[originaltext]M: In My Poets, you write about attending readings, and socializi

M: In My Poets, you write about attending readings, and socializing with writers, and the energy or tension of those face-to-face encounters—but in interviews, you’ve also said that you think that it’s "a tremendous gift to be lonely in poetry." Could you talk about that?
W: I really think this comes down to one’s temperament. Other writers are much more readily sociable creatures. [6] They feel there’s a kind of continuity between their writing life and their social life. I never experienced things that way at all.
M: Could you tell us why?
W: For me, poetry was not a zone about professionalization or networking. There are many, many different kinds of writerly engagement, but I feel that people should be given permission not to engage. [7] There’s so much pressure to find a community, and one wants a community—but community may not come from the people organizing the poetry reading. It might be found among the folk musicians, playing down there in the street. A community for poets is not necessarily other living poets.
M: Another question. How do you arrange the poetry in your books? I notice that they’re all divided into sections, and all end with a concluding part.
W: My last two books, for instance, This Blue, have central sections that speak to a complex set of associations with particular places. It’s also the case that some of the poems are so strongly voiced that if I were to begin with them, people might think the entire book is in that one mode, and I wanted to avoid that. And I often write sequences. So I almost think of the sections more musically.
M: Mmm, mmm.
W: And I’m interested in ushering people through a series of mental and tonal landscapes, of sound- and thought-worlds. For good or ill, my books have not tended to be that narrative.
M: Is this the reason that each section has a concluding part?
W: [8] I think a concluding stanza marks a kind of "sending forth of the book" to the world. It also allows you to back away from something, to modulate out of certain kinds of intensities, and to gesture maybe to something in the future. It can either restate a note, or it can refer to something more broadly.
M: Do you have a particular approach to reading your own poetry aloud?
W: [9-1] Well, you can get locked into your own sense of things, and your way may not be the best way to read that poem. You can get a little muscular contraction on your face. One doesn’t want to have facial tics, one doesn’t want things to be routinized, and I think about that. [9-2] Sometimes people are surprised by my reading. I remember a poet said to me, "Oh, your poems are a lot funnier than I thought they were"—he was being very nice, but I didn’t know how to take that!
M: Hahaha. OK. Maureen, thank you so much for being with us today.
W: Pleasure.
6. What did Maureen think about socializing with writers?
7. What was Maureen’s view about a community for poets?
8. Why did her sections have concluding stanzas?
9. What did Maureen think about her way of poetry reading?
10. What is the interview mainly about?