Alyse Bensel : part five

Why is poetry important?

I don’t know if there is a singular answer to this question, but I do know that the importance of poetry in my life has shifted and continues to shift. Initially, poetry offered me new skills and knowledge to learn in a world that I did not previously know existed. Now poetry is more of a comfort and an exploration, a conversation -- I don’t think that I read a single poetry collection where at least one line or poem doesn’t strike me, doesn’t resonate in some way. Poetry makes me want to return to poetry. It’s recursive, looping back to itself. I find it essential that there exists in my life a pursuit that asks me to both turn back to the source and branch out into the world. Poetry has this ability. 

Alyse Bensel : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Having served as a book reviews editor for several years and as a regular book reviewer for the past decade, I read a lot, and constantly, so much I sometimes wish I could slow down. The problem is that there is so much incredible work to read, especially with books that don’t get the attention I may feel they deserve. I’ll admit that I’ve been devouring more prose lately, since the summer is when I raid the shelves of my local library. But, if I consult my running list, this past year the poetry collections that have struck me most in their treatment of loss in many different ways are Self-Portrait with Cephalopod by Kathryn Smith, If This Is the Age We End Discovery by Rosebud Ben-Oni, Arrow by Sumita Chakraborty, Dear Memory by Victoria Chang, Dialogues with Rising Tides by Kelli Russell Agodon, and Lightning Falls in Love by Laura Kasischke. There are dozens more I could add to that list. 

Alyse Bensel : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

The way a poem enters the world keeps on changing for me, but generally it starts as a fragment or series of fragments in a notebook, then a rough digital draft that I will ask a friend to read, or, if a friend is busy, I will return to in a few days or weeks. By that time I’m far enough away from the initial drafting of the poem that I can begin to notice things that I haven’t before, to ask questions of the poem. I will keep drafting and redrafting and perhaps reshare again, usually with my husband who will read the poem aloud, which is a wonderful gift, being able to hear the poem in someone else’s voice than my own. I often find that speaking the poem aloud is when it truly enters the world. 

Alyse Bensel : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Until college I did not have any formal training or instruction in reading and writing poetry besides what was needed to be successful on an exam or standardized test (and a few informal writing groups). When I began to write poems in earnest in college, I carried a lot of fears about what I could and could not write about. My professors would point out how I tended to write around a subject or concern rather than directly at it. Their encouragement, and reading poetry widely and often, unlocked different ways I could consider and write a poem. I once thought of poems as static, concrete things. Now I find a poem slippery, amorphous, shifting in its power and influence within time and context. 

Alyse Bensel : part one

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020), and three chapbooks. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Indiana Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

Photo credit: Mercedes Lucero

What are you working on?

Lately, I have turned to hybrid essays and fiction writing. My poems have taken more prosaic, elongated turns, and so I have followed that turn in my latest focus: the dead and the missing in my life and familial history. My paternal grandmother was killed before her 30th birthday in a traffic accident. Her death and her very existence have existed on the periphery of my family since I can remember. And friends have died from overdoses or made terrible decisions that have effectively cut them off from society. These subjects continue to morph in how I approach writing about them, as they border the line between poem and essay and speculation. It’s both uneasy and exciting to not know what final shape this new work will take.