VIDA Reads with Mary Jo Bang

Poet Mary Jo Bang shares her current reading list, the subject of her forthcoming poetry collection, and the new collections that she anticipates reading in the future:

What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today?

Sadly, there are no subways in St. Louis but there are countless waiting rooms and in those I’ve been reading the galleys of a book that will be available in October. It’s a rather amazing book called Our Emily Dickinsons by Vivian Pollak (University of Pennsylvania Press). It examines Emily Dickinson’s hold on the poetic imagination of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath. I was actually riveted by it. I also just finished reading francine j. harris’s book of poems, Play Dead (Alice James, 2016). I love the way the pronouns in her poems often remain fluid, or stand just out of reach, as if to make room for the reader to join the speaker.

What book popped for you in 2015?

Therese Svoboda’s Anything that Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (Schaffner Press). I knew next to nothing about Ridge before reading it, but it’s clear she was a major figure in American Modernism. She was forgotten almost immediately after she died in 1941 but clearly deserves to be remembered, both as a mentor to others and as a poet. Her work is equal to Hart Crane’s and countless others who were writing at the same time. Her books were read widely and won prizes. How is it that so many women are so quickly forgotten?

Read on at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.