After an avid mamazine reader (and mamazine poet!) gushed to me about Beth Ann Fennelly's most recent work Tender Hooks, I promptly Googled the poet to find out if it would be worth my while to pursue permission to post some of her poems from the book on the site. I love a good recommendation, and I also love finding great work to share with the mamazine community.

Well, when I finally located Fennelly on the web, I was blown away by the few poems I read, and immediately sent for a review copy from W. W. Norton. In a few weeks, I received the copy, and voraciously ate it up. It isn't often when a book of poems can get me that hungry for more, so I knew Fennelly had in true what a lot of folks on the web were proposing: she embodies the tightness, risk, and restraint of Sylvia Plath and may very well be our next version of Elizabeth Bishop.

I promptly contacted Fennelly and what follows is a brief interview we conducted via email that focuses on Fennelly's work Tender Hooks, and what it is like being a new mother who is also a professional poet. With a newborn in the house, I am grateful Beth Ann could take the time to talk to our readers.

Beth Ann Fennelly's book Open House won The 2001 Kenyon Review Prize for a First Book and the GLCA New Writers Award. Her new book, Tender Hooks, was published in April 2004, by W. W. Norton. A book of essays, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother, is forthcoming from Norton in 2006. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi, and lives in Oxford, MS.
—Melissa Fondakowski

mamazine.com: Your poem "Three Months After Giving Birth..." reads "That I've loved my work occurs to me now..." Did you feel you were making a choice between motherhood and poetry at any given time?

Beth Ann Fennelly: After I had Claire, and again after I had Thomas six months ago, I stopped writing for about four months. So I guess you could say there were several months in which I chose to be a mommy to the exclusion of everything else, including poetry. But that's not exactly what it felt like—there didn't seem to be a choice involved. I just had no desire to write. In addition, I don't think I could have written even if I wanted to—new motherhood makes me very stupid. I was routinely doing things like putting a book in the freezer or mailing letters without stamps. I read a few years ago there's actually a term for this—it's called "placenta brain." What doctors have found is that many women have a better-than-average memory for baby-related data and a worse-than-average memory for everything else. It's nature's way of making sure a baby's main caregiver is paying attention, which makes sense. I wish, after I gave birth to Claire, that I knew my stupidity had a name. A name! How comforting. I thought I was losing my mind.

Although I usually beat myself up a bit when I can't seem to write poems, these two breaks were different in that I was free of the desire to write, so there was no anxiety. It was pleasant to be so free of ambition. But gradually, each time, as the baby has gotten a bit older and I've gotten more sleep and started reading more and doing more things, I've felt the desire to write again, which is wonderful, of course, but I do feel more tension now when I can't be writing because I'm taking care of the kids. This is a dilemma I think all writer-moms feel. It's a tricky balance and maybe one that can never be perfectly satisfying.

mamazine.com: Did you find yourself writing more in hindsight, or were you formulating these poems while all of this was happening?

Beth Ann Fennelly: Mostly I was writing about my experiences of new motherhood while they were happening because I wanted to understand what I was going through, and to me poetry is one of the best methods of investigating the human soul. I think if I was writing the poems in hindsight the book would have been totally different, both because an infant changes so rapidly that the details would swirl together if not fastened down at a specific time, and also because if I was writing the poems in hindsight I would have been more self-conscious about them. Now, when I give poetry readings, people often ask me what I imagine that Claire will think of these poems when she's older. She is 4-and-a-half and starting to read, and for the first time I'm really beginning to think about a future where I'm accountable for writing about her infancy. So I think if I were writing poems now that described her infancy I'd be more self-aware and less free.

mamazine.com: Did writing these poems work as therapy or as a way to preserve memory?

Beth Ann Fennelly: Often during my daughter's infancy when I'd be putting away another set of clothes she'd outgrown or looking at photos of her just a few months back but looking entirely different, I felt almost aswoon with nostalgia and panic. I do think part of my fascination with watching her and writing about her was born of the impulse to preserve. But, of course, I'd be filled with a sense of the futility of the act even as I embarked upon it because I couldn't stop her from changing even long enough to document and celebrate. And, of course, one chooses to celebrate the child's passing from stage to stage—but in the rich interior swirl of the mother, there are other, less-publicized emotions, and it's these that wanted to come out in some of the poems.

mamazine.com: What was it like, writing "Favors" and "Once I Did Kiss Her Wetly on the Mouth," which talk about that sticky place in which mothers sometimes find themselves—grappling with a sense of sensuality and sexuality felt toward the child?

Beth Ann Fennelly: When I was writing these poems, I wasn't thinking about publishing them, and I certainly wasn't thinking about publishing a whole book of them—though that's pretty much what Tender Hooks is. Also, like I said, I certainly wasn't thinking about what would happen when Claire read them later. All I wanted to do was articulate my own questions about the wild ride of motherhood, which is so much better and harder and darker and deeper than I was prepared for. One of the things that took me by surprise was this incredible hunger I had for my newborn, this very visceral desire to hold her body and have her skin touch my skin. We only talk about this in a joking manner, as when we say to a baby, "I could eat you up." But I think many mothers are shocked to feel, at one time or another, that they COULD eat their baby. This hunger for their babies is not unlike the hunger for food or sex, though it also contains some new desire never felt before. I wanted to explore this, and I did.

The reactions to these poems have very much surprised me. Some mothers seem grateful to see these issues articulated, but a few folks have been horrified. "Once I Did Kiss her…" was reprinted on the website Poetry Daily, and it's the editors' policy to forward all mail about a poem to the poet. And what they forwarded to me was hate mail! Truly. One woman called me a sicko and a pervert, which I confess really upset me…but I think that in some ways motherhood is one of our last safe taboos and is still very much on a pedestal. Of course, magazines such as yours are helping to make motherhood a subject we can discuss honestly, which is so important because I believe mothers need a community where they can discuss their feelings and experiences so they don't feel like they are crazy or alone. Maybe that's another thing I was doing in these poems—providing my own community, articulating my own experiences for the pleasure of mulling on them and seeing what I could learn from them.

To read Beth Ann's poetry on mamazine.com, click here and here.