Lisa Fishman

I live in Chicago, where I teach in the MFA and undergraduate poetry program of Columbia College, and in Southern Wisconsin where we have an organic farm. Previously, I lived in New York City and Salt Lake City, although I am a native of Michigan (Pontiac, metro-Detroit, Leelanau County).

My first poetry teacher was Diane Wakoski at Michigan State University, where I was an undergraduate (1984-88). From her, I learned the phrase, “all the important information about the author may be found inside the book,” which (in similar versions) appears on the backs of her books instead of a bio. I agree with her. But I’ll try this biographical sketch anyway, minimally. I’m also grateful to Diane for pointing me to Creeley, Olson, Levertov and for making me aware of the Black Mountain School.

William Olsen was my next main teacher, in the MFA program at Western Michigan University (1989-92). Because I subsequently entered a doctoral program in literature rather than in creative writing (University of Utah), I didn’t have mentors who were poets after that. Instead, deep readers of poetry—Charles Berger, a Stevens scholar; Lee Rust Brown, an Emerson scholar; and Brooke Hopkins, a Wordsworth scholar—were my teachers. I wrote my dissertation on Shelley (under Charles Berger), which remains unbound in the thesis office, pending formatting corrections, after being successfully defended and approved by my doctoral committee. Ironically, the title of my dissertation is “Shelley’s ‘secret alchemy’: Mercury Unbound.”

I say I had no poetry mentors after my MFA program. Of course, the main teachers are always the poets one is reading, often the dead. Michael Palmer, whom I met at BreadLoaf the one year we both found ourselves there, knew this when he pointed me to Lorine Niedecker; Robert Creeley knew this when he referred me to poets of my own generation with whom I was not familiar. So the list of influences is vast and has to include all the time I spent in the Renaissance with people like Elise Jorgens and Stephanie Richardson at WMU; all of the time I spent in Modernism with the fine teachers of that work at Utah; and of course it has to include living in the British Romantics—whom I was taught to read by Stevens and other Modernists (a learning backwards, a learning by poets). The book I really want to write (or, rather, revise and publish) is on Shelley (“Mercury Unbound”).

A project we have underway—the “we” is the poet Richard Meier, myself, my husband, and the folks at Wave Books—has come to be called, for convenience’s sake, “Poetry Farm.” It’s the brainchild of Joshua Beckman, who shares our feeling that poets need to envision ways of working and being outside of academic structures. In the past, it seems people were able to imagine such possibilities more readily. But the professionalization of poetry (or of “creative writing”) seems to have narrowed the landscape. So we have poets, somewhat inaccurately called “interns,” come to our 12-acre fruit and vegetable farm to work for four hours a day. The rest of the day is theirs to write or think or read. There is no money involved and no “workshop” or formalized discussions of poems—just a new environment in which to write and a lot of physical work to do outside. They stay in a converted chicken coop or in the former granary and are largely on their own after picking tomatoes, hoeing strawberries, tying apples trees, etc. Each session this summer has been full, and it’s been a huge help to the farm, which is the full-time occupation of my husband, Henry Morren.

I had my son, James, on Bob Dylan’s birthday when I was 37. I was born in December, 1966.

Everything else is or is not contained in the books (The Happiness Experiment; Dear, Read; The Deep Heart’s Core Is a Suitcase).