Recently, At a Lit Crawl event in Union Square, I heard Somerville poet Jennifer Badot read from her work. I asked her for an interview, and the rest is history!
From her website:
Jennifer Badot is the author of A Violet, A Jennifer ( Lily Poetry Review Books). Her poems and book reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, Studia Mystica, Lily Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, the Poetry is Bread Anthology, edited by Tina Cane (Nirala Publications), and elsewhere in the glorious vastness.
How has it been for you as a writer/poet in Somerville?
The purpose of my first ever visit to Somerville was to deliver a sheaf of poems to Somerville Poet Laureate Lloyd Schwartz at his home in East Somerville. I was a student in his poetry workshop at UMass Boston, and I was late turning in my assignment and so had to deliver it in person at the last possible minute of the last day of the semester. I recall driving in circles and getting lost somewhere near Washington Street and the McGrath Highway overpass and thinking “I could never live here!” Well, Fate obviously had the last laugh because I ended up settling in Somerville and raising my kids here. Our city has grit and vitality and is a great place to make art of any kind. As I’ve dipped in and out of the Somerville poetry scene over the years, I’ve always found welcoming faces and voices.
How difficult is it to raise children, work and have time to write? Did you totally have a shutdown during that period?
I’ve always admired people who raise children and work and still manage to have thriving writing careers. I wasn’t one of them. I was a single parent to two children and worked full time to provide for them. And while I wrote all during this time — notes, fragments, occasional poems, letters, journals, a plethora of facile marketing copy for my jobs — I was not consistently in the business of publishing and promoting my work. I was frazzled, distracted and too tired! I’m proud of me and my kids. We made it through some tough times together. Now it’s my time to shine.
You ran a poetry workshop at the defunct Boston Center for Adult Education. This was a later iteration of the very workshop that Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin attended. Did you have these poets in mind when you ran the workshop. The noted poet Tom Daley was your student. How was your experience with him?
In 2002, when I was asked to step in to run the BCAE workshop for Ottone "Ricky" Riccio, who had suddenly fallen ill, I was keenly aware of the fact that Ricky was a beloved teacher, and of the lineage of those who had run and taken the workshop before me. Naturally, I was nervous. But I took the plunge and found it to be one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. As for Tom Daley, he distinguished himself in my workshop as an astute reader of poetry and a wonderful poet. When I realized that I had to give the workshop up due to competing responsibilities as a parent and wage-earner, I knew that Tom was up to the task and so, much to his delight and surprise, I handed him the baton. Tom never fails to tell this story nor to credit me with giving him his start as a teacher. For my part, I’m overjoyed that he ran so far with it and has become the great champion of poetry that he is today.
You review poetry books. Do you feel the need to pan any of them?
No, there’s enough negativity in the world. It would be a waste of my energy. I review books that I admire and that I want to spend time with. I want to celebrate poets and the necessary life-giving work they do in the world.
In your poem "The Basket of Apples" you use a painting by Cezanne to contrast your family's situation. There is a dichotomy of perfection and reality here.
During the worst, most volatile period in my parents’ marriage (which was doomed from the start) there was a print of Cezanne’s, "The Basket of Apples" hanging in the kitchen where we ate our meals. There was tension and verbal violence at our table, and Cezanne’s apples, wine, and loaves of bread presided over it all, mocking our unhappiness. In my memory, the painting is infected with our discord. For many years, as I say in the poem, I couldn’t look at that painting “without revolting.”
You read Tarot cards—has this experience ever entered your poetry?
I’ve been reading Tarot cards professionally for nearly 20 years. While Tarot doesn’t enter my poetry explicitly, the experience of reading Tarot for others requires deep listening skills, intuition, and the ability to engage fully with images while putting one’s ego aside. These are also skills I endeavor to bring to the writing of my poems.
Why should we read your work?
I’ve never been great at self-promotion, so I’ll just steal a quote from what poet Spencer Reece said about my recent book A Violet, A Jennifer (Lily Poetry Review Books) and hope it will entice people to buy and read the book: “Badot casts her spell with these poems, in original sound and intent to make a modern secular, melancholy, mischievous, gospel. With language fresh and weird like Hopkins, tight and cryptic like HD, Badot — a girl, a woman, a single mother, a lover, a maker, a worker, a thinker, a survivor, a joker, a dancer, a cook, a gardener, a poet — attends her tasks with this charm. These poems coo and coax, water and nurture dreams.”
The Basket of Apples
What I knew of Cezanne: that he was from France, the country of our father, and a still life that hung in a blue frame in our kitchen beside the telephone, its coiled cord hanging down, a goldilocks curl. Those sweet, burnished apples couldn’t have been further from our truth, though flaxen highlights matched the colour of our walls, and shadows under the radiator were the same blackened green as the wine bottle leaning between the bread and a basket of apples. What more could we have wanted than everything on Cezanne’s tilted table to spill onto ours? When the apples tumbled out of the painting, they turned sour, and when the wine bottle emptied into our father’s unfathomable glass, our mother chewed her bread slowly, carefully, and was ridiculed with great acerbity. It would be many years before I could look at The Basket of Apples without revolting.
Jennifer Badot
What I knew of Cezanne: that he was from France, the country of our father, and a still life that hung in a blue frame in our kitchen beside the telephone, its coiled cord hanging down, a goldilocks curl. Those sweet, burnished apples couldn’t have been further from our truth, though flaxen highlights matched the colour of our walls, and shadows under the radiator were the same blackened green as the wine bottle leaning between the bread and a basket of apples. What more could we have wanted than everything on Cezanne’s tilted table to spill onto ours? When the apples tumbled out of the painting, they turned sour, and when the wine bottle emptied into our father’s unfathomable glass, our mother chewed her bread slowly, carefully, and was ridiculed with great acerbity. It would be many years before I could look at The Basket of Apples without revolting.
Jennifer Badot
