Aleyna Rentz interviews Mary Jo Salter in the Johns Hopkins Magazine. Salter is emirata from the JHU Writing Seminars and is editor of The Best American Poetry 2024. Here's how the interview ends:
There's a trend that I've noticed, both in this collection and in contemporary poetry in general, where people write a lot more about the mundane than they used to. You never had Keats, for example, writing about doing household chores, but in this anthology there's a poem by Brandel France de Bravo called "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry." What do you think about this shift?
What poetry does, among other things, is force us to slow down and recognize that we haven't been paying attention. If we're going to the laundromat every Tuesday, we're likely in a rote mindset where we don't observe certain things. Depending on the poet, you're either saying after the ecstasy, the laundry, or after the laundry, the ecstasy. But in any case, life frees itself from the banal when we stop thinking or feeling in automatic ways. When we're surprised by feeling, that tends to produce a better poem than if we're not.
