years of this cen- tury that changed all of this—my writing process, my relationship to language, and my self as a writer. I was living in NYC with my husband and baby daughter when 9/11 oc- curred, and four years later, when Hurricane Katrina devastated my native city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, I was a mother of two young daughters. During Katrina, my parents had remained in the city as it flooded. It strikes me now that my experience as a mother is defined by witnessing these disasters from afar. But perhaps more importantly, 9/11 and Katrina forever changed my relationship to poetry. I began to think about poetry very differently—to think about the kind of cultural work it could do in the world. AJB: Adrienne Rich says, “In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.” Does this statement resonate for you when considering the physicality inherent in the poems of Milk Dress? COOLEY: Milk Dress is a book about the body—the female body in particular. I was interested in writing about the languages used to talk about mothering and birthing and child-raising. I thought about this in structuring the book, for example. e poems about the Harry Harlow wire-mother experiments work as fragments that break and connect the other poems. I was very compelled by the scientific language of that experiment. AJB: How has your experience as a professor of writing (not to mention an administrator of a writing program) informed your own writing? COOLEY: My experience as a teacher has been crucial to the writing of my poems. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have co-founded an MFA program with my beloved colleagues at Queens College in 2007 and to be running that program with them now. Our program is truly a collaborative venture, one which has given all of us invaluable chances to talk about creative writing, pedagogy, and the teaching of writing. I love teaching, and I love directing the MFA program. To me, it is all about risk and taking chances with your work, and what could be more fun? And more terrifying. I always tell my students: you should always be trying to write the poem you don’t think you can write, the poem you are afraid of writing. And I am trying to do that in my own work. AJB: Who and what are your influences? COOLEY: My greatest influence in Milk Dress is Muriel Rukeyser. I discovered her as an undergraduate, but her work has meant so much to me in my adult life beyond college. e Life of Poetry, her book on poetics, is fantastic, and all of her poems blend history and personal experience with a call for social justice. Her work is of the world in the very best way. Her long poem, “e Book of the Dead,” contains my favorite lines of all time: “What three things can never be done? / Forget. Be Silent. Stand alone.” AJB: Milk Dress and much of your work focus on specific subjects: pregnancy and motherhood in Milk Dress, the Salem witch trials in e Afflicted Girls, Hurricane Katrina in Breach, the personae poems of Resurrection. What is your process for cracking open a subject, for entering it and making it truly your own? And if research is involved, how do you then turn such research into something that sings? COOLEY: at is a very interesting question. I love research— as I discovered while getting my PhD—and in particular, I am interested in archival work. Many poems in my first book were, in their first incarnations, PhD seminar papers! AJB: Subject matter poetry can be a controversial topic for contemporary poets. What is your take on the benefits and risks inherent in writing toward a specific subject? COOLEY: But subject matter can only be a way into the work not the work itself. Otherwise the poem will become an exercise in “Isn’t that interesting?” I use subject matter to find a new language, to discover a new lexicon. In my book on the Salem Witch Trials, [this new lexicon] was the language of trial transcripts where most people could not sign their names and the courts spoke for them. In Milk Dress, I am interested in the language of mothering and the language of disaster and how those two discourses shape experiences. h, fixed form is endlessly fascinating...most interesting to me when it is rebellious... author interview (continued) 5 Nancy Bareis O “ ”