Published: March 2, 2011

“Chaos and Order shared a house of lines,” writes Fordham’s Poet-in-Residence Janet Kaplan in her latest collection “Dreamlife of a Philanthropist.” Winner of the 2011 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame Press, “Dreamlife” was officially released on Feb. 28. Experimental in both content and form, Kaplan’s newest poetry collection seems to become that house she refers to, and it has a solid foundation.

As Fordham’s Poet-in-Residence, Kaplan teaches graduate and undergraduate poetry workshops at the Lincoln Center campus in the fall and at Rose Hill in the spring. She also publishes student anthologies, helps with creative writing events and organizes the creative writing prizes. This is her final year at Fordham. “It’s a visiting position,” she said. “It was only meant to be for three years, and this is my fourth. So, that’s not bad for a three-year position.”

Kaplan did not study poetry as an undergraduate. It was something she discovered later, and that she needed in her life. The poets she read at the time published poems that were stories of their lives and struggles for survival. These poets became role models for her, influencing the pieces in her first collection, “The Groundnote.” “[Those] poems were what I suppose we would call narrative—life stories mixed in with references to myth, family and growing up in the Bronx,” Kaplan said. Fordham University Press published Kaplan’s second book, “The Glazier’s Country,” as the winner of the 2003 Poets Out Loud Prize. In the second collection, she delves deeper into the story of her grandfather, which she had touched on in her prior work.

“Dreamlife of a Philanthropist” is a collection of prose poems and prose sonnets. In the literary world, there is often a blurred line between prose poetry and short fiction. Kaplan is currently teaching the distinction in her course Prose Poetry/Flash Fiction. “I do believe there’s a difference,” she said. “Prose poems are always meant [to be] poems, with all the devices of a poem… They are not plot-driven. Whereas a short story, no matter how short, has plot.” Kaplan teaches her students that prose poems are subversive; they create an illusion of logic and progression. “You can hide in a prose poem. Poets love to hide.”

Kaplan has an interesting reason for choosing the prose poem instead of the conventional broken-line poem: “I was fascinated by this particular block called the sentence. It’s a container. It has its limitations, it has its structures and it has the ability to contain meaning.” She references visual artist Joseph Cornell as inspiration, who put together seemingly dissimilar objects in a box and turned these boxes into worlds. “Because he had put these things in this container,” Kaplan said, “they belonged together. So I knew I needed to do something like that with language.”

When asked how she deals with writer’s block, Kaplan said the condition is another way for poets to say “I’m afraid.” “The ego is behind writer’s block,” she said. “[Get] beyond the ego by realizing and recognizing that everyone feels the same way.” Kaplan suggested that it takes a community for a poet to overcome writer’s block—a community of dedicated writers with deadlines. “Show up with something lousy,” she said. “But show up with something.” Kaplan said that there is a lot to discourage poets, whether it is the lack of money or audience. She added, “But why show up at the important place? Because if you don’t, you’ll have missed it.”

Kaplan said that these days, publishing houses do not edit poetry. The high volume of manuscripts received pushes editors to publish a manuscript that is, in essence, already a book. The same goes for poetry prize judges. Regarding the Ernest Sandeen Prize judges, she said, “I don’t know what they were looking for, but they chose my book and I’m very, very grateful.” A cash award usually accompanies the prize; in Kaplan’s case, it was not even enough to pay one month’s rent. The winner also gets a certain amount of author copies and a royalty contract, through which the poet gets approximately seven cents for every book sold. “So, you know,” Kaplan said, “we don’t do it for the money.”

Kaplan is currently working on a new poetry collection, “Forgery,” and a novel tentatively titled “The Desire of the Line.” While she is intently writing and revising poems for the collection, she says her novel is presently “on the back shelf.” She also hopes to work on articles about writing and teaching, and plans to read from “Dreamlife of a Philanthropist” at the Poets Out Loud Fordham Faculty Reading on March 24.

“I’m still learning,” Kaplan said. “I’m still learning how to do it. And I hope I’m 80 years old and still learning how to do it.”