Laura Solomon spent her childhood in Alabama and Georgia. She is the author of Bivouac (Slope Editions, 2002) and the poetry editor for castagraf. Buy her book here. See some work here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? When I was eight my grandmother gave me an edition of Alice in Wonderland with wonderful illustrations by S. Michelle Wiggins that I would read over and over again. Several of the poems within it fascinated me—the Mouse's Tale for instance in which "Fury" declares himself both judge and jury and eventually condemns the mouse to death. The poem tapers down the page in the shape of a tail or river, and the typeset grows tinier and tinier as the implications grow more and more ominous. Those parts where the book broke into poetry always captivated me. There was something inexplicable about them, how they seemed to exist before and beyond the story’s time, how they were somehow bigger than Alice or her adventure. There was something too so lovely and terrifying about them—The Mock-Turtle’s song of “Beautiful Soooup” made presumably at the cost of his own demise. Later on, in middle school, for some of the same reasons, I fell in love with Poe's "The Highwaymen" but also for its rhythm and William Blake's "Tyger, Tyger" which probably helped spur some of my first serious thoughts and questions about the nature of good and evil. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I'm not sure if I can come up with anything truly surprising. I subscribe to Scientific American and sometimes enjoy reading books about math and physics despite the fact that I'm totally incapable of digesting them. Why—I guess I feel as though we’re all working on the same project but through different means. Scientific American also has incredible photography. In the current issue there’s an article entitled "The Extraordinary Deaths of Ordinary Stars" with photographs of planetary nebulae. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? If the question refers to reading philosophy, I'd say for me it's pretty important. Since last year I've been particularly absorbed by Simone Weil's essays, and in the past I've been obsessed with Baudrillard, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard among others. I'm interested primarily in philosophy that is more inspired than it is analytical, and I don't read philosophy so much as to find some ultimate format for living and thinking as I do on the contrary to be with another person in the dark. I go to philosophy for many of the reasons I go to poetry, to experience something or someone, and in that sense it’s important to my writing. If the question instead is asking how important is philosophical inquiry in my writing (or of writing) to my writing, I would say that I like poems that think but I'm not interested in poems that attempt to prove. I always feel betrayed by authors who have some point peripheral to the poetry of the poem. Why write a poem then when you could write an essay? I'm sure there are reasons, but to me those reasons would lie outside the province of poetry whose sole aim should be itself—at least, this is how I'm persuaded to think about poetry. It is good to consistently consider and reconsider others' and one's own ideas about the world, but when writing a poem really one must concentrate only on that poem and delve deeper than one's own (or anyone else's) ideas. Hopefully the poem will have ideas of its own, but if my own ideas are too loud I won't be able to hear what the words themselves have to say. To a certain extent, you have to allow the language to think too if you want to discover anything other than yourself. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Right now I’m re-reading the Jaime Saenz selected that came out a couple of years ago, and I think his love poems are among some of the best ever written. I love Marina Tsvetaeva for her ferocity, vitality and tenderness. I love Dostoevsky for his compassion and insightfulness with regard to humanity, and Gogol for his humor. I love Kafka for his obsessiveness and pursuit of logic to the point of absurdity. I love Pessoa’s imagination. I love Tomaz Salamun for all of the reasons that so many other people admire him but particularly for his generosity of spirit. I love Kamau Brathwaite’s imagery and the incantatory quality of much of his work. I love Basho for his acquiescence to something larger than himself. I love Medbh McGuckian for the same reason. I love Virginia Woolf for her tenacity and syntax. I love Catullus for being frank. I love how W. G. Sebald complicates time, memory, and history in Austerlitz. I love Proust’s lyricism and extreme sensitivity. I love Simone Weil’s capacity for both feeling and thought. I love the lonely intimacy of Robert Walser’s short stories. I love William Blake, as I mentioned before, for his vision. I could really go on and on—I haven’t even mentioned any of my favorite French poets—but I think my uncurbed enthusiasm is making me appear ridiculous. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Yes, sometimes too much. Whether it helps or not depends upon how on I am. If I’m on, reading feeds me and I put books down in order to write. If I’m off or depressed, reading becomes a way in which to procrastinate until I’m poem-worthy again. How helpful reading is to my writing, I really can’t say, but I also can’t imagine going a day without reading something or a week without reading poetry. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Many many things I’m sure. I’ve never read Spencer, Virgil or Cervantes, for example because I just haven’t gotten around to them. But there are also plenty of well-established, over-anthologized, mainstream twentieth-century American poets whom I don’t read for fear of corruption. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? One way might be to show him or her a hologram of a person riding a unicycle that goes backwards or forwards depending on how you tilt the picture. Another way might be to compare a poem to something like the interval between seeing lightning and hearing thunder and the surprise the thunder always brings even if you do expect it, but still that really wouldn’t do it, because there are aftershocks that must be accounted for, so you’d have to explain that the thunder may keep coming back at any time even when no lightning precedes it, and even when there aren’t any clouds. The best answer though might be to ask the child what he or she thinks a poem is or to ask him or her to write one or find one. Honestly, I don’t think you can explain to anyone, child or adult, what a poem is anymore than you can explain, if you’ll forgive the analogy, what sex is to a virgin—to be understood one has to experienced those things for oneself. Explanation is inadequate. No matter how complete one’s definition is of poetry (or for that matter art), something else will always come along which refuses to fit that definition but which one still recognizes to be poetry / art. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? The only role I see for "the poet" is to be a poet, which requires paradoxically both a spine and a constant re-evaluation of everything including what being a poet is or should be. I’m not sure what the Role of the Citizen is or if it exists other than as an obligation to do no harm to the world or to anyone in it despite the fact that this itself is an impossibility. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**ice-cube Chiseled**change I**you Of**small stature Form**thought 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? I’m not sure I’ve ever given it much thought, but my poems tend to naturally meditate on the body’s temporality and presence, its fragilities and possibilities. My own body is what I know best and least, a familiar stranger, and I suppose my relationship to my writing is like that too.