Poet Ruth Danon is chatting with me about her new chapbook, Turn Up the Heat.
Bio:
Ruth Danon’s Turn Up the Heat, her fourth collection of poetry, was published by Nirala in 2023. Her previous books are Word Has It (Nirala Series 2018), Limitless Tiny Boat (BlazeVOX, 2015), Triangulation from a Known Point (North Star Line, 1990), a chapbook, Living with the Fireman (Ziesing Brothers, 1980), and a book of literary criticism, Work in the English Novel (Croom-Helm, 1985), which was reissued by Routledge in 2021. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies., including Eternal Snow (Nirala, 2017), Resist Much, Obey Little (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017) Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press, 2019). CAPS 20 Anthology (CAPS 2020), Stronger than Fear: Poems of Compassion, Empowerment and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022), and is forthcoming in the Poetry is Bread Anthology (Nirala Publications, 2023.) Her work was selected by Robert Creeley for Best American Poetry, 2002. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Florida Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Post Road, Versal, Mead, BOMB, the Paris Review, Fence, the Boston Review, 3rd Bed, Crayon, 2Horatio, Barrow Street, and many other publications in the U.S. and abroad. New poems will appear in Noon and the CAPS 25 Anthology.
She has worked in collaboration with musicians David Lopato and John Nichols III and has just learned that her work was set to music by Elizabeth Swados (unperformed) and will be available through the New York Public Library soon. She has been a fellow at the Ragdale Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ora Lerman Foundation, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. In September she will be a fellow at the Desert Rat Residency in Palm Desert. For 23 years she taught in the creative and expository writing programs that she directed for The School of Professional Studies at New York University and was founding Director of their Summer Intensive Creative Writing Workshop. Those workshops ran from 1999 to 2016.
She is the founder of Live Writing: A Project for the Reading, Writing, and Performance of Poetry, which has been operating since 2018. Before the pandemic she curated the Spring Street Reading Series for Atlas Studios in Newburgh, New York. In 2021 she was co-curator of the Newburgh Literary Festival in Newburgh, NY and is currently one of the curators for the Beacon LitFest, which had its inaugural show in 2023. She lives in Beacon, NY and teaches through Live Writing and New York Writer’s Workshop.
Welcome, Ruth. What do you enjoy most about writing poems?
I love the surprise. I never know what will emerge when I am writing.
What type of project are you working on next?
I am writing poems that involve spies. Of course, I think of spies as poets and poets are, inevitably, spies.
When did you first consider yourself a writer / poet?
I started writing early but did not consider myself a poet until I moved to NYC, when I was in my early thirties. I gave up a “good” teaching job at a “good” college in the Midwest to move to the city. I took a day job at an agency serving the blind. I was supposed to be an office manager, for which I had neither competence nor interest. But I was told by the man who hired me that if I could get my work done, I could have all the rest of the time to write. Early on in NYC I found myself on a bus and somehow started up a conversation with a stranger. The stranger asked what I did. I could feel my mouth opening into a grin and said, proudly, “I’m a writer.” It was a while before I published my first length book, but saying those words aloud changed everything.
How do you research markets for your work, perhaps as some advice for not-yet-published poets?
I’m the last person to give advice on this. It’s a real case of “do what I say, not what I do.” I read calls for work; I respond to requests for work. I’m doubtful every step of the way. My best advice is 1) find journals that publish work you are drawn to 2) Give up any ego attached to the outcome of submitting work 3) Cultivate relationships with publications. If a publisher shows interest in your work, do submit more to them. 4) Remember that editors of magazines or presses want good work. If you believe in your work act on that belief. 5) Don’t’ be alone. Be part of a literary community by asking people to yo read and comment on your work, by reciprocating in kind, by attending readings, by buying books.
You can research markets by reading Poets and Writers and other places that provide information about venues looking for work or for people willing to participate in readings. You can develop relationships that will let you be known to to other writers; you can pay attention to who is looking for new material. And you need to be patient. Context alters cases; pay attention to what’s happening in the world and consider what needs to be said at any given moment in time.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
For years I overused the word “little.” I’ve given that up. In the new poems my quirk is the extensive use of monosyllables. In my practice the chief quirk is that I must start with the weather, because that grounds me.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be an actor (though I would have said “actress” at that time.)
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Well, of course! Buy my book. Okay, that’s out of the way now. I think that the books is written in a kind of direct and plain style, but something is always happening (in the poems) in and odd way. That’s the trick – to make things clear and understandable and also to push some strangeness as far as it goes. It’s hard to write. Harder to publish. Don’t give up because of rejection. Make, in your own singular mind, the distinction between writing and career. It’s the writing that matters. Only that.