Hagen takes the clumsy and mundane and works it into something more elegant and sometimes funny, finding beauty or the unexpected in the pockets of a Salvation Army jacket, on the teacups at Disneyland, studying her ex-husband as he draws her a map to get across town. Entering will be published October 1 by Airlie Press , a nonprofit poetry collective based in Oregon. Hagen is the author of two previous chapbooks, Fringe Living and Among Others.
She teaches memoir and poetry writing in Eugene, where she and her husband do most of their tango dancing. We asked her a few questions. Will you pick one to share and talk about why you chose it? Well, this poem is about childhood, and mentions sex—two themes of the book! I remember them so vividly—their smell, the thrill of the hunt, the way you had to think like a firefly to guess which direction they were flying, in order to catch them.
Emerson wrote about how, if the stars showed up only one night every thousand years, people would talk about it for generations. And this poem is me, not admonishing but smiling, remembering the beauty and the destructive curiosity of childhood. That feels like the essence of your collection. How do you describe it?
A compendium of assorted ponderings? But I like your description. I do feel a permanent and ingrained kind of tenderness toward it. Can I say the book is a celebration of our stumblings? Yes, definitely. It reminds me of the Japanese term Wabi Sabi, finding beauty in imperfection. We need a word like that in English. It reminds me of The Meaning of Tingo , a book of words and phrases from other languages that have no equivalent in English.
I like that—the word and the definition. Have you always been a poet? I have, oddly enough, always been a poet. When I was seven my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Sampson, sent some of our class poems to Highlights for Children. She called me up to her desk one day and said, Highlights is going to publish your poem!
