Prize-winning poet Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment, and her book The Red Queen Hypothesis won the 2022 Prairie State Poetry Prize. She’s also the author of Water-Rites (2012) and six chapbooks, and she maintains a long-running blog. In this interview (conducted by writer Ian Haight), Michael discusses her experiences as an American undergraduate educator, as well as the impacts of technology and her recent residency at Joya, Spain, on her writing.

You’ve recently retired from a career in academia, and you worked primarily with undergraduates—especially those new to a higher education environment. How do these students tend to value literature and creative writing, and how has this valuation changed over time?

My university job mainly took place in the context of academic support for students deemed “at risk” of not persisting to a degree. Mostly I was instructing basic composition, and the majority of our students were first generation who thought of college as a way to get a good job. My classes were sort of a toe-in-the-water regarding literature and writing, creative or otherwise. I saw my role as stealth-humanities…getting non-readers to find value in texts of various kinds, in solving the problems of argument and research and conventional writing in English. Are the students arriving even less versed in the humanities? Yes. With even less writing experience under their belts? Yes. But none of that surprised me after decades in the field.

You are an alumna of Goddard College, a small liberal arts college. Goddard closed its doors summer of 2024. Smaller liberal arts colleges are vulnerable to this trend, which includes a steady decline in students of English and history. Is this just a kind of “right sizing” for higher education, a normal evolution of change in what higher educational institutes and opportunities should offer/be offered to students? Or is it a bigger commentary on societal loss? The idea of pursuing knowledge for its own sake, to become a better human being feels like an idea many students are no longer aware of as a meaningful pursuit in higher education.

Many small, less-endowed, religious, alternative, and otherwise underfunded colleges are going under; I’ve been reading with deep dismay about the sudden closure of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts (this is June, 2024) and expect to hear of more such situations. I would not call this right sizing. Tuition has gotten too high, and administrations too top-heavy, and there are social changes in terms of class distinctions and wage expectations that go far beyond what a university can address…but that doesn’t mean the upheaval in higher ed is somehow making itself “right” by changing scale. These are not changes of scale so much as of value systems—some of them elitist and in need of change—but they are not taking place in a careful way; we are subject to our capitalist system and ideals. I’ve often made fun of myself and other academic-employed people as being part of a post-Medieval system (by which I mean, hey, we’ve gotten as up to date as the Renaissance, woot! Look at the regalia!). So many reasons that system is no longer viable. But I’m not an expert in these realms. Merely a participant.

Your father was a full professor, working in higher education for most of his life. What might he have to say about the state of contemporary higher education in the United States?

My dad often made cynical remarks, but in fact he was the consummate optimist. And he thought change is a necessary thing, even though it can be troublesome and painful. He believed that education was the great equalizer, and for him it was; he came from a very modest, rural background during the Depression, was the first in his family to get a degree (Wabash College), won a Fulbright, went to graduate school in New York City, and got his PhD some years later from Drexel University. He taught in the state system, not at a private university. I wish I could ask him, though. He always had opinions…about everything.

Did your family encourage you to write literature? What familial influences are there on your aesthetic tendencies and/or purpose when writing?

We are all bookworms and library and bookstore denizens. I wrote poems and books from the time I could write, but I never thought I would be a writer until I was in college. My dad did counsel me to get a day job.

You’ve recently completed a writing residency at Joya in Spain. The landscape looks to me comparable to Sedona or Prescott, Arizona, and you’ve mentioned it is comparable to a place in America you’ve visited: New Mexico. Have you had much experience living in this kind of desert landscape? Did you find the landscape to be noticeably influential on what and/or how you created?

I first visited the Taos/Abiquiu region when I was ten years old, and I loved it and wanted to live there when I grew up. Instead, I have stayed in the mid-Atlantic area of the US. Which, let me tell you, is not a high-altitude desert. Very humid, very green, very sea-level. We’ve often visited New Mexico’s Sandia Mountains in the past five years or so, however, because our daughter moved there. I find I still love the high desert, the piñons and ponderodas, the mesas, arroyos, and the amazing skies. I would move there now.

One reason I chose to apply to Joya-Air was the concerns my husband has about the Sandias: water scarcity and the chance of wildfire. The folks who founded Joya (Simon and Donna Beckman) have devoted themselves to creating an environmentally gentle, largely self-sustaining arts retreat in an area that farmers abandoned 50 and more years ago because it had become so tapped-out after supporting generations of human inhabitants and, also, due to climate change. The Beckmans have created firebreaks and planted mixed-species orchards in an area that is largely almond plantations; they generate the electricity for the cortija by windmill and solar panels and are working on a closed hydrological system for water, sewage, and irrigation. It’s a mix of ancient wisdom and technological approaches. My daughter and her husband have been looking into some similar environmental systems for their property in the Sandias. I thought I might learn something, you know? And I did.

The cortija is not a place for everyone. If you want to take long hot showers and have regularly scheduled meals, let someone else wash up after you, pop into town for night life, then maybe not. It would be a difficult place for a person with physical disabilities. I’m in my mid-sixties, not an athletic person, I have some immunological issues—certain aspects of the place are simply challenging. I chose not to take a five-hour hike to a local neolithic cave, you know? But the residency was actually perfect for me.

You’ve mentioned the use of words—which I take to mean the process of writing creatively—causes injury as well as revelation. You mention this in the context of being at Joya and in a space meant for the creation of art. What injuries or revelations did you come upon in your writing process while at Joya?

In terms of injuries—metaphorical but also, the injuries we humans have given the earth, the wounds we’ve made…I believe you’re referring to a blog post I wrote where I compare writing to Jacob wrestling with the angel. In the biblical verses, the man survives with revelation in his heart but a lamed leg that, I suppose, troubled him for the rest of his days. There was a price for the encounter with the godly. Writing is sometimes like that. The process can be fraught. You can stir up hurts of various kinds. If you aren’t taking risks with your art, though, you cannot push into the new, into—as it were—revelation. One risk we always face as artists is failure, but there are emotional and even physical risks artists can take. So the process can be injurious. Or sometimes just a slog.

Slogging through the writing process while experiencing a dry, harsh environment—but also incredible beauty, learning to appreciate that beauty—made me reflect on art that is hard to look at. “Guernica,” to take a Spanish example. It’s an emotional, challenging painting. I think it’s beautiful, but it isn’t lovely; I wouldn’t want it hanging in my bedroom. Some artwork I love is not pretty; there are books and poems I love that make me weep, that are just so damned hard to read because the writing arouses compassion and pain. I marvel at that. I think it helps us learn to be human when we encounter art that evokes not awe because of its beauty but awe that stems from understanding. So I value poetry and art that stab me with awareness of how badly human beings have wounded not just one another but our planet, as well.

Reading your blog about your residency experience at Joya, it seems Joya is involved in permaculture—agricultural practices that resemble natural ecosystems. To expand a little on the previous question, is there anything about these human interactions with the natural world that translate into an inner interaction with the self? Are there interactive/interchangeable elements of an aesthetic of life and art in play?

I think that interactions, yeah, I especially noted this among the other artists who were in my cohort, all of whom were visual-based or performance/documentation-type artists. There was much discovery in the wilds, on walks: textures, light, plant matter, rocks, sand, animal bones. And the shapes of the dry riverbed and the mountains, the pines and small oaks and heavily-pruned almond and olive trees. Very visual and tactile stuff—the wind blowing hard. The stars at night. The wildness—in fact, the harshness, it felt like, this desert doesn’t necessarily want us there.

So for me, and I think for the other people I was there with, all of this frequent interaction with the things of place insisted that we reflect, and we had studio space and unstructured time in which to do that.

I notice Joya’s ecological mission is partly defined by the mindful use of technology. Elsewhere, I notice a growing market of paid instruction on how to use AI to write poetry, despite many publishers saying they do not want AI or AI-assisted poetry submitted. Does AI have a role to play in creative pursuits like poetry?

I wanted flying cars and self-cleaning houses in my future, not algorithm-assisted, aggregated art and writing. But I do think there is a role for the “mindful” use of technology, if we can figure that out. Humans have been creating/implementing tech for years, always altering nature. To say there’s no place for technology, well—that’s never going to happen; it’s a socio-cultural wave, you can’t stop it on a dime. And AI is fascinating when used as a tool, for art or anything. When I was at Joya, some of the artists were using computers for videography, animation, and social media “arts publicity” or whatever you want to call it—Instagram posts and galleries, that sort of thing. Would I call that wrong, or say they’re selling out? No. Is their work original? Yes. Creative? Yes, very much so. Does AI assist them in these endeavors, whether or not they are aware of it? Well, probably. Depends on how you define AI. One thing about AI that raises big concerns for me is that it requires so much energy (see this article in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03408-z)

You had the experience at Joya of interacting with artists of different mediums, which led to new conversations about art. Do you think interacting with AI could lead to new conversations about art? Is art ever really made new or is art just a process of recycling the known and felt?

Oh, possibly the best part of the residency, for me, was that it was multi/interdisciplinary, self-directed, and small: only 6 artists in residence, but the cohort rotates because people stay for different lengths of time. I only stayed a week, was the oldest participant by a good 15 years or more, and was the only writer. But another resident would have a different experience.

We didn’t get much into AI as a topic, but we did have many conversations about images, observations, narrative, and documentation. I was the only artist who wasn’t using photography (digital/video or film/analogue) of some kind as medium, documentation, narrative, or product, so I learned a good deal about contemporary trends in the field. We talked about lyricism in various art forms. And about the performance aspect of art, like, is all art also performance?—depends on how one defines performance.

As for recycling the known and felt, what else have we got?

How have your goals as a writer changed since deciding to take writing seriously? Are they in any way more ethically driven or practical?

I suppose I’ve taken writing “seriously” since I was 20 or 21, but I never have been ambitiously goal-oriented about it. And I’m not now—it’s a little late to get all ambitious, frankly; though don’t get me wrong—I have nothing against artistic ambition. But I did have a sort of revelation while I was at Joya among artists of different mediums who were at different stages in their “art careers.” I considered my work at the university as a helping job, one I was relatively good at but which I didn’t consider my life’s work. Poetry’s sort of my life’s work, though I am not a well-known or important poet, which is where these other artists were: potentially developing into important careers or status but not there yet. And they were all younger than I am.

Can you have that, a life’s work that isn’t “important” (in the socio-cultural sense)? My feeling is, you can. You can do what you happen to be good at, even if you are not a top person in your field or craft. You can do what you love, what keeps you curious and intrigued and satisfied—or dissatisfied, so that you keep pursuing it. You can learn to keep doing, and in the process, listen to what other people are saying and doing. Offer feedback—if asked. Share enthusiasm and interest and joy. In some way, whether you know it or not, you exert a force in the world, you create purpose, just by doing it and showing others. Maybe they won’t get it. Maybe they’ll hate it and try to discourage you—I mean, sounds familiar for artists, right? But if this is what you can do in the world, maybe that’s enough. I am not a good leader or organizer, for example. I’ve never been good at making money, solving the problems of house maintenance, or spreadsheets. If the way I can best live in the world is through keeping a garden, teaching, reading and writing poems and demonstrating that reading and poetry have value, maybe that’s pretty minor—but it’s not nothing.

Could you talk about your next project?

I’ve gotten started on another collection of poems; but I am afraid the poems are perhaps too sad, too many elegies and poems about dementia and dying. The editing process on this could be very slow. I’m shopping a weird little chapbook of poems about an American Korean War prisoner who was prosecuted in the US as a traitor. It’s 17 pages long and contains documentary excerpts and footnotes, rather a hybrid work—not easy to find a publisher for such a thing. And I’m drafting a good deal of work I generated or took notes on while at Joya…meanwhile, I neglect promotion of my most recent book, which came out in March 2024. Told you I’m not ambitious!

– Ian Haight