You’ve mentioned the “interruptions and selvages of mothering.” Has your process of composing work changed significantly? Or your views on what poetry can change or accomplish?

Well, yes. The process of writing has changed in every possible way. As I mentioned, I write very slowly. There is a luxury to writing slowly. I no longer have that luxury — so I have tried to teach myself to work faster, with more urgency. But Woolf was right! (“That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.”) I am interested in etymology and history, in how language changes through use, disuse, acquisition, fragmentation, amelioration and pejoration. To speak specifically and personally about it, after tbe birth of my daughter seven months ago, I have had almost no time in solitude. (Of course this means I’ve started researching the history of privacy.) While on maternity leave, I had my two older sons home with me as well. For approximately five months, I spent no time alone at all. I was never alone in our house. I was never alone at a coffeeshop. I don’t think I was ever alone in the car. It was a total lack of solitude and silence. This is a practical matter, not a philosophical one. But I am getting very interested in the juncture of practicality and philosophy. When I started to worry a little, it occurred to me that no one would suffer for lack of a poem by me for a year — and it will come back. There is no need to panic. And it did come back.

I’m reminded of that famous essay by Adrienne Rich — the one about writing “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.” In it she writes about her work becoming more fragmented while raising her small children. I have found the opposite. I find myself more interested in narrative now that I have children and spend so much time telling stories and hearing them make up their own (of course, their stories are marvelously nonlinear and wandering). Having children has attuned me more intensely to how we use narrative in daily life and in writing. It has also broadened my interest in language. I am interested in etymology and history, in how language changes through use, disuse, acquisition, fragmentation, amelioration and pejoration. I’m equally interested in the great vowel shift of the fifteenth century and the “apex of babble” (Roman Jakobson) that precedes language in young toddlers. My views on what poetry can accomplish remain pretty much the same — I think mainly it can show us a mind at work. And that that is thrilling to see.

What are you working on now?

Next I hope to write more of my current project — in progress since June 2010. It is a booklength poem series titled Marybones, a hybrid-genre exploration of various historical, cultural, and fictional Marys, including the Virgin Mary, Mary Queen of Scots, Marys in the Salem Witch Trials, Typhoid Mary, and many lesser-known Marys, including those on the Mayflower and Titanic, those found in studies of American Colonial-era wet nurses, and elsewhere. The series is research-based and ekphrastic, investigating the representation of these various Marys in art, literature, history, folklore, children’s games, and elsewhere. Why Mary? Or, more accurately, why Marys?

Images of Mary formed a first consciousness of the representation and form given to women in art, and… gave me a shape of motherhood in art — the first representation of motherhood in art and the only one I would see for many years.

The first impulse to write this poem series came many years ago, while I was writing bk of (h)rs, which was structurally based on medieval books of hours. To look further back, I attended a Catholic girls’ school from the age of three until I graduated from high school at seventeen. Images of Mary are thus a kind of vernacular, visual language for me. Images of Mary formed a first consciousness of the representation and form given to women in art, and, more specifically, gave me a shape of motherhood in art — the first representation of motherhood in art and the only one I would see for many years. I’m really interested in the ubiquity of the name/word “Mary,” ubiquitous nearly to the point of simultaneously being a name and a mark of anonymity. The name becomes a palimpsest — each Mary writing over, revising, enlarging, and partly effacing the Mary who preceded her.

After Marybones I hope to work on a project called Nu&s — a long series of prose, prose poetry, and lyric interruptions, all of it research-based and focused on codes and cryptography, secret languages, untranslatable or lost languages, and the lives of people relevant to such languages — people as varied as Christopher Marlowe, the Rosenbergs, and the Voynich Study Groups (a collection of cryptanalysts and other intelligence workers in the 1940s and 1960s, who tried to crack the mysterious and unreadable Voynich manuscript), for example. I was working on Marybones and Nulls at the same time originally, but had to put Nulls aside because I cannot successfully work on two long projects at once (as I said before) and didn’t want them to merge.