Tuesday 16 February 2010

Lucia Perillo in conversation: "We killed coyotes; we killed birds. I killed lots of things."

Here is Lucia Perillo in conversation with Maria McLeod at the Poetry Foundation Website.

As readers of this blog may know, Perillo is one of my favourite contemporary poets. If you haven't read her yet, you should. And her latest book Inseminating the Elephant is a good place to start. Perhaps this interview will convince you.

In this interview Perillo discusses her "origins" as a poet and the shift in her outward identity that came with a diagnosis of MS.

I have never really thought of Perillo as a "disabled poet" or as a "poet of disability" even though her subject matter often covers that ground. Mostly, I think of her as a kind of nature poet (in the broadest possible sense -- she is a trained biologist, and as a poet she is remarkably attuned to the physical universe), and as a poet of the borderlands between the body and the mind.

Read the whole interview here.

2 comments:

Chris Banks said...

Hey, thanks for the links. Perillo has a new poem called "The Wolves of Illinois" in the latest issue of Ploughshares guest edited by Tony Hoagland.

Paul Vermeersch said...

I'll look for that!