Award-Winning Poet Idra Novey

Idra Novey has received awards, from the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Series, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the PEN Translation Fund. Read our interview with this world renowned poet!

Commitment:  You have received a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship and in 2008 you won first place in the Poets and Writers 2008 Awards, and your book, The Next Country, received honorable mention in the Virginia Quarterly Review's Top 10 Poetry Books of 2008. What are you working on now?

Idra Novey:  I’m at work on a new book of poems connected to my experience the last three years teaching at a women’s prison.   The book has morphed into an exploration of prisons everywhere, how people relate to them, what happens to prisons when they close, all sorts of things.  Most recently, I’ve been writing about a prison on a Brazilian island that’s now a center for marine biology students. 

Commitment:  When did you first begin writing poetry?

Idra:  I remember writing poems at night in middle school, but the last time I was at my parents’ house I found a journal of mine from fourth grade with rather hapless imitations of Emily Dickinson.  I don’t remember reading Emily Dickinson in elementary school, but clearly her poems left an impression, if they led to all those imitations.

Commitment:  What advice do you have for aspiring poets?

Idra:  To read widely and passionately.  Poetry from other countries and other centuries.  Poetry that speaks to you immediately and poetry that doesn’t.  If you read widely, it opens up so many new possibilities for what might happen in your own work. 

Commitment:  Do you think President Obama's decision to include an inaugural poem by Elizabeth Alexander will result in increased interest in poetry?

Idra:  I think the current climate of uncertainty in the country may lead more people to poetry who wouldn’t read it otherwise.  Poetry requires an acceptance of uncertainties, and in a moment of uncertainty, there is nothing like reading a bold poem that gets right to the questions which, as you read them, feel like just the questions you’ve been stepping around in your thoughts for some time.  

Commitment:  As a graduate student at Columbia University you organized a political discussion group to counter what you saw as a lack of political involvement among students. Does your interest in politics find its way into your poetry?

Idra:  Absolutely. I read the news constantly.  I can’t imagine writing without taking into account the world around me.   

Commitment:  In The Next Country, “country” appears to mean more than a national entity. What is your definition of “country?”

Idra:  I see country as an entity larger than the self which casts a shadow over all the decisions a single person makes in a day.   If you grow up in the U.S., this country will influence the way you see the choices in your life, as will the country that is your family, or your marriage, or your roommates.  They all cast their shadows.  

Commitment:  You include a poem called “Trans” in The Next Country. What is it about the prefix “trans” that inspired you to write an entire poem about it?

Idra:  One day over a pot of tea, a friend and I talked about all the explosive words that began with “trans.” As a translator, I was particularly intrigued with the list we made and kept mulling over it until eventually some of the words found their way into a poem.

Commitment:  The Next Country features poems about locations in Central and South America, such as “Pausing Outside a House,” “The Need for Roots,” and “A MaÇa No Obscuro,” and poems about places in America such as “From the Small Book of Returns,” and “Scenes from Moving Vehicles, II.” How have your travels inspired your work?

Idra:  I love getting to know a country and the poetry people read there.  Every country has its enduring poets that get read and read again.  I love finding out who those poets are and what they mean to people in that country.    To be a writer feels most exciting when I’m outside the U.S. talking to people about poems that have stayed with them and I realize again what a universal, amazing thing it is to hear or read a poem and be stirred enough to remember it years later in a conversation with someone else who loves poems and lives all the way across the world.

Idra Novey's first collection of poems, The Next Country, was released in fall 2008. She's received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Series, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her poems have appeared in Slate, Paris Review, A Public Space, Ploughshares, and in the anthology Poem in Your Pocket, forthcoming this April. In 2007, a book of her translations of Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto, The Clean Shirt of It, was published with BOA Editions. Her translations and reviews appear in a number of publications, including BOMB, The Jerusalem Post, and The Believer.