Friday, December 21, 2012
1/2 Dozen with Joy Ladin
Posted by Julianna Baggott at 2:37 PM
http://bridgetasher.blogspot.com/2012/12/12-dozen-with-joy-ladin.html?spref=fbWhat an honor it is to share this Q and A with Joy Ladin, award-winning poet and memoirist. She writes of the importance of placelessness, of God, of the belittling effects of T.S. Eliot, and gives one of the best damn speeches about what poetry should aspire to do...
She's here to kindle our lives a little...
Are you a writer of place? Is place always one of your main characters?
I am a writer of placelessness. In many of my poems – too many – abstracted distance from the specifics of existence, from place or being placed, is the "main character." This placelessness reflects my often-tortured and always complicated relationship to my body (which is after all the part of us that is "placed").
I've done some work on how literature creates a sense of time and space (what my favorite literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, calls a "chronotope"). My poems usually have so many time indicators and so few space indicators that they seem to take place in no place at all – which is also the way I would describe most of my life, due to the dissociation caused by gender dysphoria and living as someone I knew I wasn't.
