Interview with Christina Olson,

author of Before I Came Home Naked

Winner of the 2007 Spire Poetry Award

Julie Bourbeau interviews Christina Olson

1. What did you hope to accomplish with this collection?

Well, I want Before I Came Home Naked (BICHN) to be funny, to be emotional, to be full of interesting poems. I want it to ring true, I want it to be a book that introduces a reader to a variety of weird facts. It has a fair amount of what I call my "epigraph poems"—poems that are launched by the introduction of a strange fact, such that there is actually a Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy.

I want it to be a collection that sticks with a reader. I want them to be able to identify with something in there, be it a poem about family or a poem about a bar.

I'd like it to be a book that perhaps captures the attention of a reader who's not so familiar with poetry. That would be cool. I'd like it to mean something to somebody. That's impossibly vague, but that's my end goal for BICHN.

2.  You experiment a great deal with form in this collection.  How do you decide what form a poem should take on?

I really don't "assign" form to a poem before I begin. In fact, most poems in BICHN began the same way: As a paragraph. I tend to write everything out as a single paragraph … if, as I write, a really great line break occurs to me, I might throw a slash in there, almost as a placeholder—a reminder to come back and break there. But generally, when I'm first working on a poem, I'm just trying to get out all the lines.

When I've written the poem, I have a large paragraph of text, and then I go back and edit that graf—take out lines and words that are holding back the poem, or that no longer fit or are needed. So then I have the poem, distilled somewhat, but still in a single paragraph form. And then I begin at the first line and break it where I think it needs to be broken. From there, moving on to the subsequent lines, the rest of poem comes together relatively quickly. It tends to find its form early, within the first couple of breaks — it may become quickly apparent that this poem is working within short lines, or longer lines. I then experiment with how the poem looks with stanzas, couplets, etc., but from that initial paragraph, the form sort of reveals itself to me.

Sometimes a poem just isn't breaking "right," or nicely, and those turn into (or stay?) prose poems. There's a few in BICHN.

Very rarely do I write with line breaks in mind, or say "This poem I'm going to sit down and write should have short couplets," but I have done it. It's a good exercise for me. It forces me to concentrate on the music and rhythm of the line as I craft it, and that in turn influences my word choice as I write. But if I do that too often it tends to hobble my voice.

3. You have some strong prose elements in your poetry.  What draws you to the form of poetry? Do you also write in prose?
 
Well, I think the fact that I craft poems as little prose pieces to begin with may lend a certain "prose-y" quality to my final poems. But I also think that my poems are pretty strong narratives—they tend to tell a story, in a way. I sometimes struggle with more lyrical elements in poetry. I have a really hard time writing a sound poem, for example, and forget rhythm. I am terribly unrhythmic. I can barely clap my hands, so writing syllabics has never been a forte of mine.

I write prose, too—I've written a decent amount of creative nonfiction, a little bit of fiction. I love to read prose. It's easier for me to write creative nonfiction than it is for me to write fiction, though I can't tell you exactly why that is. I think I'm intimidated by the idea of creating a story arc. And my prose tends to be on the shorter side—for example, I've been working on a few flash CNF pieces. The CNF that I've published has been flash.

But I'm primarily a poet. What draws me to the genre is the brevity of it—of course, I realize that there are many, many poems that are long or book-length. But mine generally aren't. I enjoy working with poetry because it forces me to distill what I'm trying to say. The poems I write have a certain leanness to them. They don't take a lot of time to go someplace, and I like that. And of course I love poetry because it knocks you off-kilter all the time: when you're reading it, while you're writing it. Poetry can be so many things in so many forms. It's very liberating, and somewhat magical.

4. What are the most exciting things you've read lately (new or old, poetry or prose, ect.)?
 
Ah. For poetry, I've been reading the new David Kirby … Paul Guest … Alison Pelegrin … Mary Biddinger … Jeannine Hall Gailey … Lynda Hull. I have Thomas Lux and James Tate waiting on my nightstand. I'm never far removed from Tony Hoagland—his books are always close at hand. Nick Flynn is wonderful. Those are the recent exciting poetry reads.

My significant other, Ben [Drevlow, prose writer, author of the forthcoming collection Bend with the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father], is an incredible reader—he always has fiction and nonfiction waiting for me to get to. His recent recommendations are Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Harry Crews. Larry Brown's prose is simply phenomenal. Our house is currently on a big Southern writers kick—beginning with Brown and working our way to Faulkner and O'Connor. It's a great way to spend a summer, even if you happen to live in Wisconsin.

I'm sure I've omitted many, many great things I've read lately, or mean to read next. There's so many.

5. Where do you see poetry heading in the future?  What direction is your own work taking these days?

I'm excited to be a poet at this age, at this time. It seems that younger writers (and all writers, honestly) are living in a time when it's easier than it's ever been to share work, to learn about other writers, to self-promote, to arrange readings … there are so many writers whose blogs I read, for example. So many writers with Web sites, so many that you can track down and e-mail just to say, Hey, I read your book, I thought it was fantastic. The Internet makes discovering writers and keeping in touch and tracking submissions and reading online magazines and finding smaller presses so very easy. I sense too that there are a lot of writers who are collaborating with other artists, and I would think that being online makes that easier.

My own work … I have a little over half of a new manuscript in the works. It's definitely a little darker, a little more morose than most of BICHN. The past year found me out of school and working in healthcare marketing, which was a rocky time for me. I think that the poems I wrote during this past year are definitely more reflective, certainly more black humor. I learned more in the past year about weird diseases and things that kill people (thanks to the job) than I would ever want to know, so a lot of those odd little tidbits and facts are starting to show up in new work. But I can't say at this point what a second manuscript might even look like—my life's about to change again, I'm moving to Michigan and returning to teaching. I'm just writing as I go, using poetry as a way to keep me busy and help me process change and entertain me and keep me sane. That's what it does, after all.

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Before I Came Home Naked is scheduled for release in December 2009.