This interview with poet Bernadette Geyer was conducted in January 2009 by Serena M. Agusto-Cox. Please read our other interviews with poets published in 32 Poems.

1. Not only are you a contributor to 32 Poems, but you also have a chapbook of poems published, your own website and your own blog.
What “hat” would you consider the most challenging to fulfill and why?

Before “retiring” to become a stay-at-home mother, I worked in public relations. So to me, the website and blog are fairly easy for me to keep up with when I think of them as marketing tools for my writing. The most difficult hat for me to fulfill is being a “writing parent” — it is challenging to find the emotional/psychic space I need to really get into the poem — or article-making frame of mind. I usually cannot create if she is awake and in the house. But I have developed some internal ways of keeping a “creative train of thought” active in my head even when I am doing something completely different.

2. What prompted you to start a blog? How active are you as a blogger? And what types of posts does your blog focus on? Also, do you believe a blog is essential to marketing your work or is the Web site more useful for that purpose?

I started my blog a long time ago, back even before I had “retired” from my full-time PR job. I think it was originally a way of engaging my mind by blogging about the poetic process during my lunch breaks. But I wasn’t a very active blogger. Even now I don’t consider myself very “active”. My posts tend towards the short side – thoughts on poems, references to interesting articles I read, news on my own writing, upcoming readings, or random tidbits I just feel like sharing. I do think a blog is an essential part of a writer marketing his/her work. A web site is a great tool, but very impersonal. I think readers find blogs give them a more personal relationship with a writer than just checking out a static web site. Blogs are great ways of building or broadening an audience for your work.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?
Outside of my writing, I am obsessed with thrift and organization, which is difficult when you have a toddler. I have to learn to “let go” of the idea that I can keep things organized for very long. In my writing, I am obsessed with the idea of a poem’s intent. Each of my poems must have a “reason” for being. Every word and line break must serve the poem’s intent, etc. But I do manage to break away from my obsession and force myself to write poems that exist for no reason other than to be fun uses or explorations of language.

4. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any “writing” books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott)

I have done all of the above over the past 10-15 years that I’ve been writing. Lately I find “how-to” books to be not very useful in inspiring my work. Exercises are sometimes useful if I just want to get the pen moving (In the Palm of Your Hand, by Steve Kowit and The Practice of Poetry, ed. by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell, in particular). I find articles, essays and books on poetics to be more inspirational to me in thinking about how I approach my own poems. American Poetry Observed (edited by Joe David Bellamy) was a book I recommend as a collection of poets discussing their own poetics. I also enjoy and find useful the essays and articles in The Writer’s Chronicle. I don’t have a post-graduate degree in writing, so I try to read everything I can to educate myself. Workshops are not very useful to me anymore except that I have a few good friends who I trust to read my work and provide comments. I’ve tried forming a writing group among local writing moms, but it’s been hard to keep a regular meeting pattern. I do teach poetry workshops in public elementary schools, and have found Kenneth Koch’s Making Your Own Days and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? to be very good reminders of how fun it can (and should) be to write for the love of words and language.

5. A great deal of writing advice suggests that amateur writers focus on what they know or read the genre you plan to write. Does this advice hold true for you? How so (i.e. what authors do you read)?

If I focused solely on what I know, I’d get bored very quickly. I’m more interested in figuring out what I don’t know in my writing. Discovering my own thoughts and feelings about subjects with which I may not be familiar. Or subjects that I find difficult to think about. I read everything and everyone I can get my hands on, but some favorite poets are Stephen Dunn, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Lux, Julianna Baggott, Claudia Emerson, Mark Strand.

6. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don’t listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

I find the white noise of my computer’s CPU to be very soothing. But when I do listen to music while writing, it has to be something I can’t really sing along to – Mosquitoes, Paris Combo, Les Negresses Verdes, Miranda Sex Garden, Cocteau Twins – or complex instrumental works by bands like Dead Can Dance.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

I do have many more writer friends since I started writing. But I also have more mom friends since I became a mother, etc. Some prior relationships have stayed the same while others have fallen by the wayside. But the focus on writing was not the impetus for those that changed. As all of my various life priorities/sectors changed, so too did my friendships.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?
I’ve really cut back on the amount of processed and packaged foods I eat. I think this has had a tremendous positive impact on my health. I don’t go to a gym, but I “try” to get some exercise outside of running around after a toddler 10-12 hrs a day. I keep myself mentally fit by reading as much as possible and by reviewing books – forcing myself to think about why I did or did not like certain things about a book, whether it’s poetry, fiction or non-fiction.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?
I can’t think of foods that keep me inspired, but I can say that I have realized that it is very difficult for me to write or read if I am at a restaurant eating sushi. If I want to go out to lunch and get some reading or writing done, sushi is far too interactive a meal to be able to really “focus” on anything but eating.
Reading definitely is one way I overcome writer’s block. Also, if I’m particularly stuck and trying to work through my thoughts on a poem, mindless chores keep my hands busy and my body active so that my mind can wander freely around a subject, working out word choices or phrasings. Chopping vegetables for soup or stew is a food-related way to let my mind follow a creative train of thought.
Forcing myself to step away from my work for a while always makes me even more desperate to return to it. If I’ve been feeling stale, I give myself permission to break from writing and focus on something else (yardwork, inventing recipes, organizing). Usually when I take a break, I find that my mind will relax enough so that I can more easily get past the writer’s block.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.
I try to stay away from thinking that an “ideal writing space” would aid my writing. I have a computer for the “business side” of writing and a small stand-alone desk that I call the “editing desk” where I leave drafts in plain view so that they are always reminding me of their presence, and so that I can work on them at any given moment. I always have a journal or notebook with me, which is where most of my poems originate. I actively avoid getting into a “crutch mode” where I believe I can only compose if I am sitting at an antique writing desk with absolute silence and a lovely view out my window as I sip a glass of Chianti. While that whole idea is “nice” and I certainly wouldn’t turn down the opportunity for such an occasion every now and then, I just don’t always have the luxury of setting this idyllic scene in order to compose. Sometimes I will have to settle for composing and committing to memory a single line while I am doing something else and scribbling it down on the nearest piece of paper before I forget. I compose in restaurants, libraries, at red lights, in the shower, etc. My ideal writing space could be anywhere, as long as I had the time and mental space to focus.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?
I’m currently submitting my manuscript The Scabbard of Her Throat to publishers and have started doing research for a new theme-based collection of persona poems. I have an older, full-length manuscript of poems that is on the back burner and in need of re-working, so I suppose I’m subconsciously working on that as well. Also, I’ve been trying my hand at translating some German poems into English, but that’s been fairly slow-going.