5 Questions with Kim Addonizio, Author of Now We’re Getting Somewhere
Kim Addonizio is the author of eight poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet's Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her 2016 collection, Mortal Trash, won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Addonizio's awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. She lives in Oakland, California.
Kim Addonizio is joined by Brittany Perham, Peter Kline, and Tracey Knapp to discuss the launch of her new collection Now We’re Getting Somewhere: Poems (published by Norton) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Tuesday, March 16th
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Where are you writing to us from?
I’m hunkered down here in the Oakland hills with a couple of lovely cats. I haven’t been to San Francisco for nearly a year—is it still even there? I’m glad City Lights is making it through in some way and will hopefully be stronger than ever on the other side of this. You guys are a beacon and an icon.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
Um…edibles? I generally tend to see reality as something to escape from. Now more than ever. So, the usual: binge-baking, binge-watching, binge-cringing at the political antics of the motherfuckers who’ve spent the last four years running the democratic experiment into the ground.
What are 3 books you always recommend to people?
Here are three I’ve recommended to friends recently:
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo—the subtitle pretty much sums it up: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. I read it several years ago and it just blew me away—the lives of those people and the sympathy with which she renders them. Nonfiction, but it reads like a novel. I’ve never forgotten it.
Lately I’m recommending the one I’m reading now, Martha Gellhorn’s The Face of War. She’s a beautiful writer who possibly had her work overshadowed somewhat by being married to Hemingway for a time. She gives you such a sense of what it’s like for people in wartime, from the Spanish Civil War through WWII and Vietnam and a few other places—without any sense of pity, just clear-sighted observation. In “The War in Finland,” she writes, “The way people stay half-sane in war, I imagine, is to suspend a large part of their reasoning minds, lose most of their sensitivity, laugh when they get the smallest chance, and go a bit, but increasingly, crazy.”
Third—Is it cheating to say I’m listening to this one? I love being read to—I became obsessed with Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Every night I disappear into the sixteenth century’s burnings, beheadings, and bling. I’m on the last one, The Mirror & the Light, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to recover from being ejected back into my own time. I’m thinking I’ll just start over with the first book, and by the time I’m through the second round, the listing ship of state will have hopefully been righted.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
It’s hard to answer this without naming every book I’ve read, every movie I’ve seen, every piece of art I’ve looked at and every kind of music I’ve listened to. I’m influenced by everything and everyone, but mostly I don’t consciously remember that stuff; it’s like my brain is doing its thing deep down in its little neural workshop and one day something surfaces. With this book, it often felt more as though I was channeling a messed-up, passionate and somehow bratty spirit who had a lot to say. I don’t know where she got it all from.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
That’s an easy one: Lola’s Tiny Bookshop. Right here in a little white bookcase in the room I write in. Lola is my five-year-old alter-ego (I guess that means I have two if you count whatever phantom wrote this book). She’s already opened Lola’s Tiny Café on the deck, Lola’s Tiny Cinema (living room TV) . . . This probably sounds unbearably precious so I’ll spare you her other designations (though I kind of like the top of the fridge, which has been rechristened the Golan Heights). The latest bestseller: that new poetry collection by Kim Addonizio.
