Sarah Manguso is the author of The Captain Lands in Paradise (2002). With Jordan Davis she is coeditor of the anthology Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books (2004). Her poems and prose have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies, The American Poetry Review, The Believer, Boston Review, The London Review of Books, McSweeney's, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. Educated at Harvard (A.B.) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (M.F.A.), she was the Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton in 2003–2004. She teaches in the Pratt Institute’s B.F.A. program in writing and in the New School’s M.F.A. program in poetry, and lives in Brooklyn. Buy her book here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? “When You Are Old,” by Yeats. I wrote it on the cover of every journal I kept before college, when I was given a computer. When you are old and gray and full of sleep, / And nodding by the fire, take down this book, / And slowly read, and dream of the soft look / Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep…. A love poem I dedicated to myself. It made me shed tears, yet I was 22 before I took a poetry class. I found it in a copy of Modern Poetry, Volume VII (1961)—edited by Maynard Mack, Leonard Dean, and William Frost—which reaches from Hopkins to Larkin. Emily and Marianne are in it, but the rest of it is what we once called a sausage party. Of course many of its youngest members are now lost to history. On the flyleaf, in blunt pencil, are written my mother’s maiden name and sorority letters. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? Vice. Is anything as consistently funny as Vice? Maybe the line in Caddyshack that Rodney Dangerfield says to the old woman: Want to earn fourteen bucks the hard way? 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Interviewer: Why don’t you ever work from nature? Jackson Pollock: I am nature. Can’t distinguish po from phil. It's like trying to distinguish color from light, or a cat from…the same cat. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Bernhard, Machado de Assis, Popa, Sebald, Correa Mujica. I like the overlap between on-one’s-knees desperation and reactive humor. This overlap seems to occur regularly in totalitarian countries. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? How much is a lot? I read slowly and reread frequently. That said, I read a lot more so-called prose than I do poetry. And reading is certainly important, but so is booze, rough sex, rock and roll, blinding religious fervor, and too much coffee. Not for their image, but for the poetry-drive they inspire in a poet. Poetry-drive is the opposite of ego-drive. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I cannot read (Moncrieff’s) Proust. I need to get the Davis translation. I’m also unable to read Ulysses. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? Seven-year-old: What is a poem? Just a bunch of words that don’t make sense? Explainer of poetry: No. A bunch of words that make sense. A kind of sense that is brand-new. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? What’s the role of the citizen? To perform citizen’s arrests? The role of the poet is to write poetry. I don’t think most people are at their best when they try to do a lot of different things at once. Kierkegaard says: Purity of heart is to will one thing. I recite this, constantly and out of context, to console myself that I’m allowed not to do much besides writing poetry. If you mean to ask subtly whether poetry should have a political role in our culture, I will say I think politics are best left to the statesmen. Now, if only there were some statesmen. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Yellow Chiseled**Chest I**Am Of**De Form**Form 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? That came out of nowhere! Well, when I’m not writing about death I’m writing about sex, both of which rely on the body as a point of origin. I don’t believe we’re a bunch of sacred disembodied minds. I think brain chemistry is pretty much the whole story. Do I believe in God? Yes. I believe that “God” is a perfectly fine name for the miracle of art. Do I believe God is made of dopamine and serotonin? In a way. So am I some kind of nihilist? Well, Mozart and Bach sure existed—which, for me, is a fine argument for the existence of God. The names for God (I think there are 99) are disparate and conflict-inspiring. Let’s just say that God exists, in us and as us, and we exist, in bodies and as bodies, and brain chemistry exists, in God and as God.