#20 Donna Stonecipher, poet & translator
'I practiced my entire girlhood to achieve good handwriting, and I like to use it!'
Donna Stonecipher is an American poet and translator living and working in Berlin. Her most recent book is "Transaction Histories” (University of Iowa Press, 2018), and she's currently writing her next poetry book: “The Ruins of Nostalgia.” Her poems have been published in many journals, including Conjunctions, New American Writing, and The Paris Review, and have been translated into six languages.
Where do you write?
I generally write prose at my desk, poems in bed.
Morning writer or late-night words?
I seem to write poems mostly in the late morning. Prose anytime, sometimes late at night.
Coffee, tea or any other drinks?
Black tea. I wrote the first few poems of my next book, “The Ruins of Nostalgia,” out of nowhere in a burst while on a caffeine high on the train to Munich after drinking too much of the restaurant car’s very strong black tea. I’ve tried to recreate this event, but so far haven’t succeeded…
Handwritten notes or phone files?
Notes and everything else by hand. I don’t own a smartphone. I love writing by hand. I practiced my entire girlhood to achieve good handwriting, and I like to use it!
Something to nibble while you write?
Writing might be one of the few things I do during the day where I’m not thinking, at least a little bit, about food.
What's your most tempting distraction?
The usuals, alas. I miss the days when my worst distraction was looking up a word in the paper dictionary and then being distracted by all the other words on the page.
Any desk essentials?
Things I find aesthetically pleasing, research images, postcards of artworks or buildings or objects or rooms I love, a photo of my dad, etc.
What’s on the speakers?
The speakers are generally off, but very occasionally they are playing Bach.
What are your pre-writing rituals?
I should probably have some of these, but I don’t. Occasionally, when I’m trying to revise my poems, I will spend a half hour reading poems by a poet I admire first. It somehow sharpens my editing scalpel.
Perfect bookshop to hide on a rainy day?
I’ve rarely met a bookshop I didn’t like, but my favorites in Berlin are Pro QM, Hopscotch, Saint George’s, and Dussmann.
The best word in the English language?
Every day I find the best word in the English language. By my age most of them are re-finds. Today was “porphyry,” a nice example of English cunningly assimilating a Greek word (by way of Latin and Middle English). But in terms of actual, everyday usage: I’m a big fan, linguistically and temperamentally, of “maybe.”
A poem that has changed your life:
“Binsey Poplars” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.