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Biography
Author of the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail (Finishing Line Press, 2006) and widely published in journals, including Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Verse, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, Jennifer Militello has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Writers at Work, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She lives in New Hampshire and teaches at River Valley Community College. Jennifer Militello has been named a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award.Links
Excerpt from Rachel Inez Lane’s interview with Jennifer Militello in the Southeast Review Online:Q: Your lyricism is dreamy, and nature plays many characters within The Finch of Song. The poem “Living Where the Halyard Can Be Hard” I feel best describes your speaker’s voice by saying, “The only identity I know is alone in the sighs/ bright wilderness.” Your poetry has an aura of solitude about it, and Kathy Fagan bestows quite the compliment about your work by saying that “Dickinson is [your] poetic ancestor.” What has been your relationship with Emily Dickinson’s work?
A: Without Dickinson, I don’t know that I’d be writing poetry. I stumbled across her poems when I was very young, and reading them changed my life. I was a child. I didn’t know that others were feeling or seeing or thinking what I was, and I certainly didn’t know that all that mixed up mess that defined me could be expressed. Those poems were electric. They were inside me already waiting to be recognized. They knocked me right down, and when I got up again, I said to myself, I want to do this. I want to recreate this interior labyrinth with an alive, vital order of images and sounds, with this kind of half object, half animal, the poem, that worms right into you like a parasite and feeds you and keeps you starving at once.
And yes, there is much solitude in the poems in Flinch of Song. I wrote most of them while living alone in a little apartment in Nashua, New Hampshire. I didn’t know anyone in the town; it was a kind of self-imposed exile. I used to just wander around among these old brick factories and churches on Main Street and look at people living their lives and observe and be quiet and then go back to my desk in this little back room. It forced me to work in a way that interruption doesn’t allow for, and it was wonderful. And so that leaked through to this speaker who I think of as an offspring of ghosts, a sibling to loss, victim of a variety of predators, someone very aware that the second part of that phrase you quote from “Living Where the Halyards Can Be Heard” is the fact that you can take apart the workings and still not understanding them; you can break that pocket watch of existing down into its particular and interesting pieces to see how they move and fit and gleam but still be left with the mystery of the whole.
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