Of language, of poetry, of memory:
An interview with Mary Jo Bang
March 18, 2025
Eugène Cicéri, “Design for a stage set” (c. 1830)
You can listen to the introduction to this interview on Substack, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
Editor’s note
Every so often, you encounter someone who has done so much so well that it becomes difficult to capture the extent of their accomplishments. Mary Jo is one of those people.
She’s published nine books of poetry and numerous works of translation, with another — Dante’s Paradiso — forthcoming later this year. Her poems have been selected for inclusion in the Best American Poetry series multiple times, and she’s taught everywhere from Yale University to the New School to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Among the many awards she has received for her work are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Book Critics Circle Award.
It was a privilege to get to learn more about the life and writing of a poet whose work is as formidable in thought as it is wide-ranging in its cultural impact.
Jana M. Perkins
Founder, Women of Letters
Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio; Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. She has a BA and an MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, a BA in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University), and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
How did your childhood shape your ideas about what work looked like and what was possible for you?
Mary Jo Bang: My family was working class. Conversations between my parents almost always centered on work. When we visited relatives, the men talked to each other about what the boss said, what the union was going do, work-related resentments and degradations. In the kitchen, the women shared stories about what their children had done (good or bad), had sotto voce conversations about health issues, family resentments and neighborhood gossip.
I knew from a very early age that I was expected to marry, have children, cook, clean, and talk to other women in the kitchen. I also knew I wanted something different from that. I remember telling my adult cousin, when I was fifteen, that I planned to go to college. He laughed and said, “What for? You don’t need a degree to change diapers.” When I said I wasn’t having children, he shared a look with my mother that said I’d come to my senses and accept my destiny.
Did you have any mentors along the way?
MJB: Of course, there were teachers—although early on, in high school, I didn’t always know how to make use of their support.
For a long time, I felt lost and out of my depth. My college teachers were encouraging and that was helpful, but even then, I don’t think I understood that they expected students to ask for their help. I was working as a research assistant for a sociology professor when I applied to graduate school, but I never told him I was applying. When he found out, quite by accident, he said I should have said something, he would have helped me. Fortunately, I was accepted without his help but it’s an example of my lack of awareness that help was there for the asking, had I known.
When I studied photography, I had a number of teachers who told me I was making photographs that mattered. And when I studied poetry at Columbia, Lucie Brock-Broido seemed to know exactly the right thing to say to me about my poems. She helped me step back and see my writing as if it had been written by someone else. That remove was crucial to my understanding of how poetic language works. She not only influenced my writing, but also my ideas about teaching.
Marjorie Perloff’s books taught me how to read poetry by others. I became friends with her when I was a poetry editor at the Boston Review. I’m sure I wouldn’t be the poet I am without the combined influence of those two women. They had radically different ideas about poetry, which proved useful to me. Since there was no way to reconcile their antithetical approaches, I had to develop my own.
Tell us about some of the projects, ideas, or questions you’re currently working on.
MJB: I am just completing a translation of Dante’s Paradiso. I published a translation of Inferno in 2012, and Purgatorio in 2021. I began working on Inferno in June 2005, so when this final canticle is published in July 2025 it will be the end of a twenty-year endeavor.
For the past ten years, I’ve also been co-translating, with Yuki Tanaka, poems by the Japanese Surrealist poet Shuzo Takiguchi. In November 2024, Princeton University Press published some of those as A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi.
I’m also working on a manuscript of my own poems called The Museum of Mary. These are ekphrastic poems that respond to artworks that feature, in one way or another, women named Mary. The project began with poems about the Virgin Mary but I eventually reached a point where I felt I’d exhausted the Immaculate One as my muse, so began to include other Marys: Mary J. Blige, Mary Shelley, Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Tyler Moore, Marianne Moore, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, an American Civil War era surgeon who refused to wear dresses, and Mary Anning, a British fossil collector, dealer, and paleontologist, who got little credit for her work during her lifetime but is celebrated now.
The conceit may seem whimsical—since a name means nothing in terms of who one is, or what one does in their limited time on earth—but as a literary device, it’s been extremely useful. I’m able to write from the perspective of myself, a Mary (plus Jo), and I can incorporate the experiences of other women, both those who came before and contemporaries. I’ve come to think of the poems as the equivalent of portraits like those in Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) and Rear Screen Projections (1981). In my Mary poems, as in Sherman’s photographs, a costumed figure played by the artist assumes the roles society assigns to women and, in doing so, refreshes our sense of how confining those roles can be.
What do you wish you’d started doing sooner?
MJB: I wish I had begun to study languages much sooner, and had studied more consistently.
I took a French class in high school but I didn’t really know how to learn a language then. I studied Spanish in college. That was more successful but I didn’t stay with it. I went back to French years later but I wish I’d kept at it instead of doing it in bits and pieces. I’ve taken other language classes, or studied with tutors: German, Mandarin Chinese.
When you think of women who have inspired or influenced you, who comes to mind?
MJB: In the beginning, it was mainly the characters in books I read.
I read the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, The Borrowers, Little LuLu comic books. While different in terms of genre, they all featured independent, intrepid, girl protagonists. On Saturdays, I walked to the Ferguson library and back, a mile and a half each way. I would check out the maximum number of books one was allowed based on age: before age nine, three; after age nine, five. Then, when I was thirteen, I was given access to the adult-only books that were kept inside a glass-walled enclosure. Those books couldn’t be checked out and taken home; you could only sit and read them under the watchful eye of the librarian.
The first two books I chose, after looking through the small card catalogue, were Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and a book about what women needed in their wardrobes: white gloves, short and elbow length, a pill box hat, a black dress, a suit with a fitted jacket and pencil skirt. There was even a diagram showing how to pack these items in a suitcase to go on a trip. I have no idea why either of those books would have been kept behind glass. What strikes me now is that, for me at least, both books were about dreaming.
I eventually found my way to Emily Dickinson, a volume of selected poems titled Final Harvest, which I probably chose based on the cover, since that’s how I chose most books then. In the 60s, I heard Anais Nin speak and then read all of her works, including her diaries. I read Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics. And later, Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck. When I was living in London, I found Plath’s Collected Poems and The Bell Jar. I was forever looking for voices that echoed my own interiority.
Photo credit: Carly Ann Faye
I was also inspired by female friends, women who didn’t question their ambitions but kept forging ahead—although in some ways, I often felt I was on the sidelines since, as a single mother, whatever I did, I had to take my child into account.
Outside of your work, what’s something you feel you’ve thought about more deeply than most other people?
MJB: I don’t know that there exists anything outside of my work. Everything I do contributes to my writing and translating. I do think a great deal about neuroscience. I’m interested in how the brain makes sense of the body, of language, of poetry, of memory.
Where can our readers find you?
MJB: Do you mean where on social media? I’m only on Facebook. But I can be found in my books. And in interviews such as this one.
We corresponded with Mary Jo over email. Our exchange has been edited for clarity.