O'Connor's reading will take place at 7pm, September 15 via Zoom. Register here to view.
Stadler Center: As Associate Director of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets, what's something that you've learned from working with emerging young writers?
Deidre O'Connor: This is easy to answer: I always learn more from them than they could possibly realize. Whether it’s learning about the poets they read and admire, watching how they absorb, discard, and/or experiment with various traditions, or observing how their identities and political commitments shape the choices they make as young writers—I’m always learning, both as a reader and as a writer. And I also learn more about contemporary culture from them—music, books, Netflix, what it’s like to be a young artist living in L.A. or rural Georgia or wherever.
SC: How has Bucknell's Writing Center evolved to accommodate students working remotely this semester? What do you think this says about the process of writing and learning to write well?
DO: Last March, we had to switch from our traditional in-person consultations to virtual sessions that use Zoom and shared Google docs, and we’re continuing to hold virtual sessions this semester. While we’ve lost some of what we love about working in person—the ability to respond to writers’ body language, for example—we’ve also discovered that some of our consultants and the writers they work with love working virtually. Sharing Google docs makes it easy to highlight text, and communicating one-on-one via Zoom is not as challenging as it can be to do with a large group.
Generally speaking, writers benefit enormously from getting “live” feedback from honest, caring reader-listeners, and we’ve found we can provide that to them online. I’m talking about all kinds of writing, by the way, not just creative writing. By offering feedback, we hope to help writers revise their work and to learn that writing well really means re-writing well. Also, given the pandemic and the requirement that we all maintain distance from each other, I think writing may feel more important to many of us than ever. Who isn’t writing more emails and texts these days? It all counts as practice in writing, and I suspect it may help students develop their skills even more than they would in “normal” times. All this extra writing may help students tailor their writing to suit new contexts.
SC: What can readers expect from your new book of poetry,
The Cupped Field?
DO: I admit that I always have a hard time knowing how to characterize my work, but I think readers will find that
The Cupped Field engages with experiences of and questions about time, place, identity, and grief, about nearness and distance and loss. It does so, I hope, through language that makes some of these experiences feel palpable and relevant to others. I didn’t realize until I put the book together as a whole that many of the poems rely on or play with traditional forms (for example, sonnets, or almost-sonnets), and that I’d actually internalized many of the forms I learned (and often resisted) as an undergraduate. In a way, I think the book, as a whole, foregrounds both pain (whether experienced and imagined) and beauty, and sort of keeps being surprised that they coexist. It’s hardly a new idea, but it’s something I keep discovering and reminding myself most days.
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Alexandra Schneider for The Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts
