Amanda Stovicek : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading recently?

I’ve been re-reading Good Bones by Maggie Smith. It is my go-to when things feel rough and when I want clean and elegant language. Smith’s poems have the right amount of words and sing with emotion. I cannot recommend this book enough.

I have just finished American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes. I loved Hayes’ collection How to Be Drawn, and this book takes a very different approach. But the lyricism and music of the poems is still there. I read this one out loud in one sitting and found so much connective tissue and repetition and sound. I definitely recommend reading it in one go, because otherwise you might miss the through-lines that Hayes draws.

I have just started reading Louise Gluck’s American Originality: Essays on Poetry. I am not very far into the collection, but Gluck’s prose is just as sharp as her poems.

Mark Antony Owen : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Absolutely. I used to insist poetry had to rhyme (it doesn’t). That poems must use accepted forms (a nonsense). That … well, many other ridiculous things besides. All of which changed once I started reading poets like Robin Robertson, Connie Bensley, Hugo Williams and half a dozen others. Work that led me on to that of scores of younger, newer writers. So when I’m asked now what advice I’d give to aspiring poets, I usually suggest they unshackle themselves from what they think they know – and possibly also, from what they were taught in school.

Judson Hamilton : part five

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

One thing I really like about poetry is how flexible it is; how it can envelop any subject or stylistic bent you may want to throw at it. And it is the only form I know of that can make sense without making sense. Which truly makes it invaluable.

gc cohen : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Absolutely. When I was a teenager, I always thought poetry had to be about love or angst. So that’s all I wrote about when I was younger. My consideration of poetry changed as I changed, and it has become ridiculously cathartic, allowing me to grapple with, work through, and further contemplate tough shit that has plagued me for years – even if I just write something and keep it to myself.

Juliet Cook : part one

Juliet Cook's poetry has appeared in a small multitude of magazines. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, recently including a collaboration with j/j hastain called Dive Back Down (Dancing Girl Press, 2015), and an individual collection called From One Ruined Human to Another (Cringe-Worthy Poets Collective, 2018).

Cook's first full-length individual poetry book, Horrific Confection, was published by BlazeVOX more than ten years ago. Her more recent full-length poetry book, A Red Witch, Every Which Way, is a collaboration with j/j hastain published by Hysterical Books in 2016. Her most recent full-length individual poetry book, Malformed Confetti was published by Crisis Chronicles Press in late 2018.

Cook also sometimes creates semi-abstract painting collage art hybrid creatures.

Find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

How did you first engage with poetry?

To an extent, via Mother Goose and other nursery rhymes. To another extent, via high school English class. To a more personal and more contemporary extent, through tons of poetry books and chapbooks I discovered for myself or was introduced to in small bookstores, college classes, libraries, and at poetry readings.

Siân Griffiths : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

No one is more important to me than Sylvia Plath. Her poetry broke everything I thought I knew about poetry, so many of which I learned in high school from Victorian poets. She showed me how a simple word could be elevated through cadence and contrast. Lines like “You do not do, you do not do/ Any more, black shoe” are so deceptively easy but also musical, but then she takes those long oos of do and shoe and shutting them down with “in which I have lived like a foot”—did the word foot ever feel so cramped, so final? And she opens it up again with “barely daring to breath or achoo,” which is delightfully comical. And she does this kind of thing over and over. I could read her all day.

Before her, I was really in love with Robert Browning, and I still love the way a poem like “Porphyria’s Lover” is part horror film, part confession. I remember reading that poem the first time as a high school sophomore and thinking, Whoa! Poetry isn’t supposed to be this violent, is it? But it is, and it’s beautiful. Understanding how Browning’s confessional dramatic monologues were fictions helped me understand Plath’s work as a constructed fiction as well, which I think is really important to unpacking her work and getting past the autobiographical way writers like Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes framed her poetry in general and Ariel in particular.

Colin Dardis : part one

Colin Dardis is a poet, editor, and arts coordinator from Northern Ireland. His debut collection, the x of y, was released in 2018 from Eyewear. His work has recently been listed in the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, Over The Edge New Writer of the Year Award, and Best Reviewer of Literature, Saboteur Awards 2018. Colin co-runs Poetry NI, a multimedia platform for poets. His work has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and USA.

What are you working on?

At the start of January, I just got accepted to release a new collection, entitled The Dogs of Humanity, with Fly on the Wall Poetry. The book won’t be released to August, but my immediate attention is with tightening up those poems, making them as good as possible. There’s going to be between 30-40 pieces, all loosely related through canine or other animal imagery.  I’m also writing a 50,000 word novella via Twitter, called The Lost Stations. It’s a story entirely in the third person, told through 15 different locations, and I’m tweeting about 130-150 words a day.