Get to Know the Poets: Stacey Waite, Oct. 6

Stacey Waite is originally from Long Island, New York. S/he majored in English at Bucknell University and earned an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. S/he now teaches as an Assistant Professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Waite has published three collections of poems: the lake has no saint (Tupelo Press, 2010), winner of the Snowbound Prize in Poetry; Love Poem to Androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2007); and Choke (Thorngate Road, 2004), winner of the Frank O’Hara Prize. A new book, Butch Geography, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2012.

YAPRS asked Stacey a few questions in anticipation of her October 6th reading with Susanna Childress:

YAPRS: Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like?
SW: The saddest part of trying to answer this question is how predicable my reading tastes are. I can't think of a single book that would be all that surprising. But perhaps it would be surprising to know that I am embarrassingly compelled by the show Project Runway, and that any time I see Fun Dip, I feel the need to have some.

YAPRS: Is there an author whom most poetry-lovers probably haven't read, but whom you think they should read?
SW: Well, it's hard to say what poets people might or might not know about (my goodness I am being very evasive of these questions) but I think lots of poets should read Antonio Porchia, and a book by Carol Potter called A Short History of Pets.

YAPRS:To what do you aspire in your writing?
SW: I know a lot of poets who say they write for themselves or even for the poems themselves, but the truth is for me that writing has always been about connection, about trying to connect with the world outside the poem, about trying to bring queer lives, queer epistemologies and queer bodies into view, about trying to make the world more bearable for those of us who fall outside the sanctioned categories for being. It's not that I believe in some romantic notion that poetry can change the world, it's more that worlds can change inside poems, and sometimes that's all the possibility we need, at least for the moment.

YAPRS: What drives you and/or your poetry?
SW: I think the answer to this question changes quite often. But I think, for this moment, my poems are driven by my own desire to say something meaningful, something terrible, something beautiful, something queer, something completely unlike the last thing I said. And when I fail to say something meaningful, I just try to enjoy the music of having failed.

YAPRS: If you weren’t a poet, what would you be?
SW: I always wanted to be a musician (yes, this is another cliche of poet as failed rockstar), but in all honesty, I bet if I weren't a poet, I'd probably want to be a carpenter, but then I'd realize how much math is involved. So maybe a postman (I am drawn to uniforms and task completion). Or, maybe a wildlife chainsaw artist. Those guys turn dying trees into birds, into hands, into mailboxes. Again, with the mail. Postman. Postman it is.