Interview with Award-Winning Poet Carey Salerno

Carey Salerno discusses the themes that run through her award-winning poetry book, Shelter.

Commitment:  Shelter is a beautiful book of poetry which won the 2007 Kinereth Gensler Award and was published in 2009.  The poems in Shelter all deal with animals in a shelter and the fate that awaits many of them.  What was it about your experience in an animal shelter that inspired you to write these poems?

Carey Salerno:  Firstly, thank you very much for your kind words about Shelter. I worked at a kill shelter at a very impressionable age, and looking back on it at the time, I can say I was still fairly emotionally immature. I think gaining emotional insight and distance was a difficult thing to accomplish when I was working at the shelter. I didn’t have the equipment necessary to comprehend or manage these highly traumatic thoughts and experiences. During the time I worked there, I remembered thinking that I wanted to write about my experiences, so that people would have more insight to what happens inside of a “shelter” for animals, unwanted or lost creatures, but most of my early attempts were thwarted by too much subjectivity. When I went for my MFA, I gained a lot of tools and knowledge about crafting poems, and was able gain perspective and “give myself permission” to write Shelter.

Commitment:  When did you first know that you wanted to be a poet?

Carey:  Well, I always wrote little poems and books when I was younger. I loved actually writing stories and making books with wood glue and my father’s old bathrobe for a “cloth cover.” Professionally speaking, I had a lot of anxiety about the career path of poetry. I was obsessed with the idea that to be successful, one needed to make boatloads of cash and that they don’t necessarily need to be happy, but rather just survive. Once I let go of this idea, which was pretty juvenile and counterproductive, I was able to embrace what I dreamed of doing: working in publishing and writing poems. I didn’t know how it would work out, but when I made the choice there was also an enormous sigh of relief.

Commitment:  How long does it usually take to write a poem?
Carey:  Gosh, it really depends for me, and my poems usually move through stages. There is initial conception, which for me can be a matter of seconds, is usually as quickly as humanly possible that my hand can get the pen to get it all down. I’m constantly frustrated by how slowly my hand is! After that point, I usually let the poems sit for months before I do anything with them, and what usually comes next is typing them out. I do that, as much as I can, verbatim, and then over the course of days, weeks, or months, I refine the poem, place it in a manuscript, consider possible venues for it, etc.

Commitment:  What is “line integrity” and how does that affect the way you structure your poems?

Carey:  Line integrity is an element of poetry that I try to take very seriously. In essence, it is the strength of individual line, the ability of a line of poetry to hold up on it’s own. I had an experience once as a budding poet working with Herb Scott in a workshop class. I remember him going over one of my poems and reading it aloud and then pausing after one particular line. He looked up at me and read it again, stressing every word, and then said “I can’t think of 5 worse words to make up a line of poetry.” That really stuck with me. I think very much about lines as individual entities, and also about what each line adds or removes from the composition of the poem. Each line should be purposeful, there should be a certain economy to it, and it should definitely add more than subtract from the project of the poem.

Commitment:  While most of the poems in Shelter deal with your experiences in the shelter, others are harder to place.  How do “Much Like a Mother” and “Lilac Thieves” fit into this book?

Carey:  These poems take place beyond the confines of the shelter, physically speaking, but emotionally, these pieces are still very much there. Life beyond the shelter is never truly life in the sense of us considering leaving work behind when you come home. I found working at the shelter haunted all of my being and activities whether they occurred within or beyond the shelter’s confines, and it truly did govern my entire life, even after I quit working there, for a very long time.

Carey Salerno is the Executive Director of Alice James Books, a nonprofit cooperative poetry press. Born in Kzoo, Carey grew up near Lake Michigan. She has a Bachelor's degree from Western Michigan University in English and a MFA in creative writing from New England College. You may find some of her poems on From the Fishouse, in Natural Bridge, The Dirty Napkin, and Rattle. Carey's first book, Shelter, won a 2007 Kinereth Gensler Award.  She lives in western Maine.

To purchase Shelter, click here.