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The Penguin employee book club chose a poetry collection this month in honor of National Poetry Month. The club read Love Comes First by Erica Jong and submitted these questions to the author. The resulting Q&A is here:
1. Where do you get your inspiration from when you write?
Inspiration is a very mysterious thing. Poems usually come with a first line or image and then I begin scrawling them in my notebook to see if they lead anywhere. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.
2. What is your poem writing process? And how does it differ from writing a fiction novel?
Writing poems is very different than writing fiction. With fiction you can push yourself to write the next chapter, whatever it may be. With poetry, you really have to wait for inspiration.
3. Are your poems written over a long period of time or did you specifically sit down and write poetry to be in a book?
The poems in Love Comes First were written over a 10 year period and I chose the very best of that period and left out others. Sometimes I’ll notice there’s a poem about a certain subject and then I’ll try to write about that subject, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
4. Your novels have drawn on your personal life; how does your poetry do this? Do you feel that your poetry or your novels are more emotionally revealing?
I think all writing is in some sense autobiographical; some writers transform their autobiographies so it’s not so obvious, but we all proceed from our own feelings.
5. At your recent reading at McNally Jackson Books you described poetry as the deepest expression and pointed out the American tendency to turn to poetry on only a handful of occasions, like when we fall in love or when someone dies. How might we bring more poetry and its deep expression into our lives?
Unfortunately, Americans have been frightened by poetry. It’s the habit of our critics to praise the most obscure poems. My poetry tends to be clear and accessible and that has always made people think it was not as worthy. But I think poetry can either be obscure or clear and it has nothing to do with its quality.
6. The concluding stanza of “In Vino Veritas” is striking. We are all reaching for “the dream,” and I would love to know the elixir that will help me grasp it. What is your elixir?
My elixir is poetry not wine. Wine is a fake elixir. It blocks out reality instead of going deeper into it.
Watch a video with Erica Jong:
Erica Jong, 
Love Comes First, 
poetry, 
Penguin Books
