RH: How did this anthology get started?
LN: An editor at Ballantine Books thought of the
project and asked me if I wanted to do it, which was a great
honor, and also slightly terrifying. After preparing a book
proposal, which was accepted, I went about selecting
poems.
RH: Tell us about your selection process.
LN: What I did was collect poems by writing to poets
that I knew who I wanted to have involved. Then I read
through all the lesbian poetry that I could find in single-
writer collections, anthologies, literary and lesbian
magazines, then put out calls for material in lesbian
magazines and writers' magazines. After I acquired a big
pile of material, I split that into "Yes", "No" and "Maybe"
piles.
The open call in magazines swamped me, but I got several
writers who had never been collected before, some who had
never been published. But it meant reading through literally
pounds of poetry.
RH: Let's talk about some of the criteria
involved in your selections.
LN: I was looking for beautiful poetry, with an
emphasis on the literary quality of the work, from a diverse
group of women. What surprised me was the range of
experiences contained in the book. When I tell people it's a
love poem anthology, they expect hearts and flowers, but
there's aging and death and illness in the book. There's
poems about homophobia, about being a parent, all kinds of
things, and all written within the last 25 years.
RH: One of your male friends commented, as you
note in your introduction, that you had found so
much good lesbian poetry.
LN: Little did he know that that comment would end up
in the book.
RH: Were you surprised by how much good
poetry you found while collecting for the
anthology?
LN: Absolutely not. I expected it and actually I got
many many more good poems than I could use. The book is much
longer than we had originally contracted for, because there
were poems I couldn't leave out.
I was thrilled to find so many fresh images, amazing
language usage in many of the poems. Writing a love poem is
like taking a photo of a sunset: it's been done ten million
times, so it's difficult to do it in a unique way. And these
poets were able to do that. What worked for me the most were
those poems that were specific -- dealing with specific
characters and specific situations. That quality made them
more human to me, more universal. I was happy to see that
there are poems that were written in form. There are
sonnets, a villanelle, a rondelle; there's no sestina, which
I tried very hard to find, but unfortunately wasn't able
to. Still, even the poems not written in classical form had
many powerful images in them.
