Smith Creative Writers Reading Series: Henrietta Goodman

Contributed

Ahead of her reading at Penn State Behrend this Thursday, poet Henrietta Goodman sat down with Gemma Malone, a BFA student in Behrend's Creative Writing Program to discuss her work, her influences, and her professional trajectory.

THURSDAY, OCT. 3

Henrietta Goodman's newest book of poems is Antillia (University of Nebraska Press, 2024). She is the author of three other poetry collections, including the sonnet-sequence All That Held Us, which won the 2018 John Ciardi Award and was published by BkMk Press. Her first book, Take What You Want, won the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books and was published in 2007. She has published poems and essays in The New England Review, New Ohio Review, Terrain, The American Journal of Poetry, and many other journals.

Gemma Malone, a junior in the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Behrend, interviewed poet Henrietta Goodman in anticipation of her visit to Behrend as part of the Smith Creative Writers Reading Series. Goodman will read from her work on Thursday, Oct. 3rd, at 6:00 p.m. in the Metzgar building. For more information visit: behrend.psu.edu/readings

Gemma Malone (GM): What led you to poetry? When did you start writing, and when did you decide to commit to this as a career?Henrietta Goodman (HG): When I was twelve or thirteen, I started writing song lyrics. I wanted to be a singer. This was the only "career goal" I could ever imagine—I would be in a band, I would write songs, I would be very weird and very cool. In my freshman year of college, I had no declared major and no sense of what I might do with my college degree, but I did have a growing interest in poetry, solidified by my experience in an elective creative writing class in which I learned that I had a talent for writing poems. This somewhat compensated for my disappointment that I had very little talent for singing, and I soon declared my English major, joined the staff of my undergraduate literary magazine, and began to see myself as a poet. 

GM: I read some of your series of animal-inspired poems. I particularly enjoyed "Raccoon." What led to making this series? Do you have a personal favorite?

HG: The animal poems are part of a dual-alphabet of animal acrostic poems that my friend Ryan Scariano and I wrote as a collaborative project. (I wrote one alphabet of poems—one animal poem for each letter—and he wrote another). This project was Ryan's idea, and it was recently published by Bottlecap Press as a chapbook called Flicker Noise. The "Raccoon" one is one of my favorites too!

GM: When researching your poetry, I found a few of your Gretel poems from Take What You Want, your first poetry collection, and I thought each one that I read was compelling in its own way (Gretel, Gretel in the Tunnel, Gretel Reconsiders). What attracted you to this character in particular? Do you still revisit Gretel?

HG: Ever since I read Anne Sexton's fairy tale poems from her book Transformations in college, I've been interested in contemporary rewritings of fairy tales. When I wrote the first Gretel poem, I was in the middle of a divorce and had fallen in love with someone new. The new relationship felt innocent and beautiful (it was my first intense experience with romantic, passionate, mutual love, despite the fact that I had been married previously) but also taboo (because the new relationship developed as my marriage was ending), and I identified both of these qualities with the story of Hansel and Gretel—except in my version, Hansel became a lover rather than a brother. 

I did revisit the Gretel character in a poem in my new book, Antillia. The poem is called "Gretel Returns." When I was working on my first book, which has five of the Gretel poems in it, I spent five months at the Marjorie Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency on the Rogue River in southwestern Oregon. I was alone there in a cabin on ninety-two acres of private land surrounded by BLM and Forest Service land. I had no electricity or phone, and the drive to the closest town, Grants Pass, took two hours. I had started the Gretel series before going to the residency, and while I was there I began to think about how, in the original story of Hansel and Gretel, it's the witch who lives alone in a little cabin in the woods. So, was I Gretel, or was I the witch? Was I both? A few years ago, I was very lucky to get to go back to the Boyden Residency property, and I spent three weeks there as an older and more capable, less terrified person. That was when I wrote the "Gretel Returns" poem, while thinking about how much had changed since my experience at the residency seventeen years before—about how growth and loss are intertwined. I felt so much regret about the past and so much sympathy for the version of myself I had been then.

GM: You are visiting Behrend as a poet, but your areas of expertise include other genres as well. I was intrigued by the mentions of American Western literature and memoir in your biography; do these other genres influence your poetry (and vice versa), or do you approach each genre in a different way?

HG: Because I've lived in Montana for over thirty years (and because I wrote my MA thesis on the poet James Galvin when I was a student at the University of Montana), I've developed an interest in literature of the American West and now teach a course on this subject at Rocky Mountain College, in Billings, Montana, where I live. So that's more of a reading interest. 

But memoir is both a reading and a writing interest. My third book, All That Held Us, is a memoir in the form of 48 linked Italian sonnets. I went back to free verse in Antillia, and some of the last poems I wrote for that book were quite long and could have become lyric essays, so as I've felt my writing going more and more in that direction, I've decided to let it. I love the flexibility of the lyric essay form—the usefulness of white space, the ability to depart from and return to individual threads, to braid them until they're both separate and not. The lyric essay is like poetry, but there's so much more room in it. I've started taking up more room while at the same time enjoying the freedom of not having to "explain" everything the way I might feel the need to in more conventional prose. 

GM: What is the most significant thing you have learned about writing throughout your career? Is there anything you wish you had realized sooner?

HG: I don't know whether this is the most significant thing, but I really appreciate how writing well involves being both concise and precise. I tend to overwrite, so I find it rewarding to see how much I can remove from anything I've written to make it better. Sometimes it's just a few words; sometimes entire sentences. I love that process of removing unnecessary stuff to get to what's most necessary. 

If I had gone directly into a PhD program after getting my MFA, I would have had a different career trajectory. At the time, the MFA in creative writing was still thought of as a terminal degree, so I considered getting a PhD but instead stayed in Missoula, where I earned my MFA, and worked in a bookstore, did some adjunct teaching at UM, and got married and had a child. If I had left Missoula to get a PhD, I probably would have published my first book sooner, and I definitely would have gotten a tenure-track job sooner. But then I wouldn't have had the life I've had, and I can't wish to undo that. 

GM: What are you working on now?

HG: I'm working on a book-length memoir about my mother, who died a couple of years ago. She was an unusual person, a mystery to me in many ways. We weren't especially close, but I was an only child, so I now have all of her personal papers and photos. She was from a very proper Southern family, but her life took some odd turns, and I found out in sorting through her papers that she wrote several songs for the soundtrack of a soft-porn movie made in 1969 by the notorious LA porn director Carlos Tobalina. She wrote these songs with a guy named Frank, whom she'd mentioned occasionally as a "friend," but with whom she'd clearly had a serious relationship before she met my father. So the memoir is investigative journalism in a way. I'm investigating her history, but also my own.