We’ve been eagerly awaiting Camille Guthrie’s latest book of poetry, Diamonds, since we heard her read at our Writer’s Process Night, all the way back in the fall of 2018. Camille’s poems about mid-life, divorce, and motherhood are bold, hilarious, and inspiring, full of references to myth and literature and pop culture. In a word, these poems are all-around brilliant. And of course, it felt like a natural pairing to have bold and brilliant fiction writer, Makenna Goodman, ask the questions.

When you begin Diamonds, you may just find yourself sneaking in every opportunity to read another poem and text your favorite lines to friends. It’s so good that you’ll tote it around with you until you’re finished and then you’ll begin again.

Diamonds is out now from BOA Editions. Congratulations, Camille!

Makenna Goodman: Your poems are so funny; to be honest, I don't always associate poetry with humor and I was laughing the whole way through Diamonds. Tell me about humor in your work.

Camille Guthrie: I’m glad you were laughing! It was wonderful to meet you at my reading for Literary North, then become your friend and read your brilliant novel, The Shame. I think you’re right: most people think of poetry as serious and earnest. When I read from the book, I often tell the audience that the poems are intended to be funny so that they don’t feel obligated to be quiet and polite. 

One of my intentions for Diamonds was to write in many tones; I find it a bit dull when poets have a book all in the same tone. In “My Boyfriend, John Keats,” a poem about feeling possessive about my love for Keats, I went for it, and like stand-up, timing is everything. For me, the most fun image is the Terracotta Bucket, next to which the speaker makes out with Keats in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Modernist poets Dorothy Parker and Mina Loy showed me how to inflate and deflate poetic rhetoric, and that technique can be humorous and subversive. A bucket from antiquity was just what I wanted—the humble cousin of Keats’s Grecian Urn.

I have a habit of mind to think that things could always be worse when they are bad. It may come from a children’s book by James Stevenson called “Could Be Worse!” that I read when I was a kid. That’s where the poem “During the Middle Ages” came from, but I wrote it long before the global pandemic. (Yet, again, we have vaccines, and in medieval times, they did not.) Humor is one personal and poetic strategy—an affect, a tone—that provides another perspective. It’s relief from pain, “those little Anodynes / That deaden suffering,” to quote Emily Dickinson. I also love and admire Shirley Jackson’s books about her young family and writing life: Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages. Hilarious writing with an acerbic and tender tone. 

MG: What is life like, as a poet and a teacher?

CG: It’s wonderful. I feel lucky to have the job that I have—to talk about literature and writing with such talented students. At Bennington College, I created a series of courses called the Scriptorium, which is the room in a monastery for writing, and I change the topics all the time; I’ve taught courses on Beauty, Love, Ekphrasis, Visual Culture, Borders and Boundaries. One of my most favorite activities is close reading; there’s magic when you do a very close reading of a poem or essay with a room of enthusiastic students. And, one of the joys of teaching and being a writer is reading a text with students who reveal to you something that you never noticed before. 

When I was teaching Paradise Lost, many of my students pronounced “Satan” with a glottal stop or silent t like “kitten.” I wrote S-A-T-A-N on the chalkboard to suggest that we say his name with a hard t since he is Lucifer and rather evil. An act which had surprised my soon-to-be boyfriend, whose math class was held right after ours. Thinking about that moment lead to my poem “Upon Reading Milton,” since it’s always an adventure to read that epic poem as a modern, atheist woman. Because I’ve been teaching for more than twenty years, certain texts stay on my mind: Mina Loy’s poems, Judith Butler’s essays, books by Roland Barthes and John Berger, Shakespeare’s sonnets and Hamlet, Moby-Dick, Octavia Butler’s short stories. That language affects my poems. In this book, I include some of those texts that I’ve been rereading for many years, as many of my poems concern being immersed in reading. In the classroom, I try to approach texts with humility and openness, yet in my poems, I approach with questions and sass. Flirtatiously.

MG: What advice do you have for young writers?

CG: Read everything. All genres of writing. Read mysteries, epics, plays, fanfiction, journalism, screenplays, literary journals, artist’s statements, experimental writing, “minor” novels, translations, sacred texts, graphic novels, interviews. Don’t limit your tastes. When I was younger, I read all of Virginia Woolf, all of Dickinson and Plath, and all the books about them. Find literary mentors wherever you can and learn all their tricks. Assemble your artistic family. 

Make friends with other writers and create a community for yourself. Share your work with others. I have writing partners who have shared my disappointments and joys for year. 

Write tons of drafts. See where your heroes are being published, and submit your work with the expectation of receiving a lot of rejections. Successful writers get more rejections than acceptances. 

I also follow the advice I got from a professor and friend of mine, Joline Blais, when I was an undergrad at Vassar. She wrote in the morning when she could, then it stayed on her mind for the rest of the day. I try to do that with a full-time job and two kids. And, if I don’t have the ability or time to write, I do something else that makes me feel connected to poetry and my work. With social media, it’s easy to read poems every day.

Octavia Butler has the best advice about writing in her essays. She wrote, “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”

Julianna Baggott (novelist, poet, short story writer) has excellent advice about writing. She has taught me so much about perseverance paired with invention and realism. She created a six-week writing program called Efficient Creativity (an audio series) that has encouraging, practical advice. Julianna has published more than 20 books in various genres and is now writing for film and TV. 

To put in the time is essential: your heart and soul come through anyway. That’s the way to be a writer.

MG: If you were never to write a poem about something, what would it be?

CG: Never say never? I don’t know. I think that we are all haunted by our own content. It’s not necessarily a choice. I find that if I’m writing about something that upsets or scares me, I preoccupy myself with form. My first drafts are often done as if I’m looking at the page in a blur, askance, indirectly, as if I’m not writing it. Then, I return and add, extract, revise—focusing on the sounds, lines, rhythm. I stick the emotional content into a sonnet or sestina. If I were to say I would never write about something, my inclination would be to write about it soon after.

MG: Do you have a favorite poem?

CG: I could never, ever choose. I love Shakespeare’s sonnets. I love H.D., Lorine Niedecker, all the Modernist women poets, Mary Ruefle, Lucille Clifton, and John Keats. I am smitten with Robert Browning lately. Right now I am admiring and loving these new poetry books: Mark Wunderlich’s God of Nothingness, B.K. Fischer’s Ceive, Katie Peterson’s Life in a Field, Phillip B. Williams’s Mutiny, Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets, and Kendra DeColo’s I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World.

MG: Five words about Keats? 

CG: I won’t be able to keep to just five words. I cannot!

Bright star, Fanny, forever, Negative Capability, odes, Happy, happy love!, This living hand, Phoenix wings.

MG: Five words about Wordsworth?

CG: How about eight? Lyrical Ballads, daffodils, Dorothy, Tintern abbey, Lake District.

MG: Five words about H.D.?

CG: So many words to describe her. Queen, elegance, cheekbones, expat, Bryher, Perdita, antiquity, myth, Trilogy, the Blitz, discipline, angels.

MG: Five words about the best book you've read in the last few years?

CG: Another impossible question. I have been completely blown away by Miriam Toews’s novels. Believe it or not, I read Alice Munro’s stories for the first time over the pandemic. Why did it take me so long to get to her work? I am in love. I also read almost all of Octavia Butler’s work. Absolutely astonishing. I picked up an Agatha Christie mystery when I was at MacDowell before the pandemic arrived, then ate up so many of her books. Do people know about her? Wow, what a stylist, and I love her cuts on the Modernists. And, I also love the fabulous novels of Laura Sims, Helen Phillips, Maria Semple, and Melissa Broder. I cried over Shawna Kay Rodenberg’s beautiful memoir Kin. I could go on.

Literary North: Thank you so much Camille and Makenna!

Camille Guthrie is the author of Diamonds (BOA, 2021) and three previous books of poetry: Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois (Subpress, 2013), In Captivity (Subpress, 2006), and The Master Thief (Subpress, 2000). Her poems have appeared in such journals as At Length, Boston Review, Green Mountains Review, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, Poem-A-Day, and Tin House, as well as in several anthologies including the Best of American Poetry 2019 & 2020 (Scribner) and Art & Artists: Poems (Everyman’s Library). Guthrie has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell and the Yaddo Foundation. She received her MFA from Brown University and her BA in English Literature from Vassar College. The Director of the Undergraduate Writing Initiatives at Bennington College, she lives in rural Vermont with her two children.