DONNA J. GELAGOTIS LEE

Conversations with Creative Writers: 

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Winner of Prize Americana, Donna J. Gelagotis Lee's second award-winning book of poetry, Intersection on Neptune, moves outward from the immigrant experience through first and second generations to unravel a history of American life in New York and New Jersey beginning in the early to mid-1900s. In a sweep of suburban, city, and rural life, this intersection of lives spins off separate journeys to what will become twentieth-century American experiences reaching to the present.

Donna earned a B.A., cum laude, in English and creative writing from Sweet Briar College, where she was a Davison-Foreman scholar. She is the author of On the Altar of Greece (Gival Press, 2006), winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award and recipient of a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category.

Her poetry has appeared internationally in literary and scholarly journals, including The Bitter Oleander, The Cortland Review, Feminist Studies, Journal of New Jersey Poets, The Massachusetts Review, Review Americana, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.

This conversation travels through geography, landscape, space, location, setting, ritual, history, myth, process, memory, intersections, people, culture, community, connection, and authenticity – all in service to the working poets among our readership.

Intersection on Neptune moves readers through New York City, New Jersey suburbs, and shared cultural rituals – from Yom Kippur to Coney Island. How do you think about geography and ritual as poetic engines, and what draws you to these particular communal spaces?

Geography has been the impetus for many of my poems and is much more than location purely in the sense of physical terrain. It encompasses the people and thus the culture of that place. Though the visual can be a starting place for a poem, it's a window through which we can see. In that respect, it can drive the poem.

Landscape is a reciprocal notion. We see what's in front of us through our own personal lens. So while the outline and objects may be the same, how we see them is different. After all, the mind synthesizes that information.

My work is often rooted in location. It's not coincidental that we say a poem is set in a particular place, for place is like a setting where life, or in this case the lyric or the narrative or the dramatic, plays out.

As for ritual and the particular geography of Intersection on Neptune, I am intimately familiar with New York and New Jersey, having grown up in New Jersey and having worked in New York City, staying overnight there once a week during that time. My husband grew up in Brooklyn, so I've visited Brooklyn many times. I'm aware of the different ethnicities in the city. As I mentioned in one of my poems, in a building in Brooklyn, a sign in the lobby was in both English and Russian. My mother-in-law lived in a co-op apartment in that building. Her mother lived right outside of Sea Gate and went to temple in Sea Gate, a largely Jewish community. At Hanukkah, I witnessed the cars with large menorahs atop. Rituals are packed with meaning, often multilayered. These rituals are personal and communal. Ritual creates a place or occasion for contemplation, much as a poem can.

When I think of Coney Island, I think of the Parachute Jump and Sea Gate, its history, my own and others', and also the people. Coney Island brings to mind the different ethnic communities and their traditions. In the title poem of Intersection on Neptune, people at this "intersection" include Jamaicans, Chinese, Russians, and "men with yarmulkes." Some people wait to share stories while the "sea breeze inter- / venes." I can recall the feeling of the breeze off the water from blocks away and the scents the breezes carried. It was not only the visual but also the auditory and the olfactory, the experiential, that all brought this poem together.

 

Several reviewers note the strong sensory presence in your poems – food, sound, weather, movement – and how those details create what one called a "neighborly pastoral." How intentional is your use of sensory memory as a way to build empathy and community on the page?

I wouldn't say it's intentional. It's my process. It goes back to the idea of geography, particularly landscape, informing my work. I would say that I tend to immerse myself in the landscape. I don't quite share the view that it is separate. We are part of it, and so its smells, its sounds, how it feels – whether the breeze, or the sea, or the land and its fruit in our hands, its visual elements – all have impact. So when one or more of these elements surface and prompt a poem, it's a natural progression that the poem contains these elements. It's rather organic for me. The revision process is far more deliberate. If I succeed in building empathy and community, it's because those elements already exist in some way and manifest in the work. Environment is often pivotal.

 

In Intersection on Neptune, the immigrant experience emerges not as abstraction but as lived, neighbor-to-neighbor reality. How do you balance personal history with collective memory when writing poems that speak to both individual and shared identity?

Balancing the personal with the collective is sometimes a tightrope walk. I'm very careful when dealing with the personal, not to overstep and not to lapse into the sentimental, except when intentional(!). I will research a poem as part of the revision process in an attempt to be accurate as to the time and place and events of the poem or the historical place where the poem exists, not to rewrite but to tweak as necessary. I don't mean to say that a poem needs to be 100 percent autobiographical or biographical or factual but that the overall arc of the poem should be believable.

 

On the Altar of Greece has been praised for resisting familiar classical clichés while still engaging deeply with myth, history, and place. What was your process for entering such a heavily mythologized landscape and rendering it "real" again through contemporary observation?

I wrote most of the poems for On the Altar of Greece many years after I returned from Greece. I wrote one or two poems set in Greece, and then the floodgates opened. I approached them via memory and perspective gained from distance. Greece was such an immersive experience that my time there etched into my psyche. I lived a contemporary life in the midst of a culture that maintained age-old traditions and in some instances beliefs.

As an American, I was keenly aware of the differences but respectful of them, for the most part, at the same time. We have our own mythologies even in our own country after all. Therefore, it was not difficult to engage with the impact of the environment I found. It was a lived experience with all that entailed. If myth was a part of my experience, it came forth.

 

Across both collections, readers have remarked on a quiet but powerful sense of connection – between people, between past and present, between place and self. What do you hope readers carry with them after leaving the worlds of these poems, and how do you see poetry functioning in a time when those kinds of connections often feel fragile?

Reading is important, reading poetry perhaps even more so now, as it implores us to slow down and pay attention when our attention may be fragmented. Reading informs us on many levels. But so does experiencing real connections to place and people. Otherwise, we can miss nuance. We can miss the understanding that comes from interaction. Even, as mentioned, landscape can interact.

Sometimes I'm concerned that we are going to lose something vital to what has made us human as we immerse ourselves in our digital world rather than in the physical environment, especially in nature, which itself is changing, and as we look less and less to history than we once did. For all of the positive things that technology has brought, including information, facts, data, it cannot replace our place with each other in the natural world and our ability to discern what's real or authentic. Even myth can help here, but not in isolation.

I hope that my work can carry forth some of that history and some of the authenticity of time and place so that we can better see our interconnectedness, where we are and where we are going. If you can feel a place and a people, you are closer to understanding yourself and what surrounds you and how you fit in it.

 

Leslie Kreiner Wilson, Editor and Interviewer

Winner of PRIZE AMERICANA, read Intersection at Neptune here.

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