Interview with Award-Winning Poet Anne Marie Macari

Award-winning poet Anne Marie Macari discusses how motherhood influences her poetry and how she finds inspiration in every day events.

Commitment: Many of the poems in your beautiful book of poetry, Gloryland, have feminine and feminist themes: motherhood; birth; breast feeding; marriage. What is it about womanhood that inspires your poetry?

Anne Marie Macari: I never planned to write poems about motherhood.  Like many women I thought that my own experiences as a woman/mother would lead to sentimental poems.  In my head I probably still heard the old voices that said women’s subjects were too “domestic,” not “universal,” not worthy.  

I wrote the first poem in the book, “Mary’s Blood,” because I could see that the subject of Mary as a woman, as a living mother who gave birth with her body, as we all do, was a subject that surprisingly hadn’t been touched.  Mary was still the Virgin, the pure vessel who’d never experienced a sexual union, who conceived and gave birth magically, as if her body had nothing to do with it.  Once I wrote that poem, a door opened and I felt I had access to all kinds of poems about being inside a woman’s body.  I had to write them.  Suddenly I understood that birth had to have been, at one time, our central myth, not death (as in Christianity).  And yet, that central rite, that miracle, had been demeaned in Genesis (when Eve is punished by God to suffer the pangs of childbirth); and then again, in the Gospels, birth is taken away from women and becomes an ethereal event driven and controlled by the male God.  In writing these poems I began to understand how distant I was from my own body, and how I’d kept my own female, essential experiences, at bay.  It became clearer and clearer to me as I was writing that the female body has so much cultural and religious baggage to carry around.  How is it possible for us to just be present inside ourselves without having to live up to the endless demands on us?  And the pressures seem to me to have gotten worse despite so many achievements in other areas for women.  We are more concerned than ever with constantly being physically attractive and young.  We seem now to never relax about our bodies, and mothers too are under ever expanding pressures to be home and in the world at once. 

After years of not thinking consciously about these issues, I am more and more inspired by the sacred feminine, which has no obvious place in our culture, but which exists anyway, as an underbelly, an undercurrent.  No wonder there are fervent cults of Mary—because we cannot live in a world that exiles the feminine so completely; we need more balanced world in which the female energies are as valued as the male.  My writing life now is always in search of that missing aspect.  It seems to me to be so invisible in our lives that we don’t even know how to explain or define it.

Commitment:: How have your own experiences as a mother influenced your work?

Anne Marie:  My experiences as a mother have been more than an influence on my work, they really have been deeply central to my work.  Maybe in part because I raised my three sons without much participation or support from their father, from whom I was separated early on, and who then died when the boys were in their teens.  I was the parent and my “motherhood” was something all encompassing.  It was a motherhood and fatherhood.  Many, many parents experience this.  I am not consciously writing about that these days, and yet the person I have become is so deeply indebted and informed by this quarter of a century I have spent being a mother, that how could it not continually inform my work at some level.  In my second book, Gloryland, it obviously was the energy and foundation of the poems.

Commitment: Many of your poems are about the physical aspects of being a woman. Is it important to understand how much of being a woman is physical?

Anne Marie:  Motherhood is physical.  That was such a huge awakening for me.  Because having been brought up with visions of the purity of motherhood (Mary again), the spiritual aspect of motherhood as something removed and transcendent, how could I know how very physical it would be?  From pregnancy to the birth process, to nursing, to chasing after little ones and getting no sleep, and on and on, it is a physical endeavor.  That doesn’t take away from the spiritual and emotional aspects of motherhood, in fact, it deepens those aspects.  But again, we are here, in bodies, women are reminded every month that we are tied to the earth, to the lunar cycle.  Why not be proud of that, why the need to sanitize every experience from birth to illness to death?  Think of how offended people get by women nursing in public.  That has to be the most insane taboo of our culture, especially when every magazine has advertisements for bras!  Every town has its strip bar.  Billboards, TV shows, they’re all full of breasts, but as long as those breasts are in the service of sex, it’s ok.  The minute it’s about motherhood, something as necessary and natural as nursing becomes “offensive.”  That’s a schizophrenic culture!

Commitment: When did you first start writing poetry?

Anne Marie:  I began writing when I was sixteen and a substitute teacher came to our class, she was a practicing poet herself, and she read Whitman aloud to us.  Maybe no other student in the class even paid attention.  But for me it was galvanizing and I knew I wanted to write poetry.  I had always been a reader, but suddenly I knew poetry was my calling. 

Commitment: What is the Gloryland of the title?

Anne Marie:  Although “Gloryland” comes from a spiritual that my son had learned at school and was singing around the house (I have a home in Gloryland that outshines the sun), the Gloryland of the poems began, over the time of writing the book, to transform from a far off heaven to the heaven of the body.  In writing the poems in that book it began to seem that being here, on earth, in these bodies, was enough of a miracle.  Somehow I hope that the title straddles both meanings and that readers come away from the book thinking of the body itself as a gloryland, whatever else might await us, whatever else we believe in as an afterlife, why not value what we have here and now.

Commitment: Some of your poems are about everyday acts: making soup, watching a duck in a lake, ironing a son's shirt. How do you find beauty in what seem like mundane events?

Anne Marie:  In the first two years that I was working on this book I also was taking care of someone who was sick, and my children were still quite young.  I had to make peace with being so tied to home, to my domestic life.  I had to accept it and not fight it or I would have gone crazy.  Out of that acceptance came a deeper appreciation of my home life, a sense that I didn’t have to resist it so much, I didn’t have to think I should be off doing something important in the world; what I was doing was important.  I love to cook, it’s important in our family to sit together at a table as often as possible and share a meal together.  To light candles every night.  In making peace with all of that I was able to find some internal quiet, some stillness from which to write, I was also able to use what was all around me, my everyday life, as my material.

Commitment: Reading your poetry, one realizes how much of loving a child is physical, from birth to nursing to preparing food to the primeval fear of harm coming to a child. Did you know that before you started writing the poems in Gloryland or is that something that came to you as you began to write? 

Anne Marie:  Writing Gloryland taught me so much, those poems gave me more than I could have given to them.  They created me as much as the other way around.  I don’t know if that makes sense.  But there were things I didn’t know I knew, things I hadn’t allowed myself to feel, that came to me by way of writing poems.  I feel very fortunate for that.  I always try not to write about something I think I know.  I want to be surprised by my poems, to learn from them.  I’ve never been a particularly physical person.  I’ve never been very connected to my body.  Nor have I valued that part of my life.  So writing these poems gave me back so much of what I had dismissed about my life as a woman, as a mother.

Commitment: Are you working on a new collection of poetry?

Anne Marie:  Gloryland was my second collection.  I now have a new book out, She Heads Into the Wilderness, by Autumn House Press, which picks up, in a way, from where I left off in Gloryland.  It extends my exploration from the female body, to the body of the planet.  It is a kind of elegy for the earth.

Anne Marie Macari is the author of three books:  She Heads Into the Wilderness (Autumn House, 2008), Gloryland (Alice James Books, 2005), and Ivory Cradle, which won the APR/Honickman first book prize in 2000, chosen by Robert Creeley.  The recipient of the James Dickey prize from Five Points Magazine, Macari has had poems published in The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Field, and TriQuarterly.  Macari is the director of the Drew University Low-Residency MFA in Poetry & Poetry in Translation.

To purchase Gloryland, click here.  To purchase She Heads Into the Wilderness, click here.