Paula Eisenstein was recently a Toronto based writer but is now a rural New Brunswick based writer. Her novel Flip Turn was published by Mansfield Press in 2012. Some literary magazine publication credits include Descant, filling Station, The Rusty Toque and The Puritan. Her most recent Amelia Earhart poems came into being thanks to the generous assistance of artsnb.
You can read her poem Leaving Boston 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?
I’ve been writing these Amelia Earhart poems since 2016. I accidentally fell into the project google-contemplating the moon’s power to cover and uncover things. (A story came into my feed in which a metal patch from Amelia’s lost airplane washed up on shore.) My plan was for the project to be shaped by information that came from biographies about Earhart then to use a Vedic Astrology tool to tell me more about the emotional tenor of the time to inform the poems. I wanted the poems to take place amid some kind of life action. But such has been the case that the poems don’t seem to come alive until some animal, often birds, or an insect gets involved.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
At the outset of my Amelia project, I employed a 4 stanza, 17 syllable structure: with 4 syllables per line and 5 for the last line. This made the poems long and thin and terse and sometimes choppy, which related, in my mind, to the last fraught communications that came from Amelia as her craft was going down.
By now the constraint has loosened up a lot. This poem is written in couplets that break in mostly obvious places, like at the end of a sentence or thought. I have begun to break from the 17-syllable format, but the couplets in this poem are still all 17 syllables.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
I feel that way about some fictional writing. I love David McFadden’s A Trip Around Lake Erie and A Trip Around Lake Ontario. They are both so funny and sad-smart and human. I value those qualities. I am crazy for Doris Lessing’s novel series Canopus in Argos: Archives which is a history of the colonization of earth under the influence of three galactic empires. I find its epic sweep and especially its wise extra-terrestrial characters terrifically consoling.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
Poetry is still pretty mysterious to me. I think poets are much stranger creatures than regular writers and count myself as more the latter. I think poets have the ability to live regular lives and have regular jobs at the same time as being poets. It’s almost like being a regular person is the counterpoint that allows them to find their poetry and for their poetry to exist. Whereas I think regular writers are constantly holed up somewhere doing their writing away from everything. It’s hard for them to be in their lives.
I feel like I have barely begun to write poetry and access its fulfillments (having a life) so it’s a bit soon to ask what if I didn’t write poetry.
How do you revise your work?
I love being in the editing/revising part of my brain and part of a project. It’s so sharp and juicy. The most important thing for me is to leave what was written alone to itself for long enough that I’m no longer attached to my original intentions. If I come back to something before I get there, there’s no point. I’m useless.
I don’t judge myself and early bad drafts harshly because I know it’s a process. I like the process and I like the parts of myself involved in participating in the process.
I ask my husband to look at my work when I feel it’s done and he always has some great observations. I have begun to ask for help from writing friends too.
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?
The best advice I got was in grade 8 art class when our assignment was to go out and draw from local architecture. I lived in a suburb and was old enough to think the architecture was really boring and ugly, but there was a saving grace. An old farmhouse backed onto the school property. Along with the old farmhouse came a tall row of pine trees on the school property. It was June and hot and I went and sat under the pine tree closest to the old farmhouse to draw it. And so did Pam Johnson, only the best artist in the class! I asked her how she did it and she said just draw what you see. A more precise, you could say literal perspective came into my purview. This approach also seems to work for me with writing.