“What is Sexy”: Eight Questions for Laura Cronk
Sometimes I think about how hard it is to really pay attention. Most days, I’m scrolling, multitasking, or half-listening. But poetry, at least the kind that makes you stop and breathe, demands something slower. That’s what drew me to Laura Cronk’s work, which finds beauty in the unnoticed. The light shining on an iron fence, the rhythm of a city morning, the quiet humor in the ordinary things. Her poems remind me how much beauty hides in plain sight.
Laura Cronk is the chair of the poetry track in The New School’s MFA program, where she helps writers find their voices in a world that often forgets to listen. Before that, she co-directed the Summer Writers Colony, bringing authors like Lydia Davis to meet students and inspire new work. Her poetry blends clear images with honest emotion, exploring attention, sensuality, and reflection. It shows that poetry can still surprise us and help us see life with more focus and feeling.
I read that you’re a member of a feminist writing collective called The Matrix. What kind of community and creative support does being part of that collective give you? Has your involvement with The Matrix influenced the way you approach your poetry, either in the themes you explore or in your writing process?
This group was created by Michele Kotler, the founding director of Community Word Project, in 2020. It’s a writing group that meets weekly on zoom and includes poets that are geographically far apart but closely connected in several ways. When Michele started it she was feeling estranged from her own writing and realized that in her career she created the conditions for other writers and artists to thrive, but she had a hard time doing the same for herself. The initial group brought together women in her network who also had careers focused on supporting other writers. I wrote about it in Poets & Writers magazine here. The group has transformed my process by bringing me back to a sense of playfulness and chance – we always try to work random words into our writing that day and it becomes a fun kind of puzzle. And I love the way I feel the presence of my friends in the poems I write during these sessions. Now that the group has been writing together for five years, we’ve experienced dramatic highs and lows together in both the larger culture and in our personal lives. Even through the darkest losses, losses connected to political persecution or unimaginable personal losses, the gravitational force of the group is secure enough to contain both playfulness and pain simultaneously.
In your poem “What is Sexy,” were you actually walking through a real city on your way to work when the idea came to you? If so, which city was it, what kind of job were you doing at the time, and did the poem come out all at once or over time?
If I’m remembering correctly, I was reading Lydia Davis’s book of short stories “Can’t and Won’t.” I was reading it because we were hosting her at The New School in New York City as part of our Summer Writers Colony, which I planned and directed with the poet and novelist Ben Fama. Writers in the colony spent a week reading and discussing the book before the author came for an event dedicated to that book and Lydia Davis joined us that evening. I think I wrote the first lines of this poem sitting as an audience member in that event. Lydia Davis writes short stories, but all of us poets also know that she’s one of us. Reading anything of hers, but especially the experience of reading Can’t & Won’t, woke up my senses. I remember walking from the subway down 12th Street to The New School and feeling the surprising energy in everything around me. I couldn’t get over the decorative tops on the wrought iron fence I passed. Why did this hundred year old fence seem so… something? Listening to Lydia Davis read, her delight and her insistence on intense observation, made me think, cracking myself up, that the wrought iron fence was actually sexy. I just followed that impulse and chronicled my walk from the subway to my desk at work calling the things that pleased me sexy and the things that didn’t not sexy. So the situation is real. The sexiness of the sidewalk or the hydrangeas- open to interpretation. Oh, KP Kaszubowski, a poet who is actually in the Matrix group, made a prompt out of the poem here which was fun to see.
Was there a person or maybe even a moment that inspired you to start writing poetry seriously? Do you consider poetry something you were naturally drawn to, or did someone mentor or guide you in those early stages? Also, are there any non-poetry artists (like musicians, filmmakers, etc.) who have had an unexpected influence on your writing?
I’ve always loved language – talking, writing, reading, taking language in and using it myself. If I’m facing a problem or a complex situation, I can figure out a way forward if I spend time writing or talking with someone I trust. I’ve written since I was a child and I think writing and drawing can serve a similar function for children and really for all of us – both can be a way to express something, remember something, play around with no purpose, relax, focus our attention. Poetry combines several things I love, but maybe my favorite thing about it is the way it moves in images and associations to let us override the logical, control freak part of our minds. Poetry is the form of writing that has the most direct access to our senses and our unconscious minds, at least in my experience. I had a beloved high school English teacher, Richard Willis, who relished poetry and was the first teacher I’d ever had who put the pleasure of poetry, the enjoyment, first. I remember he read us a Gwendolyn Brooks poem and we were supposed to talk about some specific device or theme, but he read it and then he stopped, he seemed to be in a kind of ectsacy. Doesn’t it just sound so good? he asked us. We spent time just appreciating that and eventually got to the technique but it was a thrilling moment. I realized we’d always been led to believe that as far as learning was concerned, analyizing something was more important than experiencing it. But Mr. Willis insisted that how a piece of writing sounded or how it made us feel could be just as important, or even more important, than anything else.
What is your opinion on the state of American poetry? In our class, we are scheduled to read some articles written by Joseph Epstein and Dana Gioia about the current state of American poetry. What is your take on it?
Well, at this moment I’m on the train on the way home from a reading in a packed room, more than a hundred people and poets hanging out, eating cake and celebrating a new anthology Poetry Is Not A Luxury, published in May be Simon & Schuster. The anthology came out of a hugely popular Instagram account by the same name, run by an anonymous person. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” is the title of an Audre Lorde essay and the Instagram account and the anthology tap into that idea in a very straightforward way – that we long for poetry and need it. The curation is really eclectic, but if the poems the anonymous editor is choosing have something in common, it’s that all of them are full of feeling. I don’t have to sit and ponder, I really feel the impact immediately. They’re all saying something urgent. Probably the threat of this moment in this country makes the beauty and sensitivity in these poems feel even more precious. All of us packed into that room at The New School tonight were almost giddy to be together. That’s a long way of saying I think poetry is doing great. It’s not trying to sell you anything and so it can take more effort to seek out, but wherever you find it is a place worth your time. Also, as the chair of the poetry track for the MFA at The New School, there’s no way to doubt the state of American poetry when you’re deep in conversations with these incredible poets each week.
If you had to describe your poetry as a kind of fashion style or aesthetic, what would it be and why? Do you think your poems “dress differently” depending on what you’re writing about?
Ohhhhh, I LOVE this question. Love it. I love clothes and think about them more than I like to admit. But my poems, hmmmm. I think there are many costume changes. They were more explicit in my first book with some shapeshifting between complicit queen figures like Eva Braun and fairy tale queens in heavy brocade gowns, but hmmmm. Lately I think my newer poems dress like I do. Well-made second hand pieces whenever I can find them, details that sometimes have a sense of humor, conscious of my line.
Has there ever been a moment when writing a poem helped you understand something about yourself or even helped you get through something difficult? If so, how did that poem come to be, and do you ever go back and reread it?
Oh definitely, but all of those moments would be the most intimate or difficult in my life so I’ll just let them be in the poems rather than explaining here. Sometimes my poems know things before I do.
And my last question is if you’re working on a new collection of poems to be published soon
I’m working on a manuscript that is long enough to be a book, but I’m moving things around and trying to figure out what belongs where and if there are any themes or registers I should write into some more.
I’m also interested lately in the ways that artistic prompts can be used in unexpected settings. Like in facilitating a conversation with a group of emergency room medical staff or a group of local government officials. And I’m interested in thinking about the ways that reading and writing poetry might be a healing modality…