Deborah Rosch Eifert : part one

Deborah Rosch Eifert (@EifertPoetry) is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and the author of the newly released chapbook Sewn from Water, from Uncollected Press. Her work has appeared  in Whiskey Island Quarterly, Constellations, Cathexis Northwest, Persephone’s Daughters, as well as other literary presses, and is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic and Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art. Her work also has been published in several anthologies. She has received an Editor's Choice award from Formidable Woman Sanctuary Press, was named Poet of the Month by Flying Ketchup Press, was a semifinalist in the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition and was First Runner-up in the 2018 Esthetic Apostle Chapbook Contest.  

How did you first engage with poetry?

I started reading and writing poetry as a teenager. I had some very chaotic aspects to my home life including various kinds of violence I experienced throughout my early years. I was consumed by a constant tension between feeling compelled to communicate and being desperate to keep my reality secret. There was also a constant push-pull between the beauty I saw in nature and kind people against the ugliness and cruelty in humanity’s constructions and in people who bully, abuse, violate. Another dichotomy I lived out was that I was partly wild and reckless (I didn’t care what happened to me from anything I did) and partly an extremely timid ‘good girl.” I think poetry is dramatically well suited to showing and reconciling dichotomies, in indirect and startling ways. The first poets I really had much exposure to were confessional poets – Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin. I felt like it gave me permission to write, particularly Plath. Oddly, the things I loved by Plath 40 years ago I don’t care for as much now, and the things I disliked then, I really feel admiration for now – like “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” In college, I read “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Her Kind” compulsively. Then I mostly stopped writing for 35 years while I went to grad school in clinical psychology, went through a first marriage and raised my daughter. Moving back home to New England, frequently writing again, publishing my poems and hitting my mid-fifties all happened at about the same time.