poems where thinking was happening, because that was a canonical thing. Helen Vendler would talk about the thinking that was happening in, say, Keats \u2013 and I\u2019m actually not trying to align myself with \u201cgreat poets,\u201d but it became this real whiteness \u2013 that writing was cerebral thinking, and if you were a person of color, you were telling your story or you were writing the narrative. You were educating people around you instead of actually thinking in the poem, too. It\u2019s important to explore the variety of cognitive experiences in the poem rather than just telling a story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AMANDA MAULE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where do you see that thinking happening, or what kind of thinking are you doing in your poetry?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s evident in the progression of the books \u2013 this is just something I\u2019ve always returned to \u2013 but I like thinking of the poem as that place to speak about theory without it being academic. Artists are developing their theories about the world, and we do that in a poem. We don\u2019t have to do it in an essay. That\u2019s the kind of thinking I hope I\u2019m doing. All the stuff that you can\u2019t do anywhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In all three books, I have poems where I\u2019m proposing ideas, a personal philosophy that I think is lofty in an absurd way, but where it\u2019s fun to be absurd with thought. I think a lot of German philosophy is lofty, and a lot of Hindu is more general \u2013 you know, general audience ideas. So I wanted to explore places where you could have extravagant thinking without having it fixed to one movement or another. I think men do this all the time. And going back to humor, when women explore humor, sometimes it\u2019s sort of slapstick or jokey, and that can be awkward. But there are so many male poets who are funny in their poems, like Kenneth Koch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think women are funnier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Women are funnier. I\u2019m just wondering if it\u2019s as much in the poem as in the way we interact and engage. But we may be funny when we\u2019re making points when we\u2019re remarking on something that\u2019s unfair. We can be slightly snide and funny. Are we using the poem as a place to enjoy our playfulness? We are now, I think. A lot more poets are. Arielle Greenberg is, I think. And Matthea Harvey, in the way in which her humor is felt through abstraction and character. There\u2019s that playfulness to the poems. I think her second book, Sad Little Breathing Machine<\/em>, does that. She has nouns and objects stand in for people. I think there\u2019s a lovely quality in the strangeness of the humor there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among South Asian poets, I think there are a few male poets who explore craft and wit, really think of it formally, but I\u2019m wondering if there\u2019s still not more of that playfulness that could be found. In terms of gender, I\u2019m not sure if we\u2019re still fixed with the kind of confessional \u201cI.\u201d Or when we experiment, do we just extract language from the narrative and not necessarily put our personality in there? I don\u2019t know where we are with humor in terms of cultural identity. But in terms of gender, a lot of women are playing; they just don\u2019t want to be too slapstick. There\u2019s a particular poet who I\u2019m not going to mention, who may be just a little too funny. Then you\u2019re like, Ugh, I don\u2019t want that. I don\u2019t want to be a comic. So there\u2019s the risk, I think. A lot of men can be comedic and even use one-liners, and it\u2019s okay. They just take that kind of space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m having trouble thinking of funny male poets. You mentioned Kenneth Koch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kenneth Koch I really love. And Tony Hoagland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAULE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dean Young can be funny, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah. And people have said they see connections between what I do and Dean Young\u2019s work, structurally. I like his work. I haven\u2019t thought about it in relation to my work, but I certainly know he was publishing when I was younger, and his poems were playful and exploratory. Structurally, they had a voice that was working against some perceived notion of the poem he was undoing. That\u2019s something I like to do. If there\u2019s a rule, I want to play with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the funny poems of yours is \u201cAfter the Weekend with Geniuses.\u201d The fiction writers are the geniuses who are full of pages, and the poets are the warriors and false gardeners who end up languishing on the lawn like love-starved lawn ornaments. Are poets lazy and ornamental? How are fiction writers different?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I spent a weekend with a bunch of fiction writers and we were helping Heather McGowan, a fiction writer, think about her first run of edits on her novel, which was experimental. Whenever we talked about it, I would say, \u201cYou know, if it were a poem, you could just do this and you wouldn\u2019t have to do those fifty things.\u201d But it was never helpful because she couldn\u2019t just do this<\/em>. So I thought, \u201cWe\u2019re so extravagant, poets. We can just do this little thing and then lounge about and not do any more.\u201d With the poem, you have a lot of autonomy I don\u2019t think you have as a prose writer. We poets have more autonomy to be ourselves. That\u2019s extravagant, I think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAULE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dean Young has surreal tendencies. Do you see a relationship to surrealism in your work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My undergraduate study was really formal, and I learned a lot about modern and contemporary poetry \u2013 the canonical lens \u2013 and then went on to Brown, which was an experimental program. There was a new or different, alternative cannon: Stein and O\u2019Hara and Ashbery. And realizing you could read Eliot and Pound and go one way, or read Eliot and Pound and go the other way. You could go to Lowell or you could go to Olson in your thinking. That was really new to me to think that \u2013 Oh, there are open parentheticals, or, Oh, language, words can stand in for other words. You don\u2019t need a simile here; we don\u2019t need to do this with craft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I moved to New York and realized that the poets who seemed to have the most fun, in general, were having fun on the page and having fun in their lives. It spoke to me that I could play in the poem, and I could find surrealism. I think there are some poems trying some surrealism\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I guess, more, it\u2019s imagination \u2013 really figuring out where you want your imagination to be. I think it would be easy to say that I\u2019m surrealist, but I don\u2019t think I am. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a structure I try on. I just like pairing certain ideas. I like being contrary, so a poem is set up to sort of contradict itself. Just as we go from one thought to another, the poem invites another idea. I don\u2019t think I\u2019m as experimental at all. I\u2019m that square peg in a round hole. I\u2019m not sure what makes the poems so different from somebody else\u2019s in terms of contemporary, nontraditional poems \u2013 if we call narrative traditional. But I don\u2019t know if we\u2019re doing that anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do like some surrealism, but after a certain point I get tired of a poem being purely nonsensical, in the sense that I don\u2019t need meta-symbolism for the poem. Tate does an American surrealist thing where suddenly you step back \u2013 I forget which poem it is, but he\u2019s talking about a daughter marrying a prince. After a certain point, you realize the absurdity of this father-daughter relationship and where it goes, and it\u2019s quite metaphorical but it\u2019s also absurd, and you understand that the essential part of the poem is that father-daughter relationship can be estranged in such complicated ways that you might not be able to talk about them directly. I love Tate because the surrealism provides a way to talk about complicated relationships. The surrealism serves a philosophical purpose, makes room to talk about something. I think Dean Young does that, too. I think American surrealism, if that is indeed the right term, does something that the metaphor isn\u2019t always able to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some of your more recent work, you put the urban into a wild setting, such as being mugged in a river. What sorts of things do you do to ground or un-ground your imagination?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know how I ground myself. I do feel like an outsider in ways in the West. I used to feel like an outsider in suburbia, growing up with no other Indians around me. I can really go to places where things are invented for me. There are social norms I have to explore. I try to create high stakes around some questions, and then my imagination takes over. I position myself in a place where I have to explain myself, and the terms that I\u2019ve set for myself are both real and imaginary. For example, Homi Bhabha, the theorist, talked a lot about \u2013 I\u2019m going to butcher this because it\u2019s been a long time since I\u2019ve read the essay \u2013 but he talks about how colonized people will mimic the colonizer. That\u2019s a very interesting power dynamic. He has this beautiful line where he says, to paraphrase here, Mimicry represents ironic compromise, not always representationally but even in the language, then I was somehow enacting a theory that felt very close to me, which was about power relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You seem to write a lot about ideas \u2013 your ideas about ideas, and what triggers a viewpoint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theory is interesting to me. I\u2019m na\u00efve and excited about it at the same time. Poems seem to be places in which you can actually take ideas, and figure out how they can be inhabited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think that\u2019s a common view? I\u2019ve heard that ideas are for essays and images are for poems?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t stand rules like that. After a certain point, you have to have the strength and character and belief to be a writer. Images aren\u2019t going to save you from yourself. Beyond craft issues, you have to start wrestling with why you are who you are. Your poems are going to have to save you. If you think about great poets, they\u2019re always doing something new. If we talk about anyone who\u2019s doing something interesting, we\u2019re not talking about how they follow the rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m teaching an insider and an outsider class where we read poets inside and outside canon. I think what\u2019s hardest for all of us is to say what makes us uncomfortable. When do we think the poet is getting away with something? Why is that so disturbing? When do we think correcting them is appropriate? What are the problems with over-determining the body of work by any given poet and its significance? Sometimes I just want to stop being in the institution and say, Well, what is the real pleasure here, and what\u2019s the pleasure you\u2019ve been taught<\/em> to experience in the poem. Un-schooling may allow you to write something different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What would it take to escape the institution?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know if anyone can escape. In grad school, our professor, William Keach, asked my friend what he was doing for the summer, and he was like, \u201cOh Professor Keach, I don\u2019t even want to tell you, you\u2019re a Socialist\/Marxist.\u201d And he said,  \u201cNo, I want to know what you\u2019re doing for the summer.\u201d My friend said, \u201cI\u2019m working for Citibank,\u201d and Keach said, \u201cWe\u2019re all working for Citibank.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In essence, we live in the institution. I think I make fun of being in an institution because I work in an MFA program. There are things that naturally happen in that environment. But I think it\u2019s funny to think more ironically about it being an intentional community and that we all agree to be a certain way and do certain things and push against certain things. It seems people don\u2019t generally like work that\u2019s far from the institution. \u201cLanguage\u201d poetry\u2019s been co-opted by the academy, but people don\u2019t know what to do with spoken word. People see a lot of outsider poetry as being written by someone not knowing, not reading, or not understanding literary traditions. It\u2019s interesting to thing about what inside and outside mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I try to introduce my students to poets who either write outside the academy or don\u2019t consider their poetry identity to be their primary identity \u2013 you can have a multi-functional, professional identity. Ofelia Zepeda is a linguist at the University of Arizona, and she\u2019s a poet. What she\u2019s don\u2019t for Tohono O\u2019odham culture \u2013 she\u2019s been preserving Tohono O\u2019odham language for Native communities \u2013 has been primary and has served her poetry, and her poetry enacts it. I think it\u2019s interesting when you have certain ideas and your work enacts them, so that you\u2019re engaged in how your work does something maybe larger socially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that goes back to how I want South Asians to feel good about how complicated they are. Rather than trying to please the reader or aim for certain success, they can fail. So much immigrant culture is based around this idea of needing to be successful, so usually you don\u2019t choose to be a poet because it\u2019s not a choice that can pay the bills or that can make your family proud of you. In some Indian communities, it\u2019s fine to be an intellectual. But being a poet is kind of scary because it\u2019s creative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m interested in communities where people do explore the difficult: being a poet, writing about things that aren\u2019t cool to write about. I think if you\u2019re only success driven, your art will fail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAULE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Could you give more examples of outsider poets you\u2019re teaching?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve read Amiri Baraka; his earlier work as LeRoi Jones is so popular. People love how he writes about influences \u2013 the Beats, Black Mountain, Olson, Pound, Eliot \u2013 in ways that re-center him around racial discourse. He\u2019s not that confrontational in the earlier work, but the more confrontational he gets, the more uncomfortable the white reader is with Baraka.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I found I was in this non-place where I didn\u2019t feel threatened by the work at all. I was interested in the politics, and I\u2019m interested in what the work tries on. I\u2019m trying to explore what it\u2019s like to be a white reader reading work that\u2019s confrontational, having never occupied that space where I\u2019m confronted as the person employing the power. It\u2019s interesting when you\u2019re both inside and outside, and I\u2019m trying to get my students to figure out how their identity is complex but not generalized. They love the canonical work. I taught Jorie Graham\u2019s first book so we could talk about a first book that propelled someone into the canon. They can identify all those moves in Graham. They can very much imitate Graham. But imitating Baraka is hard for them. If we go back to Homi Bhabha\u2019s ideas of mimicry and ironic compromise, maybe they\u2019re not experiencing enough of that compromise in the poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m also teaching an Indian poet, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, who\u2019s a cognitive scientist. She writes out of the model where there are some strange narrative turns in the poems that you don\u2019t expect. We\u2019re reading Claudia Rankine\u2019s Don\u2019t Let Me Be Lonely<\/em>. Claudia is Jamaican, so she looks at her identity as it relates to being in America, but she also has other ideas of lineage \u2013 that\u2019s the thing I\u2019ve really been trying to get my students to thing about. What if they could construct this imaginary lineage that they come out of? What would it be? Would it culturally represent just one thing? What does that mean<\/em>, to be a contemporary poet writing out of one kind of lineage? Some poets aren\u2019t writing out of just one lineage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of my students \u2013 especially at the undergraduate level \u2013 are like, \u201cWe don\u2019t have a lineage, and we don\u2019t know what you mean by that.\u201d I have to ask them, \u201cDo you want to have a lineage, or do you want to figure out the places you\u2019re writing from? Wouldn\u2019t it be nice to think of it as a lineage, or is it that a cultural thing \u2013 that I would want a lineage?\u201d Because in Indian culture, you really love the idea of mentoring, passing down wisdom. I always loved that idea that I had a lineage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In talking about feminism, maybe you can have a feminist lineage and thing of women you write out of. I\u2019m always thinking: What do we do with class now? or What did Sharon Olds offer or Anne Sexton? I don\u2019t really like Sexton\u2019s work that much, but she was a big outsider poet in a lot of ways. She was a sort of strange housewife in therapy in Newton, Massachusetts \u2013 I\u2019m from Framingham, Massachusetts \u2013 so I always thought, God it\u2019s funny to think of her getting on the subway and going to Cambridge and taking a workshop and having her therapist. That was very outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of lineage, it\u2019s been said that in Infamous Landscapes<\/em> you are responding to Wordsworth and a landscape \u201ccast in hysterics.\u201d Can you talk about this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I see Wordsworth as na\u00efve and lofty and I thought of what the feminine equivalent of that would be. So I thought, I want to try hysteria. I\u2019m interested in the individual and the sublime and how you have the landscape stand for certain emotional intensity and registers. I wanted to reposition that kind of loftiness in a feminine voice and see what it would look like. But then, I also like George Oppen and Barbara Guest, so those three influences, if you put them together, would feel closest to the work in that book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to replace a kind of innocence or idealism with more of a hysteria. I say \u201chysteria\u201d but I don\u2019t mean that the woman is always cast as hysterical. I just like taking up space in ways that confront the masculine poetic authority. What do we have for poetic authority for women? We can be kind of dramatic and insistent upon certain ideas, but we can also be confrontational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somehow we haven\u2019t managed to assume the same kind of, even, romantic poetic authority. It\u2019s very hard to figure out, so I was just trying to assume poetic authority in ways that would mirror or counteract it in romantic work. I mean, Byron has so much poetic authority, and yet he\u2019s transgressive. You know, we\u2019re always hearing how bad Byron is, like, \u201cHe\u2019s having way too much fun.\u201d I mean, they all did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wordsworth is kind of the most na\u00efve \u2013 I say na\u00efve because the poetic authority is always that wandering and speculation \u2013 but you don\u2019t really know where you\u2019ve arrived at the end of Wordsworth. I was thinking of inhabiting that romantic space, but enriching it with a more feminine sensibility, rather than a childish one, or a na\u00efve one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAULE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where do we find poetic authority? Or does it just happen and we look back on it and say, \u201cThere it was.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think we are steeped in the poetic authority of the 18th<\/sup> and 19th<\/sup> centuries, and we have it in the 20th<\/sup> century, too \u2013 I guess Lowell had poetic authority \u2013 but I\u2019m thinking of Eliot and Pound. I always felt really uncomfortable with male poetic authority because I felt that it was a way to flex knowledge. It was like saying, \u201cOkay, pack the poem with everything you know.\u201d And if it didn\u2019t have that, such as in Lowell\u2019s later work that\u2019s more confessional, then it becomes, \u201cI\u2019m a wealthy man who can\u2019t bear it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started to connect to this poetic authority with craft, so that you have to set up the stage, your poem has to have placement, the voice has to be determined, and you have to figure out if your images are really serving what they\u2019re supposed to serve. When you away from tradition, what are you doing it for? Are you turning away from poetic authority or are you reconstructing a kind of authority that has been ignored or has not been engaged with? I think you can do it formally or informally. People always talk about Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott: what Brathwaite does informally, Walcott does formally. You know, Omeros<\/em> is an amazing book for what Walcott does with Homer. So, wow! That\u2019s an incredible shift in poetic authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m thinking about whether authority comes out of craft or if it comes out of the space to do what the poem needs to do. Historically, I think it came out of white men who believed in the tradition. I think I\u2019m always trying to deconstruct the tradition, to figure out if you can have authority after that. But I know that I have a lofty authority in my poems to try all this out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAULE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If my name was Prageeta I would want to put it in a poem, and you\u2019ve done that. How does this affect the relationship between the poem and the reader?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I like to be self-mocking in the poem and I like to have the reader understand that certain truths are constructed but that I am still trying to play with the seriousness. So we have the \u201cI\u201d as the ultimate authority, but what if you put your name in the poem? What does it do to the \u201cI?\u201d Or what does it do when I\u2019m writing in the third person and I refer to myself as the third person? It\u2019s obnoxious in one sense, but it can also allow the poem to have a natural remove: I am removed in some way from the authority of the \u201cI.\u201d I\u2019m playing with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I apologize a lot, and I am interested in how we have certain gestures that are constructed culturally in terms of gender, and how we play with our diminutive self. I try to position myself in these powerless places that are my most vulnerable powerless places, and then play with that. Or, when the reader is instructed or spoken to, it creates an intimacy in the text. It\u2019s almost a reaching out or an invitation. I like trying to break down the spaces of reader and speaker so that there\u2019s an intimacy that maybe the speaker doesn\u2019t always have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAULE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I see that breaking down of the space between reader and speaker in Bliss to Fill<\/em>. The whole first section is called \u201cDear _______.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, I\u2019m interested in the lyric in that book. In that epistolary form, that heartfelt engagement, I really am trying to speak to the reader as a friend, or as all sorts of manifestation. I wrote that in New York my first couple of years there, steeped in a fabulous writing community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of poems in The Opening Question<\/em> were my graduate manuscripts that were reformulated with additional work. So, Bliss to Fill<\/em> was my second manuscript. I knew it could be freer because Subpress Collective was a really generous project. So I could enjoy all of the vulnerability of O\u2019Hara\u2019s lines. That was really an exciting time to think about the immediacy of the poem. I don\u2019t know if my poems now are as focused on that immediacy of the poem. I don\u2019t know if my poems now are as focused on that immediacy as they were in Bliss to Fill<\/em>. There is a certain rawness to that book that would be hard to recreate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAULE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poetry allows us so much freedom and intimacy and the ability to lounge out on the lawn. What is the biggest challenge of poetry?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our challenge is that we allow ourselves to exist outside the economy. That\u2019s why<\/em> we get a lot of freedom. It\u2019s very political and very interesting and if people could sit comfortably with that, they\u2019d feel more empowered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Value, worth, and money come up a lot in your work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m lucky in that I have a good job. Before I took this job, I worked a lot of different jobs in New York and I had the same questions with each: \u201cOkay, who is the person I\u2019m working for?\u201d Or, \u201cHow\u2019s this environment going to help me be creative, help me believe in a lifestyle, and help me take care of people whom I love?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I worked for a famous artist who made a lot of money. He taught me essential things about being an artist that were not about the work. And so I realized, The work is private \u2013 you do it, you believe in it \u2013 but you have to make smart decisions about who you are outside your work. You have to deal with money. You have to know how to. This artist taught me how to insure things. I learned that poets should be collecting art and figuring out how to have assets that are non-traditional. Poets should be immersed in their culture, the culture being produced around them, and engaged with it. And to really live in your mind by being shrewd \u2013 don\u2019t think that just because you\u2019re a poet you can\u2019t figure out how things work around you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am really interested in money. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s because I\u2019m first generation American born and my parents are immigrants; they came here from India with 200 dollars. They\u2019ve done well, they\u2019ve struggled, and they\u2019ve experienced a lot of racism and a lot of discrimination. I have, too. I don\u2019t have the luxury of not thinking about money, but I also really love what poetry offers me in terms of my identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a meeting yesterday, I was joking and everyone went silent. I said, \u201cWell, you know, we may not be able to promise our students lucrative careers, but they won\u2019t have a midlife crisis.\u201d I think we\u2019re providing them an inner life, which actually keeps people from buying crazy cars or leaving their spouses. I think there are a lot of interesting things that poetry offers that aren\u2019t about money. But I\u2019m still a director and I recruit people to come to an MFA program. I\u2019m not trying to be a hypocrite. I get a paycheck. I don\u2019t want people to take out loans for poetry. But I also think that people take out loans for the most ridiculous things anyway. Like why would renovating your house be more important than your inner life? I think people should pay more attention to what they spend money on and what it means to spend money on something. What\u2019s actually nourishing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love this set of directions for poets and I\u2019m especially interested in the one about how poets need to be engaged with their culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are so keen to historicize what has been interesting in the past for poets. It\u2019s like saying, \u201cIn the 50s, we had O\u2019Hara who\u2019s a poet among painters. Oh, that\u2019s great.\u201d Well, he was smart about knowing what was going on in a really exciting world \u2013 a parallel universe of art-making. A lot of those poets were involved in the arts and they knew they were on the pulse of seeing great work as it was being done, and they were also making work and making connections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have a weird economy of high and low art, but we forget that curators are looking at what\u2019s happening in strange rural places and seeing amazing work coming out of those spaces. Poets need to participate in everything going on around them or instigate or initiate or collaborate and see themselves as participating and engaging\u2026 or articulating a sense of what\u2019s going on around them. That is, creating the history that will then be romanticized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It just seems strange. I think scholars can do all that historicizing. Poets need to be making work right now and believing that they have some kind of agency. It\u2019s useful to not historicize, to not call attention to something that doesn\u2019t exist anymore, but to look at the living artists. All these careers are propelled by just believing that you have agency \u2013 by doing something new \u2013 and a lot more poets should worry less about whether they\u2019re being read or how many books they\u2019ve sold and just be more involved in the arts in ways that will feed them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You don\u2019t have to think you have to be somewhere; you just have to be immersed fully where you are. Dale, my husband, is a performance artist, and I will have a crazy work week where I\u2019ll be talking about poetry and I\u2019ll be writing a little bit or whatever. And he\u2019ll present something and I\u2019ll just think, \u201cOh my God, it\u2019s just genius.\u201d I know I\u2019m biased because he\u2019s my husband but he has taught me so much about being in your work all the time and believing that it\u2019s the most meaningful place that you have to be in the present, and understanding and engaging with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAULE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you see any potential for technology\/poetry collaborations?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, my biggest fantasy \u2013 have you been to BAM in Brooklyn \u2013 the Brooklyn Academy of Music? I remember my parents actually went there in the 70s when Peter Brookes had created that adaptation of The Mahabharata<\/em>. It was a very experimental theater in the 70s, and here was this suburban family from Boston going to see this beautiful adaptation of the classic Indian text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then I thought, Wow! Brooklyn Academy of Music has done all the great commissions, and the poets have collaborated with artists and composers. Tom Waits and his poet wife have done these incredible productions. And I\u2019m thinking, Well, all the language in all of those things has the lyric in it. It\u2019s got poetic elements. It\u2019s fragmenting language in order to heighten it, so it all involves poetry when we\u2019re looking at experimental theater or multimedia productions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think poets could be more actively engaged in cross-genre productions, in the aesthetic experience and the pleasure of it. In my workshop, I teach Matthew Barney\u2019s Cremaster Cycle<\/em> and I think, How does video art become so extravagant, whereas when you have it in the poem, it\u2019s unreadable? People will watch video art or animation \u2013 why is the visual element so much more engaging than what your mind can conjure? Why is it so disturbing when it happens in the poem? But you can spend five million dollars on it and have it represented at a gallery and it\u2019s conceptually the same thing. In some ways it\u2019s more flawed because of its budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think poets need to hijack more things. We need to be out there saying, \u201cYou should really have a poet do that.\u201d Matthew Barney should hire a poet to work with. We bring a lot more imagination to pieces. Sometimes what\u2019s surprising about some of the video art is that it\u2019s literal or Freudian. Even David Lynch. But we have his early videos and we see credit to C.K. Williams as a consultant on one of his films from art school. It would be nice if poets were not seen as so \u201cfringe-y\u201d but more useful. Like vessels of imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAULE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why are poets seen as \u201cfringe-y?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because we don\u2019t make money. Painters are \u201cfringe-y,\u201d too. Until they have big accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So many people think there\u2019s no need for so many people studying and writing poetry, but it seems like you\u2019re arguing the opposite \u2013 that as many people as possible should discover the inner life of a poet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think you have to be teaching at a university to be a poet. I don\u2019t think you have to give up who you are to do one thing or four things. There are 5,000 students entering MFA programs a year. But that\u2019s a very American thing, isn\u2019t it, to have anxiety around people studying the subject? Isn\u2019t that inherently competitive? Say we could have 5,000 people a year who are more engaged with their humanity? Though you could be a narcissist going through the program, so you have to split the 5,000. Maybe 2,500 are interested in bettering themselves. Not that poetry has to be therapeutic. But on the flip-side, all of those narcissists are actually doing something productive, instead of being awful people. So, in some ways, however you come out as a writer, it\u2019s all productive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do you do in your life to maintain literary friendships and the kinds of community you need to nurture and support yourself as an artist?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARMA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I like community; I like being involved in what people are doing, but I think a lot of people don\u2019t. They want the community to serve them, but they don\u2019t want to do enough for the people around them. I\u2019m not saying I do everything right, but I like paying attention to what people need. What I really like about the MFA program is that you\u2019re all present with each other. And that stays. I think students and faculty get to keep and protect and preserve the community around them. But I think it can be hard being the poet. It\u2019s easy to send poems out and publish, but it\u2019s hard to believe that you did the right thing. That\u2019s where all the struggle is \u2013 believing that it\u2019s okay to be a poet, especially when you\u2019re invisible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, then it\u2019s kind of funny, too. I\u2019m seeing a family friend tonight \u2013 she\u2019s going to come to the \u201cOne Hundred Days Reading,\u201d this celebration of Obama\u2019s first hundred days in office. She\u2019s a nurse in Boulder and I was like, \u201cThere\u2019ll be a lot of people in this space; it\u2019s going to probably be a little bit unsettling.\u201d It\u2019s like, all of the interest and engagement \u2013 I don\u2019t know how many of those poems are going to make sense to her. But Obama makes sense to her. And then she\u2019s going to have this funny experience with these poems playing in rhetoric language. But it\u2019s all play, ultimately. That\u2019s what\u2019s so confusing to non-writers. They\u2019re like, \u201cOh\u2026 this is all fun.\u201d and that\u2019s the secret. We\u2019re having fun all the time<\/p>\n\n

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PRAGEETA SHARMA IS THE DIRECTOR of the MFA program at the University of Montana and author of three poetry collections, Bliss to Fill, The Opening Question, and Infamous Landscapes. When asked about a guiding notion for The Opening Question, she answered, \u201cI started with the idea of a kind of unabashed confrontation with disappointment and worked towards a way of reeling … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":2810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36076"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36076"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36752,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36076\/revisions\/36752"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}