Natalie Marino is a poet and physician. Her work appears in Atlas and Alice, Gigantic Sequins, Isele Magazine, Mom Egg Review, Plainsongs, Pleiades, Rust + Moth, West Trestle Review and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Under Memories of Stars, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (June 2023). She lives in California.
You can read her poem What it is in the July 2023 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
The initial line of a poem often comes to me while I am driving. This particular poem describes the pastoral in springtime, but it is also about the temporality of living and the acceptance of death.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
This poem is written in free verse. This form is the best fit because the poem describes a scene from an omnipotent perspective in a stream of consciousness voice.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
One of my first poetic influences was Sylvia Plath, and I still often go back to her work when I am feeling stuck in my writing. I really admire her innovative use of metaphor and how she is able to say so much in just a few words. A great example that includes both of these aspects is her poem Sheep in Fog.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
I try to write every day, and when I’m not writing poetry I write in a journal. Journaling helps me process my daily experiences and these writings have often led me to writing my best poems.
How do you revise your work?
Once I write the first draft of a poem I let it sit for at least one day. When I go back to it, I move lines around, play with the form, and remove words that do not add much in terms of sound or meaning. I wholly agree with what the poet W.S. Merwin once said of revision: “When a poem is really finished, you can’t change anything. You can’t move words around. You can’t say ‘in other words, you mean.’ No, that’s not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it.”
What are you working on now?
I am working on my first full-length manuscript. It is a collection of lyric poems that reframes grief as a process towards knowing that the only choice of the living is to experience the joy and pain that love necessarily involves.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
Most of my poems are written in reverse; that is, instead of starting out with a structure or with something of significance I want to say, I start with lists of words I find interesting and let my subconscious put the words together in the hope that I can make something new and beautiful.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
I have often been inspired to write poetry after reading creative nonfiction or looking at paintings and other forms of visual art.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
This is a hard question to answer. As a mother of two school-aged children and a practicing family medicine physician, some days are better than others, but on good days I spend at least an hour after dinner time working on my writing.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
I recently read Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds, and the mysticism and beauty of the language in her stories about her mother’s family in Colombia inspired me to write several poems.
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
Richard Hugo’s craft book on writing poetry, The Triggering Town, has been indispensable to me. It offers a lot of useful and practical advice, such as never revising by erasing your writing but striking out without mulling it over too much. He also cautions against trying to communicate too much with poetry, and this is also great advice for poets because good poetry is more about making the reader feel something strongly than to make sure the reader understands the meaning of the poem completely.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
I do not belong to a writer’s group, but I do have several critique partners with whom I share my poetry drafts, and giving and receiving feedback has helped me improve my work.