Suzanne Cleary’s latest collection of poetry, The Odds (New York Quarterly Books), won the 2024 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award. Her other books include Keeping Time (Carnegie Mellon UP), Trick Pear (Carnegie Mellon UP), Crude Angel (BkMk Press), and Beauty Mark (BkMk Press), which won the 2013 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, and the Patterson Award for Literary Excellence. Her collection Blue Cloth won the 2004 Sunken Garden Poetry Festival chapbook competition. She’s the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including Best American Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Poetry London. She teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Converse College and has degrees from SUNY Oneonta, Washington University, and Indiana University of Pennsylvania. A New York City area resident for over thirty years, Suzanne was born and raised upstate, in Binghamton, New York.
Alivia Anderson (AA): In your poem “Reunion,” you mention the class that made you fall in love with poetry. Can you go into more detail on that? What was it about that class that pulled you into poetry?
Suzanne Cleary (SC): Poetry had never interested me until my senior year of high school when I enrolled in Poetry Workshop solely because the class fit well in my schedule. Our teacher, a poet named Joseph Lisowski, had us read poems by contemporary poets (e.g. Robert Bly, James Wright, Adrienne Rich), and then we’d write poems modeled after them. This was the first time I’d read poets who used language that sounded like the language I used, rather than the language used by Emily Dickinson or William Shakespeare, whose work I could not yet appreciate. In Poetry Workshop I discovered that a poem can describe small moments of an ordinary life; attention can reveal how large that life really is. I began to look more intensely at my own ordinary life. I wanted to live with my eyes open, so as to discover poems all around me…