In 2025, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Kim Addonizio discusses her curatorial approach and her own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, senior content editor at the Academy, and I am here today with the Guest Editor for March, Kim Addonizio. Kim is the author most recently of Exit Opera. Kim, welcome and thank you so much for joining me today.

Kim Addonizio: Hi. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Poets.org: Fantastic. Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for March?

Addonizio: Well, I just started thinking about poets that I admired. Some of them, I’d been aware of their work for a long time and had followed it for a long time. Others were some younger writers that were new to me, and this was just an opportunity to say, Hey, I think you’re doing good work in the world and I’d love to give you a chance to present it to more people. I don’t think there’s anything particularly that the writers have in common. I personally have tended to value surprise more and more lately in my work and the work of other people, and the elusive thing we call voice, which is the presence of the writer on the page, or in a way, really, the voice of the poem on the page, if that makes any sense. So I was really just reaching out to writers that had been on my radar for a while or who I just discovered and thought that they would be great additions to the month.

Poets.org: I’d like to talk a little bit briefly about your own work, which many would regard as part of the tradition of confessional poetry, made most famous in the mid-twentieth century by poets such as Anne Sexton and later Sharon Olds. Your work explores, briefly, themes of sex, addiction, romantic rejection. In your 2021 collection, though, Now We’re Getting Somewhere you write in one pithy poem, “No, the confessional is a mode among other modes,” almost as though you were anticipating this question from me or this statement from me about your poetry being in the confessional mode. That aphorism appears in a section of the book titled “Confessional Poetry,” which is interesting to me for its pithiness. The form of the poems in that section of the book reminds me a little bit of Rupi Kaur’s work, which is I know—

Addonizio: I’m sorry, but—

Poets.org: [laughs] If you’ll go there with me just for a moment. It does remind me a little bit of Rupi Kaur’s work, which is tailored to social media. She’s the Instagram poet. But I was just wondering, because those poems in that section do differ from what else I’ve seen from you, just for their pithiness.… And I was wondering if you were thinking at all about contemporary form, especially poetry that tends to be written for social media when you were composing?

Addonizio: Well, yeah, that’s interesting because it’s actually one poem spread out over thirteen pages. It’s not meant to be thirteen separate poems. It’s actually one poem that is.... I was saying to someone yesterday on a podcast that I’ve been tarred with the brush of artless confessionalism many times, and I do think the confessionalism mode, a lá Susan Sontag talking about, for example, she talks about the pornographic imagination and talks about pornography as a mode of expression. And so it is something that I think, probably when I started writing, I was a little more naive about what that meant, the whole concept of confessionalism. And so the piece in that book, the title of that piece is “Confessional Poetry,” and that’s why nothing else has a title on it because it’s meant to be one piece, and it’s really an argument for the confessional mode and sort of addressing some of the criticisms of that particular mode as artless as well. 

Well, you know … I don’t know what to say about Rupi Kaur except I’m not a fan. And I think it’s sad that people have less sense of language and less of a sense of the value of work that is more complex than hers. And I think it’s reductive as well to talk about certain work as confessional. It’s meant as a slam. And so that was my pushback, to say, “Well, yeah, you can say this, you can think this, but that’s not what I’m up to,” in terms of that particular criticism. And I think it’s often something that’s leveled by male critics at women, frankly, to devalue the work of women and to devalue women’s concerns. And to write about one’s body or one’s sexuality as a woman, you lay yourself open, so to speak. That’s a bad turn of phrase, but you open yourself up to that kind of criticism and to that kind of dismissal, especially from not, of course, all men, some men, you know, tend to have a real problem with women expressing their sexuality. So they’re either titillated by it, which is not interesting to me, or they’re dismissive of it. And for women to be concerned with those things that goes to the center of the way that we’re brought up in this society—in a patriarchal society, in a sexist society. And so I think they’re really important issues to talk about and to express, if that happens to be your jam, if that happens to be one of the ways that you are exploring the self in the world and, you know, the interior life as well as the life that many of us live.

Poets.org: If you could direct our readers and listeners to one poem in our collection at Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?

Addonizio: [laughs] And this really is an impossible question, and I don’t want to answer on the grounds it might damn me to dreary Tartarus. [laughs] But yeah, I will say that I could probably read another poem by Diane Seuss anytime. She wrote one recently that I talked about for Lit Hub, which title I can’t remember right now, but there are a lot of times I’m just gobsmacked by her work. And happily, she agreed to contribute a poem for the March curation. So I’m really happy to have her there, but I always really look forward to a new poem by Diane Seuss. So if you force me to answer that question, I think that would be my answer.

Poets.org: And we’d be happy with that answer because Diane is an Academy Chancellor and she served as Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day back in March 2023. Who are you reading right now?

Addonizio: It is really hard for me to remember who I read. I tend to skim a lot and pick up books and put them down and have books all over the house, as I imagine most writers do. So what I do is I go to my Kindle and I take a look at, well, who have I been reading? And then I sometimes go back to those people and reread them a lot. So I would say most recently I’ve been reading Lydia Davis’s Essays One. She’s got two volumes of essays, and I love her work. Tony Hoagland, Miranda July. Denis Johnson is a writer I’ve always admired for his fiction, but I go back to his poetry a lot as well. I’m just a great admirer of his poetry, most of which I didn’t discover until after he died.

I’ve been reading a lot of essays because of the essay collection I’ve been working on: Geoff Dyer, Joan Didion. Going back farther, Terrence Hayes, Robert Coover, Rachel Cusk, Franz Wright, Timothy Donnelly, Virginia Woolf’s Diaries. So it’s pretty varied and it’s pretty random a lot of times, but I just tend to sort of dip in and out of different writers who just speak to me at different moments or I suddenly think, Oh, I really want to read a poem by this person, and then I’ll just go off on a jag of reading them for a while and not read anything really straight through very often. I think especially since COVID, the only book I was able to read during COVID, literally the only novel I read that entire time was a grand Graham Greene novel, and I think that was because it was short and involved gin.

Poets.org: [laughs] I think that your reading habits mirror my own non-work related reading habits because sometimes I’ll pick up a novel and then put it down for a year [laughs] and then pick it up again later.

Addonizio: Yeah.

Poets.org: What are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Addonizio: Well, all three of those things really are just a part of what supports me as a writer. I do a lot of teaching of private workshops, various kinds of classes, from critique classes to generative ones to certain craft topics. So that’s a big part of what supports me as a writer, the occasional enormous royalty check [laughs] that I receive, and then doing readings here and there. So I’m doing a writing retreat in Italy this summer. I’ve been able to go there a few years now to teach at a former monastery, which is a really lovely opportunity. So I’m doing that. I don’t even know what sort of conferences or things I have coming up, but here and there I have speaking engagements and that kind of thing. So I’ve just finished a new collection of essays and just given it to my agent to see what happens.

So I’ve sort of finished that project, and now I’m turning to a collaborative book on poetic process with a friend of mine, a fellow poet, who I’m going to collaborate with to work on that book. And then I’m just, you know, always trying to write poems and always wanting a poem because I feel like poetry is where my heart is. Poetry is where I live. And I don’t feel good unless I’m in the place that poetry puts me, whether I’m reading it or writing it. And that’s the place I most want to be most of the time.

Poets.org: Well, I’m always excited to see new work from you, to hear about new work from you because I’m a fan of yours, and I’m sure we have plenty of others out in our audience. So I am very grateful to have had this time with you today. Thank you so much, Kim.

Addonizio: Thank you for having me, and I look forward to, well, all the months of Poem- a-Day.