Chelsea Rathburn

An interview with The Aroostook Review's Editor-in-Chief

Geraldine Cannon Becker

AR: Readers seem to like to know about a writer’s connections to place. Chelsea, would you tell our readers where you were born and where you grew up? What do you love about where you live? What's your least favorite thing?

Rathburn: I was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and raised in Miami. My poetry has a strong connection to place, but this takes a different form than you might expect. I don’t write much about the places I’ve lived, at least not in an identifiable way – the poems about my childhood or where I live now are more about human nature than the natural world, so they don’t go much further than my home or my own backyard. (While I’ve lived in Atlanta for close to a decade, I don’t have a strong connection to the city and don’t imagine that I’ll be here forever.)

How do I have a strong connection to place, then? Many of my poems are inspired by travel. I get a great deal of poetry out of my travels – perhaps because I’m paying more attention to the things around me, or perhaps because traveling provides more opportunities to slow down and write. I’m also interested in the ways that people change or don’t change when they journey outside their usual surroundings. For example, I have a poem, “The Talker,” which describes an annoying conversation overheard in a London restaurant, but which is really about the couple doing the eavesdropping.

In the last year, I’ve written poems based in Krakow, Poland, Paris, Las Vegas, and New York; these were written in Poland, California, and the mountains of North Georgia, where some friends and I rent a cabin each year to unwind and write.

AR: Fascinating. Would you tell us more about your current writing projects?

Rathburn: I am in the process – the long, slow process – of completing a new book manuscript, tentatively titled A Raft of Grief. (I say tentative because the poems in the collection begin in grief but rise out of it. Now that I’m looking at the manuscript as a whole, I’m afraid the title may be a little too dark.) A number of the travel poems I mentioned are in the collection, as well as an extended sequence I call the Travel Eclogues – poems that are basically conversations between an increasingly estranged couple, connected by their often dramatically different memories of the travels they took together.

I’m lucky enough to live with another poet, James May, who is my first and best reader and also a great source of inspiration to me. Not just in the sense that I write poems about him or things that we do together, but also that we have ongoing conversations about poetry (you could say that our life together is an ongoing conversation about poetry), and our poems are in turn in conversation with each other. When one of us writes a poem, the other will often respond with a poem of our own on a similar subject or theme.

AR: Ongoing conversations about literature and writing must be a mainstay for many creative/academic couples. This sounds a bit like call and response. Nice.  

Rathburn:The poems in my first poetry collection, The Shifting Line, were extremely formal – sonnets, triolets, rhyming quatrains, blank verse meditations and so on. My current work is a bit looser, but I remain very interested in the interplay between content and structure.

AR: What do you think of the interplay between economy and poetry? I was just at a poetry festival where this topic was a key focus. We often hear "poetry doesn't pay." Does it pay, though? I can't imagine a world without poetry. Sometimes pay isn't money, if you ask me. Poetry always pays.

Rathburn: Hmmm. That’s a tough question. In some sense I think that poetry exists outside of political elections or economic booms or recessions. After all, poets are inspired to write by larger dramas in our lives – and we certainly aren’t motivated by money or we’d be doing something else.

As a working poet, I know that the economy has affected me personally – I’ve had several readings canceled because the host venue lost the funds to pay for the event. I know that a number of poetry teaching positions have been put on hold in the last few years. At the same time, poetry can be a deep comfort in times of despair. So maybe we need poetry more now, just at the time when there is less support for working artists.

AR: What do you think of electronic publications? Since we are an online journal, I like to ask this question. There are other online venues, of course…

Rathburn: I think that the more opportunities there are for readers to experience poetry, the better. I find that many electronic publications are as varied and as vital as traditional print journals. The Web has also tremendously opened up opportunities for poets to hone their craft and develop a sense of community through message boards and forums about writing. While I don’t participate in them myself, I know a number of people who’ve posted poems and received feedback in online poetry forums.

I recently taught a poetry summer camp, and some of the campers have already been blogging and publishing their work in electronic journals for teens. I think that’s pretty amazing to have that outlet.

AR: Wonderful! I’m sure many of our readers will agree with you.

By the way, I’m sure our readers would be interested in what you are reading. So would you tell us what is on your night stand or your reading list?

Rathburn: Since leaving graduate school, where I had to study for comprehensive exams, I’ve become a rather undisciplined reader. I have a stack of books in every room of my house, and I pick them up in no particular order. I recently read Beth Bachmann’s Temper and was really blown away by it. I’m also a huge fan of Marie Howe’s work. She does not publish frequently, but she has a new book that I really love –The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.

AR: My eldest daughter and I were just talking about that book. She said I would love it. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers? What was the best advice you were ever given? The worst?

Rathburn: My advice to aspiring writers is to recognize that most of what you’re writing today you won’t want to look at five years from now. Does that sound bleak?

AR: No. I think I understand what you mean. Go on…

Rathburn: Every time I say that, I’m accused of being negative or pessimistic – but I don’t think it’s a negative idea at all… Each new poem leads to the next, and teaches us a new way to communicate – or a way not to communicate. To me, it’s freeing to think that I’m not tied to the poem I’m working on, that it may be just a stepping stone. Each new poem leads to the next, and teaches us a new way to communicate – or a way not to communicate.

As for advice I’ve received, the worst has been from people who’ve tried to take my poems and recast them in their own images… Generally I’m not a fan of sweeping statements like “Your poems shouldn’t rhyme” or “All of your poems should rhyme.” (When I first began exploring poetic form, I was categorically told that this was a bad idea by more than one person.)

AR: It is sometimes hard to know what advice to ignore when you are starting out or when you are trying something new. You’ve saved the best for last…

Rathburn: I can’t think of a single best piece of advice, but I suppose the most helpful have been those pieces that happened to be delivered at the moment when I was ready to hear them.

AR: Ah, yes!And often those gems come unbidden.

Chelsea, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us. I’m sure our readers will enjoy your poems.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=182824

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/the-talker

http://www.theatlantic.com/chelsea-rathburn