B M-S: You are currently involved in writing a novel. Do you find this process helped or hindered by your work as a poet? How important is poetic language in the writing of this book?
PB: My poetry has always been about communicating stories - so in this sense a novel seems like a natural progression. It's hard though, because as a poet I am always looking for the most economical way to communicate things. I build around a central image or images. So sometimes I find myself being too eliptical in the writing of the novel. Or too compact. I then have to go back and stretch things out. I think it was Stanley Elkin who said that there are two kinds of writers, those that take things out and those that put things in. In writng this novel I definitely belong to the second category. I have to remind myself to expand things all the time. The language of the novel is extremely important. Yes, it's poetic, I can't get away from that and sometimes I find myself plagiarising my own work - using phrases from my poems in my novel. I'll probably have to go through at the end and comb all these out.
B M-S: Influences?
PB: Emily Dickenson, Michael Ondaatje (his novels not his poetry), Charles Simic, Federico Garcia Lorca, Mark Rothko, Andrei Tarkovsky, Pablo Neruda.
B M-S: That seems rather ecletic combo.
PB: Yes
B M-S: What is poetry for?
PB: I simply see it as a means of communication - a way of expressing ideas.
B M-S: Does the fact you are a woman make the writing and/or publishing of poetry easier or harder? Do you rebel against or embrace the designation, "woman poet"?
PB: Labels like "woman poet" are limiting and fatuous. I don't even really like the word "poet". I prefer to just say that I'm a writer then people can inquire further if they wish. But of course I can't escape the fact that being a woman shapes my experience which then comes out in my work... I'm also very much aware of gender when I write. I like to keep a balance between the poems I write about a male character and those I write about a woman. Sometimes grammar gets in the way. It's difficult to write about two women, for example, or two men, unless you actually give them names. So this means that I write more poems about the dynamics between men and women than I otherwise might.
