A Conversation with Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
A Conversation with Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
An Interview by Ben Palpant | Words Under the Words No. 11
This post belongs to a series of interviews between Ben Palpant and important contemporary poets.
For more articles, videos, books, and resources about faith and art, visit RabbitRoom.com.
The broken body holds a broken soul.
A truth Dante knows in his poet's bones,
His own eyes weeping, his own heart full
Of pity for the lost daughters and sons
Who believed the future was theirs to tell.
Their minds fat with pride, their mouths full of stones
—from "Dante Among the Diviners," by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell
by Ben Palpant
I have given the last nearly thirty years of my life to education and, in particular, to the study of literature, so I felt an immediate affinity with Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, who, like me, has given her life to sharing her love with the next generation. Her passion for Dante and Flannery O'Connor is so deep that she has written a book of poems for each author, but it seemed fitting to start our conversation by thanking her for giving much of her life to teaching the next generation.
"I know the cost of teaching," I say. "It's an entire life calling for a good teacher."
"Yes," she says, "there's no doubt it really is a vocation."
"When I read your work and your interviews, you strike me as someone who loves fiercely and with her whole self. Do you love intensely?"
"Absolutely." She laughs and says, "My maiden name, Alaimo, is Sicilian. I love with the ferocity of a Sicilian mother."
"Maybe that's why God gave you three sons."
"Yes. And there's nothing that makes a Sicilian mother happier than having everyone together in the same house. I'm constantly trying to bring them all together. And I suppose that fierce love is a bit of a besetting sin because I'm all in with whatever I'm doing, whether teaching, writing, or parenting. It's a little crazy and obsessive."
"So, you're the kind of person who squeezes 110% out of the 100% of the time, energy, and love God gave her. Is this genetic? Tell me about your parents."
"My father was actually my mother's second marriage. She married a handsome soldier when she was seventeen. Unfortunately, he was unfaithful to her shortly after they married. She got a divorce, which, at the time, was a shameful thing for a Catholic woman. My grandfather did not get an annulment for her, so when she married my father, they had to get married in a civil ceremony, which put her outside of the official church because she was a divorced woman."
"But she remained a practicing Catholic despite the stigma?"
"Yes. She was not going to give up her Catholic identity, so she would dress her five children up on Sunday morning, and we would sit in the front row of the church. She was officially out of communion with the church, but she went anyway. She had a lovely soprano voice, and she would sing louder than everyone else, but when it came time for communion, she wouldn't receive the eucharist. When I was little, I didn't understand. Only when I was older did I realize why she couldn't take communion. Years and years later, after moving to Florida, she called me to say that her first husband had died, which meant that she could now take the sacrament. I never saw my mother take communion until she was in her last days when the priest came to give her last rights."
"Which must have been a moving experience for you."
"Absolutely. And she felt it was very important. She said, 'The priest is coming. He is going to give me holy communion.’ It was special to her. By this time, she had reverted to a childlike state. I suppose this happens to all of us when we age. One thing I’ve learned from time spent with the dying, when you start seeing your mother in the hospital room, you know it means your life journey is coming to a close. I have an unpublished poem about that somewhere in my files. I would have to go digging to find it."
"Is your poetry scattered all over the place when it's in process? Or do you keep it organized?"
"I've developed a system over the years. I keep a journal every day. I write my poems in that journal and mark them with Post-it notes. I revisit them periodically and revise them. I size them up and get a sense for which ones are worth saving and which should never see the light of day. I try to write every day. Of course, not everything I write is going to be a good poem, but you have to keep the muscle active. After some time, I will type up a bunch of the poems that I feel are as good as I can get them. I print them and revise them on paper—adjusting words here and there—and when they're ready, I'll send them out to journals and begin assembling a collection.”
"Knowing when something is worthy or unworthy feels a little arbitrary, don’t you think? Especially to a young writer. How do you know when something isn't good enough yet?"
"When I was newer to poetry, I was less sure. I was lucky enough to marry a fellow English literature scholar who is a generous and honest reader. I also had fellow poets as friends who would give me feedback. But over time, I have developed my instincts to know when a poem is good or not. For instance, I know that if it doesn't touch me, it won't touch my reader. Some poems just don't pierce through the surface of things in the way I want. So that's one way I decide."
"It still hurts when you have to toss a poem onto the proverbial cutting room floor."
"Yes, but as Faulkner said, you have to kill your darlings. Some of those poems are about subjects that are very near and dear to my heart, but, as poems, they're not as strong as they should be, and they end up diluting the overall experience of my other poems."
"A few years ago, my editor gave me helpful advice about one of my poems. She said that I had taken her down a garden path but failed to take her to the very end of the path. She felt like the poem was only half finished. To have someone who was not part of the writing process, who didn't know exactly what I was trying to say, but who had the courage and the instinct to offer that kind of feedback was a timely gift."
"That's a great editor. I once had an editor do just the opposite. He said, 'Um, you go on too long. It ends here.' It was already a short poem, but he shortened it even more."
I laugh. "Was he correct?"
"Yes. I mean, I don't remember what he cut because the poem has been in the form he suggested for too many years, but it was a much tighter poem as a result. Sometimes, you need both. Some poems must be shorter. Some should be longer. It takes a wise editor to help with that process. I tend toward compactness, toward shorter poems. I love the sonnet form because I love to work within those limits. The form won't let me go on and on."
"And sometimes there's a risk when a poem is too long, of losing the heat the poem ought to provide."
"Yes. That is a risk, but some poets can write really long poems and maintain the heat. You know, another thing to keep in mind when it comes to writing good poems that keep their heat is that we all get into habits. Even well-regarded poets get into habits of using certain formulaic tricks. You want to avoid making the same moves every time; otherwise, you will lose the heat."
"Don't you think it can be difficult to distinguish between a trick or habit and what might be called a poet's fingerprint, a mark of the poet's style?"
"Yes, that's an important point. That’s where readers are helpful. You know, once we release a book into the world, it no longer belongs to us, so readers get to tell us about our own work. They get to tell us about our fingerprints. Sometimes they tell us things that we did not see or did not consciously intend, yet they are valid observations about our work."
"I recently read an article in which the writer said poetry is meant to draw us to attention. I get the picture of a body and heart slumped in the chair of life, only to sit up tall upon reading a poem. But it sounds to me like you write to draw yourself to attention. Maybe that's what resonates with your readers. Because as you draw yourself to attention, they are also drawn to attention."
"You're right. My role as a poet isn't to shake people awake; that's my role as a teacher. With poetry, I attempt to say, 'Hey Self, sit up, pay attention, be alert to what's going on around you.' If I were to describe my mind as a poet, it's like a rabbit, ears raised and twitching, listening. You never know in which direction it might dart. On the other hand, my husband says I'm more like a bird, flitting about, gathering pieces of this or that—ribbon, twig, leaf, seed—to line her nest. I suppose that's what I'm doing with poetry. My material comes from all over the place. Sometimes, it comes from the natural world, sometimes from memory, sometimes from popular culture—from a painting or a song I can't stop thinking about. All these disparate experiences are crying out to be ordered in some way. That's what poetry can do. When I don't write, I feel very dis-ordered and de-centered."
"So really, at the end of the day, you write to make sense of your experience, not to tell people something. That might be the result, but it starts and ends with you."
"Yes. In one respect, I want to remain myself but also leave myself behind. It's this combination of trying to get beyond myself—to open up vistas. However, there is also this reflexive move that requires the poet to return to his own life and heart, to ultimately say what it might mean to him and to us."
"Unless that reflexive turn happens, the poem is less likely to have a life of its own because it is more like an intellectual exercise than a fully human expression."
"Absolutely. Frost says that poetry is about the relationship between outer and inner weather. So, a poet can observe something in the natural world, but he never stays there. What he sees must have some meaning or impact on the inner weather of the perceiver. To simply describe what you see is like a painting by Audubon. It might be pretty and decorative, but it won't likely move the reader. The poet gives meaning to experience. The return to the self is absolutely necessary if what lies outside the self is to have any impact on the reader and the poet."
"Without necessarily explicating what you see,” I add. “Without getting didactic.”
“Right,” she replies
“I read a poem yesterday in which the poet was observing nature and said outright that she would impose no meaning on what she saw. For her, it was a virtue simply to observe."
"It always starts with observation,” she says, “but I don't think it stays there."
"I can understand where she's coming from,” I say. We shouldn’t impose our own meaning on things, but because God made all things and because he holds all things together, even what appears meaningless has meaning woven into it. The meaning just isn't always obvious."
"I don't think a poet should impose meaning on experience, but I do think meaning still emerges. As humans, we constantly look for meaning. Sometimes, a poet needs to provide the image and allow the reader to find the meaning. I recently read a poem about a bird trying to get a twig that was too large into its little birdhouse. Just presenting the image is enough."
"Yes, it opens onto various meanings for the reader."
"Right, but the poet insisted on adding a stanza in which she unpacked the meaning for us. It wasn't necessary. It was didactic. That's a teacher's job, not a poet's."
"This conversation reminds me of the psalmist who spends much of his time talking to himself,” I say. “He's looking for meaning; he's finding meaning, but not just any meaning. He's trying to see how God sees. The meaning is emerging, but he's making sure it has a semblance of truth.”
"One of the hallmarks of the Catholic imagination is to recognize that everything means something and it means intensely,” she says. “As Hopkins put it, 'The world is charged with the grandeur of God.' Creation, every single thing, points back to its maker. In that respect, every created thing is a living thing, alive with the fire God put into it. One of the poet's jobs is to note that fire and to help us see it. I think God has even given this gift to unbelieving poets; he lets them see a glimpse of that fire and wonder in nature and the human heart. The best poets, regardless of religious beliefs, have this sense that there's something greater than us, something transcendent that everything points toward. Robert Frost was not a terribly religious man, but there's no question that he sees these things around him and, therefore, makes them visible to us as well."
"Don't you find that the great poets have a hunger for something beyond themselves, that they keep pointing at that something even though they may not know what to call it?"
"Yes, something greater than us, something greater than our understanding. Even the best scientists have this sense of things beyond our ken. The language they use might be the language of mathematics, but there is ultimately a sense of mystery. The best scientists are not materialists. You need a great imagination to be a great scientist. Actually, you need a great imagination to be a great human being because there's something inside us that cries out, that longs to elucidate the wonder at the heart of all things, at the heart of our deepest selves, so that others can see it. We long to see things in light of eternity, to see meaning that is not time-bound."
"You're talking about the full gamut of human experience, which includes a great deal of hurt. So, even in our suffering, we long to find meaning. And we want to elucidate that meaning somehow. In your book Still Pilgrim, you say of your younger self that 'she knew herself lonely, didn't belong with the happy kids.' Although you strike me as someone whose joy bubbles over, there's much hurt in your life. It seems to me that the woman you are today has grown up with her roots in the soil of sadness. Would you say that you are straining light through poetry?"
"Absolutely. Writing helps. It's not an accident that soldiers who return from war are given writing classes. It gives them an opportunity to articulate the trauma of they have experienced. Writing is an important part of healing. We should do more of it. I started young, maybe five or six. You know there was a part of me that really wanted to become an opera singer, but we couldn't afford singing lessons, so that was out. But I could write poems. All I needed was a piece of paper, a pen, and a love for words. I discovered that there was something powerful about recording the things that happened to me. Those events became more meaningful and consequential, making poetry made me feel like I mattered more. It was a tremendously empowering experience. More importantly, the poems redeemed the poverty, alienation, and darkness I experienced.—."
"Redeemed, I'm assuming, not simply by the retelling, but by how you lit the experience? I'm thinking of Rembrandt and the way he would light his subjects, impoverished or ugly as they might be."
"Yes. In some ways, poets are myth-makers, making intentional decisions about how certain events will be remembered without lying about the events. We're imposing order on events by the choices we make, the way we use language, poetic forms, and all the tools at our disposal. And that's important for the human experience. Many of the greatest poems were born out of suffering, from an urge to make some kind of sense, an ordering that will redeem the suffering."
"So it matters very much how we light the subject, whether the subject is grievous or whether it is joyous."
"I like to think of Saint Ignatius, who illuminates the full gamut of human experience. There are poems of desolation and poems of consolation. Or Hopkins, with his sonnets of joy and the so-called terrible sonnets, chronicling a soul that is suffering and feeling a sense of loss and distance from God. We should write those kinds of poems and every kind in between. God not only permits us to do so but calls us to do so."
"And the psalmists lead in that example. You're reminding me of a line by Seamus Heaney: 'I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing."
"I love that poem, 'Personal Helicon,' because it depicts a child kneeling at the edge of the well to see what he can see down in the depths. He can't see much, and what he can see is scary—the rat that slaps across the water—yet he keeps looking. That's when he realizes that although he can't understand everything, he can make songs that set the darkness echoing."
"Which comes as a surprise."
"A surprise and a gift. The song becomes a surprise, and even moments in the song can surprise the one writing the song. As Frost says, if there's no surprise in the writer, there's no surprise in the reader. This happened to me with a poem called "The Still Pilgrim Honors Her Mother." When I was a little girl, I used to watch my mother get dressed. It was a complicated ritual in those days, so this sonnet is fairly straightforward until the final three lines, which went in a direction I didn't expect. The poem ends this way:
Her narrow waist encased in folds of flesh,
Five pregnancies leaving their mark.
In a world of rain, she was our ark.
As often happens when I write in form, I had no idea what the poem's final line would be. I wrote the second to last line knowing that I would need a couplet to complete this sonnet, and there aren't that many words that rhyme with 'mark.' Just like that, the word ‘ark’ struck me with tremendous force. Suddenly, and without my engineering it, I knew what my mother had been for us. With my father dying when I was young, with all of the sorrow and poverty, she was an ark."
"That's a beautiful story. I assume those kinds of grace moments don't happen with every poem, but when they do, they're startling."
"Exactly. You're right. They don't happen a lot. I often think of writing poetry in light of baseball. My husband and my three sons love the game, and we watch a lot of baseball. When you're a .300 hitter, that means you're really good. It also means you're missing seven out of ten times at bat. That realization always makes me feel better. Randall Jarrell says that writing poetry is like standing in a parking lot hoping to get struck by lightning, and if it happens seven times in your life, you should count yourself lucky."
"That's really funny," I say. "I've never heard that before."
"Kind of a frightening thought, but pretty spot on."
"Can we talk about form poetry?"
"Sure."
"In a recent article, Abram Van Engen mentioned that the word ‘stanza’ comes from the Italian for ‘Little room.’ That seems to be an apt description of your work. Each stanza plays host to the reader, welcoming us into not merely an idea or a statement but a place where we are changed. Do you see yourself as creating little rooms? Are you decorating and furnishing them as an act of hospitality? Are you creating beautiful spaces for readers to enter and commune with you?"
"I love that image! As you know, among the Greeks and Mediterraneans, hospitality is the highest virtue. The person you turn away at the door could be one of the gods. And from the book of Hebrews, ‘how do you know but that you might be entertaining angels unawares?’ My whole family is obsessed with hospitality. To be inhospitable is the worst sin imaginable. Dante doesn't include the inhospitable in his visions, which is problematic for me—it's a major oversight. Am I allowed to say that of the great Dante?"
“That’s funny. Yes, you can say it, but I’ll only let you say it this one time.”
"Thank you. So I love this idea. Yes, each poem issues an invitation to enter the poet's world, to see what she sees, to be together in this moment. They don't have to be large and ornate rooms; they can be small and simple. I would go so far as to say that each line is its own little room opening onto other rooms. I love those lines from Emily Dickinson: 'I dwell in possibility, a fairer house than prose, more numerous of windows, superior for doors.' I love the idea that a poem has multiple doors and windows by which the reader might enter. So, in my poem about my mother, the word ‘ark’ invites you into the poem even though it comes at the end. It calls you to read the poem again, but with new eyes. I think form is essential. You're not very hospitable when you just cast a bunch of syllables onto the page in a chaotic fashion. Anyone can toss words onto the page, but it takes hard work to build something beautiful."
"When I was in high school, poems struck me as random acts; a poem was a riddle. They made me miserable. Even the poems written in form felt like riddles, which were fun to untangle for those who liked riddles, but they still weren't very inviting. It seemed to me that poets were writing something out of reach just to show they could do it. I wasn't even sure they knew what they were talking about.”
“Yes, that can be frustrating.”
“Over the years, I've decided that there's a distinction between poets who abandon form entirely for the sake of being obtuse and those who still hold to musicality without necessarily using formal structures."
"That’s helpful. I also think some poets are more oral, and some are more visual. Maybe that accounts for some of the differences. Some poets like to write in open form, to see the poem on the page, and to pay attention to the relationship between each line and the negative space around it. For others, it's all about the images and the sounds. I'm very much an ear-centric poet, but I greatly respect those poets who can write free verse well. My tastes are eclectic. I have a deep appreciation for a varied array of poetry styles. Part of why I respect those poets is that I find it very difficult to write free verse. Over the years, I've learned to go with my predilections."
“Yes,” I say. "Though these differences can create unhealthy rivalry among poets. We live in a society of envy. We and our children are catechized in the doctrines of desires that ultimately destroy us and our relationships."
"Dante treats envy in a unique and powerful way in The Purgatorio. The envious are punished by having their eyes sutured shut. The punishment excites Dante's compassion because he can understand the temptation. It's human nature to be quickened by desire for what we do not have. As I say in one of my Dear Dante poems, it seems easy, if you're blind, to avoid the temptation of envy, so in some respects, the person with his eyes sewn shut is blessed. We live in a culture saturated by images; we're constantly presented with beautiful, desirable things. It’s hard not to want them.”
“It’s not just on television or billboards anymore; it’s wherever I go on the internet and social media,” I say.
“That’s right. It's hard to be a human being amid all that gorgeous plenty. My students have said that they have to get off social media because they feel worthless when they watch the exciting lives of their so-called friends play out. I mean, let's be honest, there's nothing more curated, more artificial, than what we put on social media, and that’s part of what sets us up for envy. It devalues the normality of our day-to-day lives."
"Social media is a different kind of myth-making,” I say.
"Definitely."
"Augustine understood this when he said that our desires were the seat of our actions, that our desires required proper ordering if we were to live good lives."
"Yes,” she replies. “I have all sorts of disordered desires. My relationship to the Amazon man, alone, says it all. I love the Amazon guy because he always brings me something wonderful. It will make me happy! Then, of course, the shine wears off, and I need something else. Dante would say that I'm in Amazon purgatory."
"Ha! Well, I assure you, you're not alone."
"I decided it was worth writing a poem about that problem as a way to help me wrestle with my disordered desire. Poetry and the act of writing poetry is a way of combating the false myth-making around us and that we ourselves engage in, pointing the heart to what is beautiful, good, and true in hopes that the poem may help others along the way. First and foremost, it helps me focus on what I should focus on. It has been that way for many years, and it will remain that way as long as I write."
Ben Palpant is a memoirist, poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer. He is the author of several books, including A Small Cup of Light, Sojourner Songs, and The Stranger. He writes under the inspiration of five star-lit children and two dogs. He and his wife live in the Pacific Northwest.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD is a professor, poet, scholar, and writer at Fordham University in New York City, and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include two chapbooks and nine full-length collections of poems. Her book Holy Land (2022) won the Paraclete Press Poetry Prize. In addition, O’Donnell has published a memoir about caring for her dying mother, Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell; a book of hours based on the practical theology of Flannery O’Connor, The Province of Joy; and a biography Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith. Her ground-breaking critical book on Flannery O’Connor Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor was published by Fordham University Press in 2020. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Able Muse, Alabama Literary Review, America, The Bedford Introduction to Literature (anthology), Christian Century, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940 (anthology), Christianity & Literature, Contemporary Catholic Poetry (anthology), Flannery O’Connor Review, Italian Americana, Italian Poetry Review, Literary Matters, Mezzo Cammin, Peacock Journal, Presence, Reformed Journal, and Taking Root in the Heart (anthology), among others. O’Donnell’s eleventh book of poems, Dear Dante, was published in Spring 2024.