Andrea Cohen’s book of poetry, Long Division is one of the first books we’re recommending to friends and family this year — no matter if they’re readers of poetry or not. Her “lyrical compression” and fresh syntax demonstrate a poem’s ability to surprise, take risks, and leave in the reader an aching-for-more aftertaste. Cohen’s clean, cogent poems carry you up a tight suspension bridge and leave you satisfied and changed at the end. This experience makes Long Division a humorous, breathtaking, and clever collection, deserving of what one might call a five star review. – Lori Huskey
Dark Sky Magazine: When did you start writing poetry?
Andrea Cohen: I started writing poetry when I was very young. I would recite it to my dog, who was a very good dog and did not let on that the poetry was very bad.
DSM: How did you come to put your book together?
AC: I never sit down to write a book. I sit down every morning with the hope of getting a poem, or the beginnings of one. Then I try to figure out how all the poems fit together, in what I hope is a fairly organic way.
DSM: The first poem in Long Division is an ideal introduction to your book, your work, your style. I feel it’s an excellent example of how poetry should offer the unexpected — how poetry should not say but do. In your opinion, what should a poem do, and what is expected of it?
AC: Thank you. Frost put it pretty well, didn’t he, that a poem “should begin in delight and end in wisdom.” And then MacLeish said: “A poem should not mean but be.” I guess I’d go so far as to say that a poem should have no should about it. I don’t know what would be expected of a poem, per se, but my rebellious streak would surely want to then set out to do the opposite. A first draft is a pretty unconscious act for me, so I can’t think about expectations. When I read, I guess I want a poem to stop me in my tracks so that I see the world or myself somehow anew.
DSM: Taking from Long Division, which poems are you closest to?
AC: I usually feel closest to the most recent poems I’ve written. In this collection, I’m partial to “To an Ant Fallen in the Salt Shaker” and “In a Haystack.”
DSM: How is the narrator different or similar to you? Most of your poems appear autobiographical, so is it safe to say the “I” is you?
AC: Well, I come from the school that always calls the speaker the speaker. I never would say that I am that speaker. He or she is the one who gets to jump off the high dive, discover there’s no water in the pool, and then dive in again. Maybe the speaker is akin to the roadrunner version of me, if you recall those Saturday morning cartoons.
That said, of course there are elements of me in all the poems, in all the speakers, but there are elements of a whole lot of other people and creatures and foreign objects as well, all of whom/which teach me something.
DSM: I’m thinking of how affable poets like Charles Simic and Billy Collins build rapport with their readers by making the poem a warm, funny, hospitable place. This can be found in your poetry, too. Do you have the reader in mind when you write warmly — are you making an attempt to reach out to him or her?
AC: I don’t think I am consciously reaching out to the reader while writing. For me, too much consciousness in a first draft is a death knell. But writing is a conversation, a sort of dialogue with the self. And if one gets the poem right, one has a shot at giving a reader purchase in that conversation.
As for the humor, I’m probably just another failed stand-up comic: one who sits at the kitchen table and scribbles poems instead of monologues.
DSM: Describe your poetry to those who have not read it.
AC: Fruity with a diesel hint? I’m always flummoxed by that request. Someone asked me to describe my poetry at a party last Saturday night and my response was to recite a poem for him. This may explain why I don’t get invited to a lot of parties.
DSM: Which poets have influenced you?
AC: So many poets have and will influence me. Phillip Levine was a teacher early on, and I learned a lot from his voice. Eastern European poets such as Tadeusz Różewicz and Wisława Szymborska have meant much to me, as have Keats and Russell Edson, Frank O’Hara, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Yannis Ritsos, James Tate and Emily Dickinson. It’s a long list that will get longer.
DSM: Are you excited about any emerging poets?
AC: I’m excited to see the upcoming first books of Todd Hearon, Rebecca Morgan Frank, and Patty Paine, among others.
DSM: Thanks Andrea. And now, here’s a poem.
Tragicomedy
by Andrea Cohen
Jean Jacques, an outcast
from the Comedie Française,
taught me to say
je t’aime convincingly
in a little theater
near the Seine.
He demonstrated,
while reciting
the line, how
to pick invisible
lint from the sleeve
of a sweater.
It didn’t matter
whose sweater,
whether solid
or argyle, whether
the object of make-
believe ardor responded.
This was beginners’
acting in a foreign tongue.
I studied hard, harnessed
my wits to pick
girls up by the river,
by the bucketful,
picking lint as fast
as I can, as fast
as jilted girls can
toss themselves
into the Seine.
Je t’aime,
quand meme.
_____________________________________
Andrea Cohen is the author of the poetry collections Long Division and The Cartographer’s Vacation. Her poems and stories have appeared in journals such as Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, and Glimmertrain. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Mass.
