Prageeta Sharma

 

What role do historical and geographical factors play in American poetry and in your work specifically? What other aspects of your life (for instance: gender, sexual preference, class, ethnicity, religious beliefs) relate to your sense of being a poet in America?

Additionally, this exuberance is something I took for granted in New York. Leaving New York and teaching in a creative writing MFA program, there's sometimes too much seriousness in art-making and less of the O'Hara "going on your nerve." And it's hard, in rural white environments to be a stranger. I have to ask myself whether my work is-- or can be read-- in correspondence with Richard Hugo's work now that I live here in Missoula: is it working against or with his traditions, say for example, writing about the natural world and/or place.

And I think my role changes based on where I am. For me ethnicity, gender, (dare I say height?), class, and religious (I'm a relaxed Hindu) beliefs have all been a major factor for me. Ethnicity, gender, and class have had a deep effect on my work. The more I realize what upward mobility has afforded my family and me--my family came here from India with $200. While my father landed a visiting faculty position at MIT, it wasn't enough to support his family, so he worked as a security guard in the evenings at the Museum of Fine Arts. He had experienced profound discrimination the higher he went up in the Academy. This is something I will forever be aware of in relation to my own identity. I'm a short, brown woman running a program and teaching in the academy in the deep West.