Gregory Crosby : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

For me, music is poetry, and vice versa (which is funny, as I have zero actual musical ability). I’m always listening for the music in a poem, for the rhythms, whatever they may be. I’ve always felt you have to be a little in love with language (or at least consider it your Best Frenemy Forever) to be a poet, and part of that is recognizing that language is, in fact, a musical language: even on the page, the aurality of poetry should rise up and seize the reader like James Brown’s horn section, or slip under your consciousness like Debussy.

Gregory Crosby : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Vievee Francis’ Forest Primeval rocked my world from the first poem onward—an amazing book. I tend to dip in and out of collections, but this is a book I read straight through. I’ve also been spending quality time with Kirsten Kaschock’s Explain This Corpse, Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems, and Rae Armantrout’s Conjure. 

Gregory Crosby : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

John Berryman taught me how to (partially) write my way out of suffering; Anne Carson taught me that any genre (any thought, really) can be rendered in poetry; Frederick Seidel taught me that rhyme can be put to strange and surprising uses. And Kenneth Koch reminds me, always, to have fun—that poetry is serious play, and should be approached as such. 

Gregory Crosby : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

It feels like a cliché, but at the age of 15 I read “Prufrock” for the first time and was instantly obsessed with the voice of that poem; I’d never come across a voice like that in the poetry I’d been exposed to up until then (I’ve long maintained that Prufrock isn’t a middle-aged man but a young man who is unfortunately already middle-aged). It led me down the whole weird, wonderful rabbit hole of High Modernism. 

Gregory Crosby : part one

Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021, Brooklyn Arts Press) and Walking Away from Explosions in Slow Motion (2018, The Operating System). He teaches creative writing at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and in the College Now Program at Lehman College, and leads poetry workshops for Brooklyn Poets (https://brooklynpoets.org/). 

What are you working on?

I’ve just put the finishing touches on a manuscript of prose and poetry about the pandemic; unfortunately, the last thing anyone wants to read at the moment is poetry and prose about the pandemic. So I’m turning back to an older manuscript, revising and rearranging.