JILL BIALOSKY: Poet, Editor, Novelist

By Joanne Pilgrim

"I really became a poet by happenstance," Jill Bialosky said. "I remember when I was younger, I was sort of embarrassed to tell people I was a poet." The general perception of a poet, she feared, was of "somebody who sort of sat in their room and daydreamed."

There is not a lot of whiling away the time in Ms. Bialosky's life as a poet, novelist, teacher, mother, and editor at W.W. Norton and Company in New York City. On weekends, she spends time with her husband and son at their Bridgehampton getaway, all the while plumbing her experiences for material.

"I feel writing is like a secret life," Ms. Bialosky said on a recent Saturday afternoon. A lot of the process occurs internally while she is completing the mundane tasks of daily life, she explained, such as making dinner for her 7-year-old son. "It's like two narratives. I really rely on that. Usually when I sit down at the computer, I'm immediately writing."

"I think writing is sort of an internal dialogue; you're having a long conversation with yourself. A lot of poems for me begin with some kind of inner argument."

"Internal pulls and what's going on physically around me, and then, kind of the mythic world" all find their way into her poems.

"For instance, one of my favorite poems is called 'The Circles, The Rings.' It's really about a girl who is finding selfhood and has to see around her the evils of the world, as she was skating around them," Ms. Bialosky said.

Into the creative mix as the poem took shape went an ice-skating outing to Manhattan's Wollman Rink, childhood memories, and some thoughts about Dante's "Inferno."

"I sound like I'm incredibly conscious, but I'm not. Some people might pick up the theme, but it doesn't matter. I really want my poems to be for any person to enter; I don't want them to be academic at all."

Inevitably, she said, one's own central issues inform a writer's work. "I think there are two kinds of poems. There's a discovery poem, and there's a poem that comes out of a concept, intellectual. I sort of know what I want to explore now when I'm writing."

"Subterranean," a book of poems published by Knopf last year, deals with "issues of motherhood and loss, virginity and fertility," said Ms. Bialosky, "because I lost two children. Then it's about the beauty of birth."

She also, she said, used as "back story" the myth of Persephone and Demeter. "In the middle of writing the book, I realized that a lot of the themes I was dealing with provoked that myth. It's another layer of the book."

The title poem depicts a "modern-day Persephone" who is "tempted by desire and the underworld, in a way. That was a theme I was really interested in - the dark side of desire," she said.

The book also includes several poems with imagery and ideas prompted by visits to Bridgehampton. "Pumpkin Picking" took shape as the poet watched fields change with the seasons on trips out here, "The Aviary" describes a pheasant she observed, most likely from the nearby Spring Farm, and motivation for "The Arborist's Lament" sprang from seeing the fields at the Channing Daughters winery, which is also nearby.

"The landscape really got into my system," she said.

Ms. Bialosky graduated from Ohio University and then attended the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, studying poetry for a year. Back in Cleveland, her hometown, she waited tables, writing poems in between. After a year she began a poetry course at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and she earned a master of fine arts degree there.

Iowa "was cornfields and a lot of wind; there's a lot of wind in the poems that I wrote then," she said.

After a move to Manhattan, Ms. Bialosky got a job as an editorial assistant to two senior editors at Norton, eventually becoming an editor herself.

"I was writing poems in the secret hours of any day I could find. I was fortunate to find a day job that was about books," she said.

"It was a great opportunity because Norton had a tradition of publishing poetry. They were delighted that I had an interest in poetry. I read the poetry slush, and started finding manuscripts that they took on."

They include works by Marie Howe and Alice Fulton, a MacArthur fellow, Ai, who won a National Book Award, and two anthologies put together by the former poet laureate Robert Pinsky with Maggie Dietz, "America's Favorite Poems" and the forthcoming "Poems to Read."

Although the audience for poetry is growing, she believes, "I still think, sadly, it is the small child of literature," she said. "It's difficult to get people interested in newer poets." Poets on the Norton list, she said, are largely those who have published before and are expected to command an audience.

Ms. Bialosky also began acquiring fiction for Norton, and is responsible for the publication of "The Horned Man" by James Lasdun, "The Death of Vishnu" by Manil Suri, and "The Undertaking" by Thomas Lynch, a poet and undertaker who became a finalist for the National Book Award.

The publication of her own first book, a collection of poems called "The End of Desire," came about in 1997 after Ms. Bialosky sent the manuscript to Harry Ford, a "legendary" poetry editor at Knopf. Out of friendship and professional courtesy, Mr. Ford agreed to take a look, then called the author to say, "It's a good book, Jill." The publication was "just a total miracle as far as I'm concerned," Ms. Bialosky said.

"I see my first book as about finding my poetic voice," she said. "I wanted to explore, why does desire bring suffering? A lot of the book is about how suffering is both wonderfully deep and terribly painful."

In the spring, Ms. Bialosky teaches an undergraduate poetry workshop at Columbia University. "I view it as two hours of talking about poetry. When do you get to do that in life?" she asked. She keeps her teaching schedule to a minimum, however, in order to "keep the spark" in her own writing life.

Nonetheless, teaching has given her insights. "For me, every poem is personal," Ms. Bialosky said. Influenced by Stanley Plumley, a poetry teacher at Ohio University, Ms. Bialosky said she learned to "write out of your pain," but has seen, through her students, that poets may take a more pragmatic approach. It is just as valid as long as the writers are "receptive to the language and the world around them," she believes.

But, she added, "the ones that are writing out of a dark place or a deep place, you can tell immediately."

With her students, she explores different poetic forms, experimenting with configurations of language, lines, and space, as she does in her own work.

"I like to challenge myself, thinking about the form the poems will take, and the subject matter. I really feel, a lot of times, that the content dictates the form and vice versa. They're really entwined."

"It's really fun. You can shift the whole meaning of a poem by changing one thing. The same with fiction."

Ms. Bialosky has written a novel, "House Under Snow," which will be published by Harcourt Brace in July. It recently received a positive review in Publisher's Weekly.

About a widow with three young daughters in the 1960s and '70s in Ohio, the book came together through trial and error and numerous drafts. "It took me a long time to figure out how to do it. I knew the characters and the situation were really vital and interesting, but I hadn't figured out the drama yet."

The story turns on the dilemma of the mother, who defines herself as a wife and mother, although it is told from a daughter's point of view. "I wanted to write about those women caught before the feminist movement," Ms. Bialosky said.

"It's sort of about the nature of patriarchy, being a young girl or a woman, and the relationship to power and vulnerability. I question the nature of evil in the book, in a way," she said. "I felt like in fiction I could tell that story. You can capture a world in a poem, but you can't really tell a story."

A new novel and a new book of poems, are under way. In August, Ms. Bialosky will read from her novel at Book Hampton in East Hampton, although she is not a big fan of giving readings.

"For me it feels a little naked," she said. "It's a completely different experience from writing. The positive is, it's nice to get an immediate response, an awareness of how your work is transcending to an audience."