Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of the poetry collection Little Murders Everywhere, a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have appeared in such places as Ploughshares, The Georgia Review,Guernica, Crazyhorse, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and Best New Poets 2008, and  her new work received the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. She received an MFA from Emerson College, and a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She is the  co-founder and editor of the online literary magazine Memorious  and an assistant professor at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers.

 
This interview was conducted orally, between Thomas J. Dowell-Howko, who was the interviewer, and the interviewee, Dr. Rebecca Morgan Frank. This interview took place on April 5th, 2013 around 4 o’clock on UC’s Clermont Campus. Questions were inspired by Dr. Frank’s visit to the University of Cincinnati-Clermont Campus where she conducted a master poetry class, book reading, and publishing seminar. The oral interview was then transcribed and turned into a written document to be published on the East Fork Literary Magazine. The students of UC are forever grateful for the sound writing experience that Dr. Rebecca Morgan Frank brought to the campus.

 

Did you plan to become a poet or did poetry find you?

 
I think I always sort of had a dream of being a writer, although when I was younger I was a dancer. But I thought if I wasn’t going to be a dancer, I was going to be a writer. I never saw that it would be poetry; I thought that I would write novels, so I think that I would say that poetry…found me.

 
Do you remember who the first poet was that struck that heart cord?

 
Well, when I was a child I had Robert Lewis Stevenson’s The Child’s Garden of Verses and I also had T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Those were the two books of poems that I first remember reading and having.

 
You chose “Little Murders Everywhere” as the title poem of your book. What relationship do you have with this poem?

 
In my 20’s I was teaching environmental education at a residential facility in central California. City; kids would come and stay with us for a week and we would take them on nature walks. And we had a red-tailed hawk that we were rehabilitating. And so I would work with her, her name was Suju. I would have to put on the falconer’s glove. And we all would collect road kill and freeze it and we would also get dead birds, they killed all the male chicks at the chicken factory, so we would have bags full of those. So we would have her fly to us to eat in order to try to strengthen her wings. So that was where the conceit came from. It is also a poem about someone who was terminally ill, who was an adult but also somewhat captive. I was thinking about what it was like to have so much control over someone or something injured that depends on you to live.

 
There is a structural pattern with your poems “For the sin of…” that are scattered throughout the book. Was separating these symbolic in anyway?

 
I played around with structure quite a bit, and what I found was that clumping them together was too much repetition. I think that sometimes if you have poems that are similar in form or subject matter they can be more alive for the reader if they are spread out.

 
Do you see a connection between your poem “Eros is Headed Toward Us” and “For the Sin of Foolishness”?

 
Perhaps they are tonally similar, and they are both admonishing love in some way. “Eros is Headed Towards Us” is a poem that I wrote after I had gone on a date with an astronomer. I Googled him and there were all of these columns about astronomy that he had written, and the more I started reading about this asteroid called Eros, some of the lines in the popular science articles were really so funny. This poem includes some found lines, so it is a little more playful.

 
Do you have a personal poem that is your favorite for “Little Murders Everywhere” and why?

 
You know it’s hard to pick favorites, but I probably would say “For the Solitary Diner” is one of my favorites because it came to me as a line and kept coming back. A teacher told me it shouldn’t be in the book, and I’m really glad I fought for it.

 

 

As you begin to sit and write, I’m guessing you sit, standing does deliver a better rush in my opinion, if I could run and write I would, do general ideas spark your poetry or does a slight detail start the fire?

 
Well, first I have to tell you that Joyce Carol Oates supposedly writes while she runs! I think it depends on the poem, but I think it’s often more that the particular leads me to what I’m really writing about, so the big idea is kind of floating around and the small thing is my door to the bigger thing.

 
Memorious has been active for 19 issues now. Being a co-founder, how has this experience progressed from the beginning?

 
When we started it, we had no idea what we were getting into and it’s been amazing, I think, how it has progressed. The two people that I started with are no longer working on it. So it really is my magazine; I have a staff and all the editorial control and responsibility. I think the big thing that has changed is that a community has emerged; I am so familiar with the works of all the people that I’ve published and I get to celebrate all of their accomplishments. In the beginning we were trying to prove ourselves and now we are trying to continue and grow. Another thing that has changed dramatically was that in 2008 when the economy crashed, a lot of literary magazines, particularly ones at schools, lost their funding and a move began to happen more quickly towards online publishing. All of a sudden people were coming to me for advice about online publishing. We started as underdogs when few people really took online magazines seriously, and now there is so much more respect because people realize that this is the direction we all are going in. So much has changed.

 
What has teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi taught you about your own poetry?

 
This is a new teaching position, I started there in August. So, it might be early to say, but I think that my graduate students remind me that I need to keep taking risks. My undergraduates too, in a different way; they’re so open there. They are brave and not squeamish.

 
Of all the projects that you work on which is the most rewarding?

 
Well, I would say it has to be the writing itself. But one of things that has been really special in my life is the Memorious Art Song Contest, which brings poets and composers together. We have a contest for which poets submit poems, and our guest composer picks the winning poem and sets it as a piece of music. We have a concert in Chicago and publish the recording online. Our first concert that I went to, when I heard the poet’s work coming out of this opera singer’s mouth, I thought, “This is the best thing that ever happened in my life!” Bringing them together felt magical. Also, having my own work set by composers and played by musicians is pure magic, one of the greatest joys of my life.

An Interview with Poet Rebecca Morgan Frank
By: Thomas Dowell-Howko