You have a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (1991), which you returned to school to pursue after some time working. What kind of work did you do before entering grad school? What got you interested in poetry?

Actually I was in the advertising business for years, so I guess I was what you'd call "a writer", even then. I worked first for the Sears Roebuck catalog writing ridiculous copy for ladies' underwear, and then I spent six years writing promotion and publicity copy for the Chicago Tribune—print ads for trade journals, radio and TV spots, promotional campaigns—one of which involved a stuffed dog named Cuddly Dudley.

Did you write poetry as an undergrad or as a child? Where did you grow up? What did your parents do?

I lived in Milwaukee as a small child, but I think of Madison as my home town; it's where I went to high school and college. My father was a self-employed designer of packaging; my brilliant mother was a housewife with a fabulous but wasted education—the University of Chicago and the Sorbonne. She was also a concert-caliber pianist.

I wrote little rhymes as a child, but I never took writing poetry seriously until decades later.

You've worn a lot of different hats in the fifteen years since you got the Ph.D.—teaching creative writing at UW-Milwaukee, editing stints at The Cream City Review and Cup of Poems, publishing five books of poetry, sitting on boards and committees that serve Wisconsin's poets, like Council for Wisconsin Writers and the state's Poet Laureate search committee, and being Milwaukee's Poet Laureate, just to name some of your many occupations. Do these various positions go together for you, or do you find that one gets in the way of another?

One always, always gets in the way of another! In fact, I am forcing myself to cut back on some of these things, like the Woodland Pattern board of directors and the Poet Laureate search committee. Also, my two-year term as Milwaukee Poet Laureate has recently ended. So I'm hoping I'll have more time now for writing, and for giving readings and short classes, which I love to do.

How do you find time to write when you do many different things? Would you describe your writing habits?

My writing habits are sporadic, at best; I write when I've managed to shove other responsibilities and distractions out of the way temporarily. This tends to happen between 10:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. Fortunately, I don't seem to need a whole lot of sleep!

Do you enjoy teaching writing as much as you enjoy writing? What advantages does a poet with a university position have? Are there any disadvantages?

I do enjoy teaching, but to be honest, I enjoy writing even more. The second part of your question is harder, though. A poet with a university position often gets to become involved with visiting writers, and the contact with young students is always stimulating—many are incredibly talented! But I would say that a university position is by no means essential for a poet. In fact, being involved in some other field often works to a poet's advantage.

What do you do as Milwaukee's official Poet Laureate? Are you in touch with other city laureates from WI or out of state? How did this position come into being? Would you recommend that other cities establish a poet laureate program?

It was wonderful being Milwaukee's PL; the Public Library—and City Librarian Kate Huston in particular—were wonderfully supportive of my work, and very flexible. I am still deeply honored by their having chosen me. I am not in touch with other city laureates, except for the ones I knew anyway; there is simply no matrix in place for that. The Milwaukee PL position came into being in 2000; it was the brain-child of the Friends of the Milwaukee Public Library, and a splendid development. I was the third poet to hold the position, after John Koethe (2000) and Antler (2002)—and now there's an excellent 4th, which at this writing is still a secret.

You've just been nominated for a prestigious national poetry prize, The Poets Prize, awarded annually to the best book of verse published in America in the preceding year, and founded by Robert McDowell, Frederick Morgan and Louis Simpson. Congratulations! You also received two Pushcart nominations for work published last year, and I read somewhere that you've had some poems recently translated into other languages. Do you think of yourself first as a Wisconsin poet or as an American poet?

I think of myself as a Wisconsin poet who aspires to be a little more high-profile on the national poetry map. Who doesn't? But despite those honors you mention above, I'm afraid very few have ever heard of me, except possibly for some the formalists that I work with in conjunction with the annual poetry conference at West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Have you felt limited as a writer working in Wisconsin?

Wisconsin may not be a national "center" for poetry, but there is a wonderful, enthusiastic statewide poetry community here. Working here is very gratifying. I haven't felt limited at all.

You're a great supporter of Wisconsin poets and poetry, and belong to the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, as well as other organizations. Why don't more teachers at the university level belong to this organization? Do you think there's enough exchange between university/non-university poets in Wisconsin?

I definitely think there is NOT enough exchange between university and non-university poets in Wisconsin. There are some clear exceptions to this blanket statement—but I would like very much to see a lot more give and take between the two communities.

What, if anything, characterizes Wisconsin's poetry?

Well, how about excellence? I think there are some astonishingly good poets working here, who would be rich and famous—or at least famous—if they had the same networking opportunities as their New York City counterparts.

You're an accomplished formalist who makes use of traditional forms like sonnets, although you also write in syllabics and in free verse. Do you have a method for deciding what kind of form to use in a particular poem? Does the form come first, or second, or does that vary?

I think we all like to play to our strengths. I seem to have a knack for rhyme and meter, so I tend to use them often. But I make sure that the subject-matter is not what some would expect of formal poetry, e.g. predictable, sappy topics. Using a traditional form for an exceedingly edgy, contemporary subject can result in an amazingly strong poem.

For me, I would say the form and the meter come simultaneously. I'll think of a line that expresses the subject I want to write about, and the line will already be in iambic pentameter. It's uncanny.

Have you always written formal poetry? What, if any, would you say are its largest limitations? its greatest strengths?

Occasionally I write free verse, but again, I think my own formal poems are better than my free verse poems. The danger in writing formal poetry, of course, is the tendency to sound like a Hallmark card. The good formal poet has to have some kind of an innate ability to avoid this.

It's perfectly respectable to write in form now, but did you ever encounter resistance to your poems or have difficulty publishing because of your aesthetic choices?

Some people still find formal poetry a terrible throwback. I disagree strenuously, but that's a topic for another article! A formal poet learns where to submit his or her poems—which journals welcome them—and therefore doesn't have any unusual degree of difficulty getting them published. Just the same degree of difficulty everybody else has.

Even though formal verse is more tolerated these days, and sometimes celebrated, I'm still not sure if it's well-understood. Do you find readers have misperceptions about you and your work because of its formal aspects?

Yes. The pre-conception is that formal verse equals polite, boring verse. Sometimes this is true. But the same could be said for free verse poems, especially the prosy, casual free-verse poems that are everywhere right now. They may be fun to read, but where is the craft? Why isn't it just presented as prose? Formal devices can help a poet avoid writing a sloppy, if well-meaning, poem.

Do you worry about readers recognizing the forms you work in?

No. The ones who recognize the forms simply recognize the forms. Those who don't, don't. All I want a reader to do is to enjoy or appreciate the poem as a whole.

Do you train your students in form? What's their attitude toward poetry written in rhyme and meter?

Yes, i always present a couple of assignments where form and meter are required. By and large, the students genuinely enjoy them; some are amazed and relieved to see that such poetry is still being written. The only objections tend to come from students who see themselves as terribly, terribly advanced—the neo Bukowskis and Ginsbergs and Sharon Oldses—and who have closed their minds to trying anything new and challenging.

Do you have a favorite form? What do you think of formal experimentation, i.e., expanding the boundaries of what people recognize as a sonnet or an ode, etc.?

My favorite form is the sonnet. Fourteen lines seem just right for expressing what I usually have to say. There have been many who have pushed the envelope on the so-called "rules", which is fine, and often fun. My only caveat is that the poet know and to experience what the traditional rules ARE before feeling free to break them.

I admire the way you use extended sequences of shorter poems to tell more detailed stories. "Notes from the Good-Girl Chronicles, 1963" is a crown of sonnets; "Outside the Frame: The Photographer's Last Letters to her Son" presents a photographer's experience with Alzheimer's. In that sequence, form itself becomes central to characterization and plot: the first several poems are sonnets, and the sequence includes a poem with a concrete visual device in the shape of both a convex and concave lens, a poem written in syllabics, a free-verse poem, and a poem with the random lineation, blanks, and skips common to language poetry. Does that sequence express your view about the superiority of one form, relative to the next, given that the narrator's mental decline seems to mirror (or be mirrored by?) a brief history of forms?

Thanks for reading my work so closely! In "Outside the Frame", yes, I very consciously chose the forms to underscore the increasing fragmentation and disorganization of the speaker's mind. This was a one-case scenario, but I believe it can work. Look, for example, at E.E. Cummings, who raised this technique to an art form 75 years ago!

Do you find yourself writing about different subjects depending on whether you're writing in a particular form or in free verse?

No, for me the form never determines the subject. It's exactly the opposite; the subject determines the form.

Your subjects are often large ones—death , mortality, love—although you often write about them tongue-in-cheek. I think for some reason of Lucille Ball when I read, for instance, your incredible poem "Clown" about an aging woman's body. Other poems like "Notice from the Sweet Chariot Funeral Parlor," "The Day After I Die," "Another Thing I Ought to Be Doing," and "Reading the Obituaries" all make light of death/mortality, while being simultaneously painful and sad. You're also not afraid to risk sentimentality (in for example, "Speculations While Walking Through Lake Park Without My Dog") or romanticism (in, e.g., "The Geniuses Among Us" or "Poem for a 75th Birthday"). Can you talk about the balance of these aspects of your poems?

Thank you. I try to use wit and dramatic monologue to get across some painful realities, and it often works. Regarding sentimentality: the dog poem that you cite is very guilty of that. But it was a very early poem of mine, and since then I hope that most of my poems succeed in getting emotion across, without crossing over into pathos and sentimentality.

Do you have a favorite subject? Do you think formalist poets gravitate toward the traditional poetic topics?

No, not really. My favorite subjects tend to deal with aspects and quirks of human nature, I guess, but this is not done consciously. And no, I don't think formalists gravitate toward traditional topics; not at all. A good anthology of formal poems will reflect subject matter from all over the map.

You often write persona poems—"Outside the Frame," "Notes from the Good-Girl Chronicles, 1963," the Aunt Eudora poems are a few examples of many. You take on a lot of different characters' voices, often in the first person, in these poems. Do you ever worry that readers will mistake you for your characters? I'm thinking for example about a poem like "The Vow," a villanelle about an alcoholic, or "The Adulterer's Waltz," either of which could wrongly be interpreted as a confessional poem. Do mistakes about these or other poems happen?

People who make this mistake—and they do—are usually newcomers to poetry. If they do think that every poem I write in the first person is about me personally, then I am clearly an adulterous alcoholic agnostic who is aging rapidly, while simultaneously lusting after younger men. Sounds like fun!

There's often a flippant, even mocking, tone to your work—in for example, "On Learning, Late in Life, That Your Mother is a Jew," "The Adulterer's Waltz," "The Relatively Famous Poet's Mother"—is that coming from you, or a persona created for those poems?

Absolutely a persona—except in the case of "On Learning, Late in Life." That is one of only two or three of my poems that are pretty much autobiographical. Others include "Explication of a True Story", "Leaving the Clinic", and "After Twenty Years." That's about it.

"Caveat for Poets" (from Shadows Like These), if it expresses your beliefs, suggests you might take a dim view of mixing politics with poetry, and yet your current collection contains extremely political/feminist poems about women's disempowerment, e.g.,"Notes from the Good-Girl Chronicles, 1963," "Explication of a True Story" and "The Blue Water Buffalo," which is also an anti-war poem. What do you think about political poems? about efforts like "Poets Against the War"?

Politically I am very much anti-war. But I suspect that there are many, many poets who write anti-war poems not so much out of conviction, but because writing anti-war poems is the Thing to Do at any given time, and can help them get published. On the other hand, I think poems can be and should be "political" if they arise out of a poet's honest beliefs. I think I can tell the genuine ones from the fake ones from a mile away.

I will believe in an anti-war poem by Wilfred Owen or Bruce Weigl or Yusef Komunyakaa or Wisconsin's own Dale Ritterbusch much more quickly than one written by someone who hasn't a clue, who offers nothing but foot-stamping and platitudes.

Your poems are filled with people, but your reader knows very little about your life from reading the poems, or if the people in your poems are real or fictional. Do you deliberately try not to write about yourself and the people close to you? Do you write more about yourself now than you used to?

It's not deliberate; I'm just not a confessional poet, much as I enjoy reading Lowell and Plath and Sexton and their followers. I don't think I'll ever be one, frankly.

You have a grown son, yet you haven't spent much time writing about your experience of parenting. Is that a conscious choice?

I did write some poems about him when he was a kid—"The Boy on the Plane" is one, and "Late Baby" is another. But he was such an easy child, such a breeze to raise, that he didn't provide much fodder for poetry. He's still doing fine, got married last year, and I'm pleased to add that he actually reads and enjoys poetry!

In the poem "Subject to Change" you wrote, "I have to tell myself it's wrong to think of them as anything but fiction," referring to your students. Are most of your characters fictional? Do you think it's limiting or unethical to write about "real people"?

Most, if not all, of the characters in my dramatic monologues are composites of "real people". So they are both fictional and not.

Which poets or writers have influenced you? Which poets do you currently like to read?

Influential poets, for me, have been Dickinson, Swinburne, Richard Wilbur, Marilyn Hacker, Albert Goldbarth, Sexton, and many others. I never get tired of reading these poets, as well as Robert Francis, Jane Kenyon, A. E. Stallings, David Wagoner, lots more.

What projects, poetic or otherwise, are you working on now?

I've been doing some collaborative work with other women formalists. We just completed three collaborative sonnet crowns that are pretty juicy, even a little risque. Fun stuff. We're hoping to develop a book using these and other poems by all seven of us. I'm also working on some individual poems, trying to get a manuscript put together.

What interests do you have outside writing?

Travel, plus all of the areas peripheral to writing poetry: conferences, lectures, teaching, coaching, judging contests. And eating frozen custard from Kopp's.

What do you tell students who are interested in becoming poets?

Get a day job, of course—but don't ever quit writing poems! Poetry is probably not going to put food on your table, but when you love it, and devote to it a major part of your waking hours, there is nothing in the world more fulfilling.

Are there any topics I haven't brought up that you'd like to discuss?

Are you kidding, Wendy? Thank you for everything!