Shara Lessley : part five

How does a poem begin?

With curiosity. And discomfort. With a question. Or an image. A poem begins with the ordinary. The extraordinary. The particular. Or the peculiar. This poem started with an image; that one, an idea. Your poem begins with a fragment; mine, a gallop. That poem started where the last one ended, meaning with the one true note that is silence. This poem (like those before it) is falling apart, but will pick itself up and begin again, hoping to sing.    

Shara Lessley : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Here There Was Once a Country (Vénus Khoury-Ghata, trans. Marilyn Hacker), Kumukanda (Kayo Chingonyi), Human Hours (Catherine Barnett), My Bishop and Other Poems (Michael Collier), Deaf Republic (Ilya Kaminsky).

Shara Lessley : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Frank Bidart, Carl Phillips, George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Wisława Szymborska, John Donne, Kathleen Jamie, Shane McCrae, Spencer Reece, Federico García Lorca, Emily Berry, Louise Glück, Dunya Mikhail, and on and on and on...

Shara Lessley : part two

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Nothing about poetry is easy. I fail constantly. That there is great joy in the failure tells me I’ve found my calling.

Shara Lessley : part one

Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife and Two-Headed Nightingale, and coeditor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, her awards include an National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize, among others. Shara was the inaugural Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College and currently serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Acre Books. She lives in Oxford, England.

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

Bruce Snider has been my primary reader for more than a decade and a half. He sees every draft I write, whether it’s poetry, creative nonfiction, or criticism. Together, we dreamed up and coedited The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, an anthology of essays. I couldn’t ask for a better collaborator or friend. Robin Ekiss, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Danielle Cadena Deulen, David Roderick, Rachel Richardson, and Sara Michas-Martin are also important readers and sources of great support.