Katha Pollitt Talks to Adam Gopnik

Katha Pollitt, has released The Mind-Body Problem, her first poetry collection since her debut, Antartic Traveller, won acclaim in 1982. This week, she sits down with Adam Gopnik to discuss everything from her political writings to her admiration of Sylvia Plath. While some of her themes derive from politics, there’s a freedom, she explains, in the structure of poetry and in that there are no requirements like the ones that exist for political writing. “For me, poetry and politics come from different places most of the time,” Pollitt says. She discusses some her inspirations–John Milton, and W.H. Auden, to name a few–and reveals a little bit about the process of writing a poem, which she confesses she still doesn’t fully understand. “I never know how long a poem is going to take,” Pollitt says. “Some I’ve fiddled with for months or even years. (And then there are those lumpish, sluggish, confused ones that lie there muttering in draft after draft till I give up on them.)” And simply being a female poet, Pollitt explains, has its own challenges and implications, too. “A woman poet doesn’t have to wrestle with the legacy of, say, Emily Dickinson, the way an Irish poet, even today, has to confront, or get around, Yeats.”