Tommye Blount : part five

How does a poem begin?

This is one of the questions that always makes me feel like a bad poet, because I don’t have one set way of approaching poems. There are some poems that arrive to me quite fast like “My God, Lick Him Clean” from my book Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books). Then again, that might not be the whole picture.

The painting that sent me to the poem, “Portrait of Christopher D. Fisher, Fourth Reich Skinhead, 1995” by Peter Williams, had been in my head for years. It’s on view in Detroit of Institute of Arts (DIA). Before The Pandemic, I was a frequent visitor to the DIA, so the painting was always a stop on my perusal through the galleries. Nightmarishly grotesque yet somewhat whimsical, the painting challenged me and terrified me.

The DIA approached me about participating in a poetry series called “Poetry is Art / Art is Poetry.” They asked me, and a few other poets from Detroit, to pick a painting from the African American gallery, and write a poem in conversation with that painting. Of course, I knew it would be Williams’ painting. The actual writing of the poem took three months, but, unbeknownst to me, I had been writing it in my head over the years, each time I visited the painting.

With all of that said, I do think I write poems in my head, but don’t realize that I am doing that work. When I am pressured into writing a poem, a deadline or something like that, is when the thing actually comes out. Then there are some poems that, at the time of creation, I think of as false beginnings. I have abandoned many of those only to come back years later and go, “Oh, I know what you were after now, Tommye.” So I guess both are true for me in how poems begin: sometimes it requires pressure to get it from my head to the page; and other poems require a few years for me to catch up to their initial impulse.

Mark Harris : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry? 

The desire to get it right, to make an impossibly perfect creation, gets in the way. I need to tear that impulse down before I can write.

Charlie Clark : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Well, there are my teachers—Phillis Levin, Michael Collier, Stanley Plumly, Elizabeth Arnold, Joshua Weiner. Each of them was and remains incredibly important to my writing. But aside from direct tutelage, I’ve had countless moments reading poems and books that have altered my sense of what a poem is or can do, and therefore what I need to be willing to bring to the page, creatively. I think of these as moments from which there is no going back. One of the earliest such experiences I had was encountering Tomaž Šalamun’s poem “History” as an undergraduate. It was like nothing I had ever read before. There is the impossible (wonderfully self-mythologizing) assurance of that first line—so bold and yet somehow coy, the concision of each line, its understanding of breath and utterance, the tenuousness of the connection from line to line, image to image (though the connections are there). It’s a poem that starts one place and seems to run immediately in every other direction but forward. It’s a poem I have spent decades coming back to, imitating, reminding myself of how to move away from the self into the universe, but always remain in very tactile particulars.

More recently, I’ve been absolutely floored by Ai’s first few books: her ability to inhabit the dramatic first person, the project of exploring history through the voices of its players big (JFK, Joe McCarthy) and small (an anonymous journalist or police officer, a participant in Kristallnacht). She makes each of them intimate, strange, and worthy of our attention. The poems become so much more than a checklist of historical signifiers; they become excavations of the strange particulars of human psychology. They are phenomenal. There’s no going back from them.

Victoria Mbabazi : part two

How does a poem begin?

A poem usually starts with me when I get fixated on a sentence from an intrusive thought or something someone said to me. I tend to use conversations as prompts which sometimes makes me a bad conversationalist because I can be quite spacey. If I have no one around me to use for content I go to music and I try to find inspiration from the beats or the rhythm of the songs.

Julie Hogg : part one

Julie Hogg is published widely in many literary journals and anthologies. Her debut pamphlets are Majuba Road Vane Women Press 2016 and Eleutheromania Blueprint Poetry Press 2019. She tweets @hogg_julie.

What are you working on?

Firstly, I’m currently thoroughly enjoying writing the final poems of my first, full, collection. Also, as a publisher, fellow poet Jo Colley and I are Blueprint Poetry Press; we founded in the later part of 2019, publishing satisfying slices of poetry by poets who are between full collections @poetryblueprint. Following publication of my debut pamphlet Majuba Road in 2016, Vane Women Press invited me to become a member of their esteemed collective; we publish first pamphlets of fine poetry by women poets in the North East of England. www.vanewomen.co.uk. I’m lucky enough to review poetry pamphlets and collections for London Grip. www.londongrip.co.uk

Michael Chang : part five

Why is poetry important? 

All poetry is political.  Let’s get that out of the way first.  For me, poetry is an avenue for political protest and bearing witness.  With my unique lens as a lawyer and political operative, I believe in storytelling as a means of affecting change.  Maya Angelou said that there “is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.”  At a time when forces choose to pick at the historical scabs of inequity and injustice, we must bear witness!  We must say loudly: we’re here!  And use the language of seeing and telling as a means of strengthening our communities and advocating for our fellow people.

In my own work, I consider aspects of diaspora dislocation, estranging inheritance, the decentering of self, distance, rupture, and restlessness.  Ultimately, poetry is important because it challenges convention and introduces unruliness, boundlessness, borderlessness as a means of reclaiming power and enacting change.

Keith Leonard : part one

Keith Leonard is the author of the poetry collection Ramshackle Ode (Mainer/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). His poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Believer. Keith has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I’m afraid I don’t. Not really. It’s generally a vague sensation. I try to lean towards hope in my work—which is always an incomplete gesture, a feeling with a touch of mystery and momentum. For that reason, I try not to over-polish a poem—I want a line or phrase I don’t completely understand in there.