Road Trip: Joan Larkin

In 2010, Ali Liebegott took a road trip by train. Destination: the Emily Dickinson house. Along the way, she interviewed poets—Dorianne Laux, Marie Howe, CAConrad, and many more. We’ll be reposting the series to celebrate the release of Liebegott’s fourth book, The Summer of Dead Birds.

I first met Joan Larkin in the mid-90s when I was a student at Sarah Lawrence College. While she was never my teacher there we were put into contact and became friends who would walk our dogs together in Prospect Park in the mornings. Her poetry collections include Housework, A Long Sound, Cold River, Sor Juana’s Love Poems/Poemas de Amor (in Spanish and English, translated with Jaime Manrique), My Body: New and Selected Poems, Legs Tipped with Small Claws, and Blue Hanuman. I interviewed Joan Larkin in her Brooklyn apartment in Fall 2010.

—Ali Liebegott

I. Keeping Alive

THE BELIEVER: When did you first think of yourself as a writer?

JOAN LARKIN: Oh, from the beginning. I was a poem-writing child. I wrote little novels in my composition book when I was eight, nine years old.  My brother, Donald, who’s a science fiction novelist—Donald Moffitt—is eight years older than I am and he was the person who handed me books, art, music, and it was just an assumption—that was what I was going to do.

But when I got to college, Dan Hoffman—who’s still alive and writing in his late eighties [note: poet Daniel Hoffman died on March 30, 2013, a few days short of his 90th birthday]—was a teacher of mine, and he said to me, “Why don’t you concentrate on poetry?” I’d always read fiction and was still thinking I wanted to write novels. It wasn’t to be. I got some insight into why, when I asked Grace Paley during an interview, “Have you ever considered writing a novel?” and she said, “Oh, I’ve started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.”  I’m much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I’ve gotten very surgical about poems.

BLVR: [Laughs.]

JL: I love stories, but writing fiction is another craft and I don’t feel as if I have it.

BLVR: Have you published stories?

JL: No. Only poems.

BLVR: And essays, right?

JL: So far, mainly book reviews. I’ve taught in low-residency programs, and almost every semester for more than a decade, I’ve given a talk; I keep telling myself that I should transcribe them. Last January I gave a talk about the tension between needing solitude to write and the importance of having poetic peers...