Life Stories #85: Kim Addonizio

I didn’t realize until well into my conversation with Kim Addonizio that she’d written (but never published) a full-length memoir, a straightforward narrative about the breakup of a longterm relationship, before Bukowski in a Sundress, the collection of autobiographical essays that we’d met to discuss. That got us to talking about rejection and failure, which dovetailed nicely into some of the larger themes we’d been pursuing about finding the right voice for each of these essays—some of which deal with personal relationships, some of which tackle the writing process, some of which play directly with her reputation as a “confessional” poet—and about claiming her space as a woman dealing with all the things women have to deal with in literary culture. The “Bukowski in a Sundress” tag, for example, had been pinned on her condescendingly by a male critic, and she came to embrace it ironically… then we got to talking about other writers who’d been a much stronger influence on her:

“When I was just starting out as a poet, Sharon Olds was very important to me, because she said things in poems that I didn’t know you could say, and that opened up a lot for me in terms of realizing you could actually talk about things that I thought weren’t supposed to be in serious poetry. And in prose, people like Kathy Acker, for example—at one point, I was reading a lot of [Henry] Miller and Jean Genet and Kathy Acker and Georges Bataille… and Susan Sontag’s essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination,’ and thinking about all those things as modes of writing, expanding the possibilities of what could be said and understanding that writing is about being human, so nothing about being human should be off limits to us as writers.

And for some reason, for some people that seemed to be a new idea in poetry, which makes no sense to me. We’ve got Catullus, we’ve got all sorts of people throughout history who’ve been doing this, and yet I got called ‘edgy’ a lot of times, and I thought, well, I don’t really understand what’s edgy about it. It’s human experience and so why not talk about anything that we are obsessed with or interested in or thinking about or experiencing? And I guess I’ve just always been drawn to a certain aspect of experience. I’m always sort of going down rather than looking up.

I’m not sure why; I mean I could have some sort of therapeutic, psychological reasons why that’s true, but I’ve just been drawn more to the margins and the stuff that is maybe not as talked about in polite conversation. I mean, if I go to a dinner party and people are sitting there stiffly, my first reaction is I want to fuck this up somehow. I want to make some trouble here. Not out of disrespect, but because it’s just hard for me to tolerate a certain kind of decorum… I guess it just goes back to what your character is.”

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photo: via KimAddonizio.com

22 September 2016 | life stories |