Visiting with Eva Hooker
by Claire Guyton, Art + Life Editor
What inspired your poem “I Don’t Keep the Moth-Part of the House”?
I often take a sentence that has me in full halt from a poem or a novel and write it on a page and just let it play. I don’t keep the moth-part of the house was such a line. I wondered what the “moth-part” was. Not wanting to dwell on holes in sweaters, I moved on to Arachne. Once there, wherever “there” was, I moved on.
Tell us about your writing process—either generally or specifically with regard to the birth and development of this poem.
I don’t think I can describe it. I make intuitive jumps when I write. In this poem, I moved from the act of wanting to know to what the “fuel of Rapture might be.” That’s probably the best I can do by way of description. I wanted to know such knowing. Then it felt dangerously sweet, like a wolf.
Raymond Carver said a writer should follow the command “No tricks.” Do you keep any quotes or reminders at your desk? Or just in the back of your mind as you write?
I keep a copy of a poem by Frank Bidart:
The Poem Is a Veil
V E I L, —as if silk that you in fury must thrust repeatedly
high at what the eye, your eye, naked cannot see
catches, clinging to its physiognomy.
(From Music Like Dirt, Sarabande Books, 2002.)
I like to remind myself both of the veil and the fury.
Do you have any guilty reading pleasures?
I have a beautiful journal, hand sewn with beautiful paper. When I see a perfect image or 
sentence, I give it its own page in the journal. An example – from George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “. . . we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Those sentences become markers in the long sequence of my reading. I don’t comment on them. They simply are.
One journal is at home. Another, in my office at the college. When I see the sentences years or months later, I am startled both by their beauty and the narratives they tell in the course of a year or two.
*Contact Claire with any questions or suggestions for Hunger Mountain’s Art + Life section at hungermtnal@gmail.com.
