Penelope Pelizzon is the author of the poetry collections Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time (2014) and Nostos (2000), which won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her upcoming book, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye, has just been published in the Pitt Poetry Series. She is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, and she kindly agreed to be interviewed for LRR via video conference.
Rylee Thomas: So, let’s get started. I’m Rylee Thomas, and I’m one of the interviews and podcasting editors for the Long River Review.
Sofia Tas-Castro: I’m Sofia Tas-Castro. I’m one of the members of the podcast and interviews team.
Rylee: Today we are interviewing Professor Penelope Pelizzon, and we are very excited to ask her about her forthcoming collection of poetry, which is going to be coming out in February, I believe, right? This month?
Professor Penelope Pelizzon: Yes, that’s right.
Rylee: What was your journey as a writer like? When you were first starting, how did you know you wanted to be a poet? How did you find your voice as a poet? How did you go about making such a successful career out of your poetry?
Professor Pelizzon: Those are great questions.
So, I’m thinking about this idea of the journey as a writer. Rylee, we may have talked about this at some point, but maybe not. You may not know that I started when I was a college student as a musical theater major at a performing arts conservatory. So, I had a very different career aspiration. I thought that I was going to be an actress, and I was going to direct plays and I was going to be involved with singing and dancing and all of this stuff. I did two years at the musical theater conservatory, and then I flunked out. So, there I was 19, and my artistic dreams had been crushed. But, at that time, I was working towards reading and writing more poetry. So, that was something that I was doing in the background.
I was writing a lot of bad, angry, feminist poetry. That was sustaining to me, and something I became more and more attached to as it was clearer that I was not going to become a star of the stage and screen. Those themes are coming to this kind of artistic failure on one hand, but then having this impulse to work more with literary works.
I was able to take some time off after that from academia. I was working as a waitress, and then I ended up going off to live in Ireland for winter, basically just to work on my writing. I thought, what do you do if you are 19 or 20 years old, and you’re kicked out of school and you want to be a writer? I thought, well, going off and hiding in the house somewhere and just working on writing seems like a good thing. So, I did that. Then, I worked as a waitress for a couple of years. It was after a couple of years of doing that, while writing consistently and reading, that I realized that I did want to go back to college because I didn’t want to be a waitress forever. That was how I ended up getting a Bachelor’s degree, and then going on to get an MFA.
So, I was reading constantly, writing pretty constantly, but didn’t necessarily have an academic guideline or guidepost for part of that time. But then, when I went back to my Bachelor’s degree, I was a very good student by that point, because I was a little bit older. I was like 22 at that point, and much more mature, much more focused. I also learned at that point that there was this thing called an MFA that I could do as a writer, which you guys are familiar with and may be thinking about.
This was back in the 1980s. Or this was the early 90s by now. So, at that point, the MFA structure was a little bit different than it is now. There weren’t quite so many programs. Most of them were also funded, which is something that is not always the case now, but it seemed like a no-brainer. I could finish my bachelor’s degree and then be a waitress. Or, I could finish my bachelor’s degree and then someone would pay me to read and write. So, what I ended up doing was going to get the MFA, and I did that for two years.
That was useful, but I finished my degree feeling like I still didn’t know anything particularly. I knew more about my working habits, but I did not know a lot of literature before the 20th century in any organized way.
I was committed to this art form. I wanted to delve into it more, and I wanted more structure and guidance about where to go before the 20th century. So, I ended up going back to get a Ph.D., and that was a five-year program. That was great. Because again, it was like, someone will pay me for five years to spend my time in the library and work on my first book. So, that’s what I did, and that was great. That was a really good choice for me.
Rylee: Do you think that time spent on your own was the most instrumental in you figuring out your poetic voice and what you wanted to do? Or do you think your time at school, in your MFA program, and your PhD program, was more instrumental? Or were they helpful in different ways to help you hone your poetry?
Professor Pelizzon: I would say helpful in different ways. I didn’t know anything about what I wanted for my voice, et cetera. I didn’t figure that out until I was in my PhD program. For the MFA, I still was not there yet. The time of not being in school was helpful for just learning how to be by myself. I learned how to live in the middle of nowhere without other humans around.
So, I figured out how to focus on my own. I didn’t necessarily need the structure of a program to do that, but what I did need was the community and feedback. I wasn’t really in touch with any other writers. So, that was when the MFA was really useful for us. It put me in touch with a lot of other people who were reading a lot of contemporary work. As you guys know, when you’re with other people and you’re getting reading suggestions all the time, when you’re getting feedback on your work. That’s the more communal aspect. But it’s really important, also, to know how to keep yourself going and how to be alone. But that’s not what an MFA teaches you, right?
Sofia: Going off that, when you mentioned there was this curiosity to know more about the art form itself, do you take that into account when you’re going through your creative process? Does it influence how you teach your students and how they go through their creative process?
Professor Pelizzon: That’s an interesting question. I always think about form in conversation with literary history in my work, as you will see if you read this new book. A writing process is your process. So, it’s idiosyncratic in that it’s not always helpful to anyone else. But the thing I think that you can do as a teacher is help students try a lot of different things so they can find their process.
One of the things I like to do is suggest a lot of different types of writing and push people to try things that are out of their comfort zone. One thing you can do as a teacher is encourage students. You can create an environment where it’s fine to fail. Taking risks as a writer means that you’re always going to be potentially on the verge of writing something that’s unfinishable or a disaster. You can’t write anything great unless you’re pushing yourself. So, thinking less about getting things perfect, I’m encouraging students to think, how can I kind of write at the edge of my knowing? How can I write to the point where I have to sink through every step of the way? That’s where exciting writing happens.
But the ways that people engage with that are going to be different. I like to provide students with a lot of different types of projects, like, try this and see if this works. Getting people to experiment with a lot of different types of techniques. I think that’s the kind of thing that you can do as a teacher for students. You can’t tell them this is a process that will work, but you can encourage them to not be afraid of failing as you’re on your way to figuring out what works for you. Does that make sense?
Rylee: I can testify that that’s so true. I remember, in our nature writing class, I submitted so many poems in so many forms. A lot of them got pretty good, and I was proud of some. But I remember you pushing me out of my comfort zone. I used to stick to free verse in writing whatever I felt needed to be said, and you pushed me to write more structured poetry. That helped me develop a different voice than I had before, and I improved a lot because of that.
Professor Pelizzon: You had that breakthrough with syllabics. I think that one of the things is that most students in undergraduate programs write free verse, because that’s just the atmosphere. Students mostly have never encountered anything beyond that. It’s not typical to learn anything more formal before you get to college.
I think some people have this fear of technique that is a little more demanding. There’s a fear that this is somehow going to stifle your creativity, and I’m like, no, no, your technique is not the stifler of creativity. Technique is the tool of creativity. If you have a lot of different techniques you can call upon, you can do different things with them. If you can only write in free verse, it’s like you can only paint with the color yellow. Yellow is a great color, one of my favorite colors. But there’s a lot of stuff that you can’t do with only that one color, right?
Rylee: Definitely. Another question that I wanted to ask was how you got your idea for your new book of poetry, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye.
Professor Pelizzon: So, the thing that might not be clear if you haven’t read the book is that I lived in those places. So, it wasn’t that I was researching and writing about distant places. A lot of what I write about is just daily life.
I often find that things that come up in this book arise from having a cognitive dissonance between observing something and the weird echoes or resonance between something culturally that’s happening in, say, Damascus, or somewhere I might have been living at that point. Then, something from my memory. Maybe there’s some resonance in that I’m living in Namibia, Southern Africa, and it reminds me a lot of something that I experienced when I was in Syria.
In this book, you see my ways of thinking and feeling. I’m someone whose emotions are often quite hidden from me. I’ll have a sense of a feeling that I can’t articulate, which is not uncommon. But poems, for me, are ways of feeling through what am I feeling about some of the experiences that I was having while living in these places. What do those things feel like? What kinds of thought processes did they cause me to work through?
Sofia: Having your poems focus on everyday life also helps with the concept of exploring several different places, which seems very overwhelming. I know when I write, I spend time in one specific spot for a while so I can figure out what’s going on, but just to hear that process is very enlightening.
Professor Pelizzon: I would say, too, that I often have to not be in a place any longer to write about it. There’s a time-lapse. But I take notes all the time. So, I have notebooks full of observations. I try to make a few observations every day, like a field log. It’s like making some notes about what I noticed that day. To speak to what you’re saying, you’re in a place and you’re familiar with it. But sometimes, it will trigger thinking about another place, or someplace that you’ve been in the past that might be too overwhelming. Too much sensory overload. I’m so much in the moment in that place that I might get ideas for a poem, but the poem itself might not emerge for several years because I have to get away from that.
Rylee: I’m curious if you travel to these places intending to write about them, or if you travel to them just for the sake of experiencing new things.
Professor Pelizzon: Those are great questions. So, the reason I travel to all of these places is because the man I love has traveled to them. He’s in the kitchen probably overhearing this. I’m married to a diplomat, and his work takes him to these different places, usually for two or three-year postings. We’ve been very lucky in that the places that he’s been posted have all been places that are deeply interesting to me, and we know ahead of time where he’s going. So, there’s always a bit of lead time. It’s like, I’m going to go live there. I’m going to be studying Arabic. I need to read some things about the region. I need to learn about the history of this ancient culture. There’s so much going on there that I need to be smart about so I can have a life there, so that I’m not ignorant about what’s going on.
It’s been like that with each of the places that we stayed. For me, that kind of historical research is really interesting. So, for me, that’s a great pleasure. In some ways, it’s almost like the poems are an outlet for the pleasure of learning more about life and culture in these other places, which is often so very different from our American experience
Rylee: It’s great to contextualize all this within your life experience. Would you say that there’s a common theme that unites a lot of these places you write about within this collection of poems? Any kind of overarching theme that unites them together? Or are they just very different and beautiful in their differences?
Professor Pelizzon: Well, sometimes beautiful and terrifying. Yeah. Beautiful and devastating, right? So, I would say that’s a complicated question. One way to approach that might be to say that each place offers me the opportunity to spend part of the time not being in English. I’m very inspired by other languages, and it’s useful for me to try to have daily life in another language, like Italian or Arabic. There’s something about that feeling, wrestling through trying to make myself understood in a domestic or day-to-day context, and then the ease and the fluency that writing and English offers me.
Sofia: I specifically know that, for Arabic, not only are we reading from right to left, but there is this history of these ancient poems that are written in this almost sing-song kind of way, which is very important to their history. Is there anything like that that you’ve taken inspiration from to put into your poems?
Professor Pelizzon: Absolutely. I incorporate other languages into my poems. There are other languages there. One thing I would say is just being inspired by something like some of the early pre-Islamic poetry, some of the great Islamic poems. That tradition of the beloved who comes upon the campsite and his beloved is no longer there, and there are just the ashes of her fire, and he meditates on that and wanders into the night and he looks at the stars. So, if you read my book, you will see that those tropes are there. So, I do borrow from some of the early Arabic.
And I translate from Italian poetry. So, those rhythms shape my thinking. Italian syntax is flexible in ways English syntax isn’t. I think about that a lot when I’m writing. What are the affordances of English? What flexibility or resistance does English offer that Italian might not?
The thing I’m so sad about is my Arabic is that it should still exist, right? But it’s kind of not. I can still read Arabic, but it’s not functional in any way. So, in some ways, I feel like when I look at Arabic it’s like this beautiful lost thing that I wish that I had more access to.
Rylee: I was wondering, stylistically, how is this new book different from or similar to the poetry collections you’ve previously published? I was curious because I know you’ve worked so much with different syllabic forms in our classes.
Professor Pelizzon: I would say the interest that I’ve had in what poems can do has stayed the same across my three books, but I hope I’m getting better at it. Stylistically, I’m interested in poems that bring together lyric and poetic impulses. Like, a single speaker who is speaking intimately with the listener, or the reader. There’s a sense of an epiphany, some kind of personal experience that’s being talked about.
But at the same time, I’m interested in the dramatic possibilities of poetry. Traditionally, poetry is broken into these three modes. We might think about this going back to Plato. There is the dramatic, the lyric, and the epic. So, this ties into that idea of little epics, but in a little epic, you have these elements of dramatic circumstance, dramatic event, dramatic movement. Movement across time and history can happen in the poem at the same time. You have a close, lyric, intimate voice speaking to you.
I’m interested in a poem that can take in a lot of historical circumstances as well as a lot of moments of a speaker’s intimate day-to-day life. A lot of my poems are spoken by an “I” voice who isn’t exactly me. Some speakers are similar to what my thinking is like, but they’re not my persona. That allows me the flexibility to explore speaking through a character or doing something else. So, there’s that dramatic interest in exploring another perspective, bringing together different movements across time and space. Big, large-scale things, and the small, granular intimacy of a single voice.
Rylee: On that note, I was wondering how you went about creating the title for your book. A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye. That’s such a unique title.
Professor Pelizzon: It comes from Holinshed’s Chronicles, which is also the source where Shakespeare went for all his historical material. So, I went back to a Shakespearean source, but it’s a direct quote from William Harrison, the vicar of Wimbish, who is a peripheral, minor character in the title poem. He wrote a single essay called Of Our English Dogs and Their Qualities. He has a lot to say about middle-aged ladies who dote on their dogs too much. He’s particularly critical about women who don’t have children. And it’s like, okay, this guy needs to be taken down a peg. So, I have a poem, and it was my one pandemic problem. It deals with the situation of the pandemic, but it also deals with 500 years of misogyny in English literature. So, that’s the title of that column, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye. The original title of this manuscript was, for a long time, Animals & Instruments. But that’s a bit more conventional of a title.
Rylee: It’s so compelling. It’s the kind of title that makes you want to know, what is the history behind this. I believe we have one final question.
Sofia: I don’t personally believe in writer’s block, but I do believe in writer’s obstacles. What were the obstacles you encountered in writing this beautiful piece of work?
Professor Pelizzon: If I find the right form, I can write about anything. But figuring out the form that a poem will take takes time. I’ll spend 10 years on a poem, right? It did take ten years to get it into print. I had material, and some of the language, but sometimes it’s just not jelling because it’s not in the right form yet. I have to trust sometimes that it will take me a long time, but if I can, I try not to rush it. I work at it steadily, and I will find the right form.