Hanna Andrews is the New York-based writer whose work is featured in our next issue. Learn a little more about her here!
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P: Introduce yourself.
HA: I am a poet and an editor, originally from New York. In the past ten years, I’ve also spent time living in Oakland, CA and Chicago. I currently live in Brooklyn and work as an editor at the Academy of American Poets. I am also co-editor of Switchback Books, and teach at Fordham University.
These days, I am mostly interested in writing prose poems, using an historically narrative structure to contain that which is not necessarily narrative in the traditional sense. The space of the poem creates a new dimension where rules don’t always apply– a prose poem, to me, can be entirely non-linear, it can be a series of fragments, a snowglobe encapsulating a miniature world, a zoomed-in snapshot on one tiny detail.
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The latest cover from Switchback Books
P: What are your “greatest hits”?
HA: My #1 “greatest hit”, which I share with a few other fantastic women, is my press, Switchback Books. Switchback is a feminist poetry press publishing poetry by women, or woman-identified individuals. I co-founded Switchback with two poet friends in 2006, and we have published fantastic books by Monica de la Torre, Caroline Noble Whitbeck, Peggy Munson, Kathleen Rooney, Jessica Bozek, Marisa Crawford, and Jennifer Tamayo. We are currently working on our second project with Monica de la Torre, which will contain four short works of hers, and will be available in limited edition.
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P: Do you feel like you work with consistent themes and narratives in your writing?
HA: Yes! For about the past five years or more, I’ve been mostly writing about ideas of separation or loss. Not really in terms of grief, but more specifically the shifts that take place when things “come apart.” My first book, Slope Move, is a book-length poem entirely about separation–from an “other”, from the self (feeling divided, or having an alternate consciousness) and from narrative (the changes that occur in a story due to passage of time, shifts in perception, and ‘flaws’ in memory.)
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P: What’s your work set-up like? What’s your process like?
HA: My work set-up is non-existent, I’m afraid. I can’t really write at home. I actually prefer to write in public places–somehow, the business of people living their everyday lives creates the backdrop I like to work against. (That sounds as though I’m some sort of alien.) I like crowds and noise. I like feeling as though I need to carve out space from my surroundings. It makes working feel more active to me.
I am always in awe of those poets who compose entirely in their heads, and when the poem is ready to be written, it comes out more or less finished, whole. That is not my process at all. I often think of ideas while walking and need to stop to speak them into my phone or write them in a notebook. But those ideas or lines often sit around for a very long time before anything happens. More often than not, a poem is a philosophical problem–something I feel the need to chip away at. I’ll sit down fuzzy with the problem and won’t stop until I’ve reached some new level of understanding. I never write longhand–I’m always at a computer–and I don’t revise much at all because I don’t do much freewriting–I typically always revise each line as I’m writing it. I don’t move on to the next line until it’s “right.” This takes forever.
Switchback Books
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P: How have you noticed your work changing over the years?
HA: I’m currently working on a series of poems that are, in a way, post-loss. The poem that appears in Papirmasse from The Frames is part of that series. These poems definitely are working with loss from a vantage point of rebuilding– or amassing the fragments to make something altered, yet whole again. So I guess now I’m interested in looking at loss in a more concrete, less nebulous way. And less insular–these poems get by with a little help from their friends.
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P: Who or what are your biggest sources of inspiration?
Yayoi Kusama
HA: I am lucky enough to be writing during a time where there is a deep tradition of women writers to draw upon.
I also am lucky enough to write and work among so many talented poets–my friends constantly inspire me.
I am in a writing group and its members–Claire Donato, Caolan Madden, Becca Klaver, Krystal Languell, Lily Ladewig, and Marisa Crawford–are all out in the world doing fantastic things.
Right now, two of my biggest sources of inspiration are:
Yayoi Kusama: I think about and look at her work constantly. Her Infinity Nets and infinity (mirror) rooms floor me and I find myself thinking about them while writing.
Roland Barthes: I’ve been reading Camera Lucida, The Empire of Signs (FASCINATING!) and re-reading A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, which is the source-text inspiration for my series The Frames.
P: Got a favourite writer?
HA: This is a very difficult question. I have many! A few great loves: Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Cathy Park Hong, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, C.D. Wright, Joan Didion, Richard Siken, Nabokov, Anne Carson…etc. etc. etc.
P: What’s on your plate for the next year? Any new developments and exciting events?
HA: My first book, Slope Move, is forthcoming from Coconut Books in the fall of 2012! I’m very excited about it.
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SUBSCRIBE by November 10 if you would like to receive Hanna’s work.
For more from Hanna visit the Switchback Books website at www.switchbackbooks.com, or catch one of her blog posts at Hatching Supernovae.
