In honor of National Poetry Month, PUP author and series editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets Susan Stewart gives an overview of the series and talks about explains why, for a poet, every month is Poetry Month.
Why did you want to become the editor of Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets?
I was happy to be invited to serve as the editor of the Contemporary Poets series. It meant, and means, a great deal to me, for I enjoy the opportunity to help publish excellent and path-breaking books of poems in such fine editions—especially during a period when it is so difficult for many deserving poets to find venues for their work. And Princeton’s series has a special resonance to me, since my own first book appeared in the series when I was a young poet.
What do you look for when selecting poetry for the series?
Every May we have an open period of submissions and I try not to have too many preconceptions about what kind of work I might select. From its earliest incarnation under David Wagoner and on to my predecessor Paul Muldoon, the series always has been far-ranging and eclectic. I would like my selections, too, to give a sense of the range of work now available from living poets. Because we are a book series, I also look for strongly-composed volumes that are more than collections of individual poems. I’m drawn to books that reward careful reading.
What struck you about some of the collections in the past few years?
Each of the books we’ve published has its own myriad strengths and, considered as a whole, the series I’ve been trying to build foregrounds many formal approaches and many poetic worlds. Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who is tri-lingual and works in France, writes in her The Ruined Elegance a spare line, rich in imagery, that often addresses themes of individual memory and the consequences of state violence. The philosopher Troy Jollimore’s formally adventurous poems in Syllabus of Errors offer a wry concision. The young poet Niall Campbell’s lyrical book First Nights evokes his childhood in the Outer Hebrides and explores that world to hand, shot through with traditional narrative forms. Eléna Rivera’s book of sonnets, Scaffolding, written in syllabics and linked to specific dates like a diary, is a strikingly original meditation on urban existence. The two books we brought out last year, Myronn Hardy’s Radioactive Starlings and Miller Oberman’s The Unstill Ones, also have bold overall forms. Radioactive Starlings is in part an homage to the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and in part a study in ecology and globalism informed by Myronn’s nearly ten years of teaching in Morocco and his travels in the United States and the Middle East. Miller, an Anglo-Saxonist by training, has juxtaposed medieval poems in translation to contemporary reflections on gender and metamorphosis.
What did you love most about this Fall’s forthcoming poets, Dora Malech and Austin Smith?
These selections make for an intriguing counter-point in that both are concerned with the outcomes of ways of speaking. Austin Smith’s Flyover Country, written in an immediate but intricately-crafted diction, is a prescient study of life in the rural American mid-west—a “flyover” territory, often misconstrued by those in other regions. The book is a study in ethics as he yokes everyday actions to larger questions about technology and citizenship. Dora Malech’s Stet is a path-breaking formal experiment; the book is based in the constraint of the anagram and asks what it means to occlude, reverse, or otherwise “go back on” one’s speech—above all, she explores what happens when a vow or promise is altered.
National Poetry Month was only first inaugurated in 1996, what do you make of the recent reinvestment in poetry?
Hmmm….poetry is an art far from material “investments!” And we poets depend on the authenticity of our ancient roots. For us, and for all dedicated poetry readers, every month is Poetry Month. I’m glad Princeton University Press is playing its part.
Susan Stewart is the author of five books of poems, including Red Rover and Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other books include Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Christian Gauss and Truman Capote prizes for literary criticism, and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics. A former MacArthur Fellow, she is the Annan Professor of English at Princeton and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is the series editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets.