The Beatrice Interview

Leslea Newman

"Writing a love poem is like taking a photo of a sunset."


interviewed by Ron Hogan



P L A N E T O U T

Leslea Newman has been writing poems since she was a little girl; her first published work was a poem in Seventeen magazine. She studied poetry at Naropa and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,with Allen Ginsberg and other well-known poets, and in 1980 published her first chapbook, Just Looking For My Shoes. In 1987, a larger collection called Love Me Like You Mean It followed, then Sweet Dark Places in 1991, and she recently completed The Buddy Poems, a cycle of poems about a lesbian whose best friend dies of AIDS.

Her 1996 anthology My Lover is a Woman (Ballantine) collects poems from several poets. There were no restrictions placed on the material or subject matter. "They wanted a collection of lesbian poems," she says, "and that's what they got," with no compromises for mainstream sensibilities. Newman is pleased with the results, and with the total support that Ballantine has given the project. We spoke on the eve of a nationwide tour, during which local poets would appear with her in each town and read their work.

RH: How did this anthology get started?

LN: An editor at Ballantine Books thought of the project and asked me if I wanted to do it, which was a great honor, and also slightly terrifying. After preparing a book proposal, which was accepted, I went about selecting poems.

RH: Tell us about your selection process.

LN: What I did was collect poems by writing to poets that I knew who I wanted to have involved. Then I read through all the lesbian poetry that I could find in single- writer collections, anthologies, literary and lesbian magazines, then put out calls for material in lesbian magazines and writers' magazines. After I acquired a big pile of material, I split that into "Yes", "No" and "Maybe" piles.

The open call in magazines swamped me, but I got several writers who had never been collected before, some who had never been published. But it meant reading through literally pounds of poetry.

RH: Let's talk about some of the criteria involved in your selections.

LN: I was looking for beautiful poetry, with an emphasis on the literary quality of the work, from a diverse group of women. What surprised me was the range of experiences contained in the book. When I tell people it's a love poem anthology, they expect hearts and flowers, but there's aging and death and illness in the book. There's poems about homophobia, about being a parent, all kinds of things, and all written within the last 25 years.

RH: One of your male friends commented, as you note in your introduction, that you had found so much good lesbian poetry.

LN: Little did he know that that comment would end up in the book.

RH: Were you surprised by how much good poetry you found while collecting for the anthology?

LN: Absolutely not. I expected it and actually I got many many more good poems than I could use. The book is much longer than we had originally contracted for, because there were poems I couldn't leave out.

I was thrilled to find so many fresh images, amazing language usage in many of the poems. Writing a love poem is like taking a photo of a sunset: it's been done ten million times, so it's difficult to do it in a unique way. And these poets were able to do that. What worked for me the most were those poems that were specific -- dealing with specific characters and specific situations. That quality made them more human to me, more universal. I was happy to see that there are poems that were written in form. There are sonnets, a villanelle, a rondelle; there's no sestina, which I tried very hard to find, but unfortunately wasn't able to. Still, even the poems not written in classical form had many powerful images in them.

BEATRICE Suggested further reading
Edmund White | Madison Smartt Bell

All materials copyright © 1997 Ron Hogan