Betsy Andrews is a Brooklyn-based writer and poet. She's the author of She-Devil (Sardines Press, 2003), New Jersey (Furniture Press, 2004) and In Trouble/C-3 (with Bruce Andrews, BoogCity, 2004). She's been the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships and residencies, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and the Philadelphia City Paper Prize. Her poems and essays can be found in publications including X-Connect, PomPom, Narrativity and the Yemeni newspaper, Culture. She reviews poetry, theater and experimental prose for Gay City News. Information about buying her chapbooks can be found at: She-Devil (Sardines Press, 2003) New Jersey (Furniture Press, 2004) In Trouble/C-3(flipbook with Bruce Andrews, Boog Press, 2004) See some of her work here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Martin, was a crabby ol' thing. Yelling. Screaming. Humiliating. But she did attempt to have us recite poems. About birds. I remember the first poem I memorized and recited to the class was about the Pennsylvania state bird (I'm from just outside Philly) -- the roughed grouse. The other students basically didn't bother with the memorizing and recitation, but I was hooked. I went on to recite a veritable aviary to the class. The roughed grouse has remained close to my heart ever since. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? New York Magazine. Their reactionary politics can be breathtakingly awful. But as far as NY gossip and entertainment, it's such deep garbage, it's delicious. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? I don't consciously riff off any particular philosophers or philosophical stance. I do, though, think that I write against a particular philosophical stance, i.e. my poetry is anti-Cartesian. The soul is located in every cell of every body, in every cell of everything in my work. I remember putting together my MFA manuscript and thinking that the soul in my poems was like Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" -- the deeper you cut, the deeper in the birthmark sinks. The soul is endless. It seems "good work" to take a stand against a philosophy that basically allowed for the gruesome dissection of so many live, unanesthetized dogs in the Renaissance. Post-modernists might think of Descartes as an old chestnut that's already been smashed to bits, but the primacy of biochemistry, biophysics and genetic science shows he's still very much alive and scarfing up the government grants in order to implant chips in our brains and eliminate our brilliant idiosyncrasies. This is why I loved "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" -- it was so anti-Cartesian, i.e. memory and experience exist in the body in places other than the brain. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? First and foremost, Audre Lorde. For me, she represents self-respect, self-empowerment, self-actualization, self-awareness as the basis of activism, as the basis of writing, in order to live correctly and to help change the world for the better. If her work cannot be called precisely "experimental", it's impossible to dismiss her importance. Essex Hemphill, same reason as Audre Lorde. Both African-American and gay, both now dead of pandemics, Hemphill of AIDS, Lourde of breast cancer. Czeslaw Milosz -- his spirituality, the political urgency of his earlier work, his lyricism as well as his dry Eastern European irony, his eyebrows. Bei Dao -- to be that clean and controlled in your writing while living in forced exile. Nina Cassian -- sort of an inverse of Bei Dao, to be so lush and ecstatic in a state of exile. "Temptation" is like the most life-affirming poem ever, so I can even forgive her invocation of the Book of Genesis. Among my "peers", I really dig Thomas Sayers Ellis -- you're totally entertained and laughing and it's off the wall, and you learn something real. Lila Zemborain's work is beautiful and eerie/scary and intellectual while also being so visceral and of the body, like a dissection, yes. I wish I could read it in the original Spanish. Speaking of Spanish, I also found all the work in Jen Hofer's edited volume Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women (2003) really amazing. Gotta give her lots of props for helping to usher that work across the borders of country and language. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Admittedly, there are times when I haven't read a lot of poetry. Now is not one of those times. In horrible times, poetry is utterly necessary. And the energy I get from the poetry of my peers feeds the energy in my own work. It feels so urgent today. When I'm not reading as much poetry, I'm not writing as much poetry. I think that the relationship could be cyclical, and related to the organic evolution of my craft, of the writing self, so there was a period not too long ago when I really took a break from poetry in order to have a growth in my process and my craft, an opening up (though, at the time, I didn't know what was happening and sort of despaired). I read a lot of prose at that time, wrote prose -- creative non-fiction, started a novel. And then I found that I had busted through to the new poetical dimension, and now I'm immersed in reading and writing poetry again. I mean, for the first time in my life, I'm writing poetry on the subway, probably because I'm reading poetry on the subway. I guess I learned to trust the cycles. With dark irony, it was September 11th and the Bushian (Bushite? Bushological? -- no, let's not give him his own philosophy.) drive toward war that forced me back to poetry. I was in this group of poets called Debunker Mentality (thanks to Kristen Prevallet for our name) that went out and wheat-pasted important anti-war poems and writing up around town after 9/11, poems from poets around the globe who preceded us in their experience of historical disaster and annihilation, and from whom we all could learn. It felt like an answer to the totalitarian rhetoric of the Right and the fumblings on the Left. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? A lot a lot a lot of stuff, I'm sure. There are 119,000,000 items in the Library of Congress. Something always to look forward to. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? On Poetry, An Explanation for Gina It’s like the bird, a common bird, one you see all the time that disappoints you because it’s ordinary. Until a day, one day, you set the tables in the cafe. You are laying down the spoons. And the bird is in the small potted tree between the tables and it calls and you cannot know the meaning of its call. The bird flies away to the lamppost on the corner to the crossbeam which is hollow where, you know now, it’s built a nest. You are laying down the knives, you are topping off the sugar. The ordinary bird, it calls. You are laying down the forks. You are wiping off the chair backs. The ordinary bird, it flies to a branch in the small potted tree between the tables, and the ordinary bird, it calls. You are setting out the water glasses, topping off the salt. At your feet is another plain bird. The ordinary bird flies to the lamppost on the corner. The plain bird at your feet turns around. The ordinary bird in the crossbeam in the hollow is calling. You polish the knives. The ordinary bird flies to the tree between the tables. The plain bird on the ground finds its wings. The ordinary bird from the lamppost on the corner follows its fledgling to the nest. And you top off the pepper, and the day is like no other, and the call of an ordinary bird is like love that by rare odds and resolution guides a chick back home to the most unexpected of places. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I guess I believe in a role for the artist, to strive for an awakened consciousness, to be the keeper of memory in the face of political annihilation of memory and of peoples, and to be willing to be messy, embarrassing, emotional, angry, deeply deeply loving, to be open to the world. To love it all despite its failings, despite our own failings. I mean love. Lovey-dove. In the most concrete, exacting ways possible. I think of Muriel Rukeyser's "Waking This Morning" and George Oppen's "If It All Went Up In Smoke." Of course, this doesn't mean we have any "answers" -- it's more like what I've gleaned from kari edwards' iduna: we have questions. We need to question the established truths, then question our questions, and question our questions about our questions, and so forth. And then sometimes go on faith that, in the midst of the constant querying, something that feels real and useful can still be communicated, or else we'd lose the ability to write at all. Indeterminacy doesn't mean nothingness. It's like Gertrude Stein on her death bed asking, "What is the answer?" and when there was silence, asking, "Ok, then, what is the question?" This is no different than what I think everyone should do. Artists just allow themselves to do it. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Aunt Dan Chiseled**face I**spy Of**a moment Form**and function 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? My body, the relation of my body to experience, to sex, to violence, the movement of my body through space, the soul and the mind within my body were for a long time my main subject matter. Body body body body body. I was frustrated to find that a lot of "experimental" poetry for awhile there seemed to erase the body (and I'm glad to see the work shifting quite a lot back to the body). I remember having a discussion with Camille Roy about it. I wondered how women poets could ignore the body. Neither of us saw how it was possible for lesbian poets to ignore the body. Our bodies are the grounds of such political and cultural contention. We can't escape them. But who would want to? They're so utterly delicious and so utterly terrifying at the same time, vulnerable and resilient all at once. They're the fields of pleasure and the fields of pain. Today, given the horrifying political times we find ourselves in, it's been really important and intuitive to have an urgency about the body that isn't so myopic or narcissistic, but which turns the reader's attention upon the bodies that are threatened, damaged, destroyed in the name of "America", both the bodies of people living outside that construct we call the United States and the bodies of people living in and working in/for the United States, particularly people in the military. There is no poetry without the body, as far as I'm concerned. We're living in a material world, to quote the diva.