Lia Purpura is the author of the new poetry collection It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful. She also has written the poetry collections The Brighter the Veil, Stone Sky Lifting, and King Baby, as well as three essay collections. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New Yorker and The Paris Review. She is writer in residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and she lives in Baltimore.
Q: Why did you choose
"It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful"--a line from one of the poems in
the book--as the book's title, and what does it signify for you?
A: In both my poems and
essays, I’m interested in seeing what there is to notice that may have gone
unnoticed, or hasn’t traditionally merited attention.
I’m interested in paying
attention to the aesthetic, moral, civic, spiritual questions and demands that
are called up in the act of looking – an act which is almost always full of
complexities, contradictions, surprise, and mystery. I’m interested in
uncategorizable feelings or moments – moments that I’m convinced are inklings
of bigger questions.
What I’d call “beautiful” is
often a little off center. The objects or instances or beings that elicit that
particular response, beautiful, are so capacious … sometimes, too, they’re
attached to systems that, in their perfect workings, are themselves beautiful,
but under-sung.
This sense of surprise, this
off-centeredness, or drive to see a thing slant felt like a good lens for the
book’s intentions. Also, to give proper credit here, my husband first suggested
it as a possibility, among others, and, truth be known, he’s a master titler. I
owe him big time for a lot of good titles over the years.
Q: These poems have been
described as "compact." What do you think of that description, and
why do you write in the form you've chosen?
A: Well, the compact is often
pretty enormous in what it contains. Sure, “brief” things can be cut-short
things, tossed-off things, things capped or lopped -- or can reveal a skittishness about the
supposedly short attention span of the contemporary human.
I’d like to think about
brevity as a depth experience rather than one that responds to the inability to
pay attention. I liked working with a form that allowed for a lot of space
around it. I liked the combination of density (layered thought, heightened
moment, precise incident, lasered attention) and spaciousness.
And I liked, too, the way a
focused thought can ring out, behave like a saying or proverb or riddle, and
engage the air around it in its blooming.
Q: In addition to poetry, you
also write essays. Do you have a preference?
A: It’s not so much a
preference as a sense of great fortune to have these two very different
musculatures to work with. I can work long or short, depending on the feel of
the day.
This is not to say that the
poems are in any way easier or take less time – just that the physical
sensation, the sense of time and space is very different and I like, need, am
attracted to both.
Sometimes, actually, sort of
often now, the essays behave in highly lyrical ways and move about the way
poems traditionally do, by leaps of thought and image, and the poems behave
like small essays, organizing and presenting a thought or concept. The
crossover, the freedom of that, is exciting.
Q: Which authors have
inspired you?
A: Always a question that
draws a blank! I think what’s often meant is: which authors are you somehow aware
of as influencing your work. The question may suggest, too, that writers can
trace the origins of certain gestures or subjects back to a beloved author, or
early influence – and articulate a sense of an orderly heritage.
I’m not being cagey here, or
resisting talking about my beloveds for the sake of appearing to be
spontaneously born of a god’s forehead, or in order to come off as untouched
and pure.
A whole range of writers have
been important to me – by introducing angles of vision, by offering challenges
to the soul, by stirring generative envy, by making me feel very very small and
thus forcing growth – so, to name just a very few: James Baldwin, Dickinson,
Neruda, Whitman, and recently, say, Claudia Rankine, Mary Ruefle, Larry Levis,
Elizabeth Kolbert, Ann Pancake, Terrance Hayes, David Foster Wallace, and early
on, a whole host of post-WWII Eastern European poets -- and then, writer
friends, of course, whose own astonishing work I’ve seen through many stages,
whose ethics and aesthetics make me want to write better every day.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m mostly working on
easing It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful into the world, and that means doing an
awful lot of traveling and readings.
Writing-wise, I’ve got a few
essays under construction (a new one, “Scream, or Neverminding,” will be out
soon in The Georgia Review) and other than that, I’m trying to keep in more of
less daily touch with very new, small sparks, trying to hang out with the
mysteriously hovering stuff and get some of it down and get a sense of what’s
coming next.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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