Jacqueline Valencia : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

That would be when I was a kid in school who took books out of the Bookmobile and school library often. I was an only child until I was 7 and it felt like books were a way of learning to navigate the world. It started with Dr. Seuss books and as soon as I learned to read Alice In Wonderland, I was hooked.

Renée M. Sgroi : coda

I think the questions in this series are really interesting, and they really force a person to think about how they approach poetry and/or writing.

Fred Schmalz : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

The same things that I find rewarding about poetry are what I find most difficult, which are that each poem operates on its own terms, and those terms can’t be defined for any other poem, so you essentially have to carry what you can from the other poems you’ve written and rely on none of it. Starting over each time with no assurance of what will happen is both daunting and compelling.

Michael Sikkema : part five

What are you working on?

Right now I have two projects going, in very different stages. The first called Music Before We Were Bodies, and is a personal, almost confessional exploration of my experience as a stutterer and how that has affected my approach to writing. A little sliver of prose from that project can be found here: http://ottawapoetry.blogspot.com/2020/03/on-writing-170-michael-sikkema.html

This project is hybrid, includes verse and prose and is proving very difficult to write. Trauma is at the heart of it and it gets written in fits and starts and then sat aside for a while. While it’s certainly not individual standalone pieces, I don’t know yet if it’s a chapbook or a book length project, or more like a hybrid essay. I’m going to play along and see where it takes me. To be honest, it might not go anywhere.

The other project is also hybrid and plays with elements of video games, interactive storytelling, choose your own adventure books, police procedural stuff, horror tropes, and sci fi elements. It’s called Choose Your Fighter, and it actually lets you do that. It’s much further along than Music Before We Were Bodies, but is still in a seedling stage. I have a lot of notes and ideas, and some first threads written out. I’m designing the project so it’s clear what I will be writing next and that feels good. It’s still exploratory but has direction. I will have a brand new baby in about three weeks, so writing time will disappear somewhat.  Writing it in threads and understanding that it’s a long term project, and can be done episodes at a time makes it less overwhelming.

The manuscript allows a reader to choose a POV and to shift between them. I guess if it were a film, it’d fit into the psychotronic category, and I’d like for the end result to feel like reading is game playing, with an emphasis on play.

This one might not turn out how I have planned, but I’m confident it will turn into something.

Dorsey Craft : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Revision. Looking back at my own work makes me feel so vulnerable, especially since I often write a poem and (foolishly, brazenly) send it out to a magazine that same day. So I’m sheepish about going back in, which is almost always what the poem needs. I someday want to become one of those people that cannot stop revising and take years with a single poem, but right now I am taking baby steps. I change one or two words in a sitting. I try to make myself give poems time to marinate and feel less like mine.

Stella Hayes : part one

Russian-American poet Stella Hayes is the author of poetry collection One Strange Country (What Books Press, forthcoming in 2020). She grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Prelude, The Indianapolis Review and Spillway, among others.

Photo credit: Karin Charbit-Harnevo

What are you working on?

I am excited to have just returned to my publisher the last round of proofs of One Strange Country, my debut poetry collection forthcoming in October. I am also placing my second book Nowhere with Him.

Before the pandemic, I was working on Propaganda, my third poetry book. I had 25 poems. In it I am investigating how erotic, familial and parental love is founded on an accepted set of illusions/delusions. Night is a leitmotif and how I prefer it to day. I find myself going to bed at nearly dawn and so what I do at night continues to be a theme. At the moment, everything is up in the air and I am—be it unwillingly— find myself writing pandemic poems. I am hoping to weave them into the book, abandon the book altogether, and/or write a cycle of “Pandemic Chronicles.”

Elaine Equi : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

Not as much as I would wish it to be. I’m more of a visual person. Growing up, no one in my family played an instrument or took music too seriously. I like all kinds of music, but always feel I’m missing a key part of it. I’m mystified by it much like some people say they’re mystified by poetry. That said, I spend an enormous amount of time listening to the music in and around words – the patter and patois between them. I even have a line in one of my poems that says, “I write because I can’t sing.” It’s funny, but partly true. True in that my singing voice is less than stellar, but also true that writing for me is a way to participate in music-making – at least my version of it.