After years of persistent work, English teacher Susan Lilley has finally made a name for herself in the poetry world. She published her first book, Night Windows, in 2006 and published her new book, Satellite Beach, last year. Lilley says the books cover growing up in Florida, relationships, family, loss, memory, and beauty.
Lilley was on WMFE, the local NPR affiliate, on a show called “Intersection.” The show is about local topics and mostly interviews people from the Central Florida area. Lilley was interviewed about love poetry on February 12 because of the Valentine’s Day theme. During the interview, Lilley gave her opinions on what it means to write a good love poem.
“The poems that tend to be streaked with a little bit of sadness, or fear, or loss always tend to be a little more powerful than the ones that are ‘love you to the end of time,’” she said in her interview. “A good love poem is honest, sincere, and from the heart,” Lilley claimed.
She said she doesn’t see many love poems anymore. She can count on one hand the number of quality love poems that she’s read in the past year. Lilley said that she believes the reason love poetry isn’t as popular as it used to be is because “we listen to so much pop music and still hear a lot of songs about love.” She thinks that poets want to divorce themselves from writing the clichéd love poem and end up avoiding the subject altogether.
Lilley said she also loves Shakespearean sonnets. “They are wonderful, and they are popular for a good reason,” she said. “Even though Shakespeare followed the rules and wrote the description about the beloved, even he couldn’t resist turning that inside out and giving it an edge.”
Lilley says that she thinks edgier sonnets have far more power because they include all the emotions that come with love, including fear, guilt, and loneliness. “These are all part of love. Love is not the emotion you feel all by itself. Love always comes with other emotions too,” she stated in the interview.
Her favorite poets include Shakespeare himself, but also the poet Sappho. We know very little about Sappho other than the fact that she was a Greek poet from the 6th century BC. Lilley loves her poetry because she writes about unattainable love and admires how it is still relatable today.
As far as writing poetry, Lilley said to go through the greeting cards at a local store. “Almost all the things you want to avoid are right there,” she said. “The worst thing is to have the poem become all fuzzy and gauzy.”
Lilley also said that great poetry includes real aspects of life. “Real things about the love object as well as about life bring up the image of the loved one,” she stated.
Also, she recommends not waiting for inspiration to dawn on you, but to find time for writing. “You have to be awake, aware, and start writing,” she said. She expressed that writing is a way of thinking, and she said that if you don’t start writing, you might never find the perfect thing to write about.
“There’s a few times, usually when I’m driving, when something pops into my head, and I think ‘Oh my god, it’s a poem!’” she explained. Lilley said usually she tries to find a notebook at the next stoplight and starts writing things down. However, she claimed this is rare and more typically she sits down and finds time to write.
Lilley is also the advisor of the creative writing magazine Skylight.
It is student-run and is currently available on skylightmag.com. She is excited about the new design of the website, which includes the school colors of blue and yellow and a picture of the sky taken by junior Anna Sephton.
“In my creative writing class, everyone is kind of on the rolling staff of [Skylight] and is welcome to contribute,” she said. However, anyone is welcome to submit to be in the online magazine. Skylight is hoping to receive more student art and more writing. They also have a creative writing challenge that they want more people to enter.
Lilley said, “It’s a creative writing magazine, but some of the projects started as class projects but ended up being great creative expressions from photography, art, and studio classes.” Some of the features of the magazine include a section just for middle schoolers, called “Magic in the Middle” and interviews with the visiting authors. She is excited about this issue of Skylight and describes it as the perfect arts and culture magazine that focuses on the creative work of Trinity Students.
In January, Lilley had a book launch at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, and she also plans on doing some other community readings.
Lilley said, “On April 23, I am moderating a discussion with nationally-known poet Patricia Smith at the UCF Book Festival.” She especially loves live readings, and she hopes to have more of those in the future.
