“How can I know what I think, until I see what I say?” (E. M. Forster). How much of your writing surprises you?
If I’m working with metrics (and rhyme schemes are a kind of metrics) I’m never not surprised by the results. New neural pathways open up, every time. Roberto Calasso said it best: “It is only thanks to meter that we have style. And it is only thanks to style that we have literature”.
What is the first thing you remember reading or having read to you?
Preliterate me adored Green Eggs and Ham. But “the man with the yellow hat” or maybe just the delightful phrase “yellow hat” were the first words I ever recognized on the page, from Curious George Flies a Kite.
Is there a particular sentence that has stayed with you throughout your life?
I have tried to live by Epictetus’s advice: “If you go to the baths, expect to be splashed”. Especially apt for writers in the age of the internet, yes?
What is the most interesting item on your bookshelf?
A miniature leatherbound volume of Byron’s poems from 1837, which I bought in Charing Cross when I was seventeen on my first trip to London.
Have you ever regretted publishing something?
Virtually everything before I was forty. Didn’t Auden say that one isn’t grown up until the age of forty?
Proust had madeleines. Which foods or meals trigger your memory?
I hardly ever eat strawberry jam, so when I do have it with butter suddenly it’s April 1987 and I’m eating my first continental breakfast in Saint-Malo on my AP Art History class trip, having come over on the ferry with that selfsame tiny Byron in my suitcase.
Have you had any notable experiences meeting authors you admire?
In my early twenties I was tending bar during a poetry reading, and a poet, too revered to mention by name, rattled me by claiming I had given him the wrong change for a pint. He spread out the change on the counter and asked me if I could see my error. I froze. It turned out I had given him a dollar extra, but he waited several beats for me to figure it out (I didn’t; finally he had to tell me) while a throng of customers was clamouring behind him. Being a baby poet is bruising.
Do you have a favourite bookshop?
I miss the myriad antiquarian and used bookshops around Philadelphia in the late 1980s and New England in the 90s. I miss the thrill of the hunt. These days I know too well what titles I do and don’t want.
How does distraction inform your writing?
It reinforces my magpie tendencies. I’m always stopping to look up something or other. Going to the OED can be an extremely convenient distraction.
But more often it’s the other way around – I’m distracted from living by writing.
What are you currently reading or watching?
Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child. Frances Leviston’s The Voice in My Ear. Jennifer Moxley’s The Midnight Work. Filling in the gaps of my Muriel Spark obsession. And when I can’t read anymore, I check what’s playing on Criterion 24/7. I’m currently watching a collection of Herzog films and belatedly discovered Fitzcarraldo – it went right to my head like champagne.
Who has influenced your writing?
The motley cast of singer-songwriters whose ballads imprinted metre and rhyme on my brain while I was singing along to FM radio in the back seat of my mother’s car in the 1970s. Second to that, the Norton Anthology of Poetry, Third Edition.
Which piece of music have you listened to the most in your life?
I get earworms easily, and they can last for days – a chance encounter with a chart-topper in the supermarket can be ruinous. When I listen to music, better if it’s complex and doesn’t have any words. Brahms’s “Piano Quartet No. 1”, weirdly, has been with me since I was a teenager. I seem to be attracted to the key of G minor: that and Mozart’s two symphonies in that key are my favourites.
Do your ideas form themselves in your head or on the page?
I think pictorially, in visual rhymes and analogies. But I can only put it all together at the keyboard.
What is the worst job you ever had?
Bookstore clerk, ironically. In a shopping mall. A job I took in order to fund the aforementioned art history class trip. I was given the task of tearing covers off mass market paperbacks for returns. The owner didn’t like my method. He didn’t like books, for that matter. He said I had a problem with authority and fired me.
If you could choose any piece of art to hang above your desk, what would it be?
A Giorgio Morandi for austerity, or a Jane Freilicher for joy, I can’t decide.
What was your favourite text studied at school?
The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne had a problem with authority.
Which font do you write in?
Baskerville, unquestionably.
What does a writing day look like for you?
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. A caftan, messy hair, a distracted air.
Which other art forms are necessary to your writing?
I’m fascinated by highly organized forms of dance. I tried tango (I was awful) and adult ballet (I was passable), and it was interesting to get a feel for the symmetries involved – not to mention all that wonderful vocabulary.
Whenever I remember that the words strophe and antistrophe referred to the dance steps that accompanied the recitation of choral poems in ancient Greece, I get an odd sort of thrill.
Where do you seek refuge?
As with bookstores, I long for refuges I used to have. Sculpture gardens, botanical gardens: the hortus conclusus. Places like Storm King in New York or the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. Near where my parents lived in Pennsylvania was a Japanese garden called Swiss Pines (yes) that closed and fell into disrepair: all paradises are lost paradises.
Ange Mlinko is the author of Foxglovewise and Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the poets.
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