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November 2021
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT MAUREEN SEATON BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK
By Denise Duhamel
By Denise Duhamel
DD: Emily Dickinson famously wrote “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” What is the first poem you read that made you feel that way?
MS: I love how Emily expressed her visceral reaction to poetry, but the top of my head has never blown off. Maybe if the poem had an orchestra behind it, or at least some great percussion. I have felt, however, a sensation where I describe a poem as filling my mouth with flowers. I remember reading Marilyn Hacker’s “Rune of the Finland Woman” for the first time, or it could have been Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” or Ntozake Shange’s “I Live in Music.” Finding these poems long ago in a Manhattan bookstore, my mouth filled with flowers for the first time, and I knew what poetry was to me.
DD: Fuck Marry or Kill. (Or just Fuck and Marry, since I know you are a peaceful poet.) Gertrude Stein, Phillis Wheatley, Sappho.
MS: Denise, I know you did not make this up. Do people actually ask this question? Okay, well, I would love to be in a long-standing poetry group with all three. I know that might sound dull in comparison—but I’m all about alternatives, and no way would it be boring, right?
DD: Why Carl Jung?
MS: Because he doesn’t insist I want to sleep with my mother (or father). Plus, he invented the soul.
DD: If you could be reincarnated as anyone or anything, what would that be?
MS: A gingko tree in the East Village.
DD: How many Maureen Seatons does it take to screw in a light bulb?
MS: See, instead, Aaron Smith’s poem, “God Is Not Mocked” in the inaugural issue of the new and fabulous Allium, in which Smith writes:
How many Gods does it take to screw in a light bulb?
One, because I Am the Great and Powerful Oz!
DD: What is your secret to writing poems that just get better and better with each book?
MS: If that is, indeed, true, it may be because I keep getting closer and closer to death, and therefore soul. (See Jung.)
DD: Any advice to young poets who didn’t have the honor of studying with you?
MS: First of all, the honor is mine. Not to mention the joy and inspiration. Best advice I have: trust yourself, your muse, your own rhythm.
DD: What do you think your legacy will be?
MS: I’m not sure what a legacy is. Maybe mine will be that I never gave up on poetry.
DD: Is this interview more like a poem?
MS: Bigger than a haiku, smaller than a sonnet, daft as an exquisite corpse, and definitely a collaboration. Thanks, Denise. I love you.
Maureen Seaton has authored two dozen poetry collections, both solo and collaborative. Her recent solo books are Undersea (JackLeg, 2021) and Sweet World (CavanKerry, 2019), winner of the 2019 Florida Book Award for poetry. Honors include Lambda Literary Awards for both Lesbian Poetry and Lesbian Memoir, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, an NEA, and the Pushcart. She has co-written and published collections with Denise Duhamel, Neil de la Flor, Samuel Ace, Carolina Hospital, Holly Iglesias, Nicole Hospital-Medina, and Kristine Snodgrass, with whom she recently published a collab chapbook, Zero-Zero (Hysterical Books, 2021). She was voted Miami’s Best Poet 2020 by The Miami New Times and is a huge fan of and frequent contributor to the South Florida Poetry Journal.
http://www.anhingapress.org/poetry/myth-america-poems-in-collaboration
https://bookshop.org/books/undersea-9781737330707/9781737330707?aid=37596&listref=jackleg-press-books
https://www.hystericalbooks.com/
MS: I love how Emily expressed her visceral reaction to poetry, but the top of my head has never blown off. Maybe if the poem had an orchestra behind it, or at least some great percussion. I have felt, however, a sensation where I describe a poem as filling my mouth with flowers. I remember reading Marilyn Hacker’s “Rune of the Finland Woman” for the first time, or it could have been Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” or Ntozake Shange’s “I Live in Music.” Finding these poems long ago in a Manhattan bookstore, my mouth filled with flowers for the first time, and I knew what poetry was to me.
DD: Fuck Marry or Kill. (Or just Fuck and Marry, since I know you are a peaceful poet.) Gertrude Stein, Phillis Wheatley, Sappho.
MS: Denise, I know you did not make this up. Do people actually ask this question? Okay, well, I would love to be in a long-standing poetry group with all three. I know that might sound dull in comparison—but I’m all about alternatives, and no way would it be boring, right?
DD: Why Carl Jung?
MS: Because he doesn’t insist I want to sleep with my mother (or father). Plus, he invented the soul.
DD: If you could be reincarnated as anyone or anything, what would that be?
MS: A gingko tree in the East Village.
DD: How many Maureen Seatons does it take to screw in a light bulb?
MS: See, instead, Aaron Smith’s poem, “God Is Not Mocked” in the inaugural issue of the new and fabulous Allium, in which Smith writes:
How many Gods does it take to screw in a light bulb?
One, because I Am the Great and Powerful Oz!
DD: What is your secret to writing poems that just get better and better with each book?
MS: If that is, indeed, true, it may be because I keep getting closer and closer to death, and therefore soul. (See Jung.)
DD: Any advice to young poets who didn’t have the honor of studying with you?
MS: First of all, the honor is mine. Not to mention the joy and inspiration. Best advice I have: trust yourself, your muse, your own rhythm.
DD: What do you think your legacy will be?
MS: I’m not sure what a legacy is. Maybe mine will be that I never gave up on poetry.
DD: Is this interview more like a poem?
MS: Bigger than a haiku, smaller than a sonnet, daft as an exquisite corpse, and definitely a collaboration. Thanks, Denise. I love you.
Maureen Seaton has authored two dozen poetry collections, both solo and collaborative. Her recent solo books are Undersea (JackLeg, 2021) and Sweet World (CavanKerry, 2019), winner of the 2019 Florida Book Award for poetry. Honors include Lambda Literary Awards for both Lesbian Poetry and Lesbian Memoir, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, an NEA, and the Pushcart. She has co-written and published collections with Denise Duhamel, Neil de la Flor, Samuel Ace, Carolina Hospital, Holly Iglesias, Nicole Hospital-Medina, and Kristine Snodgrass, with whom she recently published a collab chapbook, Zero-Zero (Hysterical Books, 2021). She was voted Miami’s Best Poet 2020 by The Miami New Times and is a huge fan of and frequent contributor to the South Florida Poetry Journal.
http://www.anhingapress.org/poetry/myth-america-poems-in-collaboration
https://bookshop.org/books/undersea-9781737330707/9781737330707?aid=37596&listref=jackleg-press-books
https://www.hystericalbooks.com/
In the spotlight with Neil de la Flor,
co-editor, Reading Queer
co-editor, Reading Queer
Tell us about Reading Queer. You and Maureen Seaton were the driving forces behind the anthology and the series of readings, yes?
Reading Queer fosters queer literary culture in South Florida through an annual creative writing workshop series, craft talks, and a literary festival by and for queer writers and artists. RQ is committed to providing these events at no cost to attendees. This is made possible by a Knight Foundation Challenge Grant and private donations.
After the 2016 election, Maureen Seaton and I became the driving forces behind the anthology Reading Queer: Poetry In a Time of Chaos. (Maureen is also one of the founding members of Reading Queer.) The anthology brings together 50 diverse queer poets from around the world. It’s not a ‘definitive’ collection of queer voices. We wanted 5,000 voices! 50,000 voices! In the end, we hope that the writers in the anthology represent a window into the breadth and depth of the creativity within the queer writing community.
Has some level of acceptance been reached these days regarding being queer/gay? And whether yes or no, how does that enter into your work, or does it?
I accept being queer and gay. I also accept that society changes and that one day the pendulum may swing against being queer or gay. I also accept that being safe often depends on where queer or gay people live. Acceptance also depends on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, age, class, etc. It’s also safe to say that we live in a complex world where acceptance isn’t an absolute guarantee (even though it should be) and often depends on those intersections. And the political climate!
As far as queerness entering my work, it does and it doesn’t. It depends on the work and on which definition of queer we’re talking about. My forthcoming book, The Ars Magna for the Manifold Dimensions of z (Jackleg Press), is speculative metatheatre (I just looked up metatheatre just to be sure) that re-imagines the life of Meta, a Danish Underground informant during the Nazi Occupation of Denmark. Ars Magna is queer, stylistically. My first book of poetry, Almost Dorothy, is queer queer. It unravels the story of a queer boy who wants to be just like his queer brother/best friend but never quite measures up to his idol’s fabulousness. And that’s ok! And the boy is ok with that. He learns that being Almost Dorothy is just as awesome as being wholly (or Holy?) Dorothy, i.e. Judy Garland as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
Aside from writing and publishing poetry solo, you’ve collaborated with some great poets. Talk a bit about that and them.
It’s liberating, humbling, and regenerative. Working with other writers is a masterclass. It may sound cheesy, but it gives me life. Collaboration is one of the greatest joys of my writing life. End of story.
How long have you lived in Miami/South Florida? Where were you before coming here?
I was born and raised, right here, in South Florida.
Your Facebook posts often mention your experiences in the classroom. You’re committed. What do you see in those young minds?
I’m committed to education. I’m committed to opening windows and doors. I’m committed to evolving and learning from my students as they learn from me. They reveal themselves in different ways and they give me hope for civilization. In other words, they make my job fun.
What’s this we hear about you being an avid hula-hooper?!
Less avid over the last few years, but I can definitely hold my own with the hula-hoop, which reminds me I should hula-hoop before breakfast. Maybe I missed a career in the circus. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Who are you reading right now (poetry)?
Caridad Moro-Gronlier
Who is your go-to poet when you need inspiration to write?
Google. (Lol).
You’re a photographer as well as a poet? Do they intersect on an emotional or intellectual level?
They intersect during different moments of my life. I just do as much as I can with the time that I have to create work that is fun and interesting (for me) in whatever medium I have a decent grasp of. I love the piano, but I’m terrible.
What is your submission process- how often to you send out, do you take time off?
I submit during winter and summer break. It’s an emotionally exhausting process, but that’s life.
Lennon or McCartney?
Melissa McCarthy.
Reading Queer fosters queer literary culture in South Florida through an annual creative writing workshop series, craft talks, and a literary festival by and for queer writers and artists. RQ is committed to providing these events at no cost to attendees. This is made possible by a Knight Foundation Challenge Grant and private donations.
After the 2016 election, Maureen Seaton and I became the driving forces behind the anthology Reading Queer: Poetry In a Time of Chaos. (Maureen is also one of the founding members of Reading Queer.) The anthology brings together 50 diverse queer poets from around the world. It’s not a ‘definitive’ collection of queer voices. We wanted 5,000 voices! 50,000 voices! In the end, we hope that the writers in the anthology represent a window into the breadth and depth of the creativity within the queer writing community.
Has some level of acceptance been reached these days regarding being queer/gay? And whether yes or no, how does that enter into your work, or does it?
I accept being queer and gay. I also accept that society changes and that one day the pendulum may swing against being queer or gay. I also accept that being safe often depends on where queer or gay people live. Acceptance also depends on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, age, class, etc. It’s also safe to say that we live in a complex world where acceptance isn’t an absolute guarantee (even though it should be) and often depends on those intersections. And the political climate!
As far as queerness entering my work, it does and it doesn’t. It depends on the work and on which definition of queer we’re talking about. My forthcoming book, The Ars Magna for the Manifold Dimensions of z (Jackleg Press), is speculative metatheatre (I just looked up metatheatre just to be sure) that re-imagines the life of Meta, a Danish Underground informant during the Nazi Occupation of Denmark. Ars Magna is queer, stylistically. My first book of poetry, Almost Dorothy, is queer queer. It unravels the story of a queer boy who wants to be just like his queer brother/best friend but never quite measures up to his idol’s fabulousness. And that’s ok! And the boy is ok with that. He learns that being Almost Dorothy is just as awesome as being wholly (or Holy?) Dorothy, i.e. Judy Garland as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
Aside from writing and publishing poetry solo, you’ve collaborated with some great poets. Talk a bit about that and them.
It’s liberating, humbling, and regenerative. Working with other writers is a masterclass. It may sound cheesy, but it gives me life. Collaboration is one of the greatest joys of my writing life. End of story.
How long have you lived in Miami/South Florida? Where were you before coming here?
I was born and raised, right here, in South Florida.
Your Facebook posts often mention your experiences in the classroom. You’re committed. What do you see in those young minds?
I’m committed to education. I’m committed to opening windows and doors. I’m committed to evolving and learning from my students as they learn from me. They reveal themselves in different ways and they give me hope for civilization. In other words, they make my job fun.
What’s this we hear about you being an avid hula-hooper?!
Less avid over the last few years, but I can definitely hold my own with the hula-hoop, which reminds me I should hula-hoop before breakfast. Maybe I missed a career in the circus. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Who are you reading right now (poetry)?
Caridad Moro-Gronlier
Who is your go-to poet when you need inspiration to write?
Google. (Lol).
You’re a photographer as well as a poet? Do they intersect on an emotional or intellectual level?
They intersect during different moments of my life. I just do as much as I can with the time that I have to create work that is fun and interesting (for me) in whatever medium I have a decent grasp of. I love the piano, but I’m terrible.
What is your submission process- how often to you send out, do you take time off?
I submit during winter and summer break. It’s an emotionally exhausting process, but that’s life.
Lennon or McCartney?
Melissa McCarthy.
the O, Miami interviews
SoFloPoJo in partnership with O, Miami, interviewed select poets as part of its "Calling on Ancestors: Exploring Tenderness in Turbulent Times."
"We will discuss intimacy as a praxis for how we are with ourselves––and as a vision for how we want to be in relationship to ancestors. Six poets will explore ethical loneliness in a time of global warming, the cost of the “I” for the sake of intimacy, and self-preservation during/post-pandemic. How do we seek liberation by turning inward in our poetic practice? In what ways do we call on our ancestors as part of this practice? How can intimacy ask for vulnerability––even from strangers––based on acting out of the antithesis of individual hoarding and toward community and resource sharing? How do we sustain a writing discipline through care and tenderness"?
"We will discuss intimacy as a praxis for how we are with ourselves––and as a vision for how we want to be in relationship to ancestors. Six poets will explore ethical loneliness in a time of global warming, the cost of the “I” for the sake of intimacy, and self-preservation during/post-pandemic. How do we seek liberation by turning inward in our poetic practice? In what ways do we call on our ancestors as part of this practice? How can intimacy ask for vulnerability––even from strangers––based on acting out of the antithesis of individual hoarding and toward community and resource sharing? How do we sustain a writing discipline through care and tenderness"?
Talking with Tyre Daye
by Jennifer Greenberg
See Jennifer's video interviews of Mahogany L. Browne & Ross Gay HERE
Jennifer Greenberg: You'll be participating in a discussion hosted by O,Miami on the topic of "tenderness in turbulent times." Do you ever feel uncomfortable with the idea that the public reading your poems is an act of intimacy? Is that comforting or terrifying?
Tyre Daye: I think of poems as intimate spaces shared between reader and speaker, so I want my readers to have that relationship with my poems.
JG: Are there some things you don't feel comfortable writing about? What are your boundaries with sharing, and why?
TD: Of course, I encourage my students to write those poems that they are not ready to show the world. I keep them on my computer in a folder marked "No."
JG: Do you find it easy to write from a place of vulnerability? Does it take practice, or are you able to access the tender parts of yourself easily?
TD: I was taught vulnerability as a craft tool that should be an element of the poem, just line, metaphor and line.
JG: Many of your poems pull inspiration from relatives and life in the American south. What kinds of messages do you receive from your ancestors through writing? What do they want you to know? Is this your preferred way to feel connected to them? If you have a ritual, please tell us what it means to you.
TD: I find my relatives in memories, and I think the act of remembering is the ritual that makes the interaction with the ancestor(s).
JG: Lastly, I noticed the playlist on your website is full of nostalgic blues artists like Muddy Waters, Alice Coltrane, and Nina Simone, among others. Do you feel free to be as authentic as they were? Do you think it was less or more difficult for your ancestors to fully express themselves? What should we do with this freedom?
TD: I can only answer the first question. I turn to music when I am trying to get the tone down in my poems. Tone helps make the "I" more authentic, and Nina Simone helps me understand a tone I am reaching for in my poems.
Tyree Daye is a Cave Canem fellow. His poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Nashville Review, Four Way Review, Ploughshares. He was awarded the Amy Clampitt Residency for 2018 and The Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. His collection Cardinal was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020.
Tyre Daye's collection, Cardinal was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Buy it here.
Jennifer Greenberg is a recipient of the 2020 Joe Bolton Poetry Prize and an Associate Editor at the South Florida Poetry Journal, where she has interviewed Miami Book Fair participants Mahogany L Browne and Ross Gay. Her writing appears in several journals, including Literary Mama and SWWIM Everyday.
Tyre Daye: I think of poems as intimate spaces shared between reader and speaker, so I want my readers to have that relationship with my poems.
JG: Are there some things you don't feel comfortable writing about? What are your boundaries with sharing, and why?
TD: Of course, I encourage my students to write those poems that they are not ready to show the world. I keep them on my computer in a folder marked "No."
JG: Do you find it easy to write from a place of vulnerability? Does it take practice, or are you able to access the tender parts of yourself easily?
TD: I was taught vulnerability as a craft tool that should be an element of the poem, just line, metaphor and line.
JG: Many of your poems pull inspiration from relatives and life in the American south. What kinds of messages do you receive from your ancestors through writing? What do they want you to know? Is this your preferred way to feel connected to them? If you have a ritual, please tell us what it means to you.
TD: I find my relatives in memories, and I think the act of remembering is the ritual that makes the interaction with the ancestor(s).
JG: Lastly, I noticed the playlist on your website is full of nostalgic blues artists like Muddy Waters, Alice Coltrane, and Nina Simone, among others. Do you feel free to be as authentic as they were? Do you think it was less or more difficult for your ancestors to fully express themselves? What should we do with this freedom?
TD: I can only answer the first question. I turn to music when I am trying to get the tone down in my poems. Tone helps make the "I" more authentic, and Nina Simone helps me understand a tone I am reaching for in my poems.
Tyree Daye is a Cave Canem fellow. His poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Nashville Review, Four Way Review, Ploughshares. He was awarded the Amy Clampitt Residency for 2018 and The Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. His collection Cardinal was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020.
Tyre Daye's collection, Cardinal was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Buy it here.
Jennifer Greenberg is a recipient of the 2020 Joe Bolton Poetry Prize and an Associate Editor at the South Florida Poetry Journal, where she has interviewed Miami Book Fair participants Mahogany L Browne and Ross Gay. Her writing appears in several journals, including Literary Mama and SWWIM Everyday.
Tenderness in Turbulent Times with Monica Sok
by Jennifer Greenberg
You participated in a discussion hosted by O,Miami on the topic of "tenderness in turbulent times." Do you ever feel uncomfortable with the idea that the public reading your poems is an act of intimacy? Is that comforting or terrifying?
I love the idea that reading poems is an act of intimacy. Whenever a poem moves me as a reader, I walk away feeling changed. Something grows inside of me. I hold the poem in my mind all day or read it aloud to a friend or share it with my students. Suddenly, the poem brings me closer to others and it is comforting to be sheltered together by the world of the poem.
Are there some things you don't feel comfortable writing about (or do, but don't show the world)? What are your boundaries with sharing, and why?
When it comes to boundaries, I feel protective of my ancestors. If I'm engaging with my own history, I try to write about my people in dignified ways and protect them from the trauma gaze. I don't necessarily feel comfortable writing about anything really, but that discomfort plays a role in my truth-telling. I work through that discomfort by giving myself permission to write the poem. And the poems that I share with the world are the ones that I chose to finally abandon.
Do you find it easy to write from a place of vulnerability, or does it take practice? Are you able to access the tender parts of yourself easily, and how does this affect your mental health?
It takes practice to be vulnerable in my writing, for sure. I've learned that writing first thing in the morning allows me to be more vulnerable. When I am just waking up, I don't judge myself. I just try to write down the first thing that comes to mind, usually a dream if I remember it. I access the tender parts of myself naturally throughout the day, simply by paying attention to my body and thanking it for carrying me. Sometimes I can be hard on myself too, and I have to allow myself to grow soft again by returning to the body.
What kinds of messages do you receive from your ancestors through writing? What do they want you to know? If you have a ritual, please tell us what it means to you.
I believe that my ancestors are with me on my writing journey, and yes, sometimes they're helping me write the poems themselves. My book A Nail the Evening Hangs On is dedicated to my grandmother, a traditional weaver. When I was struggling to find a book cover and edit the final poems, I felt that she was leading me to her loom. The book cover is a photograph of her silk.
One of my rituals is actually learning the Khmer language. I feel more connected to my ancestors when I'm engaging in Khmer, which is full of poetic translations. For example, the word "to like" in Khmer can be broken down into "to take something inside the heart."
Are you working on any special projects right now that deal with tenderness and ancestry? How important is it that we write about and connect with our history?
My new poems reach for a kind of tenderness that I want to practice. As always, I'm in conversation with ancestors, but this time I am actively trying to imagine myself as an ancestor too. Connecting with history is a critical part of my writing life. It is how I've learned to name myself and find my way in this world.
Monica Sok (she/her) is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Kundiman, MacDowell, National Endowment for the Arts, and others. Sok teaches poetry at Stanford University and the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants. She lives in Oakland, California. Buy her book here.
Jennifer Greenberg is a recipient of the 2020 Joe Bolton Poetry Prize and an Associate Editor at the South Florida Poetry Journal, where she has interviewed Miami Book Fair participants Mahogany L Browne and Ross Gay. Her writing appears in several journals, including Literary Mama and SWWIM Everyday.
I love the idea that reading poems is an act of intimacy. Whenever a poem moves me as a reader, I walk away feeling changed. Something grows inside of me. I hold the poem in my mind all day or read it aloud to a friend or share it with my students. Suddenly, the poem brings me closer to others and it is comforting to be sheltered together by the world of the poem.
Are there some things you don't feel comfortable writing about (or do, but don't show the world)? What are your boundaries with sharing, and why?
When it comes to boundaries, I feel protective of my ancestors. If I'm engaging with my own history, I try to write about my people in dignified ways and protect them from the trauma gaze. I don't necessarily feel comfortable writing about anything really, but that discomfort plays a role in my truth-telling. I work through that discomfort by giving myself permission to write the poem. And the poems that I share with the world are the ones that I chose to finally abandon.
Do you find it easy to write from a place of vulnerability, or does it take practice? Are you able to access the tender parts of yourself easily, and how does this affect your mental health?
It takes practice to be vulnerable in my writing, for sure. I've learned that writing first thing in the morning allows me to be more vulnerable. When I am just waking up, I don't judge myself. I just try to write down the first thing that comes to mind, usually a dream if I remember it. I access the tender parts of myself naturally throughout the day, simply by paying attention to my body and thanking it for carrying me. Sometimes I can be hard on myself too, and I have to allow myself to grow soft again by returning to the body.
What kinds of messages do you receive from your ancestors through writing? What do they want you to know? If you have a ritual, please tell us what it means to you.
I believe that my ancestors are with me on my writing journey, and yes, sometimes they're helping me write the poems themselves. My book A Nail the Evening Hangs On is dedicated to my grandmother, a traditional weaver. When I was struggling to find a book cover and edit the final poems, I felt that she was leading me to her loom. The book cover is a photograph of her silk.
One of my rituals is actually learning the Khmer language. I feel more connected to my ancestors when I'm engaging in Khmer, which is full of poetic translations. For example, the word "to like" in Khmer can be broken down into "to take something inside the heart."
Are you working on any special projects right now that deal with tenderness and ancestry? How important is it that we write about and connect with our history?
My new poems reach for a kind of tenderness that I want to practice. As always, I'm in conversation with ancestors, but this time I am actively trying to imagine myself as an ancestor too. Connecting with history is a critical part of my writing life. It is how I've learned to name myself and find my way in this world.
Monica Sok (she/her) is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Kundiman, MacDowell, National Endowment for the Arts, and others. Sok teaches poetry at Stanford University and the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants. She lives in Oakland, California. Buy her book here.
Jennifer Greenberg is a recipient of the 2020 Joe Bolton Poetry Prize and an Associate Editor at the South Florida Poetry Journal, where she has interviewed Miami Book Fair participants Mahogany L Browne and Ross Gay. Her writing appears in several journals, including Literary Mama and SWWIM Everyday.
A Chat With Brendan Walsh
by Jennifer Greenberg
Cave Canem Reading O, Miami’s annual book prize reading celebrating the winner of a contest run by Cave Canem, the nation’s foremost poetry organization supporting black poets.
SoFloPoJo: Let’s start by talking about your new book. What is the title, who is the press/publisher, how did you like working with them, and give us an overview of what the poems are about- is there an arc?
Brendan Walsh: My latest book was just accepted for publication last month! concussion fragment is a chapbook of prose poems that won the 2020 elsewhere chapbook contest. elsewhere press will be publishing the work. We haven’t done too much work together, but they seem professional, compassionate, and all of the other positive adjectives an ingratiating poet might use to describe his new publisher. concussion fragment uses my history with the culture of masculinity to examine how a narrow definition of manhood leaves young men, regardless of their beliefs, with few options for emotional and physical outlets. It uses concussions (an injury I was prone to in my childhood and teenaged years) to frame the larger narrative of boys trying to grapple (literally and metaphorically) with how to be men, and ultimately not knowing, because the concept is so slippery and often undefinable. The arc? It starts with a concussion and ends with a concussion, with drinking, fire, death, puking, and fighting along the way.
SoFlopoJo: O,Miami has become a huge player in not only the poetry scene in South Florida, but nationally as well. Is this your first time reading for O,Miami?
BW: This is my first time reading for O,Miami. It has been a dream of mine to read at O,Miami, and to do it alongside such talented authors and generous people is incredible. Sometimes, I have to remind myself that I am living this life, and that so many of my poetry dreams and goals have actualized. I’ve attended many O,Miami readings and events, each one interesting and enlightening. To be a part of this extended family is awesome.
SoFloPoJo: Talk about a poem in your book that perhaps sums up what your work is moving toward these days. This is not your first rodeo. Where are you headed poetically speaking?
BW: In concussion fragment, the poems are deeply confessional. It seems like I’m returning to an earlier version of my writing self, the graduate school Brendan, who would write these intense personal narratives for workshop. People would say, “Are you sure you want to share this?” I don’t see why not. It’s not the poems are incriminating, but they are an indictment and exposure of a former life that I lived. Readers might find it sad or dramatic, but I am trying to channel the intensity of emotion from the time. One of the poems in the chapbook, called “wrestling season,” very much harnesses this emotional extreme. Everything feels extreme when you’re young, and these poems linger in that chaotic space. Where am I headed? I want to write and write until my fingers fall off, then I’ll see what my brain has decided. I think I’m moving away from this intensity to something more restrained. My Tupelo 30/30 writing project dealt in reverence mostly.
SoFloPoJo: it’s 2021. How are you feeling? Are you active in your local community with respect to poetry? Is it informed by current events?
BW: I feel okay! Writing-wise, 2020 was good for me. I had nothing to do but write, so I composed nearly every day, and I spent a great deal of time listening to birds outside my window, and looking at the ocean, and inhabiting my mind. I participated in the Tupelo 30/30 project, which raised a solid chunk of money for Tupelo Press, and I also made donation to SoFlo charities and organizations to “match” my contributors. I’ve had the opportunity to participate in some events, including the Wild and Precious Life Series, which is run by SoFlo poet Dustin Brookshire. Dustin is generous with his time and energy, and he does excellent work in fostering the larger poetry community. I haven’t done as much as I’d like with the SoFlo poetry community, because I’m most interested in physical poetry spaces. Soon? Please?
SoFloPoJo: How has the Pandemic influenced your writing? Or has it? What about readings? Are you Zoomed out yet?
BW: The Pandemic is an understood component of all my newest work. It’s an aside, but never a main character. I imagine this is what it’s like to write about any living historical moment: other stuff is going on that feels important, but the pandemic is a player, always. I’ll make note of quarantine, loneliness, etc, but I haven’t written any “Pandemic Poems” yet, and I doubt that I will. I think the intrigue lies in how we deal with our other lives while the pandemic rustles in the background. I am Zoomed out. I Zoom all day with students, and then I find myself Zooming nights as well, either for events, family hangouts, etc. I can’t focus with the screen! I totally understand why students can’t focus during virtual school—I can’t either.
SoFloPoJo: Do you think virtual readings are better than readings in a physical space? People can attend from anywhere. Do you think people are more apt to buy books when you’re face to face? Or are they more likely to click a link in the chat box?
BW: I think virtual readings have been a blessing this past year. I have been able to read to bigger crowds with geographically-diverse audiences, including many family and friends that couldn’t attend otherwise. This is awesome. On the other hand, we ALL miss that energy. I miss looking at people and talking to them between poems. There’s a communal feeling that doesn’t exist in virtual spaces. I sell more books in person (I think), but it really depends! I think in a big reading (like the O,Miami reading on 4/7), people will sell more than if we were in person. I hope everybody is selling books from non-Amazon sources and reading a bunch.
SoFloPoJo: In a lecture, Mary Ruefle said—paraphrasing here—that she doesn’t always know what her poems mean. South Florida Poetry Journal editors are somewhat familiar with your work, and we’d guess that you know what your poems mean. Nothing out in the stratosphere in your poems, right? You publish poems that are socially significant, at least on some level.
BW: I want to write the kind of poems that I enjoy reading. We all do, but it’s easy to get caught up in writing “like someone else” that perhaps you admire. I have a specific experience that is grounded in my body, and the sensation of living in a body. Although I am cerebral (because I’m a HUMAN), I don’t always connect with cerebral poems. I am an imagist, and through those images meaning can be extracted. I have no intention of symbolism or obtuse language, because if we believe in the democratization of poetry, which we should, then speaking clearly is the ultimate goal. That doesn’t mean I don’t love “challenging” poetry--I really do. However, something is lost there. I write with a purpose, both socio-political and personal, and if I write in a way that obscures that purpose then I’m missing the point. That, and I’m also not that smart. Maybe it’s all of the concussions.
SoFloPoJo: Following up on that—do you write in themes? Does your work lean toward a cultural “message?”
BW: I always lean towards a social and political message. I need to, because it’s how I structure the world. I don’t think that everybody has to, or should, write that way, but it’s what guides my choices in writing and life. I can’t examine the world, specifically the world of South Florida, and not consider climate change, the evils and excesses of unfettered capitalist consumption, and the impact of colonization on our earth. Everything is interconnected; I can’t look at a landscape without imagining what came before, and what hand that I, as a colonizer body, and all of my choices, had in reshaping and possibly destroying that landscape. I am so confused all of the time, because I have to live in this gorgeous world that we degrade and ignore, among gorgeous people (ourselves included), who we equally degrade and ignore. I hope that my poetry, in whatever infinitesimal way, causes people to question their relationship to the earth and its brief little creatures.
SoFloPoJo: Is there a short piece in this new work that you can copy and paste into this interview-give readers a taste of what’s inside?
puke
two days worth of rain, the brown field stole cleats from our feet through warmups and playcalls.
end of practice, coach ran us sick with gassers goal line to goal line, until sweat and drizzle formed one mess of wet on our faces. the lot of us heaved dry heat til rishesh, lagging and last to pass the line forfeit his insides to the end zone, spilled white then orange and finally whatever water was left.
we crowded him, not sure if this would cost us or save us, and coach laughed the jolliest delight i’d ever seen. then alex, overcome with the rip of bile and stomach, the inside-poured-out retch, opened his throat, released pale liquid on the flooded field, then another kid unzipped his belly, and another, another. coach laughed: all those boys hand-and-knee, gut-bulged and eye-teared. as we walked to the locker room, looked back at a dozen piles like continents
separated by seas of grass, not much could have made us prouder or sure we’d done what it was we were supposed to do.
SoFloPoJo: Last question. If you have one, what is your proudest moment? Maybe it’s getting your first poem published? First book?
BW: I have so many, and it’s good to remind myself of these things. The book launch party for my first full-length collection, Go, is one of my proudest moments. It was Spring 2016, and a local antique theatre in New Haven, Lyric Hall, hosted the event. Around 50 of my closest friends and family members, along with strangers, joined me. Lynn Marie Houston read as the “opener,” and she was incredible as always. Everyone drank well, laughed, I cried quite a bit. I couldn’t believe that so many people would join and celebrate this art. Life made perfect sense. It was unbridled gratitude. I remember I was crying in front of all these people on that ornate stage, and my brother silently approached with a Guinness and I paused to drink it. It was quiet, and it felt like my entire world felt the silence with me.
Brendan Walsh has lived and taught in South Korea, Laos, and South Florida. His work appears in Rattle, Glass Poetry, Indianapolis Review, American Literary Review, and other journals. He is the winner of America Magazine's 2020 Foley Poetry Prize, and the author of five collections, including Buddha vs. Bonobo (Sutra Press), and fort lauderdale (Grey Book Press). His chapbook concussion fragment, winner of the 2021 Elsewhere Chapbook Prize, is forthcoming from Elsewhere Press. He’s online at www.brendanwalshpoetry.com. Buy fort lauderdale through Grey Book Press Buy Buddha vs. Bonobo through Sutra Press concussion fragment will be available through elsewhere press sometime in 2021
Brendan Walsh: My latest book was just accepted for publication last month! concussion fragment is a chapbook of prose poems that won the 2020 elsewhere chapbook contest. elsewhere press will be publishing the work. We haven’t done too much work together, but they seem professional, compassionate, and all of the other positive adjectives an ingratiating poet might use to describe his new publisher. concussion fragment uses my history with the culture of masculinity to examine how a narrow definition of manhood leaves young men, regardless of their beliefs, with few options for emotional and physical outlets. It uses concussions (an injury I was prone to in my childhood and teenaged years) to frame the larger narrative of boys trying to grapple (literally and metaphorically) with how to be men, and ultimately not knowing, because the concept is so slippery and often undefinable. The arc? It starts with a concussion and ends with a concussion, with drinking, fire, death, puking, and fighting along the way.
SoFlopoJo: O,Miami has become a huge player in not only the poetry scene in South Florida, but nationally as well. Is this your first time reading for O,Miami?
BW: This is my first time reading for O,Miami. It has been a dream of mine to read at O,Miami, and to do it alongside such talented authors and generous people is incredible. Sometimes, I have to remind myself that I am living this life, and that so many of my poetry dreams and goals have actualized. I’ve attended many O,Miami readings and events, each one interesting and enlightening. To be a part of this extended family is awesome.
SoFloPoJo: Talk about a poem in your book that perhaps sums up what your work is moving toward these days. This is not your first rodeo. Where are you headed poetically speaking?
BW: In concussion fragment, the poems are deeply confessional. It seems like I’m returning to an earlier version of my writing self, the graduate school Brendan, who would write these intense personal narratives for workshop. People would say, “Are you sure you want to share this?” I don’t see why not. It’s not the poems are incriminating, but they are an indictment and exposure of a former life that I lived. Readers might find it sad or dramatic, but I am trying to channel the intensity of emotion from the time. One of the poems in the chapbook, called “wrestling season,” very much harnesses this emotional extreme. Everything feels extreme when you’re young, and these poems linger in that chaotic space. Where am I headed? I want to write and write until my fingers fall off, then I’ll see what my brain has decided. I think I’m moving away from this intensity to something more restrained. My Tupelo 30/30 writing project dealt in reverence mostly.
SoFloPoJo: it’s 2021. How are you feeling? Are you active in your local community with respect to poetry? Is it informed by current events?
BW: I feel okay! Writing-wise, 2020 was good for me. I had nothing to do but write, so I composed nearly every day, and I spent a great deal of time listening to birds outside my window, and looking at the ocean, and inhabiting my mind. I participated in the Tupelo 30/30 project, which raised a solid chunk of money for Tupelo Press, and I also made donation to SoFlo charities and organizations to “match” my contributors. I’ve had the opportunity to participate in some events, including the Wild and Precious Life Series, which is run by SoFlo poet Dustin Brookshire. Dustin is generous with his time and energy, and he does excellent work in fostering the larger poetry community. I haven’t done as much as I’d like with the SoFlo poetry community, because I’m most interested in physical poetry spaces. Soon? Please?
SoFloPoJo: How has the Pandemic influenced your writing? Or has it? What about readings? Are you Zoomed out yet?
BW: The Pandemic is an understood component of all my newest work. It’s an aside, but never a main character. I imagine this is what it’s like to write about any living historical moment: other stuff is going on that feels important, but the pandemic is a player, always. I’ll make note of quarantine, loneliness, etc, but I haven’t written any “Pandemic Poems” yet, and I doubt that I will. I think the intrigue lies in how we deal with our other lives while the pandemic rustles in the background. I am Zoomed out. I Zoom all day with students, and then I find myself Zooming nights as well, either for events, family hangouts, etc. I can’t focus with the screen! I totally understand why students can’t focus during virtual school—I can’t either.
SoFloPoJo: Do you think virtual readings are better than readings in a physical space? People can attend from anywhere. Do you think people are more apt to buy books when you’re face to face? Or are they more likely to click a link in the chat box?
BW: I think virtual readings have been a blessing this past year. I have been able to read to bigger crowds with geographically-diverse audiences, including many family and friends that couldn’t attend otherwise. This is awesome. On the other hand, we ALL miss that energy. I miss looking at people and talking to them between poems. There’s a communal feeling that doesn’t exist in virtual spaces. I sell more books in person (I think), but it really depends! I think in a big reading (like the O,Miami reading on 4/7), people will sell more than if we were in person. I hope everybody is selling books from non-Amazon sources and reading a bunch.
SoFloPoJo: In a lecture, Mary Ruefle said—paraphrasing here—that she doesn’t always know what her poems mean. South Florida Poetry Journal editors are somewhat familiar with your work, and we’d guess that you know what your poems mean. Nothing out in the stratosphere in your poems, right? You publish poems that are socially significant, at least on some level.
BW: I want to write the kind of poems that I enjoy reading. We all do, but it’s easy to get caught up in writing “like someone else” that perhaps you admire. I have a specific experience that is grounded in my body, and the sensation of living in a body. Although I am cerebral (because I’m a HUMAN), I don’t always connect with cerebral poems. I am an imagist, and through those images meaning can be extracted. I have no intention of symbolism or obtuse language, because if we believe in the democratization of poetry, which we should, then speaking clearly is the ultimate goal. That doesn’t mean I don’t love “challenging” poetry--I really do. However, something is lost there. I write with a purpose, both socio-political and personal, and if I write in a way that obscures that purpose then I’m missing the point. That, and I’m also not that smart. Maybe it’s all of the concussions.
SoFloPoJo: Following up on that—do you write in themes? Does your work lean toward a cultural “message?”
BW: I always lean towards a social and political message. I need to, because it’s how I structure the world. I don’t think that everybody has to, or should, write that way, but it’s what guides my choices in writing and life. I can’t examine the world, specifically the world of South Florida, and not consider climate change, the evils and excesses of unfettered capitalist consumption, and the impact of colonization on our earth. Everything is interconnected; I can’t look at a landscape without imagining what came before, and what hand that I, as a colonizer body, and all of my choices, had in reshaping and possibly destroying that landscape. I am so confused all of the time, because I have to live in this gorgeous world that we degrade and ignore, among gorgeous people (ourselves included), who we equally degrade and ignore. I hope that my poetry, in whatever infinitesimal way, causes people to question their relationship to the earth and its brief little creatures.
SoFloPoJo: Is there a short piece in this new work that you can copy and paste into this interview-give readers a taste of what’s inside?
puke
two days worth of rain, the brown field stole cleats from our feet through warmups and playcalls.
end of practice, coach ran us sick with gassers goal line to goal line, until sweat and drizzle formed one mess of wet on our faces. the lot of us heaved dry heat til rishesh, lagging and last to pass the line forfeit his insides to the end zone, spilled white then orange and finally whatever water was left.
we crowded him, not sure if this would cost us or save us, and coach laughed the jolliest delight i’d ever seen. then alex, overcome with the rip of bile and stomach, the inside-poured-out retch, opened his throat, released pale liquid on the flooded field, then another kid unzipped his belly, and another, another. coach laughed: all those boys hand-and-knee, gut-bulged and eye-teared. as we walked to the locker room, looked back at a dozen piles like continents
separated by seas of grass, not much could have made us prouder or sure we’d done what it was we were supposed to do.
SoFloPoJo: Last question. If you have one, what is your proudest moment? Maybe it’s getting your first poem published? First book?
BW: I have so many, and it’s good to remind myself of these things. The book launch party for my first full-length collection, Go, is one of my proudest moments. It was Spring 2016, and a local antique theatre in New Haven, Lyric Hall, hosted the event. Around 50 of my closest friends and family members, along with strangers, joined me. Lynn Marie Houston read as the “opener,” and she was incredible as always. Everyone drank well, laughed, I cried quite a bit. I couldn’t believe that so many people would join and celebrate this art. Life made perfect sense. It was unbridled gratitude. I remember I was crying in front of all these people on that ornate stage, and my brother silently approached with a Guinness and I paused to drink it. It was quiet, and it felt like my entire world felt the silence with me.
Brendan Walsh has lived and taught in South Korea, Laos, and South Florida. His work appears in Rattle, Glass Poetry, Indianapolis Review, American Literary Review, and other journals. He is the winner of America Magazine's 2020 Foley Poetry Prize, and the author of five collections, including Buddha vs. Bonobo (Sutra Press), and fort lauderdale (Grey Book Press). His chapbook concussion fragment, winner of the 2021 Elsewhere Chapbook Prize, is forthcoming from Elsewhere Press. He’s online at www.brendanwalshpoetry.com. Buy fort lauderdale through Grey Book Press Buy Buddha vs. Bonobo through Sutra Press concussion fragment will be available through elsewhere press sometime in 2021
Over the years and decades: Michael Hathaway, editor of Chiron Review Visit: Chiron Review
South Florida Poetry Journal: What is the URL for Chiron Review?
Michael Hathaway: http://www.chironreview.com
SoFloPoJo: When was CR born?
MH: Feb. 19, 1982.
SoFloPoJo: Did you create it? If not, who did? When did you become involved?
MH: Yes, I created it.
SoFloPoJo: Was there a mission statement? – A goal at that time? If so, what was it, and has it changed?
MH: There was not a mission statement at the time. The goal was to publish poetry and short stories. The closest thing we have ever had to a mission statement in our early years was, “No taboos.”
SoFloPoJo: When does CR drop?
MH: The plan is to have the fall issue in print in September, winter issue in late December.
SoFloPoJo: It is now a slick softcover, it once was a newspaper, why the change?
MH: It changed because of logistics, and because I couldn’t keep up with changing newspaper technology (and obsolescence). Some friends offered to help produce it in book form via the Internet, so I let them drag me kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
SoFloPoJo: How is CR funded?
MH: CR is funded through subscriptions, sales, donations, and minimal commercial publishing.
SoFloPoJo: How much is a subscription?
MH: A regular subscription is $60, for $100 subscribers may be listed as a Patron. Your readers may get a subscription for the low, low price of just $49 by mentioning SoFloPoJo.
SoFloPoJo: What is the submission process? Submittable?
MH: Writers are asked to check our website before submitting, to make sure we’re open to them. Submissions are preferred via MS Word attachment, but accepted in the body of an e-mail, or hard copy postal submissions with SASE (for now). I’m not a fan of Submittable, but have taken a few that way.
SoFloPoJo: Has electronic submissions, Submittable or email, changed the submission process? How?
MH: Yes, miraculously. E-mail submissions save tremendous time and money. They come with a few problems, but advantages far outweigh disadvantages. The best being that I no longer have to use the postal mail to share submissions with editors, nor do I have to retype everything for the journal by hand.
SoFloPoJo: Does CR use “readers” to sort through submissions?
MH: No, I look at each submission first and decide if it shows promise, then send it to an editor for their advice.
SoFloPoJo: Who makes the final decision?
MH: I make the final decision, but seldom veer from the advice of my editors.
SoFloPoJo: What does CR look for in poetry?
MH: We look for creativity, quality, duende (soul), musicality, eclecticism, universality, maybe a story, humor, wisdom. I can get sidetracked by alliteration, rhythm, and unusual cool/archaic words, but my editors aren’t always so easily amused. But mostly, as I babbled in a 2002 essay, we “publish unpretentious literature that is accessible beyond the ivory towers of academia and outside the bounds of religious or politically correct restrictions; a literature that celebrates honesty and humor; that reclaims poetry as an art for the so-called ‘common’ people.”
SoFloPoJo: Have there been over the years any stand-out “episodes” in publishing/rejecting poets? The “Then-there-was-that-time ...” kind of thing.
MH: Yes, lots of those. There’s nothing like the thrill of opening the mailbox being surprised by a first submission from someone like Lorri Jackson, Charles Bukowski, Lyn Lifshin, Marge Piercy, Todd Moore, Tony Moffeit, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Edward Field … or to be one of the first to publish an unknown poet whose poems “blow the top off your head,” and to witness them achieve success as years go by.
There are also stories of disgruntled poets, prima donnas, even death threats from poets who objected to how their work appeared, or objected to some one else’s work in the magazine – the predictable “kill the messenger” mentality that seems even more prevalent today.
In the early days, there were negative responses to rejections, writers who couldn’t resist responding to a rejection letter with a little jab. Mom and I both abhorred sending rejection notes. We worked hard to soften the blow with gently worded “form” notes. It cut back on most negative responses. Mom’s letters were so kind, that she often struck up correspondence with and even garnered a few subscriptions from writers whose work we turned down. She had rejection down to a fine art. She was one special lady.
There were poets who responded to rejection notes by informing me how wonderful other editors said the work was, with lengthy letters explaining how we have to publish it because they wrote the poem “just for Chiron,” and would send it back to “give you another chance.”
My favorite was a postcard from a writer whose poetry we rejected in the late 1990s who accused us of being “elitist.” I always thought of Chiron Review as the polar opposite of that, so I didn’t know whether to take it as an insult or a promotion?
SoFloPoJo: You have published a who’s who of great poets over the years – talk about some of them. Drop some names.
MH: Although our focus was on up and coming talent, I’ve enjoyed publishing some well-known writers through the years. My first submissions from Charles Bukowski, Marge Piercy, Lyn Lifshin, William Stafford, Felice Picano, Elizabeth Swados, Edward Field were big thrills. It was a delight to publish poetry by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, the “biscuits & gravy poet,” lovechild of Emily Dickinson and John Steinbeck. She was nearly blind, stabbed her poetry manuscripts out with black felt-tip marker on grocery sacks, used envelopes, whatever papyrus happened to be handy.
SoFloPoJo: CR has had some great interviews, tell us about some of them – do any stick out in your mind?
MH: We published many excellent interviews. Without cheating and reviewing back issues, there are a couple that stand out in my memory. Among my favorites is Sherman Alexie’s. I still remember his quotes, “I want to make the world more beautiful, even if I write something ugly,” and “genius finds its way, the rest of us struggle.” Other standouts are interviews with small press icons: D. Roger Martin interviewed Merritt Clifton of Samisdat, a personal hero, and Jeff Weddle interviewed Gypsy Lou Webb, Bukowski’s early publisher. It was among our greatest honors to publish those.
Back in the late 90s, a couple of writers approached me with unpublished interviews they’d done with dearly departed writers such as Erskine Caldwell. Being a compulsive historian, I enjoyed publishing those. One year I asked Lyn Lifshin and Janice Eidus to interview each other; Gavin Dillard interviewed himself as “Helen Damnation.” Larry Oberc provided us with a many interviews, including a series with well-known “punk” women writers. I didn’t really know what “punk” was (and still don’t, even though we published an “all punk” issue in 2009, and I enjoyed that very much).
Mark Weber did a series of “quirky” interviews with small press luminaries of the late 80s/early 90s. Those were fun. He let me publish a couple of them, most notably, Marvin Malone of The Wormwood Review. I wonder where those interviews are now. They’d make a marvelous book.
SoFloPoJo: How much of your time does CR take? Do you have a life outside it?
MH: It is my life, along with being caretaker of a clowder of cats and keeper of history for our local museum. I’m working on and thinking about all of it, all the time. Whatever shred of sanity I may lay claim to is attributable to those distractions from the void.
Publishing a literary journal takes so much less time than it used to, thanks to the magic of technology. It used to require hours of typesetting, correcting, cutting, waxing, pasting, laying out pages after-hours at my newspaper dayjob 25 miles away. Now it’s all done in my bedroom on a tiny lightweight wireless machine that sets on my lap. No paper. I will always remain in absolute awe of that. I admit missing the hands-on of the cutting and pasting, but not enough to go back to it.
SoFloPoJo: What is the future of CR?
MH: I always have larger than life plans and dreams, always some great goal just around the corner. But we’re still clunking along on four square wheels and a wagonload of hope, as we’ve done for 38 years, and that’s okay. We’re in the process of changing technology again, going POD with a company that provides “drop ship” services, which mostly means distribution all over the free world. Whatever happens, I’ll keep publishing the journal as long as I’m able, whether I have 10 subscribers or 10,000.
SoFloPoJo: Give us a bio: who are you, where do you come from, and when did you come to poetry, or when did it come to you?
MH: Dad and Mom were both raised in rural Kansas, he was 5th generation Kansan, she 3rd. They were stationed at the El Paso army base when I was born in 1961. Shortly after they moved back home to central Kansas, where my brother Joseph was born 15 months after me. (Our sister Kristi was born in 1964, and died in 1965.)
When I was seven, we settled in the little house on two acres where I live now, on the southeast edge of St. John, a town of about 1,000. Dad planted large gardens and pear trees on the west side, and alternate years potatoes or corn on the east. He planed wheat or alfalfa in the little field to the south to feed the chickens and rabbits. Mom canned hundreds of quarts and pints of green beans, peas, carrots, beets, corn, tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, pickled okra, and pears, which we stored in the cellar. She made jelly from currants, sandhill plums, and cherries that we picked in the country. There were also asparagus and strawberry patches, cats, dogs, ducks, quail, pigeons, a cow and a horse named Rosey.
I loved cats, poetry, music, and books, in that order, interested in everything under and over the sun. I was outgoing as a little kid, but extremely shy and introverted by junior high. I dealt with being gay in a small Kansas town against the backdrop of an evangelical upbringing and a schoolmate being cruelly “outed” in 9th grade, crucified by some of our schoolmates. It made high school mostly a terrible experience, but there were silver linings. I was part of an exceptionally kind class, and always had a couple of good friends. I loved learning, but didn’t participate in outside activities in school. Home was my sanctuary. Regardless of the nonsense the outside world brought, I never once doubted my parents’ unconditional love.
When I was a senior in high school, my parents took in three of my cousin’s children (ages 2-10) to raise, so I’m the eldest of six, five living.
Mom (Jane Hathaway) loved and wrote poetry, so I guess she introduced me to poetry. We attended church at the First Missionary Baptist Church (of which my great-great-grandparents were founding members). On many Sunday mornings in late 60s/early 70s, when the preacher asked if anyone had something to share, Mom would stand up and recite her newest hymn-like poem. As a little boy, I was so proud of that. Her faith and devotion seemed like a mountain, it carried her through some tragic events. Because of her, I thought of poetry early on as something holy and beatific, as the “language of the Gods.”
What enticed me further into literature as a teenager was the poetry in my high school lit books and the poets I foraged for in our excellent city/school library. I fell in love with words and the way good writers used them:
Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, E.E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, Leroi Jones, Lew Sarrett, Evelyn Tooley Hunt, Edgar Allen Poe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Nikki Giovanni, Rod McKuen. William Cullen Bryant, Ogden Nash, Langston Hughes, Haki R. Madhubuti, Rudyard Kipling. Also Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Evelyn Waugh, John Steinbeck, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Stephen King.
Besides being enamored of the pure poetry of church hymns and old-time gospel, around 15, I began paying attention to the music on the radio, fascinated by the poetry of rock and roll, folk, blues, pop, and the singer/songwriters of the 60s and 70s.
I was introduced to modern poetry by Nancy Sullivan’s Treasury of American Poetry in the late 1970s. Sullivan’s own poem, “His Necessary Darkness,” mesmerized me, and Richard Kostelanetz’ concrete poems delighted me. Mom got the book through her book club. I still have and treasure it.
Michael Hathaway lives in a small central Kansas town with a clowder of cats. By day he's the mild-mannered Keeper of History for the county museum, and by night edits the rough and rowdy Chiron Review literary journal, well into its 38th year. He's published several books and chapbooks of poetry, and 300+ poems and stories in journals and anthologies. His latest books are Talking to Squirrels and Postmarked Home: New & Selected Poems 1979-2019, both available from him, or Barnes & Noble. For more information about Chiron Review visit http://www.chironreview.com, or email [email protected]. Hathaway's books are available here-
Postmarked Home: https://www.amazon.com/Postmarked-Home-Selected-Poems-1979/dp/1950380084/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=postmarked+home&qid=1604185890&sr=8-1
Talking to Squirrels: https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Squirrels-Michael-Hathaway/dp/1946642983/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=hathaway+talking+to+squirrels&qid=1604185924&sr=8-1
Barnes & Noble:
Postmarked Home: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/postmarked-home-michael-hathaway/1130852373;jsessionid=4C5B8EBCAFA112F734ABEC45EA82A2DF.prodny_store02-atgap18?ean=9781950380084
Talking to Squirrels: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/talking-to-squirrels-michael-hathaway/1130664962?ean=9781946642981
Michael Hathaway: http://www.chironreview.com
SoFloPoJo: When was CR born?
MH: Feb. 19, 1982.
SoFloPoJo: Did you create it? If not, who did? When did you become involved?
MH: Yes, I created it.
SoFloPoJo: Was there a mission statement? – A goal at that time? If so, what was it, and has it changed?
MH: There was not a mission statement at the time. The goal was to publish poetry and short stories. The closest thing we have ever had to a mission statement in our early years was, “No taboos.”
SoFloPoJo: When does CR drop?
MH: The plan is to have the fall issue in print in September, winter issue in late December.
SoFloPoJo: It is now a slick softcover, it once was a newspaper, why the change?
MH: It changed because of logistics, and because I couldn’t keep up with changing newspaper technology (and obsolescence). Some friends offered to help produce it in book form via the Internet, so I let them drag me kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
SoFloPoJo: How is CR funded?
MH: CR is funded through subscriptions, sales, donations, and minimal commercial publishing.
SoFloPoJo: How much is a subscription?
MH: A regular subscription is $60, for $100 subscribers may be listed as a Patron. Your readers may get a subscription for the low, low price of just $49 by mentioning SoFloPoJo.
SoFloPoJo: What is the submission process? Submittable?
MH: Writers are asked to check our website before submitting, to make sure we’re open to them. Submissions are preferred via MS Word attachment, but accepted in the body of an e-mail, or hard copy postal submissions with SASE (for now). I’m not a fan of Submittable, but have taken a few that way.
SoFloPoJo: Has electronic submissions, Submittable or email, changed the submission process? How?
MH: Yes, miraculously. E-mail submissions save tremendous time and money. They come with a few problems, but advantages far outweigh disadvantages. The best being that I no longer have to use the postal mail to share submissions with editors, nor do I have to retype everything for the journal by hand.
SoFloPoJo: Does CR use “readers” to sort through submissions?
MH: No, I look at each submission first and decide if it shows promise, then send it to an editor for their advice.
SoFloPoJo: Who makes the final decision?
MH: I make the final decision, but seldom veer from the advice of my editors.
SoFloPoJo: What does CR look for in poetry?
MH: We look for creativity, quality, duende (soul), musicality, eclecticism, universality, maybe a story, humor, wisdom. I can get sidetracked by alliteration, rhythm, and unusual cool/archaic words, but my editors aren’t always so easily amused. But mostly, as I babbled in a 2002 essay, we “publish unpretentious literature that is accessible beyond the ivory towers of academia and outside the bounds of religious or politically correct restrictions; a literature that celebrates honesty and humor; that reclaims poetry as an art for the so-called ‘common’ people.”
SoFloPoJo: Have there been over the years any stand-out “episodes” in publishing/rejecting poets? The “Then-there-was-that-time ...” kind of thing.
MH: Yes, lots of those. There’s nothing like the thrill of opening the mailbox being surprised by a first submission from someone like Lorri Jackson, Charles Bukowski, Lyn Lifshin, Marge Piercy, Todd Moore, Tony Moffeit, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Edward Field … or to be one of the first to publish an unknown poet whose poems “blow the top off your head,” and to witness them achieve success as years go by.
There are also stories of disgruntled poets, prima donnas, even death threats from poets who objected to how their work appeared, or objected to some one else’s work in the magazine – the predictable “kill the messenger” mentality that seems even more prevalent today.
In the early days, there were negative responses to rejections, writers who couldn’t resist responding to a rejection letter with a little jab. Mom and I both abhorred sending rejection notes. We worked hard to soften the blow with gently worded “form” notes. It cut back on most negative responses. Mom’s letters were so kind, that she often struck up correspondence with and even garnered a few subscriptions from writers whose work we turned down. She had rejection down to a fine art. She was one special lady.
There were poets who responded to rejection notes by informing me how wonderful other editors said the work was, with lengthy letters explaining how we have to publish it because they wrote the poem “just for Chiron,” and would send it back to “give you another chance.”
My favorite was a postcard from a writer whose poetry we rejected in the late 1990s who accused us of being “elitist.” I always thought of Chiron Review as the polar opposite of that, so I didn’t know whether to take it as an insult or a promotion?
SoFloPoJo: You have published a who’s who of great poets over the years – talk about some of them. Drop some names.
MH: Although our focus was on up and coming talent, I’ve enjoyed publishing some well-known writers through the years. My first submissions from Charles Bukowski, Marge Piercy, Lyn Lifshin, William Stafford, Felice Picano, Elizabeth Swados, Edward Field were big thrills. It was a delight to publish poetry by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, the “biscuits & gravy poet,” lovechild of Emily Dickinson and John Steinbeck. She was nearly blind, stabbed her poetry manuscripts out with black felt-tip marker on grocery sacks, used envelopes, whatever papyrus happened to be handy.
SoFloPoJo: CR has had some great interviews, tell us about some of them – do any stick out in your mind?
MH: We published many excellent interviews. Without cheating and reviewing back issues, there are a couple that stand out in my memory. Among my favorites is Sherman Alexie’s. I still remember his quotes, “I want to make the world more beautiful, even if I write something ugly,” and “genius finds its way, the rest of us struggle.” Other standouts are interviews with small press icons: D. Roger Martin interviewed Merritt Clifton of Samisdat, a personal hero, and Jeff Weddle interviewed Gypsy Lou Webb, Bukowski’s early publisher. It was among our greatest honors to publish those.
Back in the late 90s, a couple of writers approached me with unpublished interviews they’d done with dearly departed writers such as Erskine Caldwell. Being a compulsive historian, I enjoyed publishing those. One year I asked Lyn Lifshin and Janice Eidus to interview each other; Gavin Dillard interviewed himself as “Helen Damnation.” Larry Oberc provided us with a many interviews, including a series with well-known “punk” women writers. I didn’t really know what “punk” was (and still don’t, even though we published an “all punk” issue in 2009, and I enjoyed that very much).
Mark Weber did a series of “quirky” interviews with small press luminaries of the late 80s/early 90s. Those were fun. He let me publish a couple of them, most notably, Marvin Malone of The Wormwood Review. I wonder where those interviews are now. They’d make a marvelous book.
SoFloPoJo: How much of your time does CR take? Do you have a life outside it?
MH: It is my life, along with being caretaker of a clowder of cats and keeper of history for our local museum. I’m working on and thinking about all of it, all the time. Whatever shred of sanity I may lay claim to is attributable to those distractions from the void.
Publishing a literary journal takes so much less time than it used to, thanks to the magic of technology. It used to require hours of typesetting, correcting, cutting, waxing, pasting, laying out pages after-hours at my newspaper dayjob 25 miles away. Now it’s all done in my bedroom on a tiny lightweight wireless machine that sets on my lap. No paper. I will always remain in absolute awe of that. I admit missing the hands-on of the cutting and pasting, but not enough to go back to it.
SoFloPoJo: What is the future of CR?
MH: I always have larger than life plans and dreams, always some great goal just around the corner. But we’re still clunking along on four square wheels and a wagonload of hope, as we’ve done for 38 years, and that’s okay. We’re in the process of changing technology again, going POD with a company that provides “drop ship” services, which mostly means distribution all over the free world. Whatever happens, I’ll keep publishing the journal as long as I’m able, whether I have 10 subscribers or 10,000.
SoFloPoJo: Give us a bio: who are you, where do you come from, and when did you come to poetry, or when did it come to you?
MH: Dad and Mom were both raised in rural Kansas, he was 5th generation Kansan, she 3rd. They were stationed at the El Paso army base when I was born in 1961. Shortly after they moved back home to central Kansas, where my brother Joseph was born 15 months after me. (Our sister Kristi was born in 1964, and died in 1965.)
When I was seven, we settled in the little house on two acres where I live now, on the southeast edge of St. John, a town of about 1,000. Dad planted large gardens and pear trees on the west side, and alternate years potatoes or corn on the east. He planed wheat or alfalfa in the little field to the south to feed the chickens and rabbits. Mom canned hundreds of quarts and pints of green beans, peas, carrots, beets, corn, tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, pickled okra, and pears, which we stored in the cellar. She made jelly from currants, sandhill plums, and cherries that we picked in the country. There were also asparagus and strawberry patches, cats, dogs, ducks, quail, pigeons, a cow and a horse named Rosey.
I loved cats, poetry, music, and books, in that order, interested in everything under and over the sun. I was outgoing as a little kid, but extremely shy and introverted by junior high. I dealt with being gay in a small Kansas town against the backdrop of an evangelical upbringing and a schoolmate being cruelly “outed” in 9th grade, crucified by some of our schoolmates. It made high school mostly a terrible experience, but there were silver linings. I was part of an exceptionally kind class, and always had a couple of good friends. I loved learning, but didn’t participate in outside activities in school. Home was my sanctuary. Regardless of the nonsense the outside world brought, I never once doubted my parents’ unconditional love.
When I was a senior in high school, my parents took in three of my cousin’s children (ages 2-10) to raise, so I’m the eldest of six, five living.
Mom (Jane Hathaway) loved and wrote poetry, so I guess she introduced me to poetry. We attended church at the First Missionary Baptist Church (of which my great-great-grandparents were founding members). On many Sunday mornings in late 60s/early 70s, when the preacher asked if anyone had something to share, Mom would stand up and recite her newest hymn-like poem. As a little boy, I was so proud of that. Her faith and devotion seemed like a mountain, it carried her through some tragic events. Because of her, I thought of poetry early on as something holy and beatific, as the “language of the Gods.”
What enticed me further into literature as a teenager was the poetry in my high school lit books and the poets I foraged for in our excellent city/school library. I fell in love with words and the way good writers used them:
Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, E.E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, Leroi Jones, Lew Sarrett, Evelyn Tooley Hunt, Edgar Allen Poe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Nikki Giovanni, Rod McKuen. William Cullen Bryant, Ogden Nash, Langston Hughes, Haki R. Madhubuti, Rudyard Kipling. Also Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Evelyn Waugh, John Steinbeck, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Stephen King.
Besides being enamored of the pure poetry of church hymns and old-time gospel, around 15, I began paying attention to the music on the radio, fascinated by the poetry of rock and roll, folk, blues, pop, and the singer/songwriters of the 60s and 70s.
I was introduced to modern poetry by Nancy Sullivan’s Treasury of American Poetry in the late 1970s. Sullivan’s own poem, “His Necessary Darkness,” mesmerized me, and Richard Kostelanetz’ concrete poems delighted me. Mom got the book through her book club. I still have and treasure it.
Michael Hathaway lives in a small central Kansas town with a clowder of cats. By day he's the mild-mannered Keeper of History for the county museum, and by night edits the rough and rowdy Chiron Review literary journal, well into its 38th year. He's published several books and chapbooks of poetry, and 300+ poems and stories in journals and anthologies. His latest books are Talking to Squirrels and Postmarked Home: New & Selected Poems 1979-2019, both available from him, or Barnes & Noble. For more information about Chiron Review visit http://www.chironreview.com, or email [email protected]. Hathaway's books are available here-
Postmarked Home: https://www.amazon.com/Postmarked-Home-Selected-Poems-1979/dp/1950380084/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=postmarked+home&qid=1604185890&sr=8-1
Talking to Squirrels: https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Squirrels-Michael-Hathaway/dp/1946642983/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=hathaway+talking+to+squirrels&qid=1604185924&sr=8-1
Barnes & Noble:
Postmarked Home: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/postmarked-home-michael-hathaway/1130852373;jsessionid=4C5B8EBCAFA112F734ABEC45EA82A2DF.prodny_store02-atgap18?ean=9781950380084
Talking to Squirrels: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/talking-to-squirrels-michael-hathaway/1130664962?ean=9781946642981
Visit SWWIM here—https://www.swwim.org
The Women of SWWIM Supporting Women Writers In Miami
An interview with Catherine Esposito Prescott, Jen Karetnick & Caridad Moro-Gronlier
by SoFloPoJo Associate Editor, Elisa Albo
Elisa Albo: Tell us your "birth" story, how you began SWWIM and why.
SWWIM began because we were not happy with the underrepresentation of women that existed in the literary arena. We counted up the table of contents in prize anthologies and we found the ratio was 2/3 men to 1/3 women. We read the 10 finalists of book competitions and saw the men outnumbered the women 8-2 or 7-3. We decided we needed to do something to even out the odds. We took the helm because while some men are sailing, many women are swwimming upstream—especially since many of us are charged with daily domestic issues such as childcare, aging parents, and a household in addition to school, work, etc. For a woman, writing becomes a life choice—doing this instead of that, becoming that instead of this. We wanted to do our part to give women opportunities without forcing them to make those choices. Hopefully, in the end, the more that women's voices and subjects are validated, the more their poems will be recognized and rewarded.
EA: Describe your selection process. What happens when you receive a submission? On average, how many do you receive each week or month?
SWWIM: We average about 300 poetry submissions per month. Each editor reads the work independently and then we discuss our thoughts on each poem during an editorial meeting.
EA: How would you describe the type of poem you tend to publish?
SWWIM: We are open to all forms and approaches to poetry. We don't have a set "type" of poem that we look for, but rather we are always on the lookout for fresh language, strong imagery, and a singular poetic voice.
EA: What's the best part of running a reading series with The Betsy?
SWWIM: It is an honor to be a part of The Betsy's literary ecosystem. Their philanthropy and generosity towards SWWIM and countless other cultural organizations is unparalleled and we are beyond grateful to work with such wonderful community stakeholders. We are also blessed to work with the irreplaceable, Deborah Briggs, a tireless champion of the arts, and of SWWIM.
EA: How has the pandemic and/or the social justice movement affected your editorial experience? Has it altered any practical aspects, shifted any goals or perspectives?
SWWIM: The pandemic forced us all to think outside the reading-series box, so to speak. When our reading series had to be shuttered due to COVID-19 restrictions, we created a virtual series in partnership with The Betsy, FIU-MBUS, and Miami Dade County Division of Cultural Affairs. The series was a huge hit, and it allowed audiences all over the world to tune in and enjoy our poets. We are especially proud that we were able to offer these readings live with closed captioning, which provided accessibility for the whole of our audience. It was a delightful experience for all concerned.
EA: Has your experience or original aim evolved since the inception of SWWIM Every Day and how (or why)?
SWWIM: Our mission to promote women-identifying writers has remained the same, but our reach has grown. We have moved beyond the initial reading series that began in 2016 to publishing SWWIM Every Day, which launched in 2017. In 2019, Cary came on board as an associate editor. And most recently, the editorial team welcomed two new staff readers Maylin Enamorado-Pinheiro and Christell Victoria Roach. We are thrilled to have them. To date we have published over 600 poems from a roster of writers that is wide-reaching and all encompassing. We look forward to publishing many more poets in all their beautiful diversity.
EA: Beyond your submission guidelines, if you could advise poets who want to submit work, what would you say to them?
SWWIM: The best advice we can offer is to read SWWIM Every Day for insight into the work we publish. We are very interested in promoting poetry that tackles unusual, unexpected or underrepresented themes, subject matter and/or perspectives.
Elisa Albo’s Passage to America recounts her family immigrant story while Each Day More is a collection of elegies (Main Street Rag). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Alimentum, Bomb Magazine, Connecticut River Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, International Literary Quarterly, The MacGuffin, MiPoesias, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, SWWIM Every Day, Zing Magazine, The Shelter of Politics (Brackish Daughters), Irrepressible Appetites (Rock Press), Tigertail: A South Florida Annual, Howl, 2016! Poems, Rants, and Essays on the Election, Two Countries: Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen Press, 2017), and Vinegar and Char (University of Georgia Press, 2018). An associate editor for South Florida Poetry Journal, she is co-editor with Richard Blanco, Caridad Moro, and Nikki Moustaki of the forthcoming anthology by Beacon, Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Harassment, Empowerment, and Healing. Born in Havana and raised in central Florida, she teaches at Broward College and lives with her husband and daughters in Ft. Lauderdale.
by SoFloPoJo Associate Editor, Elisa Albo
Elisa Albo: Tell us your "birth" story, how you began SWWIM and why.
SWWIM began because we were not happy with the underrepresentation of women that existed in the literary arena. We counted up the table of contents in prize anthologies and we found the ratio was 2/3 men to 1/3 women. We read the 10 finalists of book competitions and saw the men outnumbered the women 8-2 or 7-3. We decided we needed to do something to even out the odds. We took the helm because while some men are sailing, many women are swwimming upstream—especially since many of us are charged with daily domestic issues such as childcare, aging parents, and a household in addition to school, work, etc. For a woman, writing becomes a life choice—doing this instead of that, becoming that instead of this. We wanted to do our part to give women opportunities without forcing them to make those choices. Hopefully, in the end, the more that women's voices and subjects are validated, the more their poems will be recognized and rewarded.
EA: Describe your selection process. What happens when you receive a submission? On average, how many do you receive each week or month?
SWWIM: We average about 300 poetry submissions per month. Each editor reads the work independently and then we discuss our thoughts on each poem during an editorial meeting.
EA: How would you describe the type of poem you tend to publish?
SWWIM: We are open to all forms and approaches to poetry. We don't have a set "type" of poem that we look for, but rather we are always on the lookout for fresh language, strong imagery, and a singular poetic voice.
EA: What's the best part of running a reading series with The Betsy?
SWWIM: It is an honor to be a part of The Betsy's literary ecosystem. Their philanthropy and generosity towards SWWIM and countless other cultural organizations is unparalleled and we are beyond grateful to work with such wonderful community stakeholders. We are also blessed to work with the irreplaceable, Deborah Briggs, a tireless champion of the arts, and of SWWIM.
EA: How has the pandemic and/or the social justice movement affected your editorial experience? Has it altered any practical aspects, shifted any goals or perspectives?
SWWIM: The pandemic forced us all to think outside the reading-series box, so to speak. When our reading series had to be shuttered due to COVID-19 restrictions, we created a virtual series in partnership with The Betsy, FIU-MBUS, and Miami Dade County Division of Cultural Affairs. The series was a huge hit, and it allowed audiences all over the world to tune in and enjoy our poets. We are especially proud that we were able to offer these readings live with closed captioning, which provided accessibility for the whole of our audience. It was a delightful experience for all concerned.
EA: Has your experience or original aim evolved since the inception of SWWIM Every Day and how (or why)?
SWWIM: Our mission to promote women-identifying writers has remained the same, but our reach has grown. We have moved beyond the initial reading series that began in 2016 to publishing SWWIM Every Day, which launched in 2017. In 2019, Cary came on board as an associate editor. And most recently, the editorial team welcomed two new staff readers Maylin Enamorado-Pinheiro and Christell Victoria Roach. We are thrilled to have them. To date we have published over 600 poems from a roster of writers that is wide-reaching and all encompassing. We look forward to publishing many more poets in all their beautiful diversity.
EA: Beyond your submission guidelines, if you could advise poets who want to submit work, what would you say to them?
SWWIM: The best advice we can offer is to read SWWIM Every Day for insight into the work we publish. We are very interested in promoting poetry that tackles unusual, unexpected or underrepresented themes, subject matter and/or perspectives.
Elisa Albo’s Passage to America recounts her family immigrant story while Each Day More is a collection of elegies (Main Street Rag). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Alimentum, Bomb Magazine, Connecticut River Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, International Literary Quarterly, The MacGuffin, MiPoesias, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, SWWIM Every Day, Zing Magazine, The Shelter of Politics (Brackish Daughters), Irrepressible Appetites (Rock Press), Tigertail: A South Florida Annual, Howl, 2016! Poems, Rants, and Essays on the Election, Two Countries: Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen Press, 2017), and Vinegar and Char (University of Georgia Press, 2018). An associate editor for South Florida Poetry Journal, she is co-editor with Richard Blanco, Caridad Moro, and Nikki Moustaki of the forthcoming anthology by Beacon, Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Harassment, Empowerment, and Healing. Born in Havana and raised in central Florida, she teaches at Broward College and lives with her husband and daughters in Ft. Lauderdale.
Interview With A Poet- 3 Poets, 5 Questions, Each Month 2016-2020
July 2020
Ashley M. Jones
1 You’ve organized a reading of three poets to read at an exclusive venue. Who's reading?
Assuming they can be alive or dead--I'd say, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Gwendolyn Brooks. But also Nikki Giovanni...and also Tracy K. Smith...and also Rita Dove... I mean, it's hard to choose just three. If they all have to be living, I'll go with Tracy K. Smith, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez.
2 Is there such a thing as Art for Art’s Sake in poetry? i.e.- Must it “mean” something?
I actually find it hard to believe "art for art's sake" is real in any genre. What I mean is that art is created by humans, right? And humans have thoughts and histories and biases and and and--so anything we create has some inherent meaning. Even if you say "I wrote this to mean nothing" you're making a statement about meaning and coherence and the purpose of art. Everything has a meaning. Now, I'll say, much less philosophically, that I think it's really hard to write a poem in which the poet doesn't have some heart-relation. That is, the heart of a poem is a real real thing, and if there's no heart, is it a poem?
3 Is it true that a bad poet imitates; a good poet steals?
No. Unsuccessful and successful poetry can do both. I think if you mean "imitate" in the sense that a poet doesn't take the imitation to a new place, to their own place, then no, that's not really a successful poem. Stealing--again, if we mean that in the poetic, non-plagiarizing sense, then yes, we steal all the time!
4 How do you order the poems in your book?
Goodness, well, I guess I just let the poems talk to each other. I know that sounds super woo-woo new agey, but what I mean is that each poem needs to speak to the poems around it. The book should flow in some fashion that takes readers on a journey. Not a linear or narrative one, necessarily. But, I like for themes or forms to echo. I'd put a poem about my mom next to a poem about God because those two themes are related—inextricably linked in my mind. I'd put two sonnets together if they're talking to each other, but not necessarily because they're both sonnets. I often lay out all the pieces, printed, on the floor, and I put the book together that way. I pick them up, piece by piece, to see what speaks to what.
5 What is the best poem you’ve ever written?
I certainly hope I haven't written it yet.
Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She served as Official Poet for the City of Sunrise, Florida’s Little Free Libraries Initiative from 2013-2015, and her work was recognized in the 2014 Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writer’s Exchange Contest and the 2015 Academy of American Poets Contest at FIU. She was also a finalist in the 2015 Hub City Press New Southern Voices Contest, the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Contest, and the National Poetry Series. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including CNN, the Academy of American Poets, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Fjords Review, Quiet Lunch, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, Night Owl, The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, pluck!, Valley Voices: New York School Edition, Fjords Review: Black American Edition, PMSPoemMemoirStory (where her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016), Kinfolks Quarterly, Tough Times in America Anthology, and Lucid Moose Press’ Like a Girl: Perspectives on Femininity Anthology. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. She was an editor of PANK Magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her second book, dark // thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press. She won the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press, and she is the 2019 winner of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Jones is a recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and a 2020 Alabama Author award from the Alabama Library Association. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, board member of the Alabama Writers Cooperative and the Alabama Writers Forum, co-director of PEN Birmingham, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
Assuming they can be alive or dead--I'd say, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Gwendolyn Brooks. But also Nikki Giovanni...and also Tracy K. Smith...and also Rita Dove... I mean, it's hard to choose just three. If they all have to be living, I'll go with Tracy K. Smith, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez.
2 Is there such a thing as Art for Art’s Sake in poetry? i.e.- Must it “mean” something?
I actually find it hard to believe "art for art's sake" is real in any genre. What I mean is that art is created by humans, right? And humans have thoughts and histories and biases and and and--so anything we create has some inherent meaning. Even if you say "I wrote this to mean nothing" you're making a statement about meaning and coherence and the purpose of art. Everything has a meaning. Now, I'll say, much less philosophically, that I think it's really hard to write a poem in which the poet doesn't have some heart-relation. That is, the heart of a poem is a real real thing, and if there's no heart, is it a poem?
3 Is it true that a bad poet imitates; a good poet steals?
No. Unsuccessful and successful poetry can do both. I think if you mean "imitate" in the sense that a poet doesn't take the imitation to a new place, to their own place, then no, that's not really a successful poem. Stealing--again, if we mean that in the poetic, non-plagiarizing sense, then yes, we steal all the time!
4 How do you order the poems in your book?
Goodness, well, I guess I just let the poems talk to each other. I know that sounds super woo-woo new agey, but what I mean is that each poem needs to speak to the poems around it. The book should flow in some fashion that takes readers on a journey. Not a linear or narrative one, necessarily. But, I like for themes or forms to echo. I'd put a poem about my mom next to a poem about God because those two themes are related—inextricably linked in my mind. I'd put two sonnets together if they're talking to each other, but not necessarily because they're both sonnets. I often lay out all the pieces, printed, on the floor, and I put the book together that way. I pick them up, piece by piece, to see what speaks to what.
5 What is the best poem you’ve ever written?
I certainly hope I haven't written it yet.
Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She served as Official Poet for the City of Sunrise, Florida’s Little Free Libraries Initiative from 2013-2015, and her work was recognized in the 2014 Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writer’s Exchange Contest and the 2015 Academy of American Poets Contest at FIU. She was also a finalist in the 2015 Hub City Press New Southern Voices Contest, the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Contest, and the National Poetry Series. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including CNN, the Academy of American Poets, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Fjords Review, Quiet Lunch, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, Night Owl, The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, pluck!, Valley Voices: New York School Edition, Fjords Review: Black American Edition, PMSPoemMemoirStory (where her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016), Kinfolks Quarterly, Tough Times in America Anthology, and Lucid Moose Press’ Like a Girl: Perspectives on Femininity Anthology. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. She was an editor of PANK Magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her second book, dark // thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press. She won the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press, and she is the 2019 winner of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Jones is a recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and a 2020 Alabama Author award from the Alabama Library Association. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, board member of the Alabama Writers Cooperative and the Alabama Writers Forum, co-director of PEN Birmingham, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
Joseph Fasano
1 You’ve organized a reading of three poets to read at an exclusive venue. Who’s reading?
A few months ago I was asked to do just that, but the pandemic, unfortunately, has temporarily shut down in-person readings. In a hypothetical situation, though, I would prefer poets who know how to read their poems. There are so many such poets working right now, and it would be hard to pick just three. I always love to hear Ilya Kaminsky, whose voice is as powerful as his lines; Jericho Brown, who will be reading soon for my "Poem for You" Series; and Olena Kalytiak Davis, whom I met in Alaska and whose poems are syntactically fascinating.
2 Is there such a thing as Art for Art’s Sake in poetry? i.e.- Must it “mean” something?
Gandhi said "my life is my message." Something like that is happening in a true poem. It is an experience, as Rilke says. It is a lived experience in the spirit and flesh. It is the other world in this one. It is an incarnation. If we're speaking of the heavily accentual qualities of English-language poetry, I think of the rhythms of a poem as the systole and diastole of the human heart, and in that sense I feel the poem as a visceral experience. It may certainly have "ideas" and abstractions, but it must think with the body. And in that sense, I am not being figurative when I say a poem is an incarnation. I think it is literally spirit and flesh made one. I think it is literally a miracle.
3 Is it true that a bad poet imitates; a good poet steals?
It's one of those phrases whose charm is its simplicity and whose weakness is its reductiveness. Eliot said immature poets imitate, and mature poets steal. He also said a bad poet is usually unconscious where he should be conscious, and conscious where he should be unconscious. What I've always taken him to mean by the former is that undeveloped poets have not yet created their own universe with the music, imagery, and influence of their own flesh, blood, and spirit. On the other hand, poets who have done this can take elements from other universes and put them in their own universes, because those elements will make wholly new things according to the physics and metaphysics of those new worlds. I think there's some truth in that, although I confess it's not always easy to be on the borrowed side of the borrowing. This has happened, but I remind myself that none of it belongs to me anyway. We're just instruments.
Also, of course, no poet's universe is ever entirely new; it is composed of the ancient things discovered all over again with new eyes, new ears, new hands, new heart.
As for the latter point about being conscious or unconscious, I do think that we often fail our poems when our minds falsely usurp our bodies, or our bodies falsely dominate our minds. How do we know when the impulse is "false" rather than "true"? Simply put, in both instances, the failure is a result of fear: we are either fleeing our bodies or fleeing our minds, in one instance because we don't want to feel something, and in the other because we don't want to think something. The reader will always sense this false note, always. It's important to make a distinction here, though: a true poem may feel itself called to swerve from something, to "tell it slant," but there's a difference between the poem doing that--as a way to express an emotional truth about our resistances--and the poet doing that as a way to avoid an emotional truth. In the end, the reader of the true poem will not be able to feel where the body ends and the mind or spirit begins.
4 How do you order the poems in your book?
It depends, of course, on the book. In general, I can say my collections of poems begin with poems that I feel speak the fundamental questions of the world I'm inviting the reader to enter.
I order the poems as though the reader will read the collection from front to back—although readers are free to do as they wish—and in that sense I allow narrative tensions to emerge. In an essay I'm currently writing on the "long lyric poem," I introduce the concept of "archetypal narration," by which I mean a poet's fragmentary references to a "story" whose shape or content we all know on some deep, fundamentally human level. The banishment from a "Paradise" would be one such story; it occurs in many traditions, because it is an essential part of who we are. A poet can "initiate" that narrative in the reader by even the subtlest reference to—or imagistic awakening of—its essential moments. Then, mysteriously, the narrative goes on in the mind and body of the reader, even when the poet drops its explicit telling. The poet can then bring this narrative back explicitly, fulfilling or frustrating the reader's unconscious expectations, according to the aesthetic project. That's just one principle by which a long poem or a collection of shorter poems can be structured.
Of course, the poems probably order us at least as much as we order them.
5 What is the best poem you’ve ever written?
I don't think it would be my place to say. Some have told me my book-length poem "Vincent" takes them into places in themselves they forgot about. Others have said "Mahler in New York" and the title poem of "The Crossing." But at the moment I'm living in my new work, as I hope always to do.
Joseph Fasano is the author of the novel The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020). His books of poetry are Fugue for Other Hands (2013), Vincent (2015), Inheritance (2014), and The Crossing (2018).
His honors include the Rattle Poetry Prize, the Cider Press Review Book Award, and a nomination for the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse by a living American poet published two years prior to the award year." His writing has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, American Poets, The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Journal, American Literary Review, Measure, Tin House, The Adroit Journal, and the anthology Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion (Abrams, 2016), among other publications. He has been featured by the PEN Poetry Series, Verse Daily, and the Academy of American Poets' poem-a-day program.
He teaches at Columbia University and Manhattanville College, and he is the Founder of the Poem for You Series, which can be found on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
A few months ago I was asked to do just that, but the pandemic, unfortunately, has temporarily shut down in-person readings. In a hypothetical situation, though, I would prefer poets who know how to read their poems. There are so many such poets working right now, and it would be hard to pick just three. I always love to hear Ilya Kaminsky, whose voice is as powerful as his lines; Jericho Brown, who will be reading soon for my "Poem for You" Series; and Olena Kalytiak Davis, whom I met in Alaska and whose poems are syntactically fascinating.
2 Is there such a thing as Art for Art’s Sake in poetry? i.e.- Must it “mean” something?
Gandhi said "my life is my message." Something like that is happening in a true poem. It is an experience, as Rilke says. It is a lived experience in the spirit and flesh. It is the other world in this one. It is an incarnation. If we're speaking of the heavily accentual qualities of English-language poetry, I think of the rhythms of a poem as the systole and diastole of the human heart, and in that sense I feel the poem as a visceral experience. It may certainly have "ideas" and abstractions, but it must think with the body. And in that sense, I am not being figurative when I say a poem is an incarnation. I think it is literally spirit and flesh made one. I think it is literally a miracle.
3 Is it true that a bad poet imitates; a good poet steals?
It's one of those phrases whose charm is its simplicity and whose weakness is its reductiveness. Eliot said immature poets imitate, and mature poets steal. He also said a bad poet is usually unconscious where he should be conscious, and conscious where he should be unconscious. What I've always taken him to mean by the former is that undeveloped poets have not yet created their own universe with the music, imagery, and influence of their own flesh, blood, and spirit. On the other hand, poets who have done this can take elements from other universes and put them in their own universes, because those elements will make wholly new things according to the physics and metaphysics of those new worlds. I think there's some truth in that, although I confess it's not always easy to be on the borrowed side of the borrowing. This has happened, but I remind myself that none of it belongs to me anyway. We're just instruments.
Also, of course, no poet's universe is ever entirely new; it is composed of the ancient things discovered all over again with new eyes, new ears, new hands, new heart.
As for the latter point about being conscious or unconscious, I do think that we often fail our poems when our minds falsely usurp our bodies, or our bodies falsely dominate our minds. How do we know when the impulse is "false" rather than "true"? Simply put, in both instances, the failure is a result of fear: we are either fleeing our bodies or fleeing our minds, in one instance because we don't want to feel something, and in the other because we don't want to think something. The reader will always sense this false note, always. It's important to make a distinction here, though: a true poem may feel itself called to swerve from something, to "tell it slant," but there's a difference between the poem doing that--as a way to express an emotional truth about our resistances--and the poet doing that as a way to avoid an emotional truth. In the end, the reader of the true poem will not be able to feel where the body ends and the mind or spirit begins.
4 How do you order the poems in your book?
It depends, of course, on the book. In general, I can say my collections of poems begin with poems that I feel speak the fundamental questions of the world I'm inviting the reader to enter.
I order the poems as though the reader will read the collection from front to back—although readers are free to do as they wish—and in that sense I allow narrative tensions to emerge. In an essay I'm currently writing on the "long lyric poem," I introduce the concept of "archetypal narration," by which I mean a poet's fragmentary references to a "story" whose shape or content we all know on some deep, fundamentally human level. The banishment from a "Paradise" would be one such story; it occurs in many traditions, because it is an essential part of who we are. A poet can "initiate" that narrative in the reader by even the subtlest reference to—or imagistic awakening of—its essential moments. Then, mysteriously, the narrative goes on in the mind and body of the reader, even when the poet drops its explicit telling. The poet can then bring this narrative back explicitly, fulfilling or frustrating the reader's unconscious expectations, according to the aesthetic project. That's just one principle by which a long poem or a collection of shorter poems can be structured.
Of course, the poems probably order us at least as much as we order them.
5 What is the best poem you’ve ever written?
I don't think it would be my place to say. Some have told me my book-length poem "Vincent" takes them into places in themselves they forgot about. Others have said "Mahler in New York" and the title poem of "The Crossing." But at the moment I'm living in my new work, as I hope always to do.
Joseph Fasano is the author of the novel The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020). His books of poetry are Fugue for Other Hands (2013), Vincent (2015), Inheritance (2014), and The Crossing (2018).
His honors include the Rattle Poetry Prize, the Cider Press Review Book Award, and a nomination for the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse by a living American poet published two years prior to the award year." His writing has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, American Poets, The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Journal, American Literary Review, Measure, Tin House, The Adroit Journal, and the anthology Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion (Abrams, 2016), among other publications. He has been featured by the PEN Poetry Series, Verse Daily, and the Academy of American Poets' poem-a-day program.
He teaches at Columbia University and Manhattanville College, and he is the Founder of the Poem for You Series, which can be found on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Cindy Veach
Photo Mark Hillringhouse
1 You’ve organized a reading of three poets to read at an exclusive venue. Who’s reading?
I don’t typically associate exclusive venues with poetry readings so I’m going to imagine that this venue is exclusive because it’s a venue where only dead poets are invited to read. So, who’s reading? Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. These poets were early influences on my work and they continue to inspire me today. If this dream reading of dead poets doesn’t work out I’d love to organize a reading with three poets I’m reading/rereading right now: Jericho Brown, Victoria Chang and Tracy K. Smith.
2 Is there such a thing as Art for Art’s Sake in poetry? i.e.- Must it “mean” something?
While I’m naturally attracted to poems that “mean” something, poems that are narrative or that combine narrative and lyrical, I don’t think a poem has to “mean” something. I’ve found that what comes naturally or easily is not always the road to growth so I try to read a variety of poetry including poems that don’t convey a specific meaning, story or moral. For me, this could be a language poem or a highly lyrical poem.
3 Is it true that a bad poet imitates; a good poet steals?
I don’t think this is true. Is a person born a good poet? I subscribe to the Thomas Edison quote, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Becoming a poet is a process. It’s inspiration, it’s craft, it’s hard work and it’s influence. Writer’s and artists are influenced by other artists and writers. At its best the influence of other writers is transformational. There are only so many ideas and over and over throughout history writers have written about them, but they’ve found new, different and engaging ways to express these ideas. This is the challenge and joy of writing.
4 How do you order the poems in your book?
Ordering continues to challenge me. I find it difficult to extricate myself from the material to get the thousand-foot view that’s needed to tease out the best order. In general, I like braiding the poems so that various themes are intertwined. I also make sure to vary the form of the poems throughout. So, for example, I might follow a group of blockier poems, with a longer poem that’s in couplets. Once I’ve done an initial ordering I will ask a couple of trusted friends to look it over. I’ve also found it very helpful to work with an editor to finalize the order.
5 What is the best poem you’ve ever written?
Typically, I think the poem I just wrote is the best thing I’ve ever written. Then after a little time goes by I gain perspective and realize it’s a terrible poem, or it’s an okay poem. I haven’t written a best poem yet. My hope is that each poem I write puts me a little closer to writing a better poem.
Cindy Veach received an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. She is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press, forthcoming), Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), named a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a ‘Must Read’ by The Massachusetts Center for the Book, and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode and elsewhere. Her poem, This Patch Where the Light Cannot Reach, was recently selected by Mary Ruefle for the Salt Hill Phillip Booth Poetry Prize and her poem, Witch Kitsch, was selected by Marilyn Nelson for the Samuel Allen Washington Prize (New England Poetry Club). She is co-poetry editor The Mom Egg Review.
1 You’ve organized a reading of three poets to read at an exclusive venue. Who’s reading?
I don’t typically associate exclusive venues with poetry readings so I’m going to imagine that this venue is exclusive because it’s a venue where only dead poets are invited to read. So, who’s reading? Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. These poets were early influences on my work and they continue to inspire me today. If this dream reading of dead poets doesn’t work out I’d love to organize a reading with three poets I’m reading/rereading right now: Jericho Brown, Victoria Chang and Tracy K. Smith.
2 Is there such a thing as Art for Art’s Sake in poetry? i.e.- Must it “mean” something?
While I’m naturally attracted to poems that “mean” something, poems that are narrative or that combine narrative and lyrical, I don’t think a poem has to “mean” something. I’ve found that what comes naturally or easily is not always the road to growth so I try to read a variety of poetry including poems that don’t convey a specific meaning, story or moral. For me, this could be a language poem or a highly lyrical poem.
3 Is it true that a bad poet imitates; a good poet steals?
I don’t think this is true. Is a person born a good poet? I subscribe to the Thomas Edison quote, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Becoming a poet is a process. It’s inspiration, it’s craft, it’s hard work and it’s influence. Writer’s and artists are influenced by other artists and writers. At its best the influence of other writers is transformational. There are only so many ideas and over and over throughout history writers have written about them, but they’ve found new, different and engaging ways to express these ideas. This is the challenge and joy of writing.
4 How do you order the poems in your book?
Ordering continues to challenge me. I find it difficult to extricate myself from the material to get the thousand-foot view that’s needed to tease out the best order. In general, I like braiding the poems so that various themes are intertwined. I also make sure to vary the form of the poems throughout. So, for example, I might follow a group of blockier poems, with a longer poem that’s in couplets. Once I’ve done an initial ordering I will ask a couple of trusted friends to look it over. I’ve also found it very helpful to work with an editor to finalize the order.
5 What is the best poem you’ve ever written?
Typically, I think the poem I just wrote is the best thing I’ve ever written. Then after a little time goes by I gain perspective and realize it’s a terrible poem, or it’s an okay poem. I haven’t written a best poem yet. My hope is that each poem I write puts me a little closer to writing a better poem.
Cindy Veach received an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. She is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press, forthcoming), Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), named a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a ‘Must Read’ by The Massachusetts Center for the Book, and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode and elsewhere. Her poem, This Patch Where the Light Cannot Reach, was recently selected by Mary Ruefle for the Salt Hill Phillip Booth Poetry Prize and her poem, Witch Kitsch, was selected by Marilyn Nelson for the Samuel Allen Washington Prize (New England Poetry Club). She is co-poetry editor The Mom Egg Review.
June 2020
Ilhem Issaoui
1 What have you been reading during this pandemic?
I’ve been reading some of Albert Camus’s essays and a novel of his called “La mort heureuse/A Happy Death.” He’s in vogue again these days but I was interested in his writings a long time ago when I saw a copy of “The Stranger” in French at my father’s bookshelf. I am currently reading his “Exile and the Kingdom.” I admire his writings a lot since they revolve around the idea of creating meaning when the world doesn’t offer any. It is a writing of hope. The themes his writings touch upon are of quintessential interest to me both as a researcher and a writer, but also as a human: the questions of what it means to be human, how to face death and loneliness.
2 Who are you Zooming (if anyone/thing)
I’ve been Zooming some spoken-word poetry events both nationally and internationally. I think this is a great opportunity for those introverts like me to join other writers and poets from the other side of the world. In a few days, I will also attend a Sylvia Plath Symposium via zoom by the end of this month.
3 Have you tried your hand a Covid 19 poem?
Yes! I did. I have never been this committed to writing. And this pandemic has been an interesting inspiration to me since themes like isolation, confinement, and loneliness are now common and shared rather than felt only by some people. It is now a reality that demands from writers to commemorate it, to play the role of the historian and social critic more than ever before, and to imagine the world after the pandemic. I believe this is my mission too.
4 Publish in a lesser-known print journal, or in a highly recognized electronic journal?
I usually publish in small literary magazines. But this pandemic meant that I have much more time than usual. So yes, I said why not give it a try. I’ve submitted some of my writings, and poetry in particular to some highly recognized journals. I am not expecting anything, however. (Laughs). I am still waiting for their response. It may take months. It is worth doing in the end. I was so humbled to have one of my poems accepted by the South Florida Poetry Journal.
5 If you’ve had a book published, how did you decide on the title?
There is indeed a story behind every title we choose for our books, just as some married people do with their children. I wrote my first book when I was 21 or 22 and was experimenting with some love poems, which is no longer my style. I had a title in mind but it was my publisher who suggested I opt for Fragments of a Wounded Soul. I thought it was good enough to deliver the theme of what was inside the book.
Ilhem Issaoui is a young Tunisian Ph.D. researcher and poetry and prose writer. Some of her poems and short stories have appeared both online and in print. She is also the author of a collection of poems entitled Fragments of a Wounded Soul. Her work has appeared in journals such as Literary Yard, Indiana Voice Journal, the Recusant, New Ink Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Ofi Press, among others.
I’ve been reading some of Albert Camus’s essays and a novel of his called “La mort heureuse/A Happy Death.” He’s in vogue again these days but I was interested in his writings a long time ago when I saw a copy of “The Stranger” in French at my father’s bookshelf. I am currently reading his “Exile and the Kingdom.” I admire his writings a lot since they revolve around the idea of creating meaning when the world doesn’t offer any. It is a writing of hope. The themes his writings touch upon are of quintessential interest to me both as a researcher and a writer, but also as a human: the questions of what it means to be human, how to face death and loneliness.
2 Who are you Zooming (if anyone/thing)
I’ve been Zooming some spoken-word poetry events both nationally and internationally. I think this is a great opportunity for those introverts like me to join other writers and poets from the other side of the world. In a few days, I will also attend a Sylvia Plath Symposium via zoom by the end of this month.
3 Have you tried your hand a Covid 19 poem?
Yes! I did. I have never been this committed to writing. And this pandemic has been an interesting inspiration to me since themes like isolation, confinement, and loneliness are now common and shared rather than felt only by some people. It is now a reality that demands from writers to commemorate it, to play the role of the historian and social critic more than ever before, and to imagine the world after the pandemic. I believe this is my mission too.
4 Publish in a lesser-known print journal, or in a highly recognized electronic journal?
I usually publish in small literary magazines. But this pandemic meant that I have much more time than usual. So yes, I said why not give it a try. I’ve submitted some of my writings, and poetry in particular to some highly recognized journals. I am not expecting anything, however. (Laughs). I am still waiting for their response. It may take months. It is worth doing in the end. I was so humbled to have one of my poems accepted by the South Florida Poetry Journal.
5 If you’ve had a book published, how did you decide on the title?
There is indeed a story behind every title we choose for our books, just as some married people do with their children. I wrote my first book when I was 21 or 22 and was experimenting with some love poems, which is no longer my style. I had a title in mind but it was my publisher who suggested I opt for Fragments of a Wounded Soul. I thought it was good enough to deliver the theme of what was inside the book.
Ilhem Issaoui is a young Tunisian Ph.D. researcher and poetry and prose writer. Some of her poems and short stories have appeared both online and in print. She is also the author of a collection of poems entitled Fragments of a Wounded Soul. Her work has appeared in journals such as Literary Yard, Indiana Voice Journal, the Recusant, New Ink Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Ofi Press, among others.
Dion O’Reilly
1 What have you been reading during this pandemic?
I've been reading a lot. What else is there to do? Certainly not clean. Here's a list. I'm not sure if it's complete.
Working Class by Robert Stuart
Bonfire Opera, Danusha Lameris
Indigo, Ellen Bass
Post Colonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz
What is the Grass, Mark Doty
Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Kimmerer
Selected Levis, editor David St John
Shoulda Been Jimmy Savannah, Patricia Smith
The Blessing, Gregory Orr
Summer Snow, Robert Hass
In the Lateness of the World, Carolyn Forche
Deluge, Leila Chatti
The Story and the Situation, Catherine Gornick
Also some local Santa Cruz poets
Scrimshaw, Maggie Shaw
After Modigliani, Stephen Kessler
and fellow Terrapin Poets
Sugar Fix, Kory Wells
Honey of Earth David Graham
2 Who are you Zooming (if anyone/thing)
I have two poetry groups I participate in. One is led by my super fun friend Danusha Lameris. My other is composed of Santa Cruz poets Kim Scheiblauer (who has a book coming out with Hummingbird Press), Julie Murphy, Julia Chiapella, Lisa Akeson, and JoAnn Birch. Jo Ann used to live in Santa Cruz but now lives in Denver, so it's great to have her back.
I also facilitate a Zoom class with a group of poets who are turning out some stellar work. One of them is also a long-distance student, so that's an advantage of Zoom. I can host a gathering from farther afield.
I also Zoom the occasional meeting with individual students and conduct interviews with other poets for the Hive Poetry Collective.
I talk almost every day with my grown twins on either Zoom or some other video conferencing platform. I speak to my son more than I do in non-pandemic times, so that's a good thing.
Zooming feels like kissing through a screen door, or you might say it lacks some essential mineral, but it keeps me going.
3 Have you tried your hand at a Covid 19 poem?
I have written a lot of COVID 19 poems! The epidemic invades my poetry like a brain virus. It sneaks in as both the major topic and also around the edges. Before the pandemic, climate change was my mind worm, now it's COVID. But, of course, they're related issues. End of times sharpens my mind.
4 Publish in a lesser-known print journal, or in a highly recognized electronic journal?
I have some poems that are on the verge of coming out or have been published since March. That being said, my pile of rejections is much higher and annoying.
I have one COVID 19 poem called "Myth of Bat Soup" in the Southern Iowa Review.
"Faith" in a journal from nearby San Jose called Caesura
A few from my book Ghost Dogs appear in Porter Gulch Review, a journal produced by students enrolled in our local Cabrillo College
"Fallen" in Narrative
"Hunger Moon" in Chautauqua
"Posies," which is a plague poem, in Cincinnati Review
"We Did Not See" a poem with COVID/Climate change undertones appears in Spillway.
5 If you’ve had a book published, how did you decide on the title?
My book Ghost Dogs is named after a poem in the collection. The collection is threaded with poems about the role of animals in our human journey, how they haunt us and provide succor. Dogs— well animals in general—are a metaphor in the book for healing and connection, even as our animals are eventually lost, and then others find us. We outlive them, until we don't, except my Amazon parrot, who has lived with me for forty years and shows no sign of decline. His name is Chaos. He appears in my book under the pseudonym Birdman
Dion O’Reilly's first book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her work appears in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her poetry has been nominated for several Pushcarts and been shortlisted for a variety of prizes. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces radio shows, podcasts and events. She facilitates ongoing workshops in an artsy farmhouse in the Santa Cruz Mountains--now on Zoom.
I've been reading a lot. What else is there to do? Certainly not clean. Here's a list. I'm not sure if it's complete.
Working Class by Robert Stuart
Bonfire Opera, Danusha Lameris
Indigo, Ellen Bass
Post Colonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz
What is the Grass, Mark Doty
Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Kimmerer
Selected Levis, editor David St John
Shoulda Been Jimmy Savannah, Patricia Smith
The Blessing, Gregory Orr
Summer Snow, Robert Hass
In the Lateness of the World, Carolyn Forche
Deluge, Leila Chatti
The Story and the Situation, Catherine Gornick
Also some local Santa Cruz poets
Scrimshaw, Maggie Shaw
After Modigliani, Stephen Kessler
and fellow Terrapin Poets
Sugar Fix, Kory Wells
Honey of Earth David Graham
2 Who are you Zooming (if anyone/thing)
I have two poetry groups I participate in. One is led by my super fun friend Danusha Lameris. My other is composed of Santa Cruz poets Kim Scheiblauer (who has a book coming out with Hummingbird Press), Julie Murphy, Julia Chiapella, Lisa Akeson, and JoAnn Birch. Jo Ann used to live in Santa Cruz but now lives in Denver, so it's great to have her back.
I also facilitate a Zoom class with a group of poets who are turning out some stellar work. One of them is also a long-distance student, so that's an advantage of Zoom. I can host a gathering from farther afield.
I also Zoom the occasional meeting with individual students and conduct interviews with other poets for the Hive Poetry Collective.
I talk almost every day with my grown twins on either Zoom or some other video conferencing platform. I speak to my son more than I do in non-pandemic times, so that's a good thing.
Zooming feels like kissing through a screen door, or you might say it lacks some essential mineral, but it keeps me going.
3 Have you tried your hand at a Covid 19 poem?
I have written a lot of COVID 19 poems! The epidemic invades my poetry like a brain virus. It sneaks in as both the major topic and also around the edges. Before the pandemic, climate change was my mind worm, now it's COVID. But, of course, they're related issues. End of times sharpens my mind.
4 Publish in a lesser-known print journal, or in a highly recognized electronic journal?
I have some poems that are on the verge of coming out or have been published since March. That being said, my pile of rejections is much higher and annoying.
I have one COVID 19 poem called "Myth of Bat Soup" in the Southern Iowa Review.
"Faith" in a journal from nearby San Jose called Caesura
A few from my book Ghost Dogs appear in Porter Gulch Review, a journal produced by students enrolled in our local Cabrillo College
"Fallen" in Narrative
"Hunger Moon" in Chautauqua
"Posies," which is a plague poem, in Cincinnati Review
"We Did Not See" a poem with COVID/Climate change undertones appears in Spillway.
5 If you’ve had a book published, how did you decide on the title?
My book Ghost Dogs is named after a poem in the collection. The collection is threaded with poems about the role of animals in our human journey, how they haunt us and provide succor. Dogs— well animals in general—are a metaphor in the book for healing and connection, even as our animals are eventually lost, and then others find us. We outlive them, until we don't, except my Amazon parrot, who has lived with me for forty years and shows no sign of decline. His name is Chaos. He appears in my book under the pseudonym Birdman
Dion O’Reilly's first book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her work appears in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her poetry has been nominated for several Pushcarts and been shortlisted for a variety of prizes. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces radio shows, podcasts and events. She facilitates ongoing workshops in an artsy farmhouse in the Santa Cruz Mountains--now on Zoom.
Carmine Di Biase
1 What have you been reading during this pandemic?
This spring I was pleased to discover the Italian novels of Claudio Morandi, one of which, Snow, Dog, Foot, has just appeared in English. Le Pietre, however, is also quite good, reminiscent of Calvino’s terrifying story, “The Argentine Ant.” Among poets I’m reading James Fenton and Simon Armitage, both of whom agree with my sensibility. Like Seamus Heaney, Armitage was moved to translate an important medieval work, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, into modern English verse. This no doubt has contributed much, as it has for so many other poets, to Armitage’s own poetry. I’m also reading Walking Home, a superb journal he wrote of a long hike he did along the English coast. He wrote this in prose but he funded part of the journey by giving poetry readings at the many stops he made along the way. Walking, of course, like the human heart beat, is poetic in the most basic way. It is why Dante walks, to the beat of his terza rima, through every region of his Divine Comedy.
My greatest discovery this summer, however, has been the work of Lawrence Hussman, whom I once knew as the head of the English Department at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, where I did a master’s degree in English in 1981-82. I fell out of touch with him after I left to do the Ph.D. at Ohio State, but those two years were of great, formative importance to me. Recently, for the latest issue of The Vincent Brothers Review, I had occasion to write about that time in a long, autobiographical article, which doubles as a review of Hussman’s books. His two books, a memoir entitled, ironically, Acanemia, and a chapbook of poems, are extraordinary. The memoir is, for the most part, an account of his long tenure at Wright State, a university which he helped to found. He takes its first administrators, and some of his fellow professors, to task for having botched that rare opportunity to get things right from the beginning, exposing the corruption that results from mingling the corporate sector with academia, from raising academic sports programs to a high level of importance, and from rewarding administrators with exorbitant salaries and outrageous perks. All of this is done in a lucid, incisive prose. When I first read it I heard again that spare, exact diction, that transparency, which had so impressed me more than thirty-five years before, when I took Hussman’s course in the American Naturalists. During that time, he was about to complete one of his most important books, Dreiser and His Fiction.
And to my great delight, I also discovered that Hussman, who is still very active, has turned to poetry. His first chapbook, Last Things, appeared just last year. These poems are bracing, at times terse, and often deeply moving. Their subjects alternate between particular people—friends and relatives, colleagues here and abroad (Hussman spent his first retirement years teaching in Poland and Portugal), and nature: fish, gulls, bears, elk—there are even poems about the death of trees. What I most admire about his poetry, on the level of content and theme, is how perfectly humanity mingles with the natural world. Now, after all these years, and after the appearance of my review—and also in part thanks to the Covid-19 virus, which has given me more time to devote to my own work—Hussman and I are back in touch. We exchange poems, often daily, and comment on each other’s work, where it succeeds, where it falls short, where it reminds us, intentionally or no, of the work of other poets. His next chapbook, More Last Things, is quickly taking shape, and it is going to be superb. Like Acanemia and Last Things, it will be published by Inkwater Books. This former professor of mine, however, is now also a new friend and a highly imaginative poet from whom I am learning a great deal in a most pleasant way. And for me, at least, this correspondence is proving to be intensely inspiring, and fruitful. I have produced enough poems, during this period, for a chapbook, which I have sent out to several publishers for consideration.
2 Who are you Zooming (if anyone/thing)
Jacksonville State University, where I’ve been teaching for the last twenty-six years, was struck by a tornado two years ago and lost several buildings (no lives were lost, thank goodness). It struck in March, during Spring Break, so all of us had to learn quickly how to finish out the semester online. The Covid-19 virus, ironically, forced us online at almost exactly the same time of year, only a little earlier this time. Because of our experience with the tornado damage, we were more ready to go online than were some other colleges and universities. Still, because this state of affairs is bound to continue for quite some time—possibly even through the fall semester—we have all had to become even more adept with Zoom, MS Teams, and other online platforms. So we’ve all been meeting up online for live meetings with colleagues who know all about this and who can teach us how to make use of the amazing technology we have at our disposal.
A particularly pleasant Zoom meeting I just had a couple days ago was with a dear friend and fellow writer in Italy, Alessandro Casola. He is an actor and playwright working in the vein of Edoardo Di Filippo, who is synonymous with Neapolitan comedy. I translated three of Casola’s plays into English. One of them, Waste, is a dark comedy about the problem of waste disposal in Naples. That play won the Massimo Troisi Award a few years ago. Casola and I stay in touch as we look for venues that might want to perform his work. We even met up in New York a few years ago with one of Di Filippo’s former colleagues, Vittorio Capotorto, who has his own theater in Manhattan, dedicated to Italian plays. Casola also teaches, and now he too, of course, like the rest of us, is teaching online. He asked me to meet up with him and his class on Zoom and talk about our collaboration and in particular how to handle Neapolitan dialect in translation.
3 Have you tried your hand at a Covid 19 poem?
In fact, I’ve tried my hand at two of them. One of them I’ve modeled on Yeats’s “Second Coming” and is now being considered by a journal. This second one I completed a few days ago:
Muzzled
A sudden, grand reproach, last spring, for crimes
against the world. They stopped their chattering mouths
behind their masks and hid their bloated pride,
hid their joys, their griefs, hid their love and hate,
put an end to all their violations,
celebrations, funeral orations,
their loud belittling of other nations.
All went home at once, noiselessly, and stowed
away in fear.
Then just as suddenly, the waters cleared.
The finned inhabitants retook their space
and even leapt into the air to dare
their winged counterparts to play once more
at catch-me-if-you-can, that deadly game
of old. Down they swooped—now that they could breathe
again and see—and spread their feathers wide
to revel in the rediscovered thrill
of pure, shared fear.
How plain, now, this game’s stark rule. All must show
respect, and all must play: outside or in,
the field is everywhere. The chastened, still
holed up this June, are in pajamas day
and night, soft garb for toughs. And muzzled tight,
they watch the blameless die, their mouths attached
to crude machines. Next month the predator
will leave, or wait, or strut right in. Respect
is three parts fear.
4 Publish in a lesser-known print journal, or in a highly recognized electronic journal?
The online journals have become very competitive. I was deeply flattered and honored to get an acceptance from The Road Not Taken: the Journal of Formal Poetry, which is strictly online. The editor is not only a talented poet but an accomplished medievalist, and the journal’s standards are high. Every poet who appears in it respects one form or another; but every one plays, in meaningful ways, with the form’s limits, making it new and fresh, and demonstrates that ancient, inescapable rule which applies to all verse, even “free” verse: that is, that artistic freedom can only come as a result of discipline. Then there is a relatively new electronic journal, which gets its name from a line out of Dante: La Piccioletta Barca, or the little boat. This journal, which comes out of England, brings painting, music and poetry together. I was happy to have an ekphrastic poem of mine accepted by its editor, who provided a painting as a stimulus. This is what W. H. Auden did when he wrote that marvelous poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” after meditating on Pieter Bruegel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Such mingling of art forms—linguistic, pictorial, musical—can be done more conveniently, often better, in electronic journals. To think otherwise is sheer sentimentalism. So, if only for this reason—not to mention the saving of paper and postage and other expenses—I am all for electronic journals. The allure, however, of the well made paper book, remains strong. Gigantic Sequins, for example, Kimberly Southwick’s excellent journal, publishes poetry and fiction but also some stunning art in black and white.
This discussion can’t ignore, I think, the current flourishing of small Indie presses. Lately I have been buying chapbooks from Omnidawn Publishing, Black Lawrence Press, Red Bird Press, and others. They are all making lovely little books. Red Bird Press uses exquisite paper, assembles each copy by hand, and the signatures are hand sewn, with the thread knotted on the outside of the spine. They make 100 copies, and each one is numbered by hand, elegantly in red ink, next to a hand-drawn emblem of a bird. The combination of the two—electronic journals and small boutique presses that do small runs of finely made books—is wonderful, I think. Publish single poems in serious electronic journals with good editors; then, when you have enough for a book or a chapbook, find a publisher who demonstrates a passion for a book’s physical, tactile charms, which will never be replaced or go out of fashion, and which, in the Middle Ages, used to be rare and perhaps ought to be rare again. Some presses, such as The Vincent Brothers Review, which began before the Internet, do both: they have an online forum and, once a year, they also produce a finely made print journal, even the occasional book of poems by one author. Its editor, Kimberly Willardson, has found what I think is a winning combination.
5 If you’ve had a book published, how did you decide on the title?
The chapbook manuscript that I have sent out to possible publishers bears the title American Rondeau. The collection contains my experiments in some traditional forms—a villanelle, a pantoum, a sestina, a couple of sonnets, poems in blank verse—and these are intermingled with poems in free verse. I open and close, however, with a rondeau, and I have placed a third rondeau in the middle. In this general way, therefore, the whole collection mimics every rondeau’s circular shape. The concluding poem is itself called “American Rondeau,” and it gives the chapbook its title. I must thank Lenny DellaRocca for the inspiration, and the occasion, for this poem, which first appeared in the South Florida Poetry Journal, and which I wrote in response to a prompt. John McCrae’s famous rondeau, “Flanders Fields,” has always seemed to me about as close to perfect as a poem can get. The reason I love this form in particular, though, is that in the space of just a few lines, one has to repeat the opening phrase twice and make it new and fresh both times. The poem works something like a prism. As you turn it in the light, the same facets produce different colors, colors which you did not expect to see, and which you did not know were even there. And this, I think, is what poetry is all about: observation—hard, prolonged, observation which bears out for the reader, and for the poet, life’s unexpected, often overlooked, colors.
Carmine Di Biase has written on Shakespeare and modern English and Italian literature. He has also written on translation. His English translation of The Diary of Elio Schmitz: Scenes from the World of Italo Svevo appeared in 2013. Di Biase is among the first scholars to examine the influence of Shakespeare on Svevo, Italy’s greatest modern novelist, whom James Joyce befriended in Trieste and who became the inspiration behind Joyce’s great character, Leopold Bloom. This interest culminated in a volume of essays by several scholars, Oh! Mio Vecchio William!”: Italo Svevo and His Shakespeare (2015), which Di Biase edited and introduced, with a critical essay of his own. Occasionally he writes reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, usually on matters involving English and Italian. Most recently, however, he has been writing about Henry James’s use of Macbeth in The Aspern Papers, an essay which should appear in the coming months.
Among Di Biase’s literary passions, which he considers a kind of linguistic hygiene, is translation. Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio has been translated into English many times, but few people know that Collodi wrote a sequel, about a monkey who wants to be a human being. Di Biase has translated this work and plans to include it in an anthology, along with a selection of Collodi’s stories and plays, which are similarly unknown in English, even in Italian. Two of his plays, for example, have never been published in any language and remain in manuscript form in an archive in Florence. These plays, and other works by Collodi, were written for adults, but when read alongside Pinocchio they bring out the serious themes of that masterpiece: poverty, ignorance, journalism and its abuses, the ineptitude of politicians.
It was translation, in fact, which led Di Biase to begin writing his own poetry seriously. His translations from Cesare Pavese’s Lavorare stanca will be published in the coming months in L’Anello che non tiene: journal of modern Italian literature. Translation, Di Biase believes, is an excellent apprenticeship and, if one chooses wisely, can be a rich source of inspiration. Among his favorite books is Robert Lowell’s Imitations (1961), in which Lowell rendered European poets into unique English translations, unique because they depart from their originals at moments when the translator was moved, by the original, to go his own way. Lowell did these, he said, when he had nothing of his own to write, and yet they are profoundly original. This collection illustrates, says Di Biase, how all good translation, even scrupulously accurate translation, leads to originality.
After translating a baker’s dozen of Pavese’s poems, Di Biase began to write his own and to discover his own voice, his own forms. His first published poem, “His Own Wine,” appeared here, in the South Florida Poetry Journal (August, 2017), and so did his next two. Most recently he had a sonnet in the Spring 2020 issue of The Road Not Taken: the Journal of Formal Poetry, and another sonnet is slated to appear this June in La Piccioletta Barca. Formal verse or free, however, Di Biase believes that all poetry requires a kind of box, a constraint that forces every word to tell. Sometimes a ready-made box is just the thing; other times one needs to make one’s own box.
Di Biase was born in Ohio in 1959 and finished the Ph.D. at The Ohio State University in 1988, after doing an M.A. at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Jacksonville State University, in Alabama. There, he also serves as dramaturg and managing director of The Shakespeare Project, a non-profit organization that offers eight consecutive, professional performances of one Shakespeare play every January, free of charge to the general public but aimed primarily at young students at local, underserved high schools. He also plays violin in a couple of local orchestras and, in his spare time, restores and repairs his fellow string players’ instruments. He lives with his wife Susan, who is a cellist and music teacher, their six house cats, and a newly arrived gentleman stray named Watermelon.
This spring I was pleased to discover the Italian novels of Claudio Morandi, one of which, Snow, Dog, Foot, has just appeared in English. Le Pietre, however, is also quite good, reminiscent of Calvino’s terrifying story, “The Argentine Ant.” Among poets I’m reading James Fenton and Simon Armitage, both of whom agree with my sensibility. Like Seamus Heaney, Armitage was moved to translate an important medieval work, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, into modern English verse. This no doubt has contributed much, as it has for so many other poets, to Armitage’s own poetry. I’m also reading Walking Home, a superb journal he wrote of a long hike he did along the English coast. He wrote this in prose but he funded part of the journey by giving poetry readings at the many stops he made along the way. Walking, of course, like the human heart beat, is poetic in the most basic way. It is why Dante walks, to the beat of his terza rima, through every region of his Divine Comedy.
My greatest discovery this summer, however, has been the work of Lawrence Hussman, whom I once knew as the head of the English Department at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, where I did a master’s degree in English in 1981-82. I fell out of touch with him after I left to do the Ph.D. at Ohio State, but those two years were of great, formative importance to me. Recently, for the latest issue of The Vincent Brothers Review, I had occasion to write about that time in a long, autobiographical article, which doubles as a review of Hussman’s books. His two books, a memoir entitled, ironically, Acanemia, and a chapbook of poems, are extraordinary. The memoir is, for the most part, an account of his long tenure at Wright State, a university which he helped to found. He takes its first administrators, and some of his fellow professors, to task for having botched that rare opportunity to get things right from the beginning, exposing the corruption that results from mingling the corporate sector with academia, from raising academic sports programs to a high level of importance, and from rewarding administrators with exorbitant salaries and outrageous perks. All of this is done in a lucid, incisive prose. When I first read it I heard again that spare, exact diction, that transparency, which had so impressed me more than thirty-five years before, when I took Hussman’s course in the American Naturalists. During that time, he was about to complete one of his most important books, Dreiser and His Fiction.
And to my great delight, I also discovered that Hussman, who is still very active, has turned to poetry. His first chapbook, Last Things, appeared just last year. These poems are bracing, at times terse, and often deeply moving. Their subjects alternate between particular people—friends and relatives, colleagues here and abroad (Hussman spent his first retirement years teaching in Poland and Portugal), and nature: fish, gulls, bears, elk—there are even poems about the death of trees. What I most admire about his poetry, on the level of content and theme, is how perfectly humanity mingles with the natural world. Now, after all these years, and after the appearance of my review—and also in part thanks to the Covid-19 virus, which has given me more time to devote to my own work—Hussman and I are back in touch. We exchange poems, often daily, and comment on each other’s work, where it succeeds, where it falls short, where it reminds us, intentionally or no, of the work of other poets. His next chapbook, More Last Things, is quickly taking shape, and it is going to be superb. Like Acanemia and Last Things, it will be published by Inkwater Books. This former professor of mine, however, is now also a new friend and a highly imaginative poet from whom I am learning a great deal in a most pleasant way. And for me, at least, this correspondence is proving to be intensely inspiring, and fruitful. I have produced enough poems, during this period, for a chapbook, which I have sent out to several publishers for consideration.
2 Who are you Zooming (if anyone/thing)
Jacksonville State University, where I’ve been teaching for the last twenty-six years, was struck by a tornado two years ago and lost several buildings (no lives were lost, thank goodness). It struck in March, during Spring Break, so all of us had to learn quickly how to finish out the semester online. The Covid-19 virus, ironically, forced us online at almost exactly the same time of year, only a little earlier this time. Because of our experience with the tornado damage, we were more ready to go online than were some other colleges and universities. Still, because this state of affairs is bound to continue for quite some time—possibly even through the fall semester—we have all had to become even more adept with Zoom, MS Teams, and other online platforms. So we’ve all been meeting up online for live meetings with colleagues who know all about this and who can teach us how to make use of the amazing technology we have at our disposal.
A particularly pleasant Zoom meeting I just had a couple days ago was with a dear friend and fellow writer in Italy, Alessandro Casola. He is an actor and playwright working in the vein of Edoardo Di Filippo, who is synonymous with Neapolitan comedy. I translated three of Casola’s plays into English. One of them, Waste, is a dark comedy about the problem of waste disposal in Naples. That play won the Massimo Troisi Award a few years ago. Casola and I stay in touch as we look for venues that might want to perform his work. We even met up in New York a few years ago with one of Di Filippo’s former colleagues, Vittorio Capotorto, who has his own theater in Manhattan, dedicated to Italian plays. Casola also teaches, and now he too, of course, like the rest of us, is teaching online. He asked me to meet up with him and his class on Zoom and talk about our collaboration and in particular how to handle Neapolitan dialect in translation.
3 Have you tried your hand at a Covid 19 poem?
In fact, I’ve tried my hand at two of them. One of them I’ve modeled on Yeats’s “Second Coming” and is now being considered by a journal. This second one I completed a few days ago:
Muzzled
A sudden, grand reproach, last spring, for crimes
against the world. They stopped their chattering mouths
behind their masks and hid their bloated pride,
hid their joys, their griefs, hid their love and hate,
put an end to all their violations,
celebrations, funeral orations,
their loud belittling of other nations.
All went home at once, noiselessly, and stowed
away in fear.
Then just as suddenly, the waters cleared.
The finned inhabitants retook their space
and even leapt into the air to dare
their winged counterparts to play once more
at catch-me-if-you-can, that deadly game
of old. Down they swooped—now that they could breathe
again and see—and spread their feathers wide
to revel in the rediscovered thrill
of pure, shared fear.
How plain, now, this game’s stark rule. All must show
respect, and all must play: outside or in,
the field is everywhere. The chastened, still
holed up this June, are in pajamas day
and night, soft garb for toughs. And muzzled tight,
they watch the blameless die, their mouths attached
to crude machines. Next month the predator
will leave, or wait, or strut right in. Respect
is three parts fear.
4 Publish in a lesser-known print journal, or in a highly recognized electronic journal?
The online journals have become very competitive. I was deeply flattered and honored to get an acceptance from The Road Not Taken: the Journal of Formal Poetry, which is strictly online. The editor is not only a talented poet but an accomplished medievalist, and the journal’s standards are high. Every poet who appears in it respects one form or another; but every one plays, in meaningful ways, with the form’s limits, making it new and fresh, and demonstrates that ancient, inescapable rule which applies to all verse, even “free” verse: that is, that artistic freedom can only come as a result of discipline. Then there is a relatively new electronic journal, which gets its name from a line out of Dante: La Piccioletta Barca, or the little boat. This journal, which comes out of England, brings painting, music and poetry together. I was happy to have an ekphrastic poem of mine accepted by its editor, who provided a painting as a stimulus. This is what W. H. Auden did when he wrote that marvelous poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” after meditating on Pieter Bruegel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Such mingling of art forms—linguistic, pictorial, musical—can be done more conveniently, often better, in electronic journals. To think otherwise is sheer sentimentalism. So, if only for this reason—not to mention the saving of paper and postage and other expenses—I am all for electronic journals. The allure, however, of the well made paper book, remains strong. Gigantic Sequins, for example, Kimberly Southwick’s excellent journal, publishes poetry and fiction but also some stunning art in black and white.
This discussion can’t ignore, I think, the current flourishing of small Indie presses. Lately I have been buying chapbooks from Omnidawn Publishing, Black Lawrence Press, Red Bird Press, and others. They are all making lovely little books. Red Bird Press uses exquisite paper, assembles each copy by hand, and the signatures are hand sewn, with the thread knotted on the outside of the spine. They make 100 copies, and each one is numbered by hand, elegantly in red ink, next to a hand-drawn emblem of a bird. The combination of the two—electronic journals and small boutique presses that do small runs of finely made books—is wonderful, I think. Publish single poems in serious electronic journals with good editors; then, when you have enough for a book or a chapbook, find a publisher who demonstrates a passion for a book’s physical, tactile charms, which will never be replaced or go out of fashion, and which, in the Middle Ages, used to be rare and perhaps ought to be rare again. Some presses, such as The Vincent Brothers Review, which began before the Internet, do both: they have an online forum and, once a year, they also produce a finely made print journal, even the occasional book of poems by one author. Its editor, Kimberly Willardson, has found what I think is a winning combination.
5 If you’ve had a book published, how did you decide on the title?
The chapbook manuscript that I have sent out to possible publishers bears the title American Rondeau. The collection contains my experiments in some traditional forms—a villanelle, a pantoum, a sestina, a couple of sonnets, poems in blank verse—and these are intermingled with poems in free verse. I open and close, however, with a rondeau, and I have placed a third rondeau in the middle. In this general way, therefore, the whole collection mimics every rondeau’s circular shape. The concluding poem is itself called “American Rondeau,” and it gives the chapbook its title. I must thank Lenny DellaRocca for the inspiration, and the occasion, for this poem, which first appeared in the South Florida Poetry Journal, and which I wrote in response to a prompt. John McCrae’s famous rondeau, “Flanders Fields,” has always seemed to me about as close to perfect as a poem can get. The reason I love this form in particular, though, is that in the space of just a few lines, one has to repeat the opening phrase twice and make it new and fresh both times. The poem works something like a prism. As you turn it in the light, the same facets produce different colors, colors which you did not expect to see, and which you did not know were even there. And this, I think, is what poetry is all about: observation—hard, prolonged, observation which bears out for the reader, and for the poet, life’s unexpected, often overlooked, colors.
Carmine Di Biase has written on Shakespeare and modern English and Italian literature. He has also written on translation. His English translation of The Diary of Elio Schmitz: Scenes from the World of Italo Svevo appeared in 2013. Di Biase is among the first scholars to examine the influence of Shakespeare on Svevo, Italy’s greatest modern novelist, whom James Joyce befriended in Trieste and who became the inspiration behind Joyce’s great character, Leopold Bloom. This interest culminated in a volume of essays by several scholars, Oh! Mio Vecchio William!”: Italo Svevo and His Shakespeare (2015), which Di Biase edited and introduced, with a critical essay of his own. Occasionally he writes reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, usually on matters involving English and Italian. Most recently, however, he has been writing about Henry James’s use of Macbeth in The Aspern Papers, an essay which should appear in the coming months.
Among Di Biase’s literary passions, which he considers a kind of linguistic hygiene, is translation. Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio has been translated into English many times, but few people know that Collodi wrote a sequel, about a monkey who wants to be a human being. Di Biase has translated this work and plans to include it in an anthology, along with a selection of Collodi’s stories and plays, which are similarly unknown in English, even in Italian. Two of his plays, for example, have never been published in any language and remain in manuscript form in an archive in Florence. These plays, and other works by Collodi, were written for adults, but when read alongside Pinocchio they bring out the serious themes of that masterpiece: poverty, ignorance, journalism and its abuses, the ineptitude of politicians.
It was translation, in fact, which led Di Biase to begin writing his own poetry seriously. His translations from Cesare Pavese’s Lavorare stanca will be published in the coming months in L’Anello che non tiene: journal of modern Italian literature. Translation, Di Biase believes, is an excellent apprenticeship and, if one chooses wisely, can be a rich source of inspiration. Among his favorite books is Robert Lowell’s Imitations (1961), in which Lowell rendered European poets into unique English translations, unique because they depart from their originals at moments when the translator was moved, by the original, to go his own way. Lowell did these, he said, when he had nothing of his own to write, and yet they are profoundly original. This collection illustrates, says Di Biase, how all good translation, even scrupulously accurate translation, leads to originality.
After translating a baker’s dozen of Pavese’s poems, Di Biase began to write his own and to discover his own voice, his own forms. His first published poem, “His Own Wine,” appeared here, in the South Florida Poetry Journal (August, 2017), and so did his next two. Most recently he had a sonnet in the Spring 2020 issue of The Road Not Taken: the Journal of Formal Poetry, and another sonnet is slated to appear this June in La Piccioletta Barca. Formal verse or free, however, Di Biase believes that all poetry requires a kind of box, a constraint that forces every word to tell. Sometimes a ready-made box is just the thing; other times one needs to make one’s own box.
Di Biase was born in Ohio in 1959 and finished the Ph.D. at The Ohio State University in 1988, after doing an M.A. at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Jacksonville State University, in Alabama. There, he also serves as dramaturg and managing director of The Shakespeare Project, a non-profit organization that offers eight consecutive, professional performances of one Shakespeare play every January, free of charge to the general public but aimed primarily at young students at local, underserved high schools. He also plays violin in a couple of local orchestras and, in his spare time, restores and repairs his fellow string players’ instruments. He lives with his wife Susan, who is a cellist and music teacher, their six house cats, and a newly arrived gentleman stray named Watermelon.
May 2020
Darren C. Demaree
1 Are you writing more or less during this pandemic?
My writing routine has remained the same.
2 Have you read a “pandemic” poem that you can share? Have you written one?
I read one by Beth Bachman in The New Yorker today called “Mask” that was pretty incredible.
I’ve written one pandemic poem. It happened organically thank goodness. I was working hard to finish a project, and was able to do so without getting too sidetracked by a need/desire to approach Covid-19 multiple times.
3 Online poetry readings and workshops have become more popular. Have you participated in them, watched them?
I read in a Thrush contributors reading that was a blast. I’m supposed to read for a Trio House Press contributor’s thing soon as well. I’ve watched some others. I have three kids, so the online readings have been a nice occasional break from bedtime duties.
4 Which online poetry literary magazines have you been reading, if any?
I have a list of twenty to twenty-five literary magazines that I try to read most of their issues. I don’t always succeed, but there’s a lot of great work out there.
5 Could you write one line impromptu, right now, that tells us something about how you’re feeling these days?
There is no other way. No.
There are so many other ways.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently So Clearly Beautiful, (November 2019, Adelaide Books). He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
My writing routine has remained the same.
2 Have you read a “pandemic” poem that you can share? Have you written one?
I read one by Beth Bachman in The New Yorker today called “Mask” that was pretty incredible.
I’ve written one pandemic poem. It happened organically thank goodness. I was working hard to finish a project, and was able to do so without getting too sidetracked by a need/desire to approach Covid-19 multiple times.
3 Online poetry readings and workshops have become more popular. Have you participated in them, watched them?
I read in a Thrush contributors reading that was a blast. I’m supposed to read for a Trio House Press contributor’s thing soon as well. I’ve watched some others. I have three kids, so the online readings have been a nice occasional break from bedtime duties.
4 Which online poetry literary magazines have you been reading, if any?
I have a list of twenty to twenty-five literary magazines that I try to read most of their issues. I don’t always succeed, but there’s a lot of great work out there.
5 Could you write one line impromptu, right now, that tells us something about how you’re feeling these days?
There is no other way. No.
There are so many other ways.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently So Clearly Beautiful, (November 2019, Adelaide Books). He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
Michael Ellis
1 Are you writing more or less during this pandemic?
Substantially less. Being quarantined forces me to be vulnerable, realizing I am isolated and surrounded by all the things I have written in the last thirty years. After a long career of writing, quarantine gives me the opportunity to calibrate the next twenty years as I try to keep the Emily Dickinson “Because I could did not for Death” lines from being reiterated. Since my teaching position was suspended, I have spent twenty-two hours a day in my office for the last thirty days watching a beard grow. I have poems in the walls, in drawers and closets. My poetry voice starts to yell, No! This is not how it ends. Coronavirus is my “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” and commands me to take inventory or mourn my works that have expired, or reached their shelf life. Fortunately, I was able to submit a manuscript, They Wouldn’t Let Me be White to a publisher as Coronavirus enlarges my sense of time and urgency.
I took a moment to weep for all those who capsized in the last two months, in the middle of their lives so far from either shore. Then I knew I had to keep swimming even in high tide. For the first time in my life, I looked at a manuscript I had written and considered giving in a Do Not Resuscitate code. I have eight unpublished books and I had to ask which of them shall ever see the light of Amazon. Lastly I had to ask internal questions, Have I left enough ink on the page? Can I give a little more to the writing community? Or do I have “Miles To Go Before I sleep?”
2 Have you read a pandemic poem that you can share? Have you written one?
There were days during this pandemic when I questioned my physical longevity or if my poetry would soon become my ‘Sweet Lenore’ and if Coronavirus was the Raven that would tap, tap on my door. After developing a dependency to news feeds, I knew literature was the only opposite that could break my news addiction. I wanted to cry one-hundred thousand times, for every life lost. I was able to find a poem I wrote many years ago, not realizing it would take on a new meaning.
So in my introspection I wrote:
Before I Go Home
If I die before my time
I want my last words
To rhyme
So if my days are cut short
Or if I’m on
Life support
Just know that those
Moans and groans
Are just me
Still getting it on
Still
Tryna write
One last poem
Before I go home.
And I located this poem from a blog written by Mary Oliver, 2015. It accurately describes how I feel during this atrocity:
https://wordsfortheyear.com/2015/11/14/love-sorrow-by-mary-oliver/
3 Online Poetry readings have become more popular? Have you participated in them, watched them?
I attended two poetry events on a Zoom open mic this past month. It was like watching the Lakers and Celtics stage a game in a living room or garage, void of the human electricity and popcorn. A cell phone seems so small to showcase great artist of words. Verizon or T-Mobile needs more research to simulate the sound of live clapping or the feel of a hug? In the first event, everyone recited but no one was thinking about poetry. In the second Zoom reading, we were so devastated by the pandemic we just didn’t have any material to compete with the lyrics of CNN or Fox or tragic updates and body counts every ten minutes. Seemingly we have let this catastrophe wilt our daisies and lilacs. Our personification needs time to regroup. Only one poem was read in the entire forty minutes. Then we pushed buttons on our phone and it was all over. Still poets are invincible and we will lead again. I will require at least another month to attempt this again.
4 Which poetry literary magazines have you been reading if any?
I have never appreciated my lifetime subscription to Poets & Writers so much. I have at least twelve unread issues to enjoy. I resort to Online sites such as The Next Big Writer and Poetry Soup. I figure there are a total of a hundred-thousand writers in both of these sites combined. I struggle reading the poetry of others so this gives me a challenge to take in literature as opposed to teaching it to others. Generally I think of myself as a poetry vegan, but with the Pandemic and the quarantine I get to go to the buffet and eat the meaty poetry of others I have missed for years. I particularly enjoy the opportunity to mentor younger poets and evaluate their poetry on international forums.
5 Could you write one line impromptu right now, that tells us something about how you’re feeling these days?
Sorry Netflix and Hulu, but I shall never watch one of your Pandemic or Virus movies again; not even for free.
Michael Ellis, b. 1966, is the founder of Keynote Poets & Keynote Press and Keynote Mentors which supports poets on three continents. In 2016 he was asked to teach creative writing at a maximum security prison and currently teaches at an elementary school. His poetry has appeared in the Los Angeles Herald, Warriors with Wings, Crosscurrents Review, Sacramento Voices and the Marula Anthology. He has a poetry life documentary currently on Amazon Prime called "Voices." Ellis has written two books of poetry, Goodbye Langston, and They Wouldn’t Let Me Be White, and a Novel titled, Dear Oprah. Once compared to Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, Ellis spent years searching for his own voice and identity. This resulted in a book titled, Goodbye Langston. In 1996 he received four handwritten letters from Pulitzer prize winner Gwendolyn Brooks with a lifetime of instructions that changed his journey. He has done two residencies based on the merits of his work Well Spring House (Ashfield, Mass.) and at the Zorah Hurston Richard Wright @ Howard University), where he was invited for work on a novel. Michael Ellis has appeared on radio in Canada and Ireland and was published in South Korea for his poem supporting victims of breast cancer. He has garnered dual citizenship as a traditional poet and as an urban/jazz poet. Ellis has made over a thousand appearances as poet & spoken word artist and has been invited to teach in high schools and middle schools and college. In 2020 He directed a poetry stage play, When I Get Free, weaving the talents of many poets into a story.
Substantially less. Being quarantined forces me to be vulnerable, realizing I am isolated and surrounded by all the things I have written in the last thirty years. After a long career of writing, quarantine gives me the opportunity to calibrate the next twenty years as I try to keep the Emily Dickinson “Because I could did not for Death” lines from being reiterated. Since my teaching position was suspended, I have spent twenty-two hours a day in my office for the last thirty days watching a beard grow. I have poems in the walls, in drawers and closets. My poetry voice starts to yell, No! This is not how it ends. Coronavirus is my “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” and commands me to take inventory or mourn my works that have expired, or reached their shelf life. Fortunately, I was able to submit a manuscript, They Wouldn’t Let Me be White to a publisher as Coronavirus enlarges my sense of time and urgency.
I took a moment to weep for all those who capsized in the last two months, in the middle of their lives so far from either shore. Then I knew I had to keep swimming even in high tide. For the first time in my life, I looked at a manuscript I had written and considered giving in a Do Not Resuscitate code. I have eight unpublished books and I had to ask which of them shall ever see the light of Amazon. Lastly I had to ask internal questions, Have I left enough ink on the page? Can I give a little more to the writing community? Or do I have “Miles To Go Before I sleep?”
2 Have you read a pandemic poem that you can share? Have you written one?
There were days during this pandemic when I questioned my physical longevity or if my poetry would soon become my ‘Sweet Lenore’ and if Coronavirus was the Raven that would tap, tap on my door. After developing a dependency to news feeds, I knew literature was the only opposite that could break my news addiction. I wanted to cry one-hundred thousand times, for every life lost. I was able to find a poem I wrote many years ago, not realizing it would take on a new meaning.
So in my introspection I wrote:
Before I Go Home
If I die before my time
I want my last words
To rhyme
So if my days are cut short
Or if I’m on
Life support
Just know that those
Moans and groans
Are just me
Still getting it on
Still
Tryna write
One last poem
Before I go home.
And I located this poem from a blog written by Mary Oliver, 2015. It accurately describes how I feel during this atrocity:
https://wordsfortheyear.com/2015/11/14/love-sorrow-by-mary-oliver/
3 Online Poetry readings have become more popular? Have you participated in them, watched them?
I attended two poetry events on a Zoom open mic this past month. It was like watching the Lakers and Celtics stage a game in a living room or garage, void of the human electricity and popcorn. A cell phone seems so small to showcase great artist of words. Verizon or T-Mobile needs more research to simulate the sound of live clapping or the feel of a hug? In the first event, everyone recited but no one was thinking about poetry. In the second Zoom reading, we were so devastated by the pandemic we just didn’t have any material to compete with the lyrics of CNN or Fox or tragic updates and body counts every ten minutes. Seemingly we have let this catastrophe wilt our daisies and lilacs. Our personification needs time to regroup. Only one poem was read in the entire forty minutes. Then we pushed buttons on our phone and it was all over. Still poets are invincible and we will lead again. I will require at least another month to attempt this again.
4 Which poetry literary magazines have you been reading if any?
I have never appreciated my lifetime subscription to Poets & Writers so much. I have at least twelve unread issues to enjoy. I resort to Online sites such as The Next Big Writer and Poetry Soup. I figure there are a total of a hundred-thousand writers in both of these sites combined. I struggle reading the poetry of others so this gives me a challenge to take in literature as opposed to teaching it to others. Generally I think of myself as a poetry vegan, but with the Pandemic and the quarantine I get to go to the buffet and eat the meaty poetry of others I have missed for years. I particularly enjoy the opportunity to mentor younger poets and evaluate their poetry on international forums.
5 Could you write one line impromptu right now, that tells us something about how you’re feeling these days?
Sorry Netflix and Hulu, but I shall never watch one of your Pandemic or Virus movies again; not even for free.
Michael Ellis, b. 1966, is the founder of Keynote Poets & Keynote Press and Keynote Mentors which supports poets on three continents. In 2016 he was asked to teach creative writing at a maximum security prison and currently teaches at an elementary school. His poetry has appeared in the Los Angeles Herald, Warriors with Wings, Crosscurrents Review, Sacramento Voices and the Marula Anthology. He has a poetry life documentary currently on Amazon Prime called "Voices." Ellis has written two books of poetry, Goodbye Langston, and They Wouldn’t Let Me Be White, and a Novel titled, Dear Oprah. Once compared to Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, Ellis spent years searching for his own voice and identity. This resulted in a book titled, Goodbye Langston. In 1996 he received four handwritten letters from Pulitzer prize winner Gwendolyn Brooks with a lifetime of instructions that changed his journey. He has done two residencies based on the merits of his work Well Spring House (Ashfield, Mass.) and at the Zorah Hurston Richard Wright @ Howard University), where he was invited for work on a novel. Michael Ellis has appeared on radio in Canada and Ireland and was published in South Korea for his poem supporting victims of breast cancer. He has garnered dual citizenship as a traditional poet and as an urban/jazz poet. Ellis has made over a thousand appearances as poet & spoken word artist and has been invited to teach in high schools and middle schools and college. In 2020 He directed a poetry stage play, When I Get Free, weaving the talents of many poets into a story.
George Moore
1 Are you writing more or less during this pandemic?
I live the life these days, being retired from university teaching, so you might say I’ve worked in self-isolation for a number of years before the pandemic. But I have been writing more in the last couple weeks, looking for some way to engage the new “world sense” of humanity that I see. So strange that it takes a disaster to connect people, but perhaps not so strange, as we move in and out of isolation perhaps all our lives. That seems especially true as a poet. But I am also aware of a kind of urgency these days, in my writing or in what I read, and maybe it is an effort to get back to a sense of poetry I remember from some decades ago when I was in and just out of college. That urgency has been a little diluted for me over the years a bit, just as I find such a diversity of things people find poetry a vehicle for. The diversity is good, but perhaps this present crisis will bring us back down to a sense of essential human experience. Just a thought there.
2 Have you read a “pandemic” poem that you can share? Have you written one?
I tend to shy from topical poems generally, but then, of course, I’ve written a few. But I also came across a poem by Daniel Halpern that had been posted because it was relevant, titled “Pandemania.” He wrote the poem some years ago, however, and it relates beautifully to the sense of humanity that challenged by plagues and viruses. I think I was drawn to it because it was not “written for” the present contexts. Many I’ve not read look to be talking about human suffering in details of the pandemic, which is not really of interest to me as a poet. Suffering is not currency, if you know what I mean. I’ve also written a couple poems stirred on by the crisis, and one of them, entitled, “World Round” will be published in American Literary Review in the fall.
3 Online poetry readings and workshops have become more popular. Have you participated in them, watched them?
Online workshops and teaching are certainly catching on. I actually teach online with a small college I’ve worked with for years both in the classroom and online. I’ve been teaching writing online for about seven years now. I do listen to poetry online, and as my wife is a poet as well, Tammy Armstrong, and has won a number of recent competitions, in the UK and Ireland, as well as Canada, I’ve been engaged in recording and presenting her work. I do think that there is a unique audience for listeners out there, as I find many friends and relatives who might scan a poem if they see it published, are more willing to listen and even listen again when it’s performed. I also am a regular follower of Poetry Super Highway, Rick Lupert’s Live poetry site, and he is a man with more poetic energy than is normal I think. I appreciate the way boundaries are broken down by the internet. Mingling with poets from India, Ireland, and Iran all in a day seems a wonderful benefit to the medium.
4 Which online poetry literary magazines have you been reading, if any?
I was bred on print journals, of course, but I’ve gotten close to a number of online journals that I stay in touch with and read whenever a notice of a new issue comes up. I keep up with Lowestoft Chronicle, who do a fine job with a range of poetic tastes. I drop in on Every Day Poems too, as they have published work of mine, and always have a variety of writers. A new online journal, from the last year or more, SurVision magazine brings together surrealist trends, and as that area of modernism was part of my doctorial work and interest, I’ve keep up with them. I am drawn to the poetry there and elsewhere that tests the limits of vision and language. I am always excited to see a new issue of Otoliths, edited by Mark Young. They do a lot of graphic and concrete poetry, but the range is always marvelous, and the works engaging. A couple others I have been connected to and with for years are Blue Fifth Review, which I think may be on hiatus, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. Both of those have single editors whose tastes run close to mine, and I can always count on some solid, insightful work there.
5 Could you write one line impromptu, right now, that tells us something about how you’re feeling these days?
That’s tough. Maybe:
Staying centered, close to home, and hoping that the stillness reconnects us.
George Moore's poetry has been published in The Atlantic, Poetry, Orion, North American Review, Colorado Review, Arc, Orbis, and Dublin Review. He’s published six collections of poetry, the most recent include Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FurureCycle Press 2016), Children's Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015), and The Hermits of Dingle (FutureCycle Press 2013). Moore began writing when in college in Portland, Oregon, in 1970, and worked with poets Vern Rutsala and William Stafford, as well as coming to know others like Jon Silken, James Liddy, Robert Creeley and John Logan. In 1980, he returned to Colorado, and studied for his Master’s with Ed Dorn, who became both a critical mentor and a close friend. During the decade, he came to know the poets and writers John Ashbery, Jeremy Prynne, Joy Harjo, Ron Sukenick, and the Mexican poet and novelist, Jose Emilio Pacheco. Translating Pacheco’s work began a friendship that is attested to by Pacheco’s poem, “To George Moore,” which appears in his Selected Poems. A recent issue of the national newspaper, Milenio, in their cultural section, "Laberinto", published an interview and article on Moore’s friendship with Pacheco, by Jesus Quintero. Moore completed his Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Colorado and published a critical study of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, with Peter Lang, Inc. Staying in Boulder, he taught literature and creative writing at the University of Colorado for three decades, retiring in 2014. He met his wife, Tammy Armstrong, a Canadian poet, while both attended an artist residency on the island of Paros, Greece in 2011. He and his wife moved to a small lobster fishing village on the south shore of Nova Scotia in 2014. He has worked internationally, and attended residences in Iceland, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Over the years, his poetry has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Rhysling Award, the Wolfson Poetry Award, the Brittingham Award, and the Anhinga Poetry Prize. He has been nominated for six Pushcart Prizes, and for both the Best of the Web and Best of the Net awards. He has recently been shortlisted for the Bailieborough Poetry Prize and long-listed for the Gregory O'Donoghue Poetry Prize and the Ginkgo Prize.
I live the life these days, being retired from university teaching, so you might say I’ve worked in self-isolation for a number of years before the pandemic. But I have been writing more in the last couple weeks, looking for some way to engage the new “world sense” of humanity that I see. So strange that it takes a disaster to connect people, but perhaps not so strange, as we move in and out of isolation perhaps all our lives. That seems especially true as a poet. But I am also aware of a kind of urgency these days, in my writing or in what I read, and maybe it is an effort to get back to a sense of poetry I remember from some decades ago when I was in and just out of college. That urgency has been a little diluted for me over the years a bit, just as I find such a diversity of things people find poetry a vehicle for. The diversity is good, but perhaps this present crisis will bring us back down to a sense of essential human experience. Just a thought there.
2 Have you read a “pandemic” poem that you can share? Have you written one?
I tend to shy from topical poems generally, but then, of course, I’ve written a few. But I also came across a poem by Daniel Halpern that had been posted because it was relevant, titled “Pandemania.” He wrote the poem some years ago, however, and it relates beautifully to the sense of humanity that challenged by plagues and viruses. I think I was drawn to it because it was not “written for” the present contexts. Many I’ve not read look to be talking about human suffering in details of the pandemic, which is not really of interest to me as a poet. Suffering is not currency, if you know what I mean. I’ve also written a couple poems stirred on by the crisis, and one of them, entitled, “World Round” will be published in American Literary Review in the fall.
3 Online poetry readings and workshops have become more popular. Have you participated in them, watched them?
Online workshops and teaching are certainly catching on. I actually teach online with a small college I’ve worked with for years both in the classroom and online. I’ve been teaching writing online for about seven years now. I do listen to poetry online, and as my wife is a poet as well, Tammy Armstrong, and has won a number of recent competitions, in the UK and Ireland, as well as Canada, I’ve been engaged in recording and presenting her work. I do think that there is a unique audience for listeners out there, as I find many friends and relatives who might scan a poem if they see it published, are more willing to listen and even listen again when it’s performed. I also am a regular follower of Poetry Super Highway, Rick Lupert’s Live poetry site, and he is a man with more poetic energy than is normal I think. I appreciate the way boundaries are broken down by the internet. Mingling with poets from India, Ireland, and Iran all in a day seems a wonderful benefit to the medium.
4 Which online poetry literary magazines have you been reading, if any?
I was bred on print journals, of course, but I’ve gotten close to a number of online journals that I stay in touch with and read whenever a notice of a new issue comes up. I keep up with Lowestoft Chronicle, who do a fine job with a range of poetic tastes. I drop in on Every Day Poems too, as they have published work of mine, and always have a variety of writers. A new online journal, from the last year or more, SurVision magazine brings together surrealist trends, and as that area of modernism was part of my doctorial work and interest, I’ve keep up with them. I am drawn to the poetry there and elsewhere that tests the limits of vision and language. I am always excited to see a new issue of Otoliths, edited by Mark Young. They do a lot of graphic and concrete poetry, but the range is always marvelous, and the works engaging. A couple others I have been connected to and with for years are Blue Fifth Review, which I think may be on hiatus, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. Both of those have single editors whose tastes run close to mine, and I can always count on some solid, insightful work there.
5 Could you write one line impromptu, right now, that tells us something about how you’re feeling these days?
That’s tough. Maybe:
Staying centered, close to home, and hoping that the stillness reconnects us.
George Moore's poetry has been published in The Atlantic, Poetry, Orion, North American Review, Colorado Review, Arc, Orbis, and Dublin Review. He’s published six collections of poetry, the most recent include Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FurureCycle Press 2016), Children's Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015), and The Hermits of Dingle (FutureCycle Press 2013). Moore began writing when in college in Portland, Oregon, in 1970, and worked with poets Vern Rutsala and William Stafford, as well as coming to know others like Jon Silken, James Liddy, Robert Creeley and John Logan. In 1980, he returned to Colorado, and studied for his Master’s with Ed Dorn, who became both a critical mentor and a close friend. During the decade, he came to know the poets and writers John Ashbery, Jeremy Prynne, Joy Harjo, Ron Sukenick, and the Mexican poet and novelist, Jose Emilio Pacheco. Translating Pacheco’s work began a friendship that is attested to by Pacheco’s poem, “To George Moore,” which appears in his Selected Poems. A recent issue of the national newspaper, Milenio, in their cultural section, "Laberinto", published an interview and article on Moore’s friendship with Pacheco, by Jesus Quintero. Moore completed his Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Colorado and published a critical study of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, with Peter Lang, Inc. Staying in Boulder, he taught literature and creative writing at the University of Colorado for three decades, retiring in 2014. He met his wife, Tammy Armstrong, a Canadian poet, while both attended an artist residency on the island of Paros, Greece in 2011. He and his wife moved to a small lobster fishing village on the south shore of Nova Scotia in 2014. He has worked internationally, and attended residences in Iceland, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Over the years, his poetry has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Rhysling Award, the Wolfson Poetry Award, the Brittingham Award, and the Anhinga Poetry Prize. He has been nominated for six Pushcart Prizes, and for both the Best of the Web and Best of the Net awards. He has recently been shortlisted for the Bailieborough Poetry Prize and long-listed for the Gregory O'Donoghue Poetry Prize and the Ginkgo Prize.
April 2020
Marisa P. Clark
1 How important is accuracy in your poetry?
I write a lot of autobiographical poetry, but very little of it offers a faithful transcription of what “really” happened. When I draft, I often follow an idea into unfamiliar terrain to see where it takes me. I freely embellish an image or feeling or event. Likewise, I cut out huge chunks of content in revision. The more poetry I write, the more confidently I use fictional elements in service of emotional truth. Poetic license offers a good conduit to emotional truth, whereas fidelity to the literal makes for better journal entries than poems.
That said, I aim for factual accuracy whenever I include scientific data, allusions to history, and the like.
2 In what way do you use imagination in your work?
That sounds like a trick question. Doesn’t all creative output require imagination?
Once I have an idea, I try to free myself from intention. Trying to control an idea from the outset can deaden imagination and can kill the pleasure and play of creativity. I’ve learned that the hard way. My comfort zone has too often been in the literal, so whenever imagination involves mutiny from an original idea, I try to follow along, especially in early drafts.
One way I invite more imagination into my writing is by keeping a dream journal. Writing my dreams first thing every morning not only makes me remember more of them, but it’s also taught me a great deal about risking narrative leaps, blending archetypal symbols with personal ones, tossing in some quotidian concerns and waking-life residue, and trusting the overall associative process. If my unconscious mind insists on taking such chances, why shouldn’t I encourage the same from my conscious mind?
And I can’t downplay the role that queerness has had in shaping my imagination. Until I came out in my early twenties, I repressed and closeted very important parts of my imagination. Doing so was a survival mechanism, but it also made me figure out other means of expression. I wrote in symbolism, slant truths, and occasionally (an easily deciphered) numerical code. I also developed an almost detective-like habit of close observation of other people, and that resulted in what proved to be a healthful lifelong distrust of surfaces. I remain curious about the divide between what people are willing to reveal and what they carry inside and (try to) keep to themselves. Obviously, I’ll never know the whole of another person, but such curiosity keeps my imagination active and gives me all sorts of ideas for complex characters.
3 Do you re-write your poems trying different points of view, voices, forms, etc., before settling on their final expression?
Once I have a promising enough draft, I tend to revise for diction and voice first. Music and meter are prime considerations at every stage of revision. Concentrating on the sonics helps me puzzle out the form—not in the strictest sense of formal poetry, but in terms of line length and breaks, stanzas, and spatial arrangement. I probably spend the most time revising for effective line breaks.
Point of view is another matter altogether. I rarely tamper with point of view once I have my initial draft. However, this question has given me an idea about point of view that I can’t wait to execute. It would take a dissertation-length response for me to describe it here, but let me just say thanks for the inspiration; I look forward to the experiment.
4 Could you show us an example of a leap in one of your poems?
My poem “Moonlight Is Starlight (For Nicholas, Age 6),” from the winter 2019 issue of Rust & Moth, relies on leaps throughout. You can read it here: https://rustandmoth.com/work/moonlight-is-starlight-for-nicholas-age-6/.
For now, I’ll focus on the opening stanza:
Moonlight Is Starlight (For Nicholas, Age 6)
What a pretty little
child
you are--
twirling in your dress
of pink and baby blue,
colors you chose
in a pattern you picked
and your grandmother stitched
into a halter top and flowing skirt.
The first two lines attempt to subvert a normative/cisgendered reading. The reader may guess from the title’s parenthetical that the poem is addressed to a six-year-old who currently has a boy’s name, Nicholas. The descriptor “What a pretty little” typically precedes “girl,” but not here. Breaking the line after “little” and standing “child” on its own line with a staggered margin points to the speaker’s conscious decision not to assume the gender of the child. It also emphasizes a desire to let the child be exactly who they are. The third line (“you are—”) completes the opening phrase and acknowledges the child’s independent existence. The remaining six lines of the opening stanza present an image of the child that affirms their nonbinary identity, shows their agency within their selfhood, and ends by indicating they have their family’s support.
The first three words of the title, “Moonlight Is Starlight,” call for another kind of leap. What initially appears to be a mysterious, questionable equivalency is in fact a truth as plain as the ground beneath our feet, which, as the poem and child make clear, turns out not to be so obvious after all.
5 How often or do you read collections of poets from generations past?
I’m more likely to read favorite individual poems from “generations past,” but I do still treat myself to collections. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience and Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems traveled with me over winter break, and I often dip into collections by W.H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats. Bar none, The Wild Iris by Louise Glück is my favorite poetry collection; I read it about once a year. (It came out in 1992, which I suppose now qualifies as at least one “generation past.”)
Save for the few queer poets in the mix, that list has a glaring lack of diversity—no doubt a reflection of the gatekeepers of higher education, publication, and the “canon.” My bookshelves are also home to dozens of books by people of color, contemporary poets whose collections I’ve reread, and I want to promote them here as well. Jericho Brown, Ada Limón, Jenn Givhan, Chen Chen, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Blas Falconer, and Lisa D. Chávez have all written books I’ve returned to often. The book I most look forward to adding is Benjamin Garcia’s first, Thrown in the Throat.
Marisa P. Clark is a queer writer from the South whose work has appeared in Apalachee Review, Cream City Review, Nimrod, Epiphany, Foglifter, Potomac Review, Rust + Moth, and many others, with work forthcoming in Shenandoah, Louisiana Literature, Ponder Review, and elsewhere. She was twice the winner of the Agnes Scott College Writers’ Festival Prizes (in fiction, 1996; in nonfiction, 1997), and Best American Essays 2011 recognized her creative nonfiction among its Notable Essays. She reads fiction for New England Review and makes her home in New Mexico with three parrots and two dogs. The parrot with her in the photo is her African gray, Ruby.
I write a lot of autobiographical poetry, but very little of it offers a faithful transcription of what “really” happened. When I draft, I often follow an idea into unfamiliar terrain to see where it takes me. I freely embellish an image or feeling or event. Likewise, I cut out huge chunks of content in revision. The more poetry I write, the more confidently I use fictional elements in service of emotional truth. Poetic license offers a good conduit to emotional truth, whereas fidelity to the literal makes for better journal entries than poems.
That said, I aim for factual accuracy whenever I include scientific data, allusions to history, and the like.
2 In what way do you use imagination in your work?
That sounds like a trick question. Doesn’t all creative output require imagination?
Once I have an idea, I try to free myself from intention. Trying to control an idea from the outset can deaden imagination and can kill the pleasure and play of creativity. I’ve learned that the hard way. My comfort zone has too often been in the literal, so whenever imagination involves mutiny from an original idea, I try to follow along, especially in early drafts.
One way I invite more imagination into my writing is by keeping a dream journal. Writing my dreams first thing every morning not only makes me remember more of them, but it’s also taught me a great deal about risking narrative leaps, blending archetypal symbols with personal ones, tossing in some quotidian concerns and waking-life residue, and trusting the overall associative process. If my unconscious mind insists on taking such chances, why shouldn’t I encourage the same from my conscious mind?
And I can’t downplay the role that queerness has had in shaping my imagination. Until I came out in my early twenties, I repressed and closeted very important parts of my imagination. Doing so was a survival mechanism, but it also made me figure out other means of expression. I wrote in symbolism, slant truths, and occasionally (an easily deciphered) numerical code. I also developed an almost detective-like habit of close observation of other people, and that resulted in what proved to be a healthful lifelong distrust of surfaces. I remain curious about the divide between what people are willing to reveal and what they carry inside and (try to) keep to themselves. Obviously, I’ll never know the whole of another person, but such curiosity keeps my imagination active and gives me all sorts of ideas for complex characters.
3 Do you re-write your poems trying different points of view, voices, forms, etc., before settling on their final expression?
Once I have a promising enough draft, I tend to revise for diction and voice first. Music and meter are prime considerations at every stage of revision. Concentrating on the sonics helps me puzzle out the form—not in the strictest sense of formal poetry, but in terms of line length and breaks, stanzas, and spatial arrangement. I probably spend the most time revising for effective line breaks.
Point of view is another matter altogether. I rarely tamper with point of view once I have my initial draft. However, this question has given me an idea about point of view that I can’t wait to execute. It would take a dissertation-length response for me to describe it here, but let me just say thanks for the inspiration; I look forward to the experiment.
4 Could you show us an example of a leap in one of your poems?
My poem “Moonlight Is Starlight (For Nicholas, Age 6),” from the winter 2019 issue of Rust & Moth, relies on leaps throughout. You can read it here: https://rustandmoth.com/work/moonlight-is-starlight-for-nicholas-age-6/.
For now, I’ll focus on the opening stanza:
Moonlight Is Starlight (For Nicholas, Age 6)
What a pretty little
child
you are--
twirling in your dress
of pink and baby blue,
colors you chose
in a pattern you picked
and your grandmother stitched
into a halter top and flowing skirt.
The first two lines attempt to subvert a normative/cisgendered reading. The reader may guess from the title’s parenthetical that the poem is addressed to a six-year-old who currently has a boy’s name, Nicholas. The descriptor “What a pretty little” typically precedes “girl,” but not here. Breaking the line after “little” and standing “child” on its own line with a staggered margin points to the speaker’s conscious decision not to assume the gender of the child. It also emphasizes a desire to let the child be exactly who they are. The third line (“you are—”) completes the opening phrase and acknowledges the child’s independent existence. The remaining six lines of the opening stanza present an image of the child that affirms their nonbinary identity, shows their agency within their selfhood, and ends by indicating they have their family’s support.
The first three words of the title, “Moonlight Is Starlight,” call for another kind of leap. What initially appears to be a mysterious, questionable equivalency is in fact a truth as plain as the ground beneath our feet, which, as the poem and child make clear, turns out not to be so obvious after all.
5 How often or do you read collections of poets from generations past?
I’m more likely to read favorite individual poems from “generations past,” but I do still treat myself to collections. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience and Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems traveled with me over winter break, and I often dip into collections by W.H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats. Bar none, The Wild Iris by Louise Glück is my favorite poetry collection; I read it about once a year. (It came out in 1992, which I suppose now qualifies as at least one “generation past.”)
Save for the few queer poets in the mix, that list has a glaring lack of diversity—no doubt a reflection of the gatekeepers of higher education, publication, and the “canon.” My bookshelves are also home to dozens of books by people of color, contemporary poets whose collections I’ve reread, and I want to promote them here as well. Jericho Brown, Ada Limón, Jenn Givhan, Chen Chen, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Blas Falconer, and Lisa D. Chávez have all written books I’ve returned to often. The book I most look forward to adding is Benjamin Garcia’s first, Thrown in the Throat.
Marisa P. Clark is a queer writer from the South whose work has appeared in Apalachee Review, Cream City Review, Nimrod, Epiphany, Foglifter, Potomac Review, Rust + Moth, and many others, with work forthcoming in Shenandoah, Louisiana Literature, Ponder Review, and elsewhere. She was twice the winner of the Agnes Scott College Writers’ Festival Prizes (in fiction, 1996; in nonfiction, 1997), and Best American Essays 2011 recognized her creative nonfiction among its Notable Essays. She reads fiction for New England Review and makes her home in New Mexico with three parrots and two dogs. The parrot with her in the photo is her African gray, Ruby.
Christina Fulton
1 How important is accuracy in your poetry?
Accuracy is essential because I am often poking at my father’s life and suicide, and the truth is something that was missing in his life and mine by association. He had a hard time remembering just precisely what the truth was, so this is me reminding him and myself by proxy.
2 In what way do you use imagination in your work?
I often use my imagination to find new ways to express my feelings. Most of my work feeds off of my emotions, life experiences, and family drama, and I know that can get repetitive, so I try to repackage them, like using only poker terminology to describe my disappointment with individual members of my family. I like to create different lenses to explore my mental health journey and to understand my father’s life and death.
3 Do you re-write your poems trying different points of view, voices, forms, etc., before settling on their final expression?
Not really. I do a lot of pre-planning, though, so by the time I get started, I am very confident in what I am doing. I free write, do research, and even draw what I am trying to express.
4 Could you show us an example of a leap in one of your poems?
Memories
taste like puppet fluff
and pinecones.
The dead count
with a pimped out version
of my childhood.
Three bats…
can be baker acted
in moss.
I wanted to jump from my childhood memories to my very adult fears/mental health concerns.
5 How often or do you read collections of poets from generations past?
I make it a habit to read them every once in a while. I feel it is a good idea to step outside of the modern writing world to get some perspective. Before I started my first book of poetry, I read a collection of Alfred Lloyd Tennyson’s work. It helped me gain a sense of peace that I needed to move forward with processing my feelings on paper.
Christina Fulton graduated from FAU with her MFA. She teaches at MDC North. Her poetry collection To the Man in the Red Suit was a finalist for the Lauria/ Frasca Prize for Poetry and the Anne Sexton Poetry Prize. The entire collection is set to be published by Rootstock Publishing in May 2020. Two of the poems have appeared in Open Minds Quarterly. Three of the poems are on The Outsider website. Also, three of them have been published on The Stay Weird and Keep Writing website. Her poem “To Angela” was published in the spring 2018 edition of The Apeiron Review. Her poem “Our Wings are Proof of God’s and My Father’s Unfathomable Narcissism” has been published in The Awkward Mermaid. The Raw Art Review and The Saw Palmetto have also published her poetry.
Accuracy is essential because I am often poking at my father’s life and suicide, and the truth is something that was missing in his life and mine by association. He had a hard time remembering just precisely what the truth was, so this is me reminding him and myself by proxy.
2 In what way do you use imagination in your work?
I often use my imagination to find new ways to express my feelings. Most of my work feeds off of my emotions, life experiences, and family drama, and I know that can get repetitive, so I try to repackage them, like using only poker terminology to describe my disappointment with individual members of my family. I like to create different lenses to explore my mental health journey and to understand my father’s life and death.
3 Do you re-write your poems trying different points of view, voices, forms, etc., before settling on their final expression?
Not really. I do a lot of pre-planning, though, so by the time I get started, I am very confident in what I am doing. I free write, do research, and even draw what I am trying to express.
4 Could you show us an example of a leap in one of your poems?
Memories
taste like puppet fluff
and pinecones.
The dead count
with a pimped out version
of my childhood.
Three bats…
can be baker acted
in moss.
I wanted to jump from my childhood memories to my very adult fears/mental health concerns.
5 How often or do you read collections of poets from generations past?
I make it a habit to read them every once in a while. I feel it is a good idea to step outside of the modern writing world to get some perspective. Before I started my first book of poetry, I read a collection of Alfred Lloyd Tennyson’s work. It helped me gain a sense of peace that I needed to move forward with processing my feelings on paper.
Christina Fulton graduated from FAU with her MFA. She teaches at MDC North. Her poetry collection To the Man in the Red Suit was a finalist for the Lauria/ Frasca Prize for Poetry and the Anne Sexton Poetry Prize. The entire collection is set to be published by Rootstock Publishing in May 2020. Two of the poems have appeared in Open Minds Quarterly. Three of the poems are on The Outsider website. Also, three of them have been published on The Stay Weird and Keep Writing website. Her poem “To Angela” was published in the spring 2018 edition of The Apeiron Review. Her poem “Our Wings are Proof of God’s and My Father’s Unfathomable Narcissism” has been published in The Awkward Mermaid. The Raw Art Review and The Saw Palmetto have also published her poetry.
Kathleen Hellen
1 How important is accuracy in your poetry?
Within my poems, I am always in a dance with accuracy, if by accuracy you mean the facts—the who of it and when, the where and what. Sometimes these things lead, other times the poem leads.
2 In what way do you use imagination in your work?
The Artist Ralph Ammer says imagination is like breathing; you take something in, you let something out. For me as well, imagination starts with inspiration, something I might see or hear—the way the light glistens in the morning after rain, a far-off train at 2 a.m. before I fall asleep. If the image sticks, if I dwell on it, if I take it into dreams, new images emerge, followed by their own associations. I rearrange to find the new connections. In these early drafts, I play, I try not to interfere. I let imagination have its way with me.
3 Do you re-write your poems trying different points of view, voices, forms, etc., before settling on their final expression?
Aside from those rare times when the poem will write itself, I tinker—sometimes obsessively—to strike the right note between form and content.
4 Could you show us an example of a leap in one of your poems?
In “cargo of their dreams” (first published in Anti-, Issue14) the poem resisted all my efforts to contain it. An early draft grouped lines in stanzas based on sound, as in the first two below:
mix rape sex tape—hoo? saggy sack
dagger dagger dagger
cuffed her to the stunt
to the grip-swift hammer
before she turned 10—hoo? swift stick
African or Anglikaner
in a room, up the stairs
before she turned
a hundred on the Internet—hoo?
I recast the lines a dozen times or more, before I realized the lines should be enjambed for speed as well as sound, and that this form of “little rooms” did not reflect the “cargo” that could not/should not be contained. In latest revision, the lines appear as follows:
mix rape sex tape—hoo? saggy sack dagger dagger dagger
cuffed her to the stunt to the grip-swift hammer
before she turned 10—hoo? swift stick African or Anglikaner
in a room, up the stairs before she turned a hundred on the Internet--
hoo? Russian in a mug shot Egyptian with her throat slit
Indian. Vietnamese—catalogue of tricks sipping
black-out tea, hemorrhaging submission
as the crew took turns
5 How often or do you read collections of poets from generations past?
Here, Eliot informs my understanding, his idea that the work of the past should not be quarried for merely archeological purpose, but rather with “perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” This is very like the Buddhist sense of “interbeing”—so that every poem has a “simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” with the whole of literature, not only of one’s country but of all the world’s literature. Now I am rereading Tomas Tranströmer’s Bright Scythe and Rimbaud’s Season in Hell. I am reading Japanese Death Poems. I read collections by poets from the past as if they were a mirror and a joint.
Half American, half Japanese, Kathleen Hellen was born in Tokyo, after Japan's surrender to the Allies, ending World War II. Her father was a U.S. Army corporal dispatched with MacArthur’s headquarters to the Pacific theater. He served as secretary to the U.S. Defense Counsel for Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō during the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Her mother was born into the samurai and the daughter of a Shinto priest. Hellen grew up in Pennsylvania where her family settled; she later moved to West Virginia and then Maryland. Hellen is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Umberto’s Night, which won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize in poetry, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net, and featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Diode Poetry Journal, jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. Her poems have won the Thomas Merton poetry prize, the James Still Award, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. She has been awarded individual artist grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts. Hellen served as senior poetry editor for the Baltimore Review and on the editorial board of Washington Writers’ Publishing House. A former staff reporter, she covered business and finance in the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia, and in Pittsburgh, she worked as a freelance for two weekly business journals. Hellen teaches creative writing and journalism at Coppin State University in Baltimore. She received her master’s and doctoral degrees from Carnegie Mellon University.
Within my poems, I am always in a dance with accuracy, if by accuracy you mean the facts—the who of it and when, the where and what. Sometimes these things lead, other times the poem leads.
2 In what way do you use imagination in your work?
The Artist Ralph Ammer says imagination is like breathing; you take something in, you let something out. For me as well, imagination starts with inspiration, something I might see or hear—the way the light glistens in the morning after rain, a far-off train at 2 a.m. before I fall asleep. If the image sticks, if I dwell on it, if I take it into dreams, new images emerge, followed by their own associations. I rearrange to find the new connections. In these early drafts, I play, I try not to interfere. I let imagination have its way with me.
3 Do you re-write your poems trying different points of view, voices, forms, etc., before settling on their final expression?
Aside from those rare times when the poem will write itself, I tinker—sometimes obsessively—to strike the right note between form and content.
4 Could you show us an example of a leap in one of your poems?
In “cargo of their dreams” (first published in Anti-, Issue14) the poem resisted all my efforts to contain it. An early draft grouped lines in stanzas based on sound, as in the first two below:
mix rape sex tape—hoo? saggy sack
dagger dagger dagger
cuffed her to the stunt
to the grip-swift hammer
before she turned 10—hoo? swift stick
African or Anglikaner
in a room, up the stairs
before she turned
a hundred on the Internet—hoo?
I recast the lines a dozen times or more, before I realized the lines should be enjambed for speed as well as sound, and that this form of “little rooms” did not reflect the “cargo” that could not/should not be contained. In latest revision, the lines appear as follows:
mix rape sex tape—hoo? saggy sack dagger dagger dagger
cuffed her to the stunt to the grip-swift hammer
before she turned 10—hoo? swift stick African or Anglikaner
in a room, up the stairs before she turned a hundred on the Internet--
hoo? Russian in a mug shot Egyptian with her throat slit
Indian. Vietnamese—catalogue of tricks sipping
black-out tea, hemorrhaging submission
as the crew took turns
5 How often or do you read collections of poets from generations past?
Here, Eliot informs my understanding, his idea that the work of the past should not be quarried for merely archeological purpose, but rather with “perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” This is very like the Buddhist sense of “interbeing”—so that every poem has a “simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” with the whole of literature, not only of one’s country but of all the world’s literature. Now I am rereading Tomas Tranströmer’s Bright Scythe and Rimbaud’s Season in Hell. I am reading Japanese Death Poems. I read collections by poets from the past as if they were a mirror and a joint.
Half American, half Japanese, Kathleen Hellen was born in Tokyo, after Japan's surrender to the Allies, ending World War II. Her father was a U.S. Army corporal dispatched with MacArthur’s headquarters to the Pacific theater. He served as secretary to the U.S. Defense Counsel for Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō during the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Her mother was born into the samurai and the daughter of a Shinto priest. Hellen grew up in Pennsylvania where her family settled; she later moved to West Virginia and then Maryland. Hellen is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Umberto’s Night, which won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize in poetry, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net, and featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Diode Poetry Journal, jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. Her poems have won the Thomas Merton poetry prize, the James Still Award, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. She has been awarded individual artist grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts. Hellen served as senior poetry editor for the Baltimore Review and on the editorial board of Washington Writers’ Publishing House. A former staff reporter, she covered business and finance in the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia, and in Pittsburgh, she worked as a freelance for two weekly business journals. Hellen teaches creative writing and journalism at Coppin State University in Baltimore. She received her master’s and doctoral degrees from Carnegie Mellon University.
March 2020
Jennifer Martelli
1 Name a person or two who have had a significant influence on your poetry.
Probably the poet who has had the biggest influence on my poetry is Marie Howe. When I lived in Cambridge in the early to mid-nineties, I attended workshops in her apartment. We’d sit around her kitchen table and share our work; I was terrible! But, it was there that I first heard poetry, and from there, had more of an understanding of how it works, how to write it. At that same time, Lucie Brock-Broido was in Cambridge, so the same kitchen table group at Marie’s would go to Lucie’s fantastic, magical apartment up the street: there were cats and statues of nuns. Lucie had a huge impact on my work as well: her seductiveness, her adherence to the word. When I’m stuck, I make cocktails, mixing a little Howe with Lucille Clifton; Brock-Broido with Laura Jensen. Plath with anybody.
2 In the majority of your poems does form determine content or content determine form? Explain with some examples.
Oh boy, this is tricky. Let me say that I don’t usually write in form and I default (in drafts) to couplets, which don’t always serve my poems. I think I like how they look! So, in general, I’m not usually thinking about form when I sit down to write. But, there is something about form that’s so satisfying. It’s a physical satisfaction. I’m a huge crossword puzzle solver, and writing in form is like finishing a puzzle—everything fits. I think Diane Seuss’s latest and brilliant collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, really impacted my writing over the past year. She employs an invented form of fourteen lines (a sonnet), each line is an “American sentence,” seventeen syllable across the page (a haiku). This was a form that determined content—for me, anyway. Each line was its own poem, piled on top the other. They weren’t narratives, but they told a story of impression (for me); of how a thing is integrated and understood. I’ve really enjoyed writing these!
https://www.dmqreview.com/martellifall-2019
https://psalteryandlyre.org/2019/07/15/st-cocaine-of-lines-st-anisette-st-marijuana-st-horse/
I’ve also been playing with Jericho Brown’s form, the duplex, which is really tricky, but intense in its obsession!
3 Have you read any biographies of poets?
My latest biographies have been about Kitty Genovese and Geraldine Ferraro, but yes, I have read biographies in the past: Sylvia Plath: A Biography, Linda Wagner-Martin was the most recent.
4 Do you keep a journal from which you draw poems?
I never did, but lately, I’ve been carrying a notebook with me for those moments when I get a “brilliant” idea—you know when you write a poem in your head and it’s the best thing you’ve ever “written,” but then when you go to actually write it, it’s gone? Yes, that happens more and more! So, I carry a small Moleskine with me to try to capture these moments!
5 Have you attended writer’s retreats or have taken residencies?
Yes, I’ve attended the Juniper Seminar at UMass Amherst and the Nathan Mayhew Conference on Martha’s Vineyard. A group of my friends spent a week up at the Millay Colony in Austerlitz—it was a spooky week!
Jennifer Martelli is the author of My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Her chapbook, After Bird, was the winner of the Grey Book Press open reading, 2016. Her work is forthcoming in Poetry and The Sycamore Review and, most recently, has appeared in Verse Daily, The DMQ Review, The Sonora Review, and Iron Horse Review (winner, Photo Finish contest). Jennifer Martelli is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review and co-curates the Italian-American Writers Series at I AM Books in Boston.
Probably the poet who has had the biggest influence on my poetry is Marie Howe. When I lived in Cambridge in the early to mid-nineties, I attended workshops in her apartment. We’d sit around her kitchen table and share our work; I was terrible! But, it was there that I first heard poetry, and from there, had more of an understanding of how it works, how to write it. At that same time, Lucie Brock-Broido was in Cambridge, so the same kitchen table group at Marie’s would go to Lucie’s fantastic, magical apartment up the street: there were cats and statues of nuns. Lucie had a huge impact on my work as well: her seductiveness, her adherence to the word. When I’m stuck, I make cocktails, mixing a little Howe with Lucille Clifton; Brock-Broido with Laura Jensen. Plath with anybody.
2 In the majority of your poems does form determine content or content determine form? Explain with some examples.
Oh boy, this is tricky. Let me say that I don’t usually write in form and I default (in drafts) to couplets, which don’t always serve my poems. I think I like how they look! So, in general, I’m not usually thinking about form when I sit down to write. But, there is something about form that’s so satisfying. It’s a physical satisfaction. I’m a huge crossword puzzle solver, and writing in form is like finishing a puzzle—everything fits. I think Diane Seuss’s latest and brilliant collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, really impacted my writing over the past year. She employs an invented form of fourteen lines (a sonnet), each line is an “American sentence,” seventeen syllable across the page (a haiku). This was a form that determined content—for me, anyway. Each line was its own poem, piled on top the other. They weren’t narratives, but they told a story of impression (for me); of how a thing is integrated and understood. I’ve really enjoyed writing these!
https://www.dmqreview.com/martellifall-2019
https://psalteryandlyre.org/2019/07/15/st-cocaine-of-lines-st-anisette-st-marijuana-st-horse/
I’ve also been playing with Jericho Brown’s form, the duplex, which is really tricky, but intense in its obsession!
3 Have you read any biographies of poets?
My latest biographies have been about Kitty Genovese and Geraldine Ferraro, but yes, I have read biographies in the past: Sylvia Plath: A Biography, Linda Wagner-Martin was the most recent.
4 Do you keep a journal from which you draw poems?
I never did, but lately, I’ve been carrying a notebook with me for those moments when I get a “brilliant” idea—you know when you write a poem in your head and it’s the best thing you’ve ever “written,” but then when you go to actually write it, it’s gone? Yes, that happens more and more! So, I carry a small Moleskine with me to try to capture these moments!
5 Have you attended writer’s retreats or have taken residencies?
Yes, I’ve attended the Juniper Seminar at UMass Amherst and the Nathan Mayhew Conference on Martha’s Vineyard. A group of my friends spent a week up at the Millay Colony in Austerlitz—it was a spooky week!
Jennifer Martelli is the author of My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Her chapbook, After Bird, was the winner of the Grey Book Press open reading, 2016. Her work is forthcoming in Poetry and The Sycamore Review and, most recently, has appeared in Verse Daily, The DMQ Review, The Sonora Review, and Iron Horse Review (winner, Photo Finish contest). Jennifer Martelli is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review and co-curates the Italian-American Writers Series at I AM Books in Boston.
Doug Holder
1 Name a person or two who have had a significant influence on your poetry
Well—when I was starting out Allen Ginsberg stream-of-consciousness was a big influence. Later he led me to Walt Whitman, as well as a host of Beat poets. I loved the freedom of Ginsberg's voice-- the long flowing lines—the carnality —the way he described, "negro streets at dawn." The Spoon River Anthology written by Edgar Lee Masters--with Master's short and insightful portraits of residents of a small town was also an influence. Many of my own poems are portraits of people I see on the Red Line subway in Boston, the years I worked as a psychiatric counselor at McLean Hospital, and from the many interviews I conducted for my city newspaper. Joseph Mitchell--who wrote the book Down at the Old Hotel that dealt with many New York marginal, and eccentric people was a big influence for me as well. I could also say the photography of Diane Arbus and Walker Evans. I like how they gave us snapshots of people frozen in time—in postures of absurdity, and sadness, there is something so subversive about it all. I wrote a poem based one of Arbus' photos "Sig Klein's Fat Man's Shop."
2 In the majority of your poems does form determine content or content determine form? Explain with some examples.
Content always informs the poem. I come across an interesting person, etc. in my daily travel—and for some reason I know I have to write about it. Then I sort of chant the seminal lines I will use—and the poem comes alive—the requisite music the lines produce—determine how I will use line breaks, enjambments, etc. For example look at this poem of mine that was published in the Boston Literary Magazine:
Parking Lot: Bunker Hill Community College, Boston
I always feel
like I am in a movie.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
Cutting a deal with Robert Mitchum
our voices rumble
with the roar of the Orange Line
His beat-up Chevrolet
the omen of fuzzy dice
swing from
his rear view
my 200,000-mile
Honda
as dour
as the day.
Gray skies
fit with the
metallic city landscape
a bird's bleak beak
sitting on a rusty wire
watches us
with fierce objectivity.
A clandestine slip
from my to his pocket,
a tentative handshake.
He looks at me
with deep, world-weary eyes:
“The world is a tough place kid--
and it’s tougher
if you are stupid.”
I was in the parking lot of this college in Boston that I teach in—suddenly I hear the roar from the Orange Line subway tracks, and it brings to mind a film I love that was shot in Boston The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I got into my beat up Honda—looked around—and sort of chanted lines that were flowing from my head about the film and this parking lot. As the lines chanted in my head, I broke them down by instinct—the music I was creating.
3 Have you read any biographies of poets?
I am not big on reading of biographies of poets. But Kerouac's The Town and the City really spoke to the life of an emerging artist in the 1950s. It was fiction—but loosely based on Kerouac's early life. It dealt with the shift from Lowell, MA. to New York City and beyond. I found many parallels between the life portrayed in the book and my own.
4 Do you keep a journal from which you draw poems?
Most definitely—I have journals dating back to 40 years ago when I was in my 20s. I use this for fodder for poems. When I penned my collection Portrait of an Artist as a Young Poseur... (Big Table Books) I went through my journal to recreate the Boston of the 70s and 80s, that the collection deals with. I always have a pocket journal on hand to capture the moments, people, and scenes that I see during my walks around the city. For me walking is a great incubator for poems. This summer I did a number of extensive walks around Boston Harbor—and a number of poems came from that. When a poem hits—I whip the journal out. Here is a poem that developed from my walks that was published in Blue Pepper magazine:
A Veteran's Back. Carson Beach. South Boston.
There was nothing smooth about it.
Grizzled in a sea of sleek.
Brown sun spots--
burst across
his wizened map.
A teamster tattoo
his union label
blunt
on his right shoulder--
no New Age serpent
snaking around
a green fantasy
planet.
A depression
in his skin
where he took a shiv
in some red light,
honky-tonk
near Andrew Station.
The muscles still asserting themselves
below the slack skin
rolling under his flesh
his back unashamed
of its sin.
5 Have you attended writer’s retreats or have taken residencies?
I had a small residency at Wellspring House in Western, Mass. many years ago. I also attended The U/Mass Boston William Joiner's Institute for a few years where I studied with Martin Espada and Doug Anderson. But I really haven't tried to apply for any. If I want a retreat it is in a coffeehouse, or a bar, something in the city. I guess you can say I am a resident poet of a writer's group that I founded with Harris Gardner and Steve Glines in 2004, titled the Bagel Bards. We are informal group of writers that meet at an Au Bon Pain in Somerville, Mass. It's a great group for networking, friendship and writerly talk.
Doug Holder, b. 1955, is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press. He teaches writing at Endicott College and Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. He is the arts editor for The Somerville Times. His poetry and prose have appeared in The Boston Globe, Presa, Rattle, Small Press Review, Caesura, Boston Literary Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review and elsewhere. For the past 15 years he has produced a literary interview TV show “Poet to Poet Writer to Writer.” His interviews are archived at Harvard University, U/Mass Boston and elsewhere. Recently he had a dance performance of his poetry by the textmove collaborative in Boston. Holder is the recipient of a citation from the State Legislature of Massachusetts for his work as a poet, editor, publisher, and professor. In 2015 he was awarded the Allen Ginsberg Literary Community Award for his outstanding body of work, and his service and support of the literary community. The play “The Patient” was adapted by playwright Lawrence Kessenich from a short story “The Quiet Room” written by Holder. The "Doug Holder Papers Collection" is now being being processed at the University at Buffalo.
Well—when I was starting out Allen Ginsberg stream-of-consciousness was a big influence. Later he led me to Walt Whitman, as well as a host of Beat poets. I loved the freedom of Ginsberg's voice-- the long flowing lines—the carnality —the way he described, "negro streets at dawn." The Spoon River Anthology written by Edgar Lee Masters--with Master's short and insightful portraits of residents of a small town was also an influence. Many of my own poems are portraits of people I see on the Red Line subway in Boston, the years I worked as a psychiatric counselor at McLean Hospital, and from the many interviews I conducted for my city newspaper. Joseph Mitchell--who wrote the book Down at the Old Hotel that dealt with many New York marginal, and eccentric people was a big influence for me as well. I could also say the photography of Diane Arbus and Walker Evans. I like how they gave us snapshots of people frozen in time—in postures of absurdity, and sadness, there is something so subversive about it all. I wrote a poem based one of Arbus' photos "Sig Klein's Fat Man's Shop."
2 In the majority of your poems does form determine content or content determine form? Explain with some examples.
Content always informs the poem. I come across an interesting person, etc. in my daily travel—and for some reason I know I have to write about it. Then I sort of chant the seminal lines I will use—and the poem comes alive—the requisite music the lines produce—determine how I will use line breaks, enjambments, etc. For example look at this poem of mine that was published in the Boston Literary Magazine:
Parking Lot: Bunker Hill Community College, Boston
I always feel
like I am in a movie.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
Cutting a deal with Robert Mitchum
our voices rumble
with the roar of the Orange Line
His beat-up Chevrolet
the omen of fuzzy dice
swing from
his rear view
my 200,000-mile
Honda
as dour
as the day.
Gray skies
fit with the
metallic city landscape
a bird's bleak beak
sitting on a rusty wire
watches us
with fierce objectivity.
A clandestine slip
from my to his pocket,
a tentative handshake.
He looks at me
with deep, world-weary eyes:
“The world is a tough place kid--
and it’s tougher
if you are stupid.”
I was in the parking lot of this college in Boston that I teach in—suddenly I hear the roar from the Orange Line subway tracks, and it brings to mind a film I love that was shot in Boston The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I got into my beat up Honda—looked around—and sort of chanted lines that were flowing from my head about the film and this parking lot. As the lines chanted in my head, I broke them down by instinct—the music I was creating.
3 Have you read any biographies of poets?
I am not big on reading of biographies of poets. But Kerouac's The Town and the City really spoke to the life of an emerging artist in the 1950s. It was fiction—but loosely based on Kerouac's early life. It dealt with the shift from Lowell, MA. to New York City and beyond. I found many parallels between the life portrayed in the book and my own.
4 Do you keep a journal from which you draw poems?
Most definitely—I have journals dating back to 40 years ago when I was in my 20s. I use this for fodder for poems. When I penned my collection Portrait of an Artist as a Young Poseur... (Big Table Books) I went through my journal to recreate the Boston of the 70s and 80s, that the collection deals with. I always have a pocket journal on hand to capture the moments, people, and scenes that I see during my walks around the city. For me walking is a great incubator for poems. This summer I did a number of extensive walks around Boston Harbor—and a number of poems came from that. When a poem hits—I whip the journal out. Here is a poem that developed from my walks that was published in Blue Pepper magazine:
A Veteran's Back. Carson Beach. South Boston.
There was nothing smooth about it.
Grizzled in a sea of sleek.
Brown sun spots--
burst across
his wizened map.
A teamster tattoo
his union label
blunt
on his right shoulder--
no New Age serpent
snaking around
a green fantasy
planet.
A depression
in his skin
where he took a shiv
in some red light,
honky-tonk
near Andrew Station.
The muscles still asserting themselves
below the slack skin
rolling under his flesh
his back unashamed
of its sin.
5 Have you attended writer’s retreats or have taken residencies?
I had a small residency at Wellspring House in Western, Mass. many years ago. I also attended The U/Mass Boston William Joiner's Institute for a few years where I studied with Martin Espada and Doug Anderson. But I really haven't tried to apply for any. If I want a retreat it is in a coffeehouse, or a bar, something in the city. I guess you can say I am a resident poet of a writer's group that I founded with Harris Gardner and Steve Glines in 2004, titled the Bagel Bards. We are informal group of writers that meet at an Au Bon Pain in Somerville, Mass. It's a great group for networking, friendship and writerly talk.
Doug Holder, b. 1955, is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press. He teaches writing at Endicott College and Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. He is the arts editor for The Somerville Times. His poetry and prose have appeared in The Boston Globe, Presa, Rattle, Small Press Review, Caesura, Boston Literary Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review and elsewhere. For the past 15 years he has produced a literary interview TV show “Poet to Poet Writer to Writer.” His interviews are archived at Harvard University, U/Mass Boston and elsewhere. Recently he had a dance performance of his poetry by the textmove collaborative in Boston. Holder is the recipient of a citation from the State Legislature of Massachusetts for his work as a poet, editor, publisher, and professor. In 2015 he was awarded the Allen Ginsberg Literary Community Award for his outstanding body of work, and his service and support of the literary community. The play “The Patient” was adapted by playwright Lawrence Kessenich from a short story “The Quiet Room” written by Holder. The "Doug Holder Papers Collection" is now being being processed at the University at Buffalo.
Stephanie Houltzhouser
1 Name a person or two who have had a significant influence on your poetry.
My mother was a huge influence. She said if you can't speak then write. She introduced me to Emily Dickinson and I fell in love with poetry.
I can remember studying poetry in English where we had to do five different styles of poetry. I was so nervous and from then on my teachers, and mother continued to encourage. They were just shocked with what I wrote. The quiet girl that never spoke usually.
2 In the majority of your poems does form determine content or content determine form? Explain with some examples.
Content determines everything for me. Yes I know form is very important to many. For me though I write what I feel in that moment. I always felt the rules of form threw off my whole point that I was trying to convey. Prime example to look at an image I will see the emotion in it to visualize the thought I may like to write about. I am very much an emotional writer not so much as far as objects or abstract per say. If form happens cool, but if not I hope that another can relate.
3 Have you read any biographies of poets?
Yes actually I have on Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is why I fell in love with prose writing. So many see him as a poet, but actually he always said I am not a poet. Emily’s life story intrigued me. She never sought out to be famous, or her writings to be seen. It was after her death her work became public.
4 Do you keep a journal from which you draw poems?
No but I probably should. I am very much a prolific writer so I write when it hits me. I could write so much of mine I just throw it away till I get it the way I want it the first time.
5 Have you attended writer’s retreats or have taken residencies?
Not yet, but I hope to in the near future. I love getting to know other writers, and maybe even collaborating together.
Originally from Tucson Arizona, Stephanie Houltzhouser now resides in Little Rock AR. She started as a child writer for Bear Essentials Newpaper, writing articles for her school. As a child her first article was the first to make it on the paper, news, and radio at 11 years old. She never planned to share her poetry. She was always afraid she would be criticized for not writing in form. Although she loves all types of poetry. Stephanie is a very literal poet she holds no punches with the words that she dares to speak. She writes not just for the highly educated but for everyone.
She started to write poetry to cope with a language impairment. Now a mother of an autistic child. Stephanie spends time with him writing and teaching him the importance of conveying feelings no matter what they are. She just released her poetry collection: Shadowed By Her Truth, this past November. Stephanie is a huge advocate for self expression. So often we say so much more in poetry then what we would ever dare to say out loud to another person. Stephanie has been published in Ravencage, an online magazine. She plans on continuing writing not just in poetry. She is now getting involved in open mics for spoken poetry here in Little Rock AR.
"If we do not feel then what in this world is left to live for?"
Visit her is on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shoultzhouser/
Her book is available at : https://www.amazon.com/Shadowed-Her-Truth-Stephanie-Houltzhouser-ebook/dp/B07YWL6819/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=stephanie+houltzhouser&qid=1580168359&sr=8
My mother was a huge influence. She said if you can't speak then write. She introduced me to Emily Dickinson and I fell in love with poetry.
I can remember studying poetry in English where we had to do five different styles of poetry. I was so nervous and from then on my teachers, and mother continued to encourage. They were just shocked with what I wrote. The quiet girl that never spoke usually.
2 In the majority of your poems does form determine content or content determine form? Explain with some examples.
Content determines everything for me. Yes I know form is very important to many. For me though I write what I feel in that moment. I always felt the rules of form threw off my whole point that I was trying to convey. Prime example to look at an image I will see the emotion in it to visualize the thought I may like to write about. I am very much an emotional writer not so much as far as objects or abstract per say. If form happens cool, but if not I hope that another can relate.
3 Have you read any biographies of poets?
Yes actually I have on Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is why I fell in love with prose writing. So many see him as a poet, but actually he always said I am not a poet. Emily’s life story intrigued me. She never sought out to be famous, or her writings to be seen. It was after her death her work became public.
4 Do you keep a journal from which you draw poems?
No but I probably should. I am very much a prolific writer so I write when it hits me. I could write so much of mine I just throw it away till I get it the way I want it the first time.
5 Have you attended writer’s retreats or have taken residencies?
Not yet, but I hope to in the near future. I love getting to know other writers, and maybe even collaborating together.
Originally from Tucson Arizona, Stephanie Houltzhouser now resides in Little Rock AR. She started as a child writer for Bear Essentials Newpaper, writing articles for her school. As a child her first article was the first to make it on the paper, news, and radio at 11 years old. She never planned to share her poetry. She was always afraid she would be criticized for not writing in form. Although she loves all types of poetry. Stephanie is a very literal poet she holds no punches with the words that she dares to speak. She writes not just for the highly educated but for everyone.
She started to write poetry to cope with a language impairment. Now a mother of an autistic child. Stephanie spends time with him writing and teaching him the importance of conveying feelings no matter what they are. She just released her poetry collection: Shadowed By Her Truth, this past November. Stephanie is a huge advocate for self expression. So often we say so much more in poetry then what we would ever dare to say out loud to another person. Stephanie has been published in Ravencage, an online magazine. She plans on continuing writing not just in poetry. She is now getting involved in open mics for spoken poetry here in Little Rock AR.
"If we do not feel then what in this world is left to live for?"
Visit her is on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shoultzhouser/
Her book is available at : https://www.amazon.com/Shadowed-Her-Truth-Stephanie-Houltzhouser-ebook/dp/B07YWL6819/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=stephanie+houltzhouser&qid=1580168359&sr=8
February 2020
Francesca Bell
1 How much of yourself do you reveal in your poetry?
I consider myself a confessional poet, so I purposely and purposefully reveal quite a lot of myself in my poetry. My poems, other than persona poems and poems written about news stories or historical events, are typically about experiences I’ve had and situations I’ve found myself in. That being said, I think that all writers reveal themselves implicitly, sometimes involuntarily, in whatever they are writing.
2 Have you ever written a poem about someone you know but didn’t want to show it to them?
Sure. I most often don’t show my poems to the people they are written about. Sometimes because I am no longer in touch with the people and often because I simply feel awkward. Additionally, I don’t want to give myself the feeling, ever, that I have to ask someone’s permission to write about something or that I have to “clear” a piece of writing with anyone. It is a monumental task to turn off my internal censor and to shut out the chorus of censors always singing at full and constant volume in the world. If I cannot create within myself a space of radical privacy, of isolation, in which to write, then I generally cannot write.
3 There was a recent article about a medieval feminist poet, Gwerful Mechain, have you heard of her?
No, I’m sorry, I have not.
4 Another “lost” poet, Elise Cowen was a Beat who jumped from a window killing herself. What does that say about poetry culture?
I don’t think that it says anything about poetry culture that is unique to poetry culture. People from all walks of life jump from all types of literal and figurative windows every day. Poets, like everyone, sometimes see an opening where a slamming shut exists.
5 How should we regard poets who were horrible people but whose poetry is considered to be among the most influential?
In my view, it is inherently problematic to judge the work of poets and other artists based on some sort of purity test about their characters. First, the definition of “horrible person” shifts and morphs over time. The definition also differs significantly from person to person and from group to group. It can be a slippery thing to decide who is “good” and who is “bad,” and it is, by definition, subjective. Second, when I look to art of any kind, I am looking to find something that moves me, that causes me to think, that reveals to me what it is to be human and allows me to engage more fully with my own flawed humanity. Often, work that does these things reaches the world through a severely compromised portal. I still want the work. I still need the work. It is seductive to want to believe that extreme talent will be present in a person absent other types of extremity. I would argue that, though that can and does happen, it is overwhelmingly more the exception than the rule.
Francesca Bell’s poems appear in many magazines, including ELLE, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, and Rattle. Her translations from Arabic and German appear in Arc, B O D Y, Circumference, Mid-American Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She is the co-translator of Palestinian poet Shatha Abu Hnaish’s collection, A Love That Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito (Dar Fadaat, 2017), and the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019). She lives with her family in Northern California.
I consider myself a confessional poet, so I purposely and purposefully reveal quite a lot of myself in my poetry. My poems, other than persona poems and poems written about news stories or historical events, are typically about experiences I’ve had and situations I’ve found myself in. That being said, I think that all writers reveal themselves implicitly, sometimes involuntarily, in whatever they are writing.
2 Have you ever written a poem about someone you know but didn’t want to show it to them?
Sure. I most often don’t show my poems to the people they are written about. Sometimes because I am no longer in touch with the people and often because I simply feel awkward. Additionally, I don’t want to give myself the feeling, ever, that I have to ask someone’s permission to write about something or that I have to “clear” a piece of writing with anyone. It is a monumental task to turn off my internal censor and to shut out the chorus of censors always singing at full and constant volume in the world. If I cannot create within myself a space of radical privacy, of isolation, in which to write, then I generally cannot write.
3 There was a recent article about a medieval feminist poet, Gwerful Mechain, have you heard of her?
No, I’m sorry, I have not.
4 Another “lost” poet, Elise Cowen was a Beat who jumped from a window killing herself. What does that say about poetry culture?
I don’t think that it says anything about poetry culture that is unique to poetry culture. People from all walks of life jump from all types of literal and figurative windows every day. Poets, like everyone, sometimes see an opening where a slamming shut exists.
5 How should we regard poets who were horrible people but whose poetry is considered to be among the most influential?
In my view, it is inherently problematic to judge the work of poets and other artists based on some sort of purity test about their characters. First, the definition of “horrible person” shifts and morphs over time. The definition also differs significantly from person to person and from group to group. It can be a slippery thing to decide who is “good” and who is “bad,” and it is, by definition, subjective. Second, when I look to art of any kind, I am looking to find something that moves me, that causes me to think, that reveals to me what it is to be human and allows me to engage more fully with my own flawed humanity. Often, work that does these things reaches the world through a severely compromised portal. I still want the work. I still need the work. It is seductive to want to believe that extreme talent will be present in a person absent other types of extremity. I would argue that, though that can and does happen, it is overwhelmingly more the exception than the rule.
Francesca Bell’s poems appear in many magazines, including ELLE, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, and Rattle. Her translations from Arabic and German appear in Arc, B O D Y, Circumference, Mid-American Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She is the co-translator of Palestinian poet Shatha Abu Hnaish’s collection, A Love That Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito (Dar Fadaat, 2017), and the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019). She lives with her family in Northern California.
Gary Metras
1 How much of yourself do you reveal in your poetry?
I often use something or someone in my personal life as a jumping off point for a poem. For example, I have a 3rd person narrator poem about a child building a tree fort, “The Treehouse," that is based on and dedicated to my son, though he is not directly named in the poem. Another, “First Roses” dedicated to my daughter that is based on her first semi-formal high school dance that uses a first person narrator who is the girl's father. Both are fairly universal of parenting experience, at least here in America. My poem, “The Engagement,” is based on a Ukrainian custom of the bride-to-be cross-stitching a pillow to decorate the marriage bed; the poem is 3rd person unnamed narrator and describes the making of the pillow, its designs and their meanings, along with implied emotions of the young woman sewing; my wife is Ukrainian and did sew the pillow described in the poem; without knowing my wife’s ethnic origin, the poem seems entirely impersonal, as I intended. I taught high school English for thirty-one years and have a chapbook of poems based on some class room experiences and school observations; no poems mention students by name, though a couple teachers are named: Today’s Lesson (Jamaica, VT: Bull Thistle Press, 1997); this press, by the way, is run by my former high school student, Greg Joly, whom I mentored post-school in both poetry writing and letterpress printing. I also have two collections of poems based on my experiences and observations while fly fishing. So there is a lot of “me” in my poems whether or not I appear in them. At the same time, I have many poems based on news/social/historical items. The best example of this is my eighteen-part poem “A Room Full of Walls” about a woman who lived 98 years in a mental institution; the poem is at times reportorial, metaphoric, and imagistic. The poem is based on a real person. I was watching the evening news some years ago and Walter Cronkite reported on the death of one Martha Nelson of New Jersey at age 102, who had been committed to a mental institution at age four. My four-year old daughter was playing with her blocks on the carpet in front of the television and I just could not conceive of how a parent could do such a horrible thing to a child. I began writing right then and there. The next day the New York Times reported this with more detail and I worked some of that information into the poem that ended up taking me about six months to complete.
2 Have you ever written a poem about someone you know but didn’t want to show it to them?
No. If I put someone I know in a poem I always show them. But I rarely write such poems. I believe, though, that if the poet puts someone they know into a poem, the use of them should be complimentary. If not, the poet should put the poem in a forgotten folder in some desk drawer and leave it there.
3 There was a recent article about a medieval feminist poet, Gwerful Mechain, have you heard of her?
Never heard of her. Just Googled and found Poetry Foundation’s little article on her. Very interesting. Hard to say reason for her obscurity. Have you ever heard of the poet Beatrice E. Harmon? She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1922. Her book: Mosaics.
4 Another “lost” poet, Elise Cowen was a Beat who jumped from a window killing herself. What does that say about poetry culture?
My first day in Anthony Hecht’s workshop at Breadloaf Writer’s Conference in 1975, he stated, “Suicide is the occupational hazard of the poet.” His good friend Anne Sexton committed suicide the year before. Several other prominent poets of 20th century also. No need to list them here. But does this say something about a poet’s sensibilities, or more about certain individuals’ weaknesses? For every Hart Crane or Sylvia Plath, a hundred poets die of natural causes (if we count cancer and heart attack as such) or of old age. Like Robert Francis and Marianne Moore.
The larger question is: Should we as a literary culture focus on a poet’s self-death, or longevity, or on their work?
5 How should we regard poets who were horrible people but whose poetry is considered to be among the most influential?
Ezra Pound comes immediately to mind. His anti-semitism is horrible. His near worship of fascism is horrible. But he was a poetic genius. And his ability to shape and define modern poetry has no equal. How many younger poets visited him at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital as if on a pilgrimage? Should there be an asterisk noting his flaws in all and any reference to him in texts and in the back matter of his books? With perhaps a few exceptions in the Cantos, when Pound was writing poetry he was a poet not an anti-semite.
Should poets who are serial/predatory philanderers be treated similarly?
Is a poet who is a hunter and member of the NRA a horrible person?
Is a poet who supports Trump’s presidency a horrible person?
Is president JFK less historic because of his libido?
Etc.
Much of the teaching of poetry/fiction for 20th and 21st century writers includes their biographies because more is known about this than in previous centuries. Part of the idea here is that the student or reader will have an increased awareness of the written art and, hopefully, a greater understanding and appreciation of that art. For example, if we know that poet Joseph Langland was an Army Lt. in the unit that liberated Buchenwald, then we read his poem, “Buchenwald, Near Weimar,” with a different set of eyes than otherwise. When we know that Vincent Van Gogh delayed showing his work at galleries, to the detriment of his living standard, i.e., being impoverished longer than typical, while he spent some years drawing and drawing hands and feet as exercises, even though his brother, Theo, pleaded with him to finish paintings so they could be hung on gallery walls with the intent of selling his art, we have to love his dedication even more. And we, again, look at his finished paintings with a different and better set of eyes.
But this is a concern that needs to be further discussed.
“The Treehouse” in Captive in the Here by Gary Metras (West Somerville, MA:Cervena Barva Press, 2018).
“First Roses and The Engagement” in The Moon in the Pool by Gary Metras (Rockford, MI: Presa Press, 2015).
“A Room Full of Walls”, in Destiny’s Calendar by Gary Metras (Sherbrooke, Quebec: Samisdat Press, 1995, reprinted by Adastra Press, 1998).
“Buchenwald, Near Weimar” in Selected Poems by Joseph Langland (Univ. of Mass. Press, 1991).
Gary Metras is past president of the Pioneer Valley Chapter #276 of Trout Unlimited, the national cold water conservation non-profit. He is the author of eighteen poetry collections, most recently River Voice (Adastra Press, 2019), Captive in the Here (Cervena Barva Press, Dec. 2018) and White Storm (Presa Press, Feb. 2018), which was short-listed for the Massachusetts Poetry Book of the Year by the Mass. Center for the Book. His poems have appeared in such journals as America, California Quarterly, The Common, Connecticut Poetry Review, Gray's Sporting Journal, New England Watershed, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry, Poetry East, Poetry Salzburg Review, Sanctuary (Journal of the Mass. Audubon Society), Tears in the Fence (UK), Wind, Wild Earth, Yankee, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. His Two Bloods: Fly Fishing Poems won the Split Oak Press Chapbook Award in 2010. A retired educator, he has taught middle school, high school, and college writing. In April 2018 he was inducted by the City of Easthampton, Massachusetts as its first Poet Laureate. He fly fishes the streams and rivers of western Massachusetts as often as possible.
I often use something or someone in my personal life as a jumping off point for a poem. For example, I have a 3rd person narrator poem about a child building a tree fort, “The Treehouse," that is based on and dedicated to my son, though he is not directly named in the poem. Another, “First Roses” dedicated to my daughter that is based on her first semi-formal high school dance that uses a first person narrator who is the girl's father. Both are fairly universal of parenting experience, at least here in America. My poem, “The Engagement,” is based on a Ukrainian custom of the bride-to-be cross-stitching a pillow to decorate the marriage bed; the poem is 3rd person unnamed narrator and describes the making of the pillow, its designs and their meanings, along with implied emotions of the young woman sewing; my wife is Ukrainian and did sew the pillow described in the poem; without knowing my wife’s ethnic origin, the poem seems entirely impersonal, as I intended. I taught high school English for thirty-one years and have a chapbook of poems based on some class room experiences and school observations; no poems mention students by name, though a couple teachers are named: Today’s Lesson (Jamaica, VT: Bull Thistle Press, 1997); this press, by the way, is run by my former high school student, Greg Joly, whom I mentored post-school in both poetry writing and letterpress printing. I also have two collections of poems based on my experiences and observations while fly fishing. So there is a lot of “me” in my poems whether or not I appear in them. At the same time, I have many poems based on news/social/historical items. The best example of this is my eighteen-part poem “A Room Full of Walls” about a woman who lived 98 years in a mental institution; the poem is at times reportorial, metaphoric, and imagistic. The poem is based on a real person. I was watching the evening news some years ago and Walter Cronkite reported on the death of one Martha Nelson of New Jersey at age 102, who had been committed to a mental institution at age four. My four-year old daughter was playing with her blocks on the carpet in front of the television and I just could not conceive of how a parent could do such a horrible thing to a child. I began writing right then and there. The next day the New York Times reported this with more detail and I worked some of that information into the poem that ended up taking me about six months to complete.
2 Have you ever written a poem about someone you know but didn’t want to show it to them?
No. If I put someone I know in a poem I always show them. But I rarely write such poems. I believe, though, that if the poet puts someone they know into a poem, the use of them should be complimentary. If not, the poet should put the poem in a forgotten folder in some desk drawer and leave it there.
3 There was a recent article about a medieval feminist poet, Gwerful Mechain, have you heard of her?
Never heard of her. Just Googled and found Poetry Foundation’s little article on her. Very interesting. Hard to say reason for her obscurity. Have you ever heard of the poet Beatrice E. Harmon? She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1922. Her book: Mosaics.
4 Another “lost” poet, Elise Cowen was a Beat who jumped from a window killing herself. What does that say about poetry culture?
My first day in Anthony Hecht’s workshop at Breadloaf Writer’s Conference in 1975, he stated, “Suicide is the occupational hazard of the poet.” His good friend Anne Sexton committed suicide the year before. Several other prominent poets of 20th century also. No need to list them here. But does this say something about a poet’s sensibilities, or more about certain individuals’ weaknesses? For every Hart Crane or Sylvia Plath, a hundred poets die of natural causes (if we count cancer and heart attack as such) or of old age. Like Robert Francis and Marianne Moore.
The larger question is: Should we as a literary culture focus on a poet’s self-death, or longevity, or on their work?
5 How should we regard poets who were horrible people but whose poetry is considered to be among the most influential?
Ezra Pound comes immediately to mind. His anti-semitism is horrible. His near worship of fascism is horrible. But he was a poetic genius. And his ability to shape and define modern poetry has no equal. How many younger poets visited him at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital as if on a pilgrimage? Should there be an asterisk noting his flaws in all and any reference to him in texts and in the back matter of his books? With perhaps a few exceptions in the Cantos, when Pound was writing poetry he was a poet not an anti-semite.
Should poets who are serial/predatory philanderers be treated similarly?
Is a poet who is a hunter and member of the NRA a horrible person?
Is a poet who supports Trump’s presidency a horrible person?
Is president JFK less historic because of his libido?
Etc.
Much of the teaching of poetry/fiction for 20th and 21st century writers includes their biographies because more is known about this than in previous centuries. Part of the idea here is that the student or reader will have an increased awareness of the written art and, hopefully, a greater understanding and appreciation of that art. For example, if we know that poet Joseph Langland was an Army Lt. in the unit that liberated Buchenwald, then we read his poem, “Buchenwald, Near Weimar,” with a different set of eyes than otherwise. When we know that Vincent Van Gogh delayed showing his work at galleries, to the detriment of his living standard, i.e., being impoverished longer than typical, while he spent some years drawing and drawing hands and feet as exercises, even though his brother, Theo, pleaded with him to finish paintings so they could be hung on gallery walls with the intent of selling his art, we have to love his dedication even more. And we, again, look at his finished paintings with a different and better set of eyes.
But this is a concern that needs to be further discussed.
“The Treehouse” in Captive in the Here by Gary Metras (West Somerville, MA:Cervena Barva Press, 2018).
“First Roses and The Engagement” in The Moon in the Pool by Gary Metras (Rockford, MI: Presa Press, 2015).
“A Room Full of Walls”, in Destiny’s Calendar by Gary Metras (Sherbrooke, Quebec: Samisdat Press, 1995, reprinted by Adastra Press, 1998).
“Buchenwald, Near Weimar” in Selected Poems by Joseph Langland (Univ. of Mass. Press, 1991).
Gary Metras is past president of the Pioneer Valley Chapter #276 of Trout Unlimited, the national cold water conservation non-profit. He is the author of eighteen poetry collections, most recently River Voice (Adastra Press, 2019), Captive in the Here (Cervena Barva Press, Dec. 2018) and White Storm (Presa Press, Feb. 2018), which was short-listed for the Massachusetts Poetry Book of the Year by the Mass. Center for the Book. His poems have appeared in such journals as America, California Quarterly, The Common, Connecticut Poetry Review, Gray's Sporting Journal, New England Watershed, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry, Poetry East, Poetry Salzburg Review, Sanctuary (Journal of the Mass. Audubon Society), Tears in the Fence (UK), Wind, Wild Earth, Yankee, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. His Two Bloods: Fly Fishing Poems won the Split Oak Press Chapbook Award in 2010. A retired educator, he has taught middle school, high school, and college writing. In April 2018 he was inducted by the City of Easthampton, Massachusetts as its first Poet Laureate. He fly fishes the streams and rivers of western Massachusetts as often as possible.
Jennifer Juneau
1 How much of yourself do you reveal in your poetry?
I’d say about 100%. Whether or not I am conscious of what comes out specifically on paper, I am in there in the Lacanian sense. This is not to assume the speaker in my work is always myself, but there is definitely an emotional connection.
2 Have you ever written a poem about someone you know but didn’t want to show it to them?
Wanting to show them? Yes and No. Having the poem published in an online journal solves the dilemma for me. If that person sees it and makes the deduction, great. If not, fine. A lot of my newer New York poems have initials in place of names. If you find yourself in one of those poems, you mean the world to me.
3 There was a recent article about a medieval feminist poet, Gwerful Mechain, have you heard of her?
No, and it is a shame. When I studied Old and Middle English in graduate school, the focus was on male poets.
4 Another “lost” poet, Elise Cowen was a Beat who jumped from a window killing herself. What does that say about poetry culture?
Poetry writing is an emotional outlet, like any art. While palliative, sometimes the writing is not enough.
5 How should we regard poets who were horrible people but whose poetry is considered to be among the most influential?
I believe the art should remain separated from the person.
Jennifer Juneau is the author of the novel, ÜberChef USA (Spork Press) and the upcoming poetry collection, More Than Moon (Is A Rose Press) which was a National Poetry Series Finalist.
Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Columbia Journal, Evergreen Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Gathering of the Tribes, Pank, Passages North, Portland Review, Seattle Review, Sensitive Skin Anthology, Space and Time Magazine and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, The Million Writers Award and a Best of the Net.
Jennifer has lived in Zurich, Switzerland, and traveled Europe for over a decade. She studied in the graduate program for Literary Theory and Criticism as well as Linguistics at the University of Zurich.
For work, in Europe she wrote as a sports journalist for 90:00 Soccer Magazine and The Bleacher Report, and covered teams Manchester United, Liverpool FC and Chelsea FC in live Champions League matches. Her work has been syndicated to online soccer magazines including Yard Barker (FOX News Sports.)
Jennifer lives in New York City and co-hosts the Fahrenheit Open Mic every first Sunday of the month at Black & White on E. 10th Street. At the moment, she is working on a second novel and a second full-length poetry book.
I’d say about 100%. Whether or not I am conscious of what comes out specifically on paper, I am in there in the Lacanian sense. This is not to assume the speaker in my work is always myself, but there is definitely an emotional connection.
2 Have you ever written a poem about someone you know but didn’t want to show it to them?
Wanting to show them? Yes and No. Having the poem published in an online journal solves the dilemma for me. If that person sees it and makes the deduction, great. If not, fine. A lot of my newer New York poems have initials in place of names. If you find yourself in one of those poems, you mean the world to me.
3 There was a recent article about a medieval feminist poet, Gwerful Mechain, have you heard of her?
No, and it is a shame. When I studied Old and Middle English in graduate school, the focus was on male poets.
4 Another “lost” poet, Elise Cowen was a Beat who jumped from a window killing herself. What does that say about poetry culture?
Poetry writing is an emotional outlet, like any art. While palliative, sometimes the writing is not enough.
5 How should we regard poets who were horrible people but whose poetry is considered to be among the most influential?
I believe the art should remain separated from the person.
Jennifer Juneau is the author of the novel, ÜberChef USA (Spork Press) and the upcoming poetry collection, More Than Moon (Is A Rose Press) which was a National Poetry Series Finalist.
Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Columbia Journal, Evergreen Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Gathering of the Tribes, Pank, Passages North, Portland Review, Seattle Review, Sensitive Skin Anthology, Space and Time Magazine and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, The Million Writers Award and a Best of the Net.
Jennifer has lived in Zurich, Switzerland, and traveled Europe for over a decade. She studied in the graduate program for Literary Theory and Criticism as well as Linguistics at the University of Zurich.
For work, in Europe she wrote as a sports journalist for 90:00 Soccer Magazine and The Bleacher Report, and covered teams Manchester United, Liverpool FC and Chelsea FC in live Champions League matches. Her work has been syndicated to online soccer magazines including Yard Barker (FOX News Sports.)
Jennifer lives in New York City and co-hosts the Fahrenheit Open Mic every first Sunday of the month at Black & White on E. 10th Street. At the moment, she is working on a second novel and a second full-length poetry book.
January 2020
Samuel Ace
1 Birds, flowers, faces? What image reoccurs throughout your work?
Ocean mud creosote boy bird night sound sea dust
2 If you were a Beat poet, who would you be?
I was always more of a painter first a rothko then a pollock then a twombly then a Martin or then a musician like a glass I once thought ginsberg beating his penis into the air boys with their big bodies smelly in the sheets I felt their music their kind of queer I was drawn thrown aside repelled once I righted myself I sought the women the (hidden) trans poets Barnes Brooks Kyger Ai Rich Lorde Anzaldúa Jordan Grahn Clifton Hacker H.D. Stein
3 Do pop songs and poetry intersect?
Of course! as a child I escaped the gender conformity of a classical music cult after that everything seemed so simple but the music never left I wanted a language bound inexorably to sound
4 Do you have a ritual when you write?
I close my eyes try not to think turn on the water the tv down low
5 Is there a poem you love to read aloud to a lover, partner, friend?
Whichever poem I’m excited about in the moment I find something new and gorgeous every day.
Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, most recently Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish 2019), the newly re-issued Meet Me There: Normal Sex and Home in three days. Don’t wash., (Belladonna* Germinal Texts 2019), and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton. He is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a two-time finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. His work has been widely anthologized and recent poems can be found in Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, Vinyl, and many other journals and anthologies. He currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts.
Ocean mud creosote boy bird night sound sea dust
2 If you were a Beat poet, who would you be?
I was always more of a painter first a rothko then a pollock then a twombly then a Martin or then a musician like a glass I once thought ginsberg beating his penis into the air boys with their big bodies smelly in the sheets I felt their music their kind of queer I was drawn thrown aside repelled once I righted myself I sought the women the (hidden) trans poets Barnes Brooks Kyger Ai Rich Lorde Anzaldúa Jordan Grahn Clifton Hacker H.D. Stein
3 Do pop songs and poetry intersect?
Of course! as a child I escaped the gender conformity of a classical music cult after that everything seemed so simple but the music never left I wanted a language bound inexorably to sound
4 Do you have a ritual when you write?
I close my eyes try not to think turn on the water the tv down low
5 Is there a poem you love to read aloud to a lover, partner, friend?
Whichever poem I’m excited about in the moment I find something new and gorgeous every day.
Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, most recently Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish 2019), the newly re-issued Meet Me There: Normal Sex and Home in three days. Don’t wash., (Belladonna* Germinal Texts 2019), and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton. He is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a two-time finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. His work has been widely anthologized and recent poems can be found in Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, Vinyl, and many other journals and anthologies. He currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts.
Silvia Curbelo
1 Birds, flowers, faces? What image reoccurs throughout your work?
All of these, really. But definitely birds by far – birds of all kinds. Not just birds, but parts of birds: wings, feathers, beaks. The idea of birds, and birdness itself: liftoff, wingspan, soaring, and being carried off in great currents of air.
2 If you were a Beat poet, who would you be?
I guess this is more a matter of which Beat poet I would want to be. That would be Jack Kerouac, I imagine. I’m not a fan of his poems, but the best of his prose is rich, musical and marvelously poetic. Yes, some of it would benefit from heavy editing, but when it sings, it truly soars (there’s that bird imagery from question one) and begs to be read out loud, like most great poems. When I was in my 20’s I memorized whole paragraphs of The Subterraneans, my favorite of his books, and some small chunks from On the Road as well. If I drink a lot of red wine, I can still call up some of those glorious sentences, which seem to be ingrained in my subconscious, but not as accessible when I work at trying to bring them up – like right now.
So yes, definitely Kerouac. Plus, not to seem shallow, but he was easy on the eyes as well, which never hurts…
3 Do pop songs and poetry intersect?
Absolutely, though maybe not as frequently as some people think. Music can be very forgiving. If the melody is beautiful and evocative, the lyrics can take a back seat or sound much better than they really are. But there are many happy instances when this intersection occurs. Some late-career Beatle songs come to mind, and much of Joni Mitchell. Paul Simon seems to be a poet first, and probably Tom Waits.
Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in literature, of all things, which seems to horrify academics and many others, though I am not one of them. While his song lyrics don’t always hold up when compared to some of the best poems, his influence and impact in the world of the arts can’t be denied, so that has to be a consideration.
Of course, Leonard Cohen holds a special and unique place in this intersection. In his very best songs, exquisite lyrics bump up against a tender melody delivered in that brooding monotone that makes all the mysteries of the world open up for a bit.
4 Do you have a ritual when you write?
Even though I’ve had a writing studio in every house where I have ever lived, I seem to do all of my writing at the kitchen table. Every kitchen table of every house. Before I sit down to write, there must be a good cup of coffee. So it always begins there. Firing up the computer or breaking out the note pad means cranking up that coffee maker as well. Then there is the grinding of the beans and the careful measuring, the cup and the cream and the spoon, and the smell of that fresh brew filling the air of the room. As this part of the process is going on, my brain is gradually making the shift from daily, ordinary life to dream life, where images are born.
If it’s late in the day, then the ritual shifts to red wine, which is much less time consuming – uncork and pour – but just as essential.
Always there must be a beverage.
5 Is there a poem you love to read aloud to a lover, partner, friend?
Generally, no; not a particular poem. But I do tend to want to read a good poem out loud, to my own self – my very best audience! That’s part and parcel of the process of discovering a new favorite poem or poet. If I’m home alone, I’ll let it rip, and just sing it out as loudly as the poem calls for. If someone is home, or if I’m out in public, I’ll read very softly, or maybe silently, but hearing my own voice distinctly in my head. I will tell you that, when I’m reading poetry, my lips move as I read – pretty much always. The better the poem, the bigger the movement. If the poem is just so great that I can’t stand it, I’ll call up one of a couple of friends and say, Listen to this…
There’s no one poem in particular, though – just what I’m reading at the moment. Today I’ve got a promising brand-new book by Andrés Cerpa , Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy, and two new-to-me books by Diane Seuss. I’m also re-reading Gianna Russo’s beautiful new collection One House Down. I’m alone in a hotel room at the moment, so anything goes.
If something really shakes my world and you’re one of those couple of friends, you will be hearing from me at some point, I guarantee it!
Silvia Curbelo’s latest collection of poems, Falling Landscape, is available from Anhinga Press. Previous collections include The Secret History of Water (Anhinga Press) and Ambush, winner of the Main Street Rag chapbook contest. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation and the Writer’s Voice, as well as the Jessica Noble Maxwell Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review. She is also a recipient of a 2019 Professional Development Artist Grant from the Tampa/Hillsborough County Arts Council. Her poems have been published widely in literary magazines and more than two dozen anthologies, including The Body Electric (W.W. Norton), Poems, Poets, Poetry (Bedford/St. Martin), and the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. A native of Cuba, Silvia has lived in Tampa, Florida, all her adult life.
All of these, really. But definitely birds by far – birds of all kinds. Not just birds, but parts of birds: wings, feathers, beaks. The idea of birds, and birdness itself: liftoff, wingspan, soaring, and being carried off in great currents of air.
2 If you were a Beat poet, who would you be?
I guess this is more a matter of which Beat poet I would want to be. That would be Jack Kerouac, I imagine. I’m not a fan of his poems, but the best of his prose is rich, musical and marvelously poetic. Yes, some of it would benefit from heavy editing, but when it sings, it truly soars (there’s that bird imagery from question one) and begs to be read out loud, like most great poems. When I was in my 20’s I memorized whole paragraphs of The Subterraneans, my favorite of his books, and some small chunks from On the Road as well. If I drink a lot of red wine, I can still call up some of those glorious sentences, which seem to be ingrained in my subconscious, but not as accessible when I work at trying to bring them up – like right now.
So yes, definitely Kerouac. Plus, not to seem shallow, but he was easy on the eyes as well, which never hurts…
3 Do pop songs and poetry intersect?
Absolutely, though maybe not as frequently as some people think. Music can be very forgiving. If the melody is beautiful and evocative, the lyrics can take a back seat or sound much better than they really are. But there are many happy instances when this intersection occurs. Some late-career Beatle songs come to mind, and much of Joni Mitchell. Paul Simon seems to be a poet first, and probably Tom Waits.
Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in literature, of all things, which seems to horrify academics and many others, though I am not one of them. While his song lyrics don’t always hold up when compared to some of the best poems, his influence and impact in the world of the arts can’t be denied, so that has to be a consideration.
Of course, Leonard Cohen holds a special and unique place in this intersection. In his very best songs, exquisite lyrics bump up against a tender melody delivered in that brooding monotone that makes all the mysteries of the world open up for a bit.
4 Do you have a ritual when you write?
Even though I’ve had a writing studio in every house where I have ever lived, I seem to do all of my writing at the kitchen table. Every kitchen table of every house. Before I sit down to write, there must be a good cup of coffee. So it always begins there. Firing up the computer or breaking out the note pad means cranking up that coffee maker as well. Then there is the grinding of the beans and the careful measuring, the cup and the cream and the spoon, and the smell of that fresh brew filling the air of the room. As this part of the process is going on, my brain is gradually making the shift from daily, ordinary life to dream life, where images are born.
If it’s late in the day, then the ritual shifts to red wine, which is much less time consuming – uncork and pour – but just as essential.
Always there must be a beverage.
5 Is there a poem you love to read aloud to a lover, partner, friend?
Generally, no; not a particular poem. But I do tend to want to read a good poem out loud, to my own self – my very best audience! That’s part and parcel of the process of discovering a new favorite poem or poet. If I’m home alone, I’ll let it rip, and just sing it out as loudly as the poem calls for. If someone is home, or if I’m out in public, I’ll read very softly, or maybe silently, but hearing my own voice distinctly in my head. I will tell you that, when I’m reading poetry, my lips move as I read – pretty much always. The better the poem, the bigger the movement. If the poem is just so great that I can’t stand it, I’ll call up one of a couple of friends and say, Listen to this…
There’s no one poem in particular, though – just what I’m reading at the moment. Today I’ve got a promising brand-new book by Andrés Cerpa , Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy, and two new-to-me books by Diane Seuss. I’m also re-reading Gianna Russo’s beautiful new collection One House Down. I’m alone in a hotel room at the moment, so anything goes.
If something really shakes my world and you’re one of those couple of friends, you will be hearing from me at some point, I guarantee it!
Silvia Curbelo’s latest collection of poems, Falling Landscape, is available from Anhinga Press. Previous collections include The Secret History of Water (Anhinga Press) and Ambush, winner of the Main Street Rag chapbook contest. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation and the Writer’s Voice, as well as the Jessica Noble Maxwell Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review. She is also a recipient of a 2019 Professional Development Artist Grant from the Tampa/Hillsborough County Arts Council. Her poems have been published widely in literary magazines and more than two dozen anthologies, including The Body Electric (W.W. Norton), Poems, Poets, Poetry (Bedford/St. Martin), and the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. A native of Cuba, Silvia has lived in Tampa, Florida, all her adult life.
Priya Dolma
1 Birds, flowers, faces? What image reoccurs throughout your work?
The sky. My work often embodies intense imagery, metaphorical layers and distinct alliteration. But amidst the use of any or no literary device, personification of Nature seems to be a reoccurring theme. The sky being a darling subject, my debut book was titled Ivory Gleam as an ode to the silken white clouds that grace the contemplative atmosphere in which I write. The forthcoming work in progress is another poetry book named My Sonder Sky. To hail from a pristine yet unexplored Himalayan state like Sikkim, with the virginal endowments of environment I daily experience, has made Nature pivotal to my poetry.
Nimbus
I have been selling my secrets
to clouds, they weep
when my heart runs dry.
And when mistral memoirs
elope,
stealing more
than what was agreed to;
they turn into mistresses
of the clear sky, consumed
in its sight – my vanished plight
Birds and flowers are typically employed to denote the ambient sounds and fragrant smell infused in the setting of my piece. They are symbolic of pleasant times or nostalgia.
Star-gazer
Night broke into billions of fireflies.
Constellations atop parallel horizons of
compromising vague hillocks.
Sleep serenaded chirping cherubs.
And there I was, counting concealed
star-hives on a cloud clad carpet
in my ceaseless skies. Taking the case
of an insomniac wake, dealing
with distresses of a dream. The dream
I could see, only with my eyes open.
Faces have not helped me create evocative images. It could be because when I write from the mind's eye, what I visualize is not a particular face but what the face signifies vis-à-vis emotions like familiarity or contempt, youth or dotage, love or betrayal. I have not found myself describing facial features or any person explicitly: the focus lies more on what I see when the eyes are closed and rest of the senses are heightened.
2 If you were a Beat poet, who would you be?
It would have to be Sir Gary Snyder. Zen Buddhism and Nature are our common concerns. He has lived a rather intrepid life, and it is intriguing how he used it to his poetic advantage. Snyder applies Buddhist spirituality in American social activism, and handles natural imagery, sensitively, to convey universally personal derivatives. He has captured the essence of free living, impermanence and holistic learning through a multitude of experiences.
As a Beat Generation poet, his unconventional and flexible style, and vehement propagation of individual rights, have explored extensive issues. He combines the corporeal consciousness with inner workings, and has a refreshing take on metaphysics.
In Passage Through India, he has chronicled his 1962 trip to India sprinkled with some poetry. With his companions, he explored the temples, ashrams, shrines and cities of India. They even met the Dalai Lama. His knowledge on Buddhism and India has left me in awe. Being an Indian Buddhist myself, and a resident of the second smallest Indian state, to perceive such passionate portrayal of our people and place by a Western poet is an asset.
To quote Snyder:
"O, ah! The awareness
of emptiness
brings forth
a heart of compassion!”
3 Do pop songs and poetry intersect?
In my humble opinion, all forms of writing intersect at some point, no matter how vague the overlap. In 2016, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy. It was controversially conferred “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” making him the first songwriter to receive the prestigious award.
Pop song lyrics and poetry sometimes share qualities like rhythm, rhyme, meter, tempo, and others. However, the intersection is marginal. Pop songs are short-versed and rely on repetition of a commonly shared idea or emotion. The language is highly relatable for regular audience. That is how they appeal to the masses. They do not command much introspection.
Lyrics are designed to qualify the technical aspects of a song with instruments, melody, refrain, the singer's voice etc. In most of the cases, they have less impact once the music is taken away, notwithstanding the fact that some lyrics do have great poetic potential.
On the other hand, poems are written as isolated pieces. They use only wordplay to convey vivid images, sensory stimulation, and communication of the content. They can have multiple layers, ambiguous abstraction and a unique language. Poetry often requires deep reflection from the readers.
When adapted by skilled musical maestros, contemporary poems can work wonders as pop song lyrics. Poems and lyrics are not mutually exclusive. They converge as separate genres of equal importance. They both pertain to emotions, poetry pries into the darkest depths of human thinking while pop songs only scratch the surface.
To quote Dylan:
“To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness”
4 Do you have a ritual when you write?
The idiosyncratic writing ritual that I own is midnight activity. What helps me with my creativity is a well-rested back and silence of the night. Around 11 pm, I usually brew some fresh coffee, grab a snack or two, and cosy myself in bed with my laptop or phone. Since I have been digitally documenting my projects, it is easy to type on a flat back. Also, I keep writing throughout the day, whenever I get a chance, about anything and everything under the sun. Often, a random vent or a balanced opinion on issues. Mostly, full of mistakes and scattered ideas. This is known as free-writing. It brings clarity of thought and removes blockages. It is also an important exercise of writing more frequently.
5 Is there a poem you love to read aloud to a lover, partner, friend?
My favourite poem is "Unending Love" by Sir Rabindranath Tagore. It is a dedication to my fiancé, Chewang. I love reading it aloud to the soon-to-be husband, because it speaks beautifully of soul love that is infinite, immortal and unconditional.
To quote Tagore:
“I seem to have loved you
in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart
has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift,
wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.”
Dr. Priya Dolma Tamang is a medical graduate from the northeastern Indian state of Sikkim. With her tribal Nepali roots and deeply seated Buddhist beliefs, culture and mindfulness have both been active themes in her writing. Her debut book, Ivory Gleam, was published by Leadstart Publishers, Mumbai, in 2018. Priya's poetry has found home, among other places, in International Times, Urban Magazine, Artvilla, Headline Poetry, with work forthcoming in Tales of Reverie by Paragon Press. She currently resides in Gangtok with her family comprising of her parents and grandmother.
The sky. My work often embodies intense imagery, metaphorical layers and distinct alliteration. But amidst the use of any or no literary device, personification of Nature seems to be a reoccurring theme. The sky being a darling subject, my debut book was titled Ivory Gleam as an ode to the silken white clouds that grace the contemplative atmosphere in which I write. The forthcoming work in progress is another poetry book named My Sonder Sky. To hail from a pristine yet unexplored Himalayan state like Sikkim, with the virginal endowments of environment I daily experience, has made Nature pivotal to my poetry.
Nimbus
I have been selling my secrets
to clouds, they weep
when my heart runs dry.
And when mistral memoirs
elope,
stealing more
than what was agreed to;
they turn into mistresses
of the clear sky, consumed
in its sight – my vanished plight
Birds and flowers are typically employed to denote the ambient sounds and fragrant smell infused in the setting of my piece. They are symbolic of pleasant times or nostalgia.
Star-gazer
Night broke into billions of fireflies.
Constellations atop parallel horizons of
compromising vague hillocks.
Sleep serenaded chirping cherubs.
And there I was, counting concealed
star-hives on a cloud clad carpet
in my ceaseless skies. Taking the case
of an insomniac wake, dealing
with distresses of a dream. The dream
I could see, only with my eyes open.
Faces have not helped me create evocative images. It could be because when I write from the mind's eye, what I visualize is not a particular face but what the face signifies vis-à-vis emotions like familiarity or contempt, youth or dotage, love or betrayal. I have not found myself describing facial features or any person explicitly: the focus lies more on what I see when the eyes are closed and rest of the senses are heightened.
2 If you were a Beat poet, who would you be?
It would have to be Sir Gary Snyder. Zen Buddhism and Nature are our common concerns. He has lived a rather intrepid life, and it is intriguing how he used it to his poetic advantage. Snyder applies Buddhist spirituality in American social activism, and handles natural imagery, sensitively, to convey universally personal derivatives. He has captured the essence of free living, impermanence and holistic learning through a multitude of experiences.
As a Beat Generation poet, his unconventional and flexible style, and vehement propagation of individual rights, have explored extensive issues. He combines the corporeal consciousness with inner workings, and has a refreshing take on metaphysics.
In Passage Through India, he has chronicled his 1962 trip to India sprinkled with some poetry. With his companions, he explored the temples, ashrams, shrines and cities of India. They even met the Dalai Lama. His knowledge on Buddhism and India has left me in awe. Being an Indian Buddhist myself, and a resident of the second smallest Indian state, to perceive such passionate portrayal of our people and place by a Western poet is an asset.
To quote Snyder:
"O, ah! The awareness
of emptiness
brings forth
a heart of compassion!”
3 Do pop songs and poetry intersect?
In my humble opinion, all forms of writing intersect at some point, no matter how vague the overlap. In 2016, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy. It was controversially conferred “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” making him the first songwriter to receive the prestigious award.
Pop song lyrics and poetry sometimes share qualities like rhythm, rhyme, meter, tempo, and others. However, the intersection is marginal. Pop songs are short-versed and rely on repetition of a commonly shared idea or emotion. The language is highly relatable for regular audience. That is how they appeal to the masses. They do not command much introspection.
Lyrics are designed to qualify the technical aspects of a song with instruments, melody, refrain, the singer's voice etc. In most of the cases, they have less impact once the music is taken away, notwithstanding the fact that some lyrics do have great poetic potential.
On the other hand, poems are written as isolated pieces. They use only wordplay to convey vivid images, sensory stimulation, and communication of the content. They can have multiple layers, ambiguous abstraction and a unique language. Poetry often requires deep reflection from the readers.
When adapted by skilled musical maestros, contemporary poems can work wonders as pop song lyrics. Poems and lyrics are not mutually exclusive. They converge as separate genres of equal importance. They both pertain to emotions, poetry pries into the darkest depths of human thinking while pop songs only scratch the surface.
To quote Dylan:
“To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness”
4 Do you have a ritual when you write?
The idiosyncratic writing ritual that I own is midnight activity. What helps me with my creativity is a well-rested back and silence of the night. Around 11 pm, I usually brew some fresh coffee, grab a snack or two, and cosy myself in bed with my laptop or phone. Since I have been digitally documenting my projects, it is easy to type on a flat back. Also, I keep writing throughout the day, whenever I get a chance, about anything and everything under the sun. Often, a random vent or a balanced opinion on issues. Mostly, full of mistakes and scattered ideas. This is known as free-writing. It brings clarity of thought and removes blockages. It is also an important exercise of writing more frequently.
5 Is there a poem you love to read aloud to a lover, partner, friend?
My favourite poem is "Unending Love" by Sir Rabindranath Tagore. It is a dedication to my fiancé, Chewang. I love reading it aloud to the soon-to-be husband, because it speaks beautifully of soul love that is infinite, immortal and unconditional.
To quote Tagore:
“I seem to have loved you
in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart
has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift,
wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.”
Dr. Priya Dolma Tamang is a medical graduate from the northeastern Indian state of Sikkim. With her tribal Nepali roots and deeply seated Buddhist beliefs, culture and mindfulness have both been active themes in her writing. Her debut book, Ivory Gleam, was published by Leadstart Publishers, Mumbai, in 2018. Priya's poetry has found home, among other places, in International Times, Urban Magazine, Artvilla, Headline Poetry, with work forthcoming in Tales of Reverie by Paragon Press. She currently resides in Gangtok with her family comprising of her parents and grandmother.
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