Tina Posner
ORP: What inspired you to begin writing or creating? Has that source of inspiration changed throughout your life?
Tina Posner: Around the age of 19, in theoretical calculus, I decided that I was a poet. Not because I was failing the class, but because the math inspired a theory: When finding the area under a curve, you solve for the length x width of a series of boxes that approach infinity, so I imagined that the curve was life, and the little bits that couldn’t be measured by the sides of each box (math and science) were to be approximated by literature and art. The former was a better fit for my habits and budget, and poetry, specifically, for my nature.
ORP: Who do you consider to be your creative ancestors and contemporaries for your art and/or writing? How does your creative work converse with theirs?
TP: I studied poetry with Robert Creeley and John Clarke in Buffalo, the latter had been Charles Olson’s student and was a Blake scholar. Jack became a mentor to me, and he was my poetry father. His classes were steeped in esoteric knowledge which blew open my unsophisticated suburban mind. This is an incomplete list of those inspire me: Mayakovsky, Ted Berrigan, and Eileen Myles for swagger; William Blake, Sylvia Plath, and Louise Gluck for mythic sense; Christina Rossetti, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot for sound; Emily Dickinson, Rumi, and Brigit Pegeen for ecstasy; Russell Edson, John Berryman, and Charles Bukowski for humor; Muriel Rukeyser, Claudia Rankine, and Patricia Smith for power dynamics and justice; Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, and Natalie Diaz for radical honesty; H.D., Frank O’Hara, and Ada Limon for elegance; John Ashbery, Dara Wier, and Bernadette Myers for language play; Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, and Hoa Nguyen for line breaks; John Donne and John Clarke for metaphysics; Wislawa Symborska and Naomi Shihab Nye for plain-spoken truth. And if I never wrote another word of poetry, I'd be happy to have Diane Seuss speak for me.
ORP: Do you know more than one language? How does this influence your art and/or writing?
TP: I am learning a tiny bit Korean from my current obsession with K-Dramas. Just so you know, I'm up for a conversation on this topic any time!
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
TP: I have been attracted to vulnerability but it felt uncomfortably squishy and moist in my own hands, much like warm viscera. Why? It wasn’t just personal discomfort. Was it as Shara McCallum said during a talk I attended that labeling writers “confessional” can be a shade derogatory, especially with regard to women, the feeling that we shouldn’t be so self-involved, or exhibit ourselves inappropriately? Or worse, the idea that it's an attempt to substitute trauma for talent — even more pathetic if the traumas are small and ordinary. Why rehash old stuff? It has the whiff of immaturity and the taboo of telling family secrets. The trepidation around transgressive autobiography is also hard-wired into our animal natures. In Jane Hirschfield’s book, Ten Windows, her biologist friend says: “Visibility typically costs you your life…Sex or an advertisement of a poisonous disposition are the only reasons anything with a pulse and a wink of sense would want to be conspicuous.” That’s the dilemma, “We are most comfortable being hidden but we yearn to be seen.” More and more as we age. It's a common compulsion among elders to start telling stories about their life. I could see my stories would help fill in the map of female experience for those of us who came of age in the late 70s and early 80s, a dangerous space after the sexual revolution and before Me Too. Famously, Muriel Rukeyser posed in 1968, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” Four years later, in “Diving the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich made it her manifesto…”to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.” And as Bell Hooks added: “No woman has ever written enough.” I felt a bit more comfortable revealing more of myself as part of this larger project.
ORP: What would you say is your most interesting writing and/or artistic quirk? Do you have any habits that you believe help or hinder your creativity?
TP: Another of my recent obsessions is aphantasia — or the lack of a mind's eye. It took more than half a lifetime for me to realize that other people were not speaking figuratively when they say that they see pictures in their mind. My mind doesn't work that way. It holds concepts together — like a red string on a bulletin board for catching a serial killer. The details of images are stored as if code behind the Matrix. I often make mental notes to collect details since I can't call up images. I find it amazing that I can use these details in my poems to conjure pictures in the minds of others while my own mental theater remains dark.
