An Interview with Rose Auslander (Poetry ’15)

Rose Auslander, a 2015 poetry alum, was recently interviewed for Carve Magazine. Read an excerpt below:

An Interview with Rose Auslander

What do you love most about writing poetry?

I love trying to spin the world into a web of words.  And I love those times when it feels like those words turn into a world of their own.

What subject matters are the toughest for you to tackle in your poetry? Which topics are you most drawn to?

I love living on the water, and my poetry is soaked in it.  For years, it was the ugly beautiful of the Gowanus Canal—the bright blue Carroll Street Bridge reflected in stinky, discolored waves.  These days, it’s Aunt Betty’s Pond on Cape Cod (I just typed “Cape Cold”) and its itinerant swans.

Hard as I try to find sanctuary, though, the political world seeps through. Writing that implicates politics is tough, but necessary—sadly unavoidable.  Honestly, though, it can be a struggle to avoid being didactic—essay, not poetry.  To get to anything real, I have to press where it hurts—into personal vulnerability and self implication.  When I back off and start feeling sorry for myself, I make myself come back to Seamus Heaney’s “Punishment,” studying how relentlessly he implicates himself and how he makes the reader feel complicit.  

Love is hard, too.  I don’t write many love poems—and the ones I do are more John Lennon than Paul McCartney.  There’s always a dark side.   

Read the rest of this interview here: https://www.carvezine.com/from-the-editor/talking-with-rose-auslander