Q: Who are some of your favorite writers? Who has influenced or helped model your own writing?

A: There are so many poets whose work has been important to me. Some of my all-time favorites: Dickinson, Stevens, Plath. I've just finished reading Anne Carson's Decreation, Mary Gaitskill's novel Veronica, and Brenda Hillman's Loose Sugar.

Q: You teach at The New School in New York City. What drew you to the institution?

A: The New School has a wonderful creative writing program. It's smack in the middle of Greenwich Village so you get a real sense of the vibrancy of the literary community. Over 50 special events-readings, programs, panel discussions-take place every semester so a wide variety of acclaimed writers come through to read and speak throughout the year.

Q: It sounds like an exciting place to work. Do you enjoy being there?

A: I love teaching there—the students are dedicated and serious and the faculty are excellent, and the history of the place is so rich. Over the years New School faculty have included Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, Stanley Kunitz, May Swenson, and many others. The New School Writing Program offers an undergraduate concentration, an MFA degree, and a Summer Writers Colony.

Q: Orchidelirium is your first collection of poems. Is it an anthology of some of your earlier work or were all these poems composed together during a period of time?

A: The first two-thirds of the book were written over a ten-year period. The third section of the book-"Manhattan Fragments"-was written during the days, months and year following September 11th and added to the manuscript last, after the book had already been accepted for publication.

Q: What is the meaning behind sorting the poems into three sections?

A: The poems seemed naturally to sort themselves. Section 1 of the book details a daughter's coming of age during her mother's illness and after the mother's death, the poems of section 2 address the pleasures and x of love, marriage, and domestic life, and the poems in the final section register the griefs and anxieties of living in post 9/11 downtown Manhattan.

Q: When I read Orchidelirium, I found some poems to be more like stories and others more like pieces of art. For instance, "A Pair of Men's Briefs, Size 36" and "Traffic in West Hollywood" come across almost like prose in the way they tell a story. These contrast with poems such as "Sunday Afternoon" and "Bearing Down," which I found more abstractly emotional. What determines the style in which you write these? Could "Traffic" have been written in the style of "Bearing Down," or vice versa? And what propels you to compose a poem after some experiences? I am sure you have seen male underwear before and have dreamt many times on a Sunday afternoon. Why tell us about these instances?

A: You're right, the poems in the book are a mix of narrative and lyric. I was experimenting with style. When I wrote "Bearing Down," I was sitting in on a master class with David Trinidad at The New School in 1994 and he asked us to write a poem with very short lines. That's the gift of a workshop-you end up writing poems you would have never written otherwise because you're given an assignment, and then your range expands.

"A Pair of Men's Briefs, Size 36" is the oldest poem in the book-the puppy in the poem is now a very old dog. I still see this ex-puppy and his owner (no longer very boyish) in the neighborhood where I live. That poem wasn't written about a literal experience (finding a pair of men's underwear in my laundry basket). Rather, I wanted to use an image or metaphor that would enable exploration of sexual restlessness and longing.

The more I write the more interested I am in fragments, in poems that cut to the quick of a mood or experience rather than attempt to represent it fully for the reader. Certainly a poem like "Traffic in West Hollywood" could be compressed into a shorter lyric, and it might make a better, more interesting poem-for example, now that I look at it, the last three stanzas of the poem could probably stand on their own. That's probably what I would do with it now. The new poems I am writing, a series of Nocturnes-middle of the night, mid-winter, insomniac poems-are all much sparer. The looser, associative style and fragmented quality of these poems is more interesting to me at the moment.

Q: What kind of poems are you working on now?

A: The more I write the more interested I am in fragments, in poems that cut to the quick of a mood or experience rather than attempt to represent it fully for the reader. The new poems I am writing, a series of Nocturnes-middle of the night, mid-winter, insomniac poems-are all much sparer. The looser, associative style and fragmented quality of these poems is more interesting to me at the moment.

Q: Why do you enjoy giving readings of your work?

A: I love to give readings because it's a nice way to reach readers and feel connected to a larger literary community. Lately I've been using readings as a sort of deadline by which to finish a series of new poems, so I'll be reading some poems from my new manuscript, Nocturnes, as well as a selection from my first book.

[End.]

About the subject: Deborah Landau is the Assistant Chair of the Writing Program and has taught literature and creative writing at The New School since 1995. Dr. Landau received her Ph.D. from Brown University, where she was a Javits Fellow and specialized in 19th and 20th Century Poetry. Her first collection of poems, Orchidelirium, a National Poetry Series finalist, won the 2003 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and can be purchased onAmazon.. Her poems and articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Columbia, Grand Street, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, and American Literature, and she received a Pushcart Prize nomination. She co-curates the KGB Poetry Reading Series.

NB: This interview was conducted during a visit Landau paid to Boston University for a reading sponsored by the University Professors Program poetry series in 2006. It originally appeared on the Boston Poetry Union webpage, in a new obsolete Features section. We reprint it in this issue for the benefit of our readers whose interests bear on literary matters in general and on contemporary poetry specifically.