Interviewed by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
J. Allyn Rosser’s most recent 
collection of poems is Foiled
Again. Among her awards are the Wood and Bock Prizes from Poetry, the Peter I.B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, and fellowships from the NEA and the Lannan Foundation. In 2010-11 she was received a
Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches
in the creative writing program at Ohio University, where she edits New
Ohio Review
.
Q: What poetic form do you think doesn't get as much love as it should?
A: I think the most unfairly neglected form is the nonce. It’s more interesting (and almost always better for the poem) to invent your own form, or quasify an existing one, and then shred the template when the poem is done. Every poem should dictate the cubits and timber of its ark.
Q: What poetic form do you wish people would just get over?
A:
The
form
people
should just please
get over is the
freaking boring Fibonacci.
I mean that is so early April 2006.
Q: I know you've been working on some fiction recently, so if you could live in the diegesis of any novel for a day, which one would it be?
A: What diegesis would I like to live in for a day: Glubdubdrib, where Lemuel Gulliver met with magicians who could summon the ghosts of historical figures who then set the facts straight. But as with any world, I’d definitely limit my visit to a day or two, at most a fortnight, then go back to having my facts crooked.
Q:
What kind of child were you?
A: I was the kind of child
who was so desperately incapable of believing in imaginary friends that I
publicly pretended to have them. I made up a small stable of
friends—talking animals, mostly—that I occasionally mentioned to my parents
and actual friends to watch for their reaction. I figured imaginary
friends would be incredibly handy to have, and that people looked at you with a
mildly alarmed curiosity and respect if you interacted with your pookah or
whatever form the friend took. But I just couldn’t actually perform the
rituals, behave as if they really existed. This has extended itself
perhaps by leading to my chosen métier, since in the act of composing a poem
the reader is a figment of the purest and loneliest part of your soul.
There’s another word I have trouble with. Maybe the soul is the original imaginary friend.
Q:
What is your relationship with rejection like?
A: My relationship with Rejection is pretty tense. He’ll probably dump me for sharing this, but here’s a typical intimate dialogue:
R: You always take what I say so personally. That’s a sign of vanity, you know.
Me: There you go judging me again.
R: I’m just saying.
Me: Go lick your own eyebrows.
R: Aw, baby, don’t be that way. Take the chain off the door.
Me: Sure, like last time.
R: Why won’t you trust me? Just let me in, and we’ll crack open this nice cold bottle of Chateau Tout-ce-que-tu-veux and –
Me: No, you always do that. Once you take me in your arms I’ll catch you glancing at your cell, or the TV remote…
R: Never. That was your imagination.
Me: Actually I have a fine time with my imagination. He’s both hung and good-hearted. He’s going to run away with me.
R: That phony? He just tells you what you want to hear. I’ll always tell it to you straight, babe.
Me: How romantic. Can’t you just once be completely happy with me? At least pretend to be?
R: I told you, it’s never personal.
Me: It’s always personal. Wipe your feet please.
R: Well, who personified me in the first place? I would have been fine to stay a brick wall, a glass ceiling, a cold wind in a vacant lot, a pair of ragged—
Me: Shut up and kiss me.
R: No. Nope. Not when you ask me like that.
Q: If you were single, which poem's speaker would you want to date?
A: If I were single, I’d like to date Frank O’Hara’s speaker in “Having a Coke with You.” But I strongly doubt he’d want to date me.
Q: Which poem's speaker would you want your daughter to date?
A: I’d let my daughter date Thomas Campion’s speaker in “There Is a Garden in Her Face.” But only because I know she wouldn’t want to date him.
Q: What was the greatest surprise for you in your most recent writing?
A: My greatest surprise in my most recent writing? That I was writing at all. I’m always surprised when I’m compelled to write. It’s not like suddenly wanting to jump up or dance to a song that comes over the radio or to call someone or run down a hill or laugh, it’s not like suddenly being hungry and heading for the fridge. Writing still strikes me as an exotic, eccentric impulse: you have this powerful sense of an imminent opening of a Brigadoon curtain into some other dimension, a revelation, a rare and heightened experience of consciousness; you believe you’re about to find a long-lost piece of the cosmic puzzle, and you reach for a pen to record this event and your experience of it. But it hasn’t happened yet. It doesn’t happen until you start recording it. Whoa.
Q: The job you’d want to have—other than writer, teacher.
A: The job I wanted when I was four was that of garbage collector. These rowdy guys would come jouncing along on the back of a big truck, hanging off the back with one arm, which no one else in the world was allowed to do, and they’d be whooping and joking and singing song refrains (never the whole song, too much work). They’d swing down and dump the trashcans and then just hurl the empties onto the lawns any old way, take that, and hop back on the truck and the gears would grind and you’d hear their voices hollering robustly as they roared out of sight to the next lucky neighborhood…. Seemed like heaven to me. Since then I’ve matured. Now I’d like to be Apollo. I mean I’d like to be working in the research lab that finally figures out how to make cheap, efficient, compact solar panels. Harness the sun.
Q: What is the question you wish people would ask about your work?
A: Why don’t people ever ask, “Do you write things that don’t make me think of Shakespeare at his best, Dickinson at her most uncannily slant? I mean are there poems you write that would not make Hardy weep, or that wouldn’t drive Frost to bite his knuckles? That is, do you ever write such poems and decide not to publish them? Is that why I haven’t seen them?”
* * *
About the Interviewer: Jennifer Schomburg Kanke is a PhD student at Florida State University and currently serves as Poetry Editor of The Southeast Review. Previously, she worked for nine years in higher education administration doing anything from shuffling paperwork to organizing the homecoming parade at a large state university. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fugue, The Laurel Review, Rattle, and Earth's Daughters.