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NICOLE TALLMAN by
C A R I DA D M O R O - G R O N L I E R
What books are you reading right now? Way too many to list here, but everything I’m reading right now is Sylvia Plath. I’m re-reading her Collected Poems; I’m re-reading Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark, which I think is the best biography I’ve ever read, period. I’m all things Sylvia right now, for research purposes. I’m trying to get back into her headspace for a horror novel I’m working on.
If you could have a conversation with any writer living or dead, who would it be and what would you ask them? My answer is going to be so obvious here, but it’s Sylvia Plath. You know, there weren’t a lot of interviews of her published when she was alive, so I’d really like to ask her about craft. I’d like to ask her how she approaches her poems, how she works each poem. She didn’t talk a whole lot about craft, but toward the end of her life she gave an interview in which she said that the poems in her first book of poetry, The Colossus, bored her. She said she couldn’t stand the poems anymore because she’d learned that she must read her poems out loud for them to sound right, and she hadn’t done that with The Colossus because she had written those poems specifically for the page. Sylvia applied that lesson to the Ariel poems, of which she said something along the lines of, “I must say them out loud, I must sing them! I’m in love with these poems because I can hear them now.” That really stuck with me because you can hear the musicality evolve between The Colossus and Ariel, and that was her craft taking shape. That interview was an important lesson for me — if you’re going to write the poems down, you have to say them aloud because otherwise you’re missing so much of it.
You are organizing a literary dinner party. Who do you invite? Well, I think six-eight people is the perfect number for a dinner party, so I’m going to keep it small. Are you ready for this? I’m going to say you, me, and Richard (Blanco) along with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck. We
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