10 Questions for Alexandra Teague
- By Marissa Perez
Dear M—
It's true that I once took a ferry across the Balearic Sea to Ibiza to dance
all night like an alien that hasn't heard of sleep.
—from "Crossed Letters for a Concerned American", Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Although, like many teenagers, I’d written poetry in high school, the first poem that really felt like mine was my freshman year of college, in a class with Michael Burns. Before that, I’d only read older poetry and had never realized I could describe the people sunning at the swimming pool of my apartment complex, or my walk home from campus, or other details of my everyday life. Finding out that poetry could contain things of the contemporary world was revelatory for me.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
My newest poems are influenced by a whole range of modern and contemporary poets—Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Walt Whitman, Tyehimba Jess, C.D. Wright, and Patricia Smith, to name just a few. I’m particularly interested in contemporary innovations with poetic form, as well as in poetry that draws from research and history and other art forms.
What other professions have you worked in?
I’ve worked in art galleries and restaurants and ice cream parlors in the small, strange, magical, Victorian tourist town, Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where I was lucky to grow up. And I’ve worked as a Writing Center tutor and director, and I’ve written copy for an acupuncture website, and edited a romance novel, and other strange projects as a freelancer. Most of my adult life I’ve taught—mostly at City College of San Francisco, and now University of Idaho.
What did you want to be when you were young?
A writer and a teacher. Each year, I’d announce to my parents and friends that I was going to grow up to teach whatever grade I was currently in. The last degree I got was an MFA, and now I really do teach in an MFA program. When I was young, I was determined to have my first book published by the time I was 20; it took me until my 30s, but I’m very grateful the dream happened at all.
What inspired you to write this piece?
As a writer who often deals with the absurdly comic within politically or personally difficult situations, I’ve found the level of absurdism and horror in the Trump administration and other actions of the far right to be so extreme that it’s been hard to find an entry point or a way to speak to the absurdities and illogics. I finally realized that one way in would be to write letters to a specific figure that I was upset with—using the writing of the poem to complicate my anger and grief. I’m often inspired by quotations and oblique angles of approaching a subject, and in this case, as soon as I read that Mitch McConnell quote and found my first lines about aliens, I knew the poem had momentum. At Trinity College in Dublin a couple of years ago, I’d seen “crossed letters,” which are letters in which the writer saved paper by writing horizontally and then vertically across that on the same page, and the image of that crosshatched writing really stayed on my mind and became the other central metaphor and form for these loose sonnets.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I love this very Italo Calvino question, and I think something like his Invisible Cities and the desire to metaphorically map experience via imagined and real places influences me, as someone who has moved a lot to very different parts of the country and world. As for real cities, I spent formative years in San Francisco, and it will always be an influence.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
No, but I like long blocks of writing time. If I’m really immersed in drafting a poem, I might not do anything else for ten or more hours. My husband will have to remind me to eat.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
Visual art, particularly installation art. As Cathy Park Hong says in “Against Witness,” “installation art is an immersive somatic experience, engaging all our perceptual planes—the spatial, the aural—and not just the optical. You have to be there in person to truly apprehend the art.” I love the immersion of those kinds of spaces, and am interested in poetry that invites some of that engagement.
What are you working on currently?
I’m finishing a series of essays about my family, for a manuscript tentatively titled The Magic Kingdom of the Feral Victorians. And I’m continuing to write poems, including a series that recontextualizes American patriotic songs in relation to contemporary issues and my own life.
What are you reading right now?
Audre Lorde’s Zami and Kate Lebo’s The Book of Difficult Fruit.
ALEXANDRA TEAGUE is the author of three books of poetry—Or What We'll Call Desire (Persea 2019), The Wise and Foolish Builders, and Mortal Geography—and the novel The Principles Behind Flotation. She is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. She is a professor at the University of Idaho and an editor for Broadsided.
