Road Trip: Maggie Nelson

\In 2010, Ali Liebegott took a road trip by train. Destination: the Emily Dickinson house. Along the way, she interviewed poets—Dorianne Laux, Marie Howe, CAConrad, and many more. We’ll be reposting the series to celebrate the release of Liebegott’s fourth book this March, The Summer of Dead Birds,

The first stop on my cross-country pilgrimage to Emily Dickinson’s house was Los Angeles, to visit 39-year-old writer and thinker Maggie Nelson. She’s the author of four books of poetry and four books of non-fiction. The first time I ever saw Maggie Nelson, she was reading from a series of poems written about The Gowanus Canal called “The Canal Diaries” from her book Something Bright, Then Holes. Later I read her book Jane; then The Red Parts about her aunt’s murder, and most recently, the exquisite Bluets. I interviewed her on the lawn of The Getty museum in the sweltering heat.

—Ali Liebegott

ALI LIEBEGOTT: Do you think of yourself as a poet?

MAGGIE NELSON: It’s been a little odd recently because my first four books were poetry and I came into the world as a poet, and then my last four books have all been non-fiction. So I have yet to theorize exactly what shift has occurred, but when I grew up I was just interested in being a writer. The feeling I had reading Rilke in high school was very important to me becoming a poet. And I had a very good friend in high school and a fellow Rilke lover who was probably one of the best people who lived on this planet in my opinion. She died of breast cancer at 37 last year. Her name was Lhasa de Sela, she became a world famous singer, but she and I were poetry friends and she was a Rilke lover, and loved the same line you have tattooed on your arm—you must change your life. It was just a feeling about Rilke, it was a lyric inhale. I’ve taught “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” and had smart people deconstruct these poems in class, but it doesn’t approach what I was feeling. Paul Celan later occupied the place that Rilke occupied, which was whenever I read Paul Celan, I thought being a poet was the right thing and the best thing to be.

AL: I remember reading that it took Rilke ten years to write The Duino Elegies and that he was walking on the cliffs of whatever estate when he got inspiration to finish them, ten years later. What I like so much about him is that when I think about poets...