Paula Cisewski

Paula Cisewski's fourth poetry collection, ​Quitter, won the Diode Editions Book Prize. She is also the author of The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister.

Cisewski's work has appeared in numerous literary journals. Her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and included in the anthologies Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, 78: A Tarot Anthology, Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, and New Poetry from the Midwest. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Oberholtzer Foundation, Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, and House of Helsinglight.

While raising her son, Cisewski earned her BA from St. Catherine's University and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. During those years, she worked in warehouses, was a mosaic artist mentor with Minneapolis teens, owned a coffee shop, and waited one million tables. Now she teaches writing privately and academically, makes things, and collaborates with fellow artists and activists.

What brought you to writing in the first place? A need to imagine possibilities I didn’t see around me. As a young child I read voraciously and wrote fantasy stories as imaginative, usually haunted spaces in which to escape. For example, in a pile of my childhood ephemera, I recently unearthed a story from third or fourth grade titled “Noah and the Ghosts.” Can you imagine that haunted ark? Then in my later childhood, I moved away from fantasy to writing poem-like things that attempted to articulate and lay claim to my own experience of reality, for myself if no one else. Generational family traumas were still causing lightning quick tectonic shifts and much pain all around in the home where I grew up; that’s just how it was. A notebook and a pen provided a personal universe.

Music was my poetry gateway. Even into my early twenties I was writing lyrics for a band that never materialized (I was too introverted) inspired by all the lyrics I loved by Bowie, Bauhaus, Crass, Patti Smith, Bad Brains, Killing Joke, Elvis Costello, etc, etc. And by then I was also in love with e.e. cummings and Wanda Coleman and Kahlil Gibran and Elizabeth Bishop and was writing poems while my baby napped.

A couple years later, as a nontraditional, first generation college student, I didn’t know anything about sustaining a writing life, or publishing, or even academia, really. In an effort to find my people, I asked the owner (Kenny Horst) of the jazz club where I worked nights (The Artists Quarter) if I could start an open mic, and he said yes. In the early months I served as bartender, cocktail server, and MC just to keep the night viable for the first handfuls of dedicated weekly poets! But before long it became a vibrant event, often standing room only. That’s when my eyes opened to what was already here in the Twin Cities and I fell in love with this interfusion of literary communities. And it’s from there I began to broaden my gaze.

What is your writing life like? Do you write every day or whenever inspiration strikes? I don’t think of inspiration as a thing that strikes; rather, I have to make space for a relationship with it by being attentive and open. That said, I am an adjunct professor and freelancer, so my writing life changes more or less seasonally, with each semester’s workload. Sometimes I write every day; often I don’t. What seems to matter most to my quality of life is that I’m awake in the world and that I have some reasonable amount of protected writing time peppered throughout my week. Every week. I get it on the calendar, and it becomes inviolate. I know by now to expect times when the words go dormant, and I know by now that even in those times fruitful things are happening. But it still makes me twitchy! I am a distraction-prone accident magnet when I’m not writing. Making other things--collages or assemblages or small book arts projects--when language goes underground does help. Still holding space does help.

Please share with me a poem you wish you had written. What in particular do you admire about it? I began responding to your request, Erin, by compiling a list of formative and meaningful work which soon grew beyond reason. The longer the list grew, the more I feared I would forget the most important poem and kick myself later! It’s such good luck to be permanently overwhelmed by the powerful work of others. In an effort to stop overthinking, and because I am rereading Bright Scythe, I’m going to share a Tomas Tranströmer poem (translated from Swedish by Patty Crane), knowing it’s one of infinite choices I could have made:

The Half-Finished Heaven

Depression breaks off its course. Anxiety breaks off its course. The vulture breaks off in flight.

The fervent light pours out, even the ghosts take a drink.

And our paintings are revealed, our Ice Age studio’s red beasts.

Each person is a half-open door leading to a room for everyone. The endless ground under us. Water shines between the trees. The lake is a window into earth. I admire the fullness within and around the fragmentation. The tension between sorrow and illumination. There are both surprise and clarity. There’s enough breathing room in this poem so that as a reader I feel trusted/welcome to participate in its connections. And that fourth stanza makes me fall a little in love with everybody.

What are you reading right now?

In addition to the Tranströmer, I have kept the collaboratively written Counter-Desecrations: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene, edited by Linda Russo and Marthe Reed, close for the last couple years. Also, I’m reading Matthew Salesses’ novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear and Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom.