As part of our mission to promote authors, the joy of reading, and to help independent booksellers, The Book Jam has paired with the The Norwich Bookstore in Norwich, Vermont to present an ongoing series entitled “3 Questions”. In it, we pose three questions to authors with upcoming visits to the bookstore. (We have a rotating list of six possible questions to ask just to keep things interesting.) Their responses are posted on The Book Jam during the days leading up to their engagement. Our hope is that this exchange will offer insight into their work, will encourage readers to attend these special author events, and ultimately, will inspire some great reading.
This “3 Questions” features two poets Elizabeth Powell and Chelsea Woodard. These award winning poets have authored numerous volumes of poetry. Both authors will visit the Norwich Bookstore in Norwich, Vermont at 7 pm on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 to discuss poetry and their latest collections. The event is free and open to the public. However, reservations are recommended as space is limited. Call 802-649-1114 or email info@norwichbookstore.com to save your seat.
Elizabeth A. I. Powell’s second book Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances won the Robert Dana Prize in poetry. A Pushcart Prize winner, Ms. Powell has also received a Vermont Council on the Arts grants and a Yaddo fellowship. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, Harvard Review, Handsome, Hobart, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Slope, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, Post Road, and elsewhere. Born in New York City, she has lived in Vermont since 1989 with her four children.
1.What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?
Galway Kinnell’s Selected Poems….my grandmother gave it to me and the musicality and lyricism combined with the depth of meaning and metaphor totally blew my mind permanently as a 15 year old. Prior to reading that book, I had the usual suspects, and I had spent my young childhood listening to a record album called something like “The Wit of John F. Kennedy”, and I think listening endlessly and obsessively to that gave me a real sense of tuning in to speech patterns and cadences.
Also, I like what Charles Simic says about good lines of poetry, that they are like good jokes in phrasing and timing. I grew up also listening to a lot of Groucho Marx and Richard Pryor. The Book of Lists was also important. I love list poems now.
But in terms of books, JD Salinger’s Nine Stories was and is important to my sensibility, how to come at the truth from an angle.
As a young person I loved Ernest Hemingway’s The Nick Adams Stories. It showed me the perfect sentence. It taught me “that everything is 7/8 below the surface.”
2.What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why?
Walt Whitman because he contains multitudes and I like that!
3.What books are currently on your bedside table?
- Adam Johnson Fortune Smiles
- Eileen Myles I Must Be Living Twice, and,
- I’m re-reading an old fav. Denis Johnson Jesus’ Son
Chelsea Woodard received her MFA from the Johns Hopkins University and her PhD from the University of North Texas. She earned a BA in Visual Arts and English from Union College. Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Southwest Review, Best New Poets, Blackbird, 32 Poems and other journals. She currently teaches in New Hampshire where she lives with her husband, Pete.
1.What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?
Probably Anthony Hecht. From everything I’ve heard, he was incredibly wise and dignified, and I think his writing is imbued with such grace, intelligence, and gravitas. Also sadness. I would love to sit and talk with him about life, or history, or writing. He was one of the great greats. I wish I could have met him. Second would be Geoffrey Chaucer.
3.What books are currently on your bedside table?
A creative nonfiction book called We Are as Gods by Kate Daloz, about the back to the land movement in the 1970s. A friend recommended her book, and I went to her talk in Peterborough this summer––it’s a fascinating and vivid story. Caki Wilkinson’s most recent book, The Wynona Stone Poems, The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales (which I have not started but am looking forward to), Gene Weingarten’s collection, The Fiddler in the Subway, and The Last Illusion, by Porochista Khakpour.
