Poet and professor Marilyn Annucci’s writing has appeared in journals and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, Rattle, North American Review, and Indiana Review. She is the author of Luck, a chapbook from Parallel Press, and Waiting Room, winner of the 2012 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. She lives in Madison and teaches in the Department of Languages and Literatures at UW-Whitewater. Her new book, The Arrows That Choose Us, won the 2018 Press 53 Poetry Award. Find it online at Press 53.
ALL Review: When did you write your first poem? Were you always drawn to writing and poetry?
Marilyn Annucci: I don’t remember when I wrote my first poem, but I have poems from when I was about 11 years old, so perhaps those were my first ones. I used to go to Vernon Drugs in Worcester, MA, and I’d stand in the aisle and read greeting cards, then go home and write poems (I thought it would be fun to have a job writing cards). I focused a lot on the musicality of the lines early on, and my poems were formal in structure. My diction was reminiscent of the bible or Shakespeare and the religious-inspired greeting cards I was reading. In middle school, an English teacher asked me why I was using “thy” and “thou” when I didn’t talk like that—I was striking a pose in my writing and imitating a voice that wasn’t really my own. Another teacher nominated one of my poems for a poetry contest when I was about 13. She said something like, “I think your poems might have a chance,” and I still recall standing in the hallway and feeling a visceral sense of hope and freedom. I felt acutely that I wanted something more in life and that maybe my poems, my writing, could catapult me there.
ALL: Is there a particular poet who inspired you to begin writing poems?
MA: There are so many writers who have inspired me. When I was very young, I loved Dr. Seuss and trochaic nursery rhymes (“Hickory dickory dock—the mouse ran up the clock!”). I took creative writing in high school and attended poetry readings at the Worcester Public Library, where I heard May Sarton, Stanley Kunitz, Seamus Heaney, and Czeslaw Milosz. In college, I read John Donne, George Herbert, and Emily Dickinson. I felt in communion with them, and the riddle-like quality of some of their poems. I read Louise Bogan, Theodore Roethke; I read a lot of Rilke. I took a course in Russian literature and discovered Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Tolstoy. I loved literature that took on the big questions—love, war, grief, death, betrayal, joy, mystery, God, memory, desire. Those are the kinds of themes I find myself taking on as well.
In my 20s, I started reading Adrienne Rich, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Pat Parker, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Kate Rushton, and many lesbian poets of color. They opened my world up even more, prompting me to think more about privilege, power, identity. As someone who was drawn increasingly to women, this literature was empowering and integral in shaping my consciousness and finding my voice. I had experienced marginalization due to gender and sexuality, but now I began to think about other forms of it, particularly in regard to race.
ALL: What fed your creativity? How did you find your way into the poetry community?
MA: When I moved to New Hampshire after college to work as a copy editor, I made an effort to keep up more with literary events, mostly with poetry and poets—I saw Etheridge Knight, Charles Simic and Jane Kenyon. There weren’t as many literary journals in the ’80s as there are now, but I subscribed to a small Kentucky poetry journal called Plainsong and corresponded with the editor. Although he never published any of my poems, he encouraged me to keep writing and sending out my work. I also sent poems to Howard Moss at The New Yorker. I didn’t get a poem published until I was about 30—it was my poem “Butter,” and it appeared in Cream City Review. I was determined and I didn’t give up.
My book, The Arrows That Choose Us, took about 20 years to be published. It went through many incarnations—I cut a lot of poems and added others over the years. The manuscript that won the Press 53 Poetry Award is very different from the earlier one I thought I wanted to publish.
ALL: Where do your poems come from—how do they formulate before you write them down?
MA: In New Hampshire, I lived in a studio apartment where I worked nearly every evening at my typewriter, sometimes rising in the middle of the night because of a line that came to me. Poems often start that way for me, they come out of my daily life or experiences or dreams. I write from my obsessions—the questions that haunt me (e.g. mortality). Sometimes an idea simply strikes—I hear its tone, its music, its urgency.
ALL: How do you go about writing your poetry? What's your process?
MA: I have no regular routine, though there are times in my life when I try more consciously to write even when I don’t necessarily feel moved. I think of what Flannery O’Connor said about showing up at the typewriter every day, because if something happens to come along, she’ll be there to catch it. The practice of writing is important, and I don’t practice enough lately. Getting out the junk, or maybe playing with language and getting our brains percolating can clear the way for something that needs the way cleared.
ALL: What goal do you have in mind when you’re in the midst of writing a poem?
MA: I just serve the poem that is emerging. I will work on a poem or story for hours and hours, and it will feel like mere moments. I get completely absorbed when I am onto something that feels true. I revise a lot, sometimes while I’m writing, and sometimes afterwards—there are certain poems that just need to written as a whole, then I go back when I have more perspective and see what’s there. And then some pieces take years.
ALL: Do you have any words of wisdom for aspiring poets and writers?
MA: Make time simply to BE. Quietude is important, especially in this world of endless diversions. Wordsworth wrote “The World Is Too Much With Us” circa 1802. Imagine what he would have felt about this world! Cultivate mindfulness, even if for short periods. Spend time with yourself. You’ll be more present to others and to the world. Be curious. Pay attention. Attention is a form of love. It allows us to go deeper. Writers can’t be afraid to go deep.
Don’t give up. Rejection is part of it all. Persevere. Some people don’t publish a book until they’re 70, and some people never publish a book. If you feel called to write, serve that calling.
And for those looking to connect with others and to grow as writers, check out what your community has to offer in terms of readings and workshops. These opportunities give us the support that keeps us going. And, if we’re lucky, we find kindred spirits. This journey is much more fun when that happens.
