Ithaca Times: You both write from cross-cultural perspectives. How has this shaped each of you as a poet?
Gina Franco: Probably most people in the U.S. feel as though they are straddling a boundary between a culture of origin - often more than one - and the American scene in which we grow up. Maybe what is peculiar to "American consciousness" is just how alienated most of us feel in our own skins, and just how much we feel we need to explain ourselves to fit "in." Because we're almost always forced to think and talk in terms of "identity" - who are you? - our position is almost always that of the outsider.
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IT: Who are your biggest influences?
Byrne: My father introduced me to poetry. He bought all the new books of Irish poetry as they were published. My father encouraged me to write poetry, which I was far too shy to do until long after his death when I was 17 ... I have a deep love for Gerard Manley Hopkins and Charles Reznikoff; comedians Victor Borge, George Carlin, Chris Rock.
Franco: The Bible looms up from my childhood. When I was ten, I discovered Stephen King had been an English teacher, and that information helped put me on a path. Later, Percy and Mary Shelley were really important to me. Later yet, while doing my graduate work at Cornell, I met writers Helena María Viramontes and Herman Carrillo and the world of Latino writing opened up to me. It's strange to think I had to come so far east to find it.
IT: In addition to writing poetry, you're both professors and scholars as well. How do your academic interests coincide with or influence your poetry?
Byrne: I'm developing a form which accommodates both poetry and criticism in the same text, or at least poetry and poetics. I have done some scholarly work on the great Abolitionist Frederick Douglass's time in Ireland in 1845 to 1846 - he went to Ireland and England for two years in order to avoid recapture after his Narrative was published in Boston in 1845.
Franco: Teaching is central, partly because my research interests run parallel to my teaching interests. The subject matter isn't nearly as important as the work the students bring to the table. The students remind me of my own limitations and they confront me with what I need to be thinking about. They keep me honest.
IT: When you're not writing, reading, or teaching, what would you be doing instead?
Franco: These days? You'd most likely find me taking photographs or hanging out with monks in theology class or in contemplative prayer.
Byrne: Imbibing Bob Marley. I've been downloading reggae straight into my head for five years!
IT: Did you two know each other before this reading?
Byrne: Gina was the first person I knew of at Cornell; my then partner met up with her in a building where he had gone looking for directions when we first ventured to Ithaca (from Lafayette, Indiana) in the snow to look for an apartment. I had a complete vision of her on the basis of her name!
Franco: I do know and admire Mairéad and her work, mostly from afar these days, but always with awe and appreciation for all that's savvy and bold and brilliant in her poetry. She's the reader I want to hear. Don't readings often come about so that people can gather, have a reunion, get to know each other better?
IT: What, in your opinion, is the most poetic thing about Ithaca?
Bryne: My daughter Marina, who went to Boynton and ACS, says the waterfalls!
Franco: The sound of the loose tiles on the roof of Olin Library when you walk on them. And Reeve Parker's critical prose.
For more information about SOON productions and Saturday's reading, go to www.soonproductions.org.
