Elizabeth Robinson is the author of 6 books of poetry, most recently Pure Descent, winner of the National Poetry Series in 2002, and Apprehend, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series. She has received two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Contemporary Poetry and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. With Avery Burns, Joseph Noble, Rusty Morrison, and Brian Strang, she co-edits 26, a magazine of poetry and poetics. With Colleen Lookingbill, she co-edits the EtherDome Chapbook series which publishes chapbooks by emerging women poets, and she co-edits Instance Press with Beth Anderson and Stacy Szymaszek; we have just brought out Kimberly Lyon's Saline. She recently moved from the Bay Area to Boulder, CO to teach at the University of Colorado. Buy her books here. See some work here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I think the first two poems I loved were Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat" and Robert Louis Stevenson's "When I was down beside the sea, a wooden spade they gave to me..." I was also in a church-going family, so I memorized many, many bible verses, and I remember especially liking Job, and the beginning of the gospel of John, with all its braiding of phrases ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.") That still seems to me poetic and mystical in the best kind of way. In third grade, my mother gave me a copy of Emily Dickinson's poems that I read endlessly. Otherwise, there wasn't too much available in the way of interesting poetry in Orange County in the 1970's. Then, in my first year or two of college, I remember humming a sort of a tune to myself over and over, and finally realizing that it was Frank O'Hara's "For Grace, After a Party." That poem remains miraculous to me. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I did an M.A. in bioethics, and I still find ethics texts and case studies compelling. I love biographies, all kinds. I admit to having a fondness for adventure-type books. John Krakauer is really enjoyable to read, and though I can't remember the title, I really enjoyed a book I read last year about a volcano exploding on a group of scientists who were foolishly snooping around it. I have two sons, so I am force-feeding them all my own childhood favorites: Edward Lear, William Steig, Joan Aiken are among the best of them, but I am very partial to books illustrated by Lizbeth Zwerger and Giselle Potter. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? I am ambivalent about this question, because I have sometimes felt that philosophical affiliations function as a kind of credential for poets. That said, I think that philosophical thinking can be similar to poetic thinking, in terms of recreating logic and offering intellectual and creative permissions. The work of Cixious, de Certeau, Merleau-Ponty, and (Mark C.) Taylor have been important to me. I also like the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Elaine Scarry, Iris Marion Young, and Joan Retallack, though I'm not sure that they are officially "philosophers." I went to seminary, so obviously theology plays a role in my philosophical make up, but not in a coherent way. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? When I was little, my father read lots of Gogol stories and Wilkie Collins novels to me as bedtime stories. Those remain central to my sense of what literature is. I love the work of Murakami and Kawabata. Aimee Cesaire for vehemence and lushness of language. Vargas Llosa's The Storyteller and The War of the End of the World. Edmund Jabes. Leonora Carrington. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I do read a lot of poetry, an enormous amount, but it is not always under the best of circumstances. Since I teach and co-edit a magazine, I find that I am often reading poetry that I wouldn't turn to given an option. But I learn a lot from that work, and it all goes into my sense of what makes a good poem. I also read books by friends and that feels like engaging in a very satisfying, ongoing conversation. In the past couple of years, I've written a fair number of blurbs and reviews, and I enjoy the process of really sinking into a book so that you can understand it more clearly--its mechanisms, themes, etc. I read some things repeatedly, especially Spicer and Niedecker. My preoccupation in the last couple of years has been: what constitutes a book of poetry? So I reallylike to see how others make a community of poems that read backwards and forwards to make some kind of whole. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I will acknowledge this for the first time: I've read very little of H.D. I've read Barbara Guest's biography of her; I've read The Gift and End to Torment, but precious little of her poetry. Why? I think it has something to do with the number of times people have said, "Of course, H.D. is one of your central influences! I can see it all over your poetry!" It's just become a little irksome, so not reading her poems became a kind of way of giving the micky to people who make those comments. It's akin to growing up in Southern California, but refusing to learn to drive until I lived in Rhode Island. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I would say that it's like being given a huge cardboard refrigerator box and being told you could do whatever you wanted with it, including using the exact-o knife to cut holes, etc. Rapturous fun, but not without its hazards. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? Being a poet is just one way of being a citizen. I write this on November 3, so I will say that in the current, and apparently ongoing, miasma of our national identity, it's crucial for poets to take an active role in doing what they do best: be curious, imaginative, articulate, and reflective. Those qualities are healthily disruptive. Put your work in the public sphere, as part of a public conversation. Fight cliche, especially the very disturbing violence and imperialism that has become the American cliche. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Jack Spicer Chiseled**Greek I**the golem Of**being numerous Form**flesh 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? I can never get over the miracle that speech is a product of the body, and all the eros of language, how it feels in the mouth, how it impacts the ears. I love that language is abstract and yet so embodied, that a person says something and the words are made of breath and spit, and then the sound of the thing made dissolves into the atmosphere. The base of my 'religiosity,' if one wants to call it that, is the idea of word made flesh. Poetry is an ideal site for exploring and challenging mind-body dualism.