{"id":645,"date":"2015-06-23T14:01:48","date_gmt":"2015-06-23T18:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/?p=645"},"modified":"2015-06-23T14:01:48","modified_gmt":"2015-06-23T18:01:48","slug":"mar-asks-wendy-cannella-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/mar-asks-wendy-cannella-answers\/","title":{"rendered":"MAR Asks, Wendy Cannella Answers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Wendy<\/a>
Wendy Cannella<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wendy Cannella\u2019s poetry has appeared in Phoebe<\/em>, Free Lunch, <\/em>and Southern Indiana Review<\/em>; her article \u201cAngels and Terrorists\u201d is featured in The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn <\/em>(Syracuse University Press). She earned her MFA from Vermont College, PhD from Boston College, and has taught at Boston College and Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in Coastal Maine with her husband and two daughters. Her prose poem, \u201cImmortality,\u201d appears in MAR <\/em>35.1.<\/p>\n

Quick! Summarize your poem in 10 words or fewer. Extra points if your answer rhymes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Will I receive partial credit for a haiku?<\/p>\n

To live forever
\nis to endure much housework;
\nconsider a maid!<\/p>\n

What can you share about this piece prior to its MAR publication?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cImmortality\u201d represents my first attempt at a prose poem. The subject begged this particular shape, demanded it, really, the way a clean shirt demands to be folded squarely. The concept arose through dialogue and scraps of drifting commentary, and involves more quotations than I would ever dare press upon a lyric poem.<\/p>\n

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I thought, oh no, does this mean I have to write more prose poems<\/em>? There is something in me that, like the speaker of \u201cImmortality,\u201d just might equate a long prison sentence with a long prosaic sentence, especially one I myself have written.<\/p>\n

I also thought, wow<\/em>, this is the journal I have loved since encountering Stephen Dunn\u2019s poem about seagulls in its pages in the mid-1990s (what I have long considered to be the greatest decade of all time, a belief recently made official in the New York Times<\/a><\/em>).<\/em> That poem by Dunn is titled \u201cRadical\u201d and ends like this:<\/p>\n

Then the gulls began quarreling
\nas if what was happening
\ncould be a matter of opinion,
\nbut they were merely experts,
\nthere every morning, not to be trusted.<\/p>\n

Merely experts<\/em>. I love that paradox, and I was hooked on MAR.<\/p>\n

What was the best feedback you received on this piece?
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

A good friend told me that after reading \u201cImmortality\u201d she now dumps her clean silverware, unsorted, into a kitchen drawer. So, poems can<\/em> bring change.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re at a family reunion and some long-lost relative asks about your writing. What do you say?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh, I see you haven\u2019t met my young children yet\u2026<\/p>\n

Do you have another favorite piece of writing in this MAR issue? If so, name it and tell us why.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I find myself returning repeatedly to Jennifer Sweeney<\/a>\u2019s piece, \u201cParenthetical at 35.\u201d The poem performs a number of remarkable balancing acts, not the least of which is its form\u2014which teeters between stanza and paragraph, lyric and narrative. The question of form is related to the poem\u2019s problem of the parenthetical, as Sweeney writes: \u201cWhat to place in this raw absence, this [\u2026].\u201d I love a poem unafraid to tell its own story and this one is spoken by a central \u201cI\u201d who is wise enough to step aside and allow the poem\u2019s own logic to determine how events unfold. In this way, the \u201cI\u201d occasionally gives way to information which seems to rise up from the groundswell of the speaker\u2019s world: \u201cFor headaches, feverfew. For cold womb, false Unicorn root. To ward off hibernating insects, Osage oranges in the windowsills. For twin ghosts, divide fire in two equal parts.\u201d By the end of the poem, the reader must go back to the beginning to understand just what is missing, what is finished.<\/p>\n

Thanks for the interview, Wendy!
\n<\/em><\/strong>Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wendy Cannella\u2019s poetry has appeared in Phoebe, Free Lunch, and Southern Indiana Review; her article \u201cAngels and Terrorists\u201d is featured… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contributor-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":649,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions\/649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}