Blog-view: Arielle Greenberg

 Arielle Greenberg is  a new  member of the lively Maine poetry scene, and we’re glad she and her family chose to settle in Belfast after she left a tenured position in poetry at Columbia College Chicago. She is co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of the hybrid-genre Home/Birth: A Poemic, and author of My Kafka Century, Given, and several chapbooks, including the forthcoming Shake Her. 

Not only that, she is co-editor of three anthologies, most recently the not-too-missed Gurlesque with Lara Glenum.  And she teaches poetry out of her home, in the community, and through the University of Tampa's low-residency MFA program. She can been seen in her regular column for the American Poetry Review on issues and trends in contemporary poetics

LB: What is an artifact you have in your studio or writing space, and what does it mean for your work?
AG: I don't really have a writing space per se: I usually write the first drafts of my poems long-hand, preferably while lying horizontally across my bed, or on scraps of paper while I'm driving, or on the backs of other sheets of paper.  Later I type them in at my computer, which is on a little vintage Danish modern desk in my "office" next to the kids' playroom.  My desk is covered with papers, books, things I rip out of magazines, etc., but none of these are exactly artifacts.  So, no artifact and no writing space! I don't mind, though: I'm generally kind of adverse to things or routines that mythologize and idealize the act of poem-making.

LB: We're interested in knowing what you've read recently but we'd love to know what you wish you had read at some point, or sometimes pretend you have read.

AG: I really want to read Lydia Davis' translation of Proust.  Quite a project, and one I've been meaning to undertake for years, but still have not. I've never read Proust. I love the idea of Proust, but I'm not sure I'll like the actual thing.  I love Davis, though, so I feel like if anyone can get me to read him in translation, it will be her.

LB: What is something you would like to tell the world?

AG: Oh, gosh. I'm such a loudmouth: I'm sure that I've already shouted everything I want to tell the world more than I ought to have.