Lynne Viti, the daughter of a Highlandtown tavern owner and a schoolteacher, was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a senior lecturer emerita in the Writing Program at Wellesley College, where she taught for three decades. A graduate of Mercy High School in Baltimore, she attended the College of Notre Dame of Maryland (now Notre Dame University), and received her B.A. in English from Barnard College, and her M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University. She earned her Ph.D. in English and J.D. from Boston College, where she was a university fellow. She has also taught at several college and universities, including Boston University, Boston College, Olin College of Engineering, and Brandeis University.She is the author of two poetry collections, Baltimore Girls (2017) and The Glamorganshire Bible (2018), and a short fiction collection, Going Too Fast (2020). Her poetry, nonfiction and fiction has appeared in over 150 journals and anthologies, including The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, The Baltimore Sun, Welcome to the Neighborhood, Bad Hombres& Nasty Women, and Callinectes Sapidus. She has been awarded recognition in the WOMR/Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest, and the Glimmer Train Short Fiction Contest, and has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and the Mass Book Award.
Q: Who/what convinced you to share this personal poetry?
A: To me, all poetry is personal, because it springs from the poet’s heart and soul. As to why I write, the answer is simple: I grew up in a house full fo books, I had a mother who was a teacher who taught me to read even before I went to kindergarten, and who took me to the public library regularly. I had teachers, from elementary school through high school, who encouraged me in creative writing of all kinds—literary essays, fiction, poetry, even playwriting. My study of English and American pets and fiction writers, as well as my five years of Latin and four of French, exposed me to classical Roman poetry (Ovid, Vergil) as well as the French poetry of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the 19th century. Two of my teachers at Mercy High School, Sister Augusta Reilly, RSM and Sister Carol Wheeler, RSM, inspired me. They required me to write poetry as part of a Creative English class in my senior year of high school. I wrote in college and into my twenties, and published a few poems. But it was only after my children were grown and on their own that I wandered back into writing. The first poet I ever heard read was Sam Cornish with whom I later studied in Boston while he was Poet Laureate of the city. As a s high school student, I heard Brother Antoninus read at Loyola—possibly the most intense and unusual poetry reading I’ve ever heard to this day. In college, I often went to poetry readings at the YMHA on the East Side—I heard Yevgeny Yevtushenko there, as well as Galway Kinnell, Stephen Spender, Kenneth Koch, Allen Ginsberg, and others. I traveled to St Mark’s-in-the Bouwerie to hear Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Anne Waldman, Diane Wakoski, . When I was a young high school teacher, I attended Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Middlebury Vermont, and met and heard Robert Hayden, Robert Pack, John Ciardi, and Diane Wakoski. Teaching high school English further immersed me in poetry that was part of the canon—from Beowulf and Chaucer to Ted Hughes, from Ann Bradstreet to Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. And one of my concentrations at Boston College when I studied for the PhD was in modern British and American poetry—Frost, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, H.D., Lowell; another concentration was in 156h century lyric poetry,–Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser. So, I’ve been swimming in a sea of poetry since I was a child, and along the way starting in elementary school I began to try my hand at writing some. By high school, I was more serious about it. In college, I stopped showing my work to anyone, but in my twenties, I began to send out my work and I had a few publications. But it wasn’t until about seven years ago that I became truly focused not only on producing more poetry, but on submitting it for publication, at the encouragement of Sam Cornish.
Q: When were most of these poems written, as in, are they old poems or ones you wrote more recently?
A: All the poems in this collection with the exception of a couple of them, I wrote within the past six years. Many of the poems in the first section of the book are autobiographical to some extent, although in some the speaker is not me, but someone I may have known in my younger days. The middle section, Love Drunk, contains poems I wrote very recently. And the last section, contains a mix of very recent poems, mixed in with some from three or four years ago. So, I’d say that almost everything in this collection is fairly recent—from 2015 or thereafter.
Q: You divided the poems into sections. How did you come about deciding which poems belong to which sections?
A: I worked on this for months, on and off. I took a workshop at the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Violence at U Mass. Boston in 2018, with poet Bruce Weigl, on how to organize a manuscript. I grouped the poems thematically but I also wanted to begin with reflections on childhood and adolescence, then move into young adulthood, and in the final section, be more outward-directed, writing about political issues—gun violence, climate change, the MeToo movement, loss of dear friends, aging, anxiety. My friend Joan McBreen, a very prominent Irish poet, went through my manuscript with her fine critical idea, and suggested which poems –only 2 or 3 of them–should be removed from the collection—and which should be used as section titles.
Q: I’m skipping this question because I am not quite sure how to respond to it—the events I allude to historical events? Or life events?
A: I don’t think events shape writers; I think parents and teachers and other poets and authors and artists shape writers. But writers do take in everything around them and often harness their insights and emotions in their writing.
Q: As far as writing about your experiences, do you prefer poetry to say, short storywriting? If so, why?
A: I prefer poetry, although I do like to write fiction and creative nonfiction. I am not sure why I prefer poetry—it just comes out of me more easily, that’s the best I can say.
Q: In the book you talk about serious topics, among them segregation, sexism and assassinations. Did you feel like it was important to write about and discuss these topics?
A: I grew up in the Fifties in the northernmost Southern city, Baltimore, a deeply desegregated place. I say it one of the poems; segregation was in the air we breathed in. I watched the civil rights movement unfold from the time I was in second grade, when the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education. I watched how the entrenched de facto segregation practices worked, and felt they conflicted with what I was taught in my family and my church about how we should treat one another. I chafed at the restrictions, and by the time I was in high school, I was looking for ways to protest the legacy of segregation. I came of age in the Sixties, the Sixties, a turbulent time: three assassinations within 5 years, a war in Vietnam with a universal draft, the sexual revolution, the youth revolution, recreational marijuana and other psychedelic substances, and the making of the counter-culture. Of course, those experiences made a mark on me, and turn up in my writing. IF a writer is to write what she knows, she has to think about her experiences and tell them as honestly as possible, make readers feel what she felt, see what she saw.
Q: What advice would you give to people interested in pursuing poetry?
A: Read the classics: Shakespeare, Hardy, Rossetti, Browning, HD, Spender, Auden, Hughes, Plath, Larkin, Yeats, Heaney, Bradstreet ,Pound, H.D, Crane, Frost, Sandberg, Stevens, Langston Hughes, Baraka, Giovanni, Ginsberg, Lowell, Plath, Sexton.Read contemporary poets: Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Joy Harjo, Frank Bidart, Kenneth Koch, Alice Notley, Mary Oliver, Mary Madec, Geraldine Mitchell, Andrea Cohen. Read the spoken word poets and poets of all racial and ethnic backgrounds: Terence Hayes, Kevin Brown, Rita Dove, Vijay Seshadr, Natasha Trethewey, Tracy K. Smith, Li-Young Lee, Ocean Vuong, Arthur Sze, Robert Pinsky, Richard Blanco. Go listen to poets read live, from the well-known to the neighborhood open mic at a library or community center, church or bookstore. Sign up to read at an open mic, either a poem of your own or a poem by a poet whose work you love. Join a poetry writing circle and share your work with others. Ask for honest feedback and listen to what others in the group have to say. Find an experienced poet-teacher who encourages you but also gives you honest feedback. Take a creative writing class. Do not give up. Send out your work. If your work is rejected, move on and submit it elsewhere. Never give up.
Q: What demographic audience do you think would be most interested in this book?In descending order of importance:
A: One way of answering:WomenAfrican American and White men and womenRetired people with leisure time to readLibrary users ages 15-90Baby boomersGen XMillennials. Another way of answering is that all readers (age 15 and up) of poetry or readers willing to give poetry a try;• readers interested in politics, race relations, love, family relationships, loss and grieving, nature especially in a time of climate change,• readers who live or have lived in Baltimore, in other border state cities, or in the Delmarva area at any time from 1950 on, for any length of time• readers who consider themselves “baby boomers”—those born between 1945 and 1964• editors of poetry magazines or magazines that feature poetry• tv, radio and podcast producers and general interest periodical journalists.
