The well-traveled Susan Rich spent time in countries as diverse as Bosnia, Gaza, and South Africa before she was 35. Author of three books of poetry, Rich serves on the boards of Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge Press, and Whit Press, and also teaches at Highline Community College, where she runs the reading series Highline Listens: Writers Read Their Work. She sat down with Fringes Rachel Dacus to talk about her latest venture, poems based on the lives of Somali citizens, and about the state of todays poetry.

What is the role of inspiration versus revision in your writing? I use inspiration and revision; no versus” here. Sometimes, it is the subject itself that inspires me to be a better poet than I believe myself to be. When I began my Somali Voices” project, interviewing Somali citizens about their life in Somalia before the civil war and their subsequent journey to the United States, I worried whether my poetic skills were up to the task of documenting peoples real lives. Writing poems of another persons life, a person who would see the finished poem, added a new kind of pressure to my work. The end result would not be a hopeful placement in a book, but a page out of someones life. I explained to the people I interviewed that I was not a journalist, not recording their life stories, but…taking one piece of what theyd told me during our three-hour interviews and imagining from there.Do you often work from personal stories or biographies?

In my more recent work, published in The Alchemists Kitchen, there is a sequence of poems based on the life and artwork of Myra Albert Wiggins. This was my first entrée into costume jewelry poetry, poems inspired by other art forms. Again, I wondered if I was up to the task. Secretly, I had previously found poems inspired by visual art a snooze; why was I suddenly so enthralled?I joke that poetry is my long-term relationship; weve been together, seriously, for twenty years. Sometimes, I worry that the romance will grow stale, and so I create new challenges for myself.Your poems use both sound and imagery in vivid and compelling ways. Which techniques do you use most often?Thank you for your kind words. Like many other poets, I read my poems aloud as I work on them. I print poems out, change lines, words, rearrange stanzas, and go back to the computer. A poem changes shape several times during the revision process. Recently, I wrote a costume jewelry that I actually quite like (usually it is hard for me to like my work for at least a few months, years, if ever).What do you think makes a poem memorable?Image, sound, voice—what else actually stays?Who are the best poets now writing?I think we will all be dead and gone before the answer to that becomes clear. This is an interesting time in poetry—many more books are being published than any other period in my lifetime. When I finished college in the mid 1970s, I could count on two hands the presses publishing poetry. Copper Canyon, Greywolf, and White Pine were all brand new. I knew their names only. And since I didnt think I had the (then) pedigree to be an FSG, Knopf, Norton, or New Directions poet, I assumed I better find something else to do. I joined the Peace Corps—which it turned out—returned me to writing.Travel and history have both provided you topics and given you a perspective of yourself as a global citizen. Will travel continue to be an important source for you, or do you find yourself turning in other directions?When I was in my 20s and 30s, I lived or worked in a slew of different places: Bosnia, Gaza, West Africa, and South Africa, to name a few locations. Thankfully, Ive now settled into one geography. This doesnt mean that I dont travel, but it isnt the same as spending months or years someplace new. In The Alchemists Kitchen, Ive traveled back in time one hundred years to the life of northwest photographer, Myra Albert Wiggins. In investigating her photographs, I learned a good deal of life in Oregon Country. And as your question hints, there are similarities in traveling through space and traveling through time.

What is the use of poetry? What place does it serve in our culture, and how do you think it needs to be brought into a more central position?Oh thats a big question. I could answer that after September 11th, newspapers across the country were publishing poems, and that poems of Naomi Shihab Nye and W. H. Auden went viral, traveling from email box to email box and back again. I received both their poems upwards of a dozen times. So yes, in times of national crisis, poems can respond to an emotional tsunami.But what about in our everyday lives? Right now my Maine Coon, Otis, best pet ever of eleven years, is dying and there is not a damn thing I can do about it. I am not turning to poetry; I am turning to a glass of prosecco. In a few weeks or months, or even tomorrow, I may find something in a poem to take me away momentarily from the horrors of death—but not tonight. It always hits me afresh that even as a poet, there are times when words seem paltry, pathetic, and fully unsatisfying. Yet, during the first year of my MFA degree, when my father was dying—and then by spring, had died—there was nothing I could do but write poems of struggling with his death—and my mothers death the year before. One poem, Muted Gold,” which I wrote because I was in a program and had to hand in something every week, now seems to me a gift of remembering. And yet, when I finished that poem, I knew it was nothing but the diapositive—the negative of the negative—of the event. In other words, words are sometimes not enough.

How did you become interested in poetry? Who are some of the poets who formed your early influences? My older sister gave me The Oxford Book of Childrens Verse when I was six or seven. I loved the purple dust cover complete with wizard and cauldron. Walter de la Mare and Lewis Caroll and Emily Dickinson are a few poets I remember. I memorized The Walrus and the Carpenter” on my own, amazed that the story could take such a dark turn (the oysters end up murdered). But I believe a more developed interest in poetry began for me as a teenager when I began reading Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov. These poets, especially Rich (no relation), opened up a world for me that I had intuited but could not express. Their poems struck me as no less than magic.How often, or over what period, do you typically revise a poem?Im not sure there is much that is typical” about my revision process. What I can say, with certainty, is that I am a chronic reviser. It isnt unusual for me to work on a poem for a year or more. I have some poems with over thirty versions on the computer—and that doesnt count the drafts done off the computer.In my essay Reclamation: A Poem on Revision” in the recent anthology, Poem Revised, I traced the life cycle of one poem from inception to publication. Here is what I ended up saying:

The point is this: revision is the difference between the adequate poem and the excellent one. It is the magic of a word positioned just right in a harmonious line of sound, it is the title changed and re-changed again. It is believing in your own poem. Get to work.