Artist Profile: Erika Meitner
Photo by Shawn Poynter. Profile of Erika at Loghaven residency in Tennessee.
Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010)—a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry; and Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022). Her poems have been published most recently in The New Yorker, Orion, Sierra, Electric Literature, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Meitner is currently a professor of English and MFA program director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You can find more about her here: https://erikameitner.com/
Working while in residency at Marble House Project in Vermont
Who or what are 2 or 3 inspirations that have supported (or challenged) your artistic growth in the past several years?
I'm definitely a poet of place. I spent 15 years living in the mountains of Southern Appalachia, which very much shaped my work. I moved to Wisconsin in the summer of 2022, and I live near two kettle ponds —Tiedeman's Pond, and Stricker's Pond — that are also conservation areas and estuaries. I walk a loop around both ponds nearly every day, and have learned about so many new birds and their habits: red-winged blackbirds dive-bombing people who get near their nests, sandhill cranes who hang out in pairs and mate for life, a fleet of pelicans fishing as a group — and these all have made their way into poems, which is a little hilarious to me, as I'm not really a nature poet. I grew up in a pretty urban part of Queens, NY. I guess I'm a bird person now. I'm also consistently inspired by current events. I often write from headlines, or while listening to NPR, and I've been writing about gun culture and gun violence, immigration, women's issues, the act of political protest, climate change, and other issues that shape our experiences in the world for many years. I find these topics challenging as an impetus for — and topic of — art, but I'm very much a writer who brings the world into my poems.
Erika reading at NYC Poetry Festival
Would you be willing to share one of your first formative experiences of poetry?
This is going to sound really cheesy, but one of the first experiences I remember of seeing the arts represented in film in a way that resonated for me was watching Irene Cara in the movie Fame, which was released in 1980. Both my parents were trained as accountants, and I grew up in a house without many books. English was not my parents' native or first language, but like many first-generation American kids, I had a library card, and we had television. I saw Fame on TV a few years after it was released, when I was maybe 8 or 9, and watching all these kids in a performing arts high school chasing their dreams of 'making it' in dance, music, and theater really made me — and tons of other Gen X-ers with arty dreams against all odds who maybe hadn't seen themselves represented on screen until then as city kids with lots of tenacity and grit and resilience, but less polish and money — feel like being an artist of any kind was an option.
Erika reading at Grove 34 for Poets of Queens
How do other mediums, like book arts or the natural world, shape/inform your writing and how you work language on the page?
I'm very drawn to dance — especially modern dance — as a mode of expression that skirts language entirely. Poems are the only form of language that have a fixed body on the page — a container— and no matter what medium you take that poem across, it doesn't usually change shape. One of my first jobs was in documentary film, and the company I worked for did a lot of arts programming, so I worked with Bill T. Jones and the Balanchine archives. But we also did investigative films, and that set me on a path of collaborating with photographers on various documentary poetry projects, where we go on the road together as journalists and explore social issues in urban environments in verse. You can find some of my work in that vein — for Virginia Quarterly Review, in Detroit, Cleveland, and Miami — up on my website. For the past 8 years or so, I've also been really interested in architecture and art criticism as disciplines to explore for streams of new language for my poems.
Erika’s works in progress at Marble House Project.
What are 2 to 3 exhibitions, concerts, books and/or book talks, spoken word events and/or films you're hoping to check out this season in Wisconsin or virtually?
I'm excited to check out the Shilpa Gupta exhibit "I did not tell you what I saw, but only what I dreamt" that's up at MMoCA through January 2025 — and actually, as part of a joint initiative between the Monsters of Poetry reading series and the museum, during banned books week I'll be doing a poetry reading at 7pm on September 26th in the museum atrium alongside Wisconsin poets Steven Espada Dawson, Nicholas Gulig, Natasha Oladokun, Nikki Wallschlaeger, and Timothy Yu, of poems we've written specifically from interacting with the exhibit.
In general, I'm a regular at Monsters of Poetry, which happens about 8 times a year — and also the monthly Watershed Reading Series at the Arts + Lit Lab. And I'm really looking forward to the Midwest Video Poetry Festival at ALL, which is October 5th and 12th this year. Likewise, I attend tons of Wisconsin Book Festival events, and I can't wait to hear Jesse Lee Kercheval talk about her new graphic memoir French Girl on September 11th. Also, Hanif Abdurraqib will be coming to town on September 5th to read from his new book There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension at The Goodman Community Center sponsored by A Room of One's Own, which is a terrific bookstore.