Marcella Durand holds an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College, where she
studied with Allen Ginsberg and L.S. Asekoff. She is the poetry editor for
Erato Press and was the Newsletter Editor for the Poetry Project at St. Mark's
Church from 2003-2005. She is also the recipient of a PEN/NYSCA Translation
Grant. Durand is the author of the following books and chapbooks: The Anatomy
of Oil, Western Capital Rhapsodies, City of Ports, and Lapsus Linguae. She
is currently an assistant to the poet John Ashbery. Born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania;
she lives in New York City.
Name: Marcella Durand Where are you from: New York, NY Where do you live/work: New York, NY
How has this specific site of Lower Manhattan influenced and/or
made its way into your works?
The light is fantastic here. I’ve been observing how it moves over
the skyscrapers during the day. It seems to come from all directions, which
I guess is caused by having water on three sides down here. And it seems
to have a very pure, white quality that highlights all the architectural
features. The buildings throw reflections onto each other in the most interesting
ways as the day passes. It’s helped me give a sort of diurnal (yet
urban) shape to the long poem I’ve been writing while here—in
it the sun keeps setting and then the poem is back again the next day,
ongoing with more reflections and skyscrapers.
Is there any recurrent motif that appears in your works? What is
it and why?
I’ve been told I use the word “sphere” a little too
much. I probably also really overuse the words “it,” “something,” “this,” “the,” “city,” “water,” “construction,” “you,” and “electricity.” I
do plan to write a piece (and it must be more than a few lines long) avoiding
all of these words, but not today.
How has the LMCC Residency affected your work?
For the residency, I tried not to have too many expectations about how
much I was going to “produce,” but sort of to my own surprise,
I’ve ended up writing my longest poem. I became so used to squeezing
poetry between work and life demands that I didn’t realize how pent
up I was. I never guessed I would end up writing 20-plus pages, starting
almost on the day I moved in. I love both the locale and the space; the
view from my window has been catalytic. On one side I see Trinity Church,
the tall skeleton of a building-to-be on the horizon, and a sliver of the
Hudson River. On the other side is a fascinating view of the World Trade
Center site (not that I’m writing directly towards that, but certainly
the concepts of deep urban construction and reconstruction have become
part of the poem). The interior of the residency has been just as important:
the rawness of the space, what the artists are doing, the rough floors,
the ceilings with metal bits hanging down. It’s been fantastic to
enter the space, see what people are doing, look out the window, and pick
up where I left off the previous day with only the distractions I want
in the poem (hammering, changes of light, etc.).
Do you have an unrealized dream project? (no matter how improbable,
absurd, costly, etc. it might seem)
I’d like to work in (or build) the “infinite library.” The
idea was originally developed by the 18th-century French architect Étienne-Louis
Boullée, who also designed an unbuildable monument to Isaac Newton:
a gargantuan sphere that worked in reverse, with “sunlight” inside
during the night, and “starlight” during the day. In his sketch
for the monument, the human figures are drawn as small as ants. His library
is drawn on a similarly impossible scale, with what seems like miles of
bookshelves dwarfing tiny human figures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bibliotheque_nationale_boul.jpg).
This would be my idea of heaven.
