Beth Ann Fennelly Interview

Beth Ann Fennelly: A Journey to Brazil to Explore the Concept of "Home" in Her Work, and Elizabeth Bishop's

  

What attracts me most is a poet’s voice:  the unique rhythm, use of language, the special lilt and color that mark the writer’s special vision of the world. Beth Ann Fennelly’s poems strongly possess that perhaps indefinable quality of individuality. Comic, light-hearted, tender, loaded with vivid sensory details and narrative force, Beth Ann’s work immediately announces itself as hers, an authentic and stirring voice.
   I first encountered Beth Ann’s work in one of David Lehman’s “Best American Poetry” series. Her funny and resourceful “I Need to be More French. Or Japanese” instantly entered my personal anthology of poems that I’ll keep re-reading. Further reading strengthened my appreciation of her depth and variety.

   Beth Ann teaches at Ole Miss and lives in Oxford with her husband, the writer Tom Franklin, and their daughter Claire, and son Thomas. She graciously took time out from a trip to Brazil to answer the questions that I e-mailed her. Beth Ann joins Kelly Cherry, Rosanne Warren and Tim Suermondt as distinguished Southern Bookman interviewees (see below).

     

1. First, at the time of this interview, you are in Brazil. If possible, could you tell us about your project? What are your impressions of Brazil and its citizens’ feelings about Americans?

   I’m in currently living in Brazil’s third biggest city, Belo Horizonte, (the name means “Beautiful Horizon”), in the state of Minas Gerais.  I’ll be here for five months on a Fulbright Fellowship, half teaching, half research.

   For the research part, I’m studying the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet who lived in Brazil for almost 20 years.  I’m focusing on her poems that explore the concept of “home,” and I’m writing poems that explore the same theme that will become part of my fourth book of poetry. For the teaching part, I’m giving a class on American Literature at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. The University is quite good, and my students are wonderful; I’m teaching in English and I’m impressed by how well they are writing in a second language.

   So far I have to say Brazil is amazing. The people are incredibly warm and welcoming, and the natural beauty here is astonishing.  The city where I’m living isn’t on the ocean, and isn’t visited by tourists, and perhaps for this reason we’re a bit of a novelty, but in a really nice way — I can’t stop someone on the street and ask for directions without getting involved in a conversation about who I am and what I’m doing here. The Brazilians are very friendly and helpful and seem to regard Americans highly. Thank God we have a new administration in the White House, so I don’t feel that I need to apologize for Bush, whom everyone here seems to dislike heartily.

 

2. I love the humor in your work, such as “I Need to Be More French or Japanese.” For years, most poems were pensive and brooding. Do you see yourself as part of a return to more light-hearted work?

   I don’t see myself as part of a movement in this regard, though there might be one.  For me, using humor was more of a natural evolution that came out of feeling I wanted to bring the full range of human emotion to my poetry. It wasn’t so much that I started trying to write funny poems as I stopped preventing myself from writing them. 

   I think when I was younger I was so concerned with wanting to be taken seriously that I felt I had to write serious poems all the time. But I started to loosen up and my work did, too.  I like it when I read a poem and I have a sense that the writer had fun writing it. Not every poem can or should include humor, but I think, in a volume or poetry, there can and should be humorous moments — for enjoyment, for range, for balance, and because humor can make the sad parts sadder.

 

3. You recently did a recording of “Kudzu” for YouTube. Do you feel that Internet sites like You Tube and Facebook will help popularize poetry? Will they make poetry more of a performance, oral art, than a literary art?

   I think that nowadays we are such a visual culture that any way we can appropriate popular media to serve poetry is a good thing. I believe deeply that poetry needs to be heard aloud, be spoken and recited, and there are a lot of really exciting ways that that is happening now.

  My limitation in this regard is lack of technical knowledge — the Kudzu film was made independently of me, using a voice recording I had made for the online magazine Blackbird.  I wouldn’t know how to go about making such a film myself, but I’m glad someone else did, and I like the kinds of films and podcasts of people’s poems that I’ve seen on You Tube. They are finding people in new places — for example, in the elevators of the last Associated Writing Program conference.  Much cooler to hear a poem being read than listening to elevator music.

 

4. Recently, David Orr published an essay in the New York Times Book Review on poetic greatness, about whether any poets today will achieve “greatness” like poets of the past did. Do you and others writing today strive for “greatness” like poets of the past did?

   Hmm, without having read the article I’m not sure exactly what Orr meant, but I’d say writers today strive for greatness as they always have — that fundamental machine, ambition, keeps grinding its gears. 

   

5. I remember reading an essay you wrote about moving to Mississippi from the Midwest. Your poem “Kudzu” alludes to this transplanting. How do you feel about the South now? Do you find it still a special region, or has it become just like the rest of the country?

   Moving to Mississippi was a profound experience for me because (for no obvious reason) Mississippi felt like home. That made me start to wonder how we choose and define our homes, and how landscape influences psychology. These are questions that still interest me, and in fact, have to do with my Bishop project here in Brazil — why did Bishop, from the Eastern seaboard of the United States, come to Brazil and feel like she’d found a home? 

   The South is still a special region to me, and I think it always will be. A lot of the things I enjoy about being an American of Irish decent — the emphasis on family, the music, the literature — are valued in the South, and these values define the region and preserve its uniqueness.  I don’t imagine we’ll want to live any place else.  We made several moves early in our marriage — getting started in academia often involves a lot of one or two year gigs — but we’re happily settled now.  I joke about my next move being next to Faulkner in the town cemetery

  

What attracts me most is a poet’s voice:  the unique rhythm, use of language, the special lilt and color that mark the writer’s special vision of the world. Beth Ann Fennelly’s poems strongly possess that perhaps indefinable quality of individuality. Comic, light-hearted, tender, loaded with vivid sensory details and narrative force, Beth Ann’s work immediately announces itself as hers, an authentic and stirring voice.
   I first encountered Beth Ann’s work in one of David Lehman’s “Best American Poetry” series. Her funny and resourceful “I Need to be More French. Or Japanese” instantly entered my personal anthology of poems that I’ll keep re-reading. Further reading strengthened my appreciation of her depth and variety.

   Beth Ann teaches at Ole Miss and lives in Oxford with her husband, the writer Tom Franklin, and their daughter Claire, and son Thomas. She graciously took time out from a trip to Brazil to answer the questions that I e-mailed her. Beth Ann joins Kelly Cherry, Rosanne Warren and Tim Suermondt as distinguished Southern Bookman interviewees (see below).

     

1. First, at the time of this interview, you are in Brazil. If possible, could you tell us about your project? What are your impressions of Brazil and its citizens’ feelings about Americans?

   I’m in currently living in Brazil’s third biggest city, Belo Horizonte, (the name means “Beautiful Horizon”), in the state of Minas Gerais.  I’ll be here for five months on a Fulbright Fellowship, half teaching, half research.

   For the research part, I’m studying the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet who lived in Brazil for almost 20 years.  I’m focusing on her poems that explore the concept of “home,” and I’m writing poems that explore the same theme that will become part of my fourth book of poetry. For the teaching part, I’m giving a class on American Literature at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. The University is quite good, and my students are wonderful; I’m teaching in English and I’m impressed by how well they are writing in a second language.

   So far I have to say Brazil is amazing. The people are incredibly warm and welcoming, and the natural beauty here is astonishing.  The city where I’m living isn’t on the ocean, and isn’t visited by tourists, and perhaps for this reason we’re a bit of a novelty, but in a really nice way — I can’t stop someone on the street and ask for directions without getting involved in a conversation about who I am and what I’m doing here. The Brazilians are very friendly and helpful and seem to regard Americans highly. Thank God we have a new administration in the White House, so I don’t feel that I need to apologize for Bush, whom everyone here seems to dislike heartily.

 

2. I love the humor in your work, such as “I Need to Be More French or Japanese.” For years, most poems were pensive and brooding. Do you see yourself as part of a return to more light-hearted work?

   I don’t see myself as part of a movement in this regard, though there might be one.  For me, using humor was more of a natural evolution that came out of feeling I wanted to bring the full range of human emotion to my poetry. It wasn’t so much that I started trying to write funny poems as I stopped preventing myself from writing them. 

   I think when I was younger I was so concerned with wanting to be taken seriously that I felt I had to write serious poems all the time. But I started to loosen up and my work did, too.  I like it when I read a poem and I have a sense that the writer had fun writing it. Not every poem can or should include humor, but I think, in a volume or poetry, there can and should be humorous moments — for enjoyment, for range, for balance, and because humor can make the sad parts sadder.

 

3. You recently did a recording of “Kudzu” for YouTube. Do you feel that Internet sites like You Tube and Facebook will help popularize poetry? Will they make poetry more of a performance, oral art, than a literary art?

   I think that nowadays we are such a visual culture that any way we can appropriate popular media to serve poetry is a good thing. I believe deeply that poetry needs to be heard aloud, be spoken and recited, and there are a lot of really exciting ways that that is happening now.

  My limitation in this regard is lack of technical knowledge — the Kudzu film was made independently of me, using a voice recording I had made for the online magazine Blackbird.  I wouldn’t know how to go about making such a film myself, but I’m glad someone else did, and I like the kinds of films and podcasts of people’s poems that I’ve seen on You Tube. They are finding people in new places — for example, in the elevators of the last Associated Writing Program conference.  Much cooler to hear a poem being read than listening to elevator music.

 

4. Recently, David Orr published an essay in the New York Times Book Review on poetic greatness, about whether any poets today will achieve “greatness” like poets of the past did. Do you and others writing today strive for “greatness” like poets of the past did?

   Hmm, without having read the article I’m not sure exactly what Orr meant, but I’d say writers today strive for greatness as they always have — that fundamental machine, ambition, keeps grinding its gears. 

   

5. I remember reading an essay you wrote about moving to Mississippi from the Midwest. Your poem “Kudzu” alludes to this transplanting. How do you feel about the South now? Do you find it still a special region, or has it become just like the rest of the country?

   Moving to Mississippi was a profound experience for me because (for no obvious reason) Mississippi felt like home. That made me start to wonder how we choose and define our homes, and how landscape influences psychology. These are questions that still interest me, and in fact, have to do with my Bishop project here in Brazil — why did Bishop, from the Eastern seaboard of the United States, come to Brazil and feel like she’d found a home? 

   The South is still a special region to me, and I think it always will be. A lot of the things I enjoy about being an American of Irish decent — the emphasis on family, the music, the literature — are valued in the South, and these values define the region and preserve its uniqueness.  I don’t imagine we’ll want to live any place else.  We made several moves early in our marriage — getting started in academia often involves a lot of one or two year gigs — but we’re happily settled now.  I joke about my next move being next to Faulkner in the town cemetery