Ren (Katherine) Powell : part three

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

There are several poets I turn to for different reasons. When I am feeling vulnerable and need a hug, I pull out my worn copy of Patricia Fargnoli’s Necessary Light (Utah State University Press). She worked as a counselor before she was a poet. I don’t think she ever stopped comforting people. When I’m feeling insignificant, I pull out Elisabeth’s Bishop’s collected poems. Her humor is sly, and her humanity all over the page. When I need to be reminded of resiliency I reread “Song” by Brigit Peegan Kelly. It’s a painfully sweet poem to read again and again. Can you imagine turning out just one such perfect piece of art into the world? 

I have to say, reading these poets doesn’t directly renew my writing life. All of them intimidate me as a writer. But their poems renew me as a person. So it’s just one slow circle.. I come around in the end to a blank page.

Stephen Jackson : part two

How does a poem begin?

Most of what I write is written in that weird state between sleep and waking. This is where my raw material comes from. Later in the day I will type it into a document that won’t get opened again for three months (I used to wait six). Part of my daily schedule is to open the document created three month prior to that day and give it a first revision and a title, if it doesn’t already have one. This keeps things interesting, because I have no idea what I’m about to open up and work on. And I usually have only a vague remembrance of writing it. It’s a little like revising someone else’s poems. Occasionally, the writing is promising, oftentimes it is less so. One way or the other, I require myself to work with what I have before me until I’ve turned it into as good a piece as I possibly can. If it’s still promising, this can go on for days, weeks, months, or years. 

Christopher Merrill : part one

Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.

Photo credit: Ram Devineni

What are you working on?

I have just sent off the galleys for a new book of prose poems, Flares, which White Pine Press will publish in May, not long after the University of Iowa Press issues “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up”: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings, A Selection with Commentary, which my colleague, Ed Folsom, and I wrote. Meantime I am writing The Trials of Roger Williams, a biography of my first relative in the New World, while remaining alert for something that might become a poem.

Nathanael O’Reilly : part three

How did you first engage with poetry?

My father was a high school English teacher and I grew up in a house full of books. I read voraciously from a young age, but I mostly read fiction until I was in my mid-teens. I was raised in a Christian household and read the Bible frequently, so the first poetry I would have engaged with would have been the Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon and Isaiah. The first poets I remember reading on my own and really falling in love with were John Keats, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, John Donne and Seamus Heaney. I had a fantastic high school English teacher, Rob Robson, who gave me permission through his passion and example to immerse myself in reading and writing poetry. He introduced me to Heaney, Donne, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Phillip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Les Murray. I lived in a large country town in Australia where most people only seemed to care about Aussie Rules football, drinking beer and fighting, so reading and writing poetry felt like a radical, subversive, secret pursuit. 

Tom Harding : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

My beside currently has books by Selma Hill, Claudia Rankin, William Stafford.

My favourite book of recent times is a collection edited by John Brehm entitled The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness.

Jessi MacEachern : part one

Jessi MacEachern lives in Montréal, QC. Her writing on the contemporary feminist poetics of Lisa Robertson, Erín Moure, and Rachel Zolf has been published in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature Canadienne and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Her poetry has been published in Poetry Is Dead, Vallum, MuseMedusa, Canthius, PRISM, and CV2. Her first full-length poetry collection, A Number of Stunning Attacks, is forthcoming with Invisible in March 2021. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University.

What are you working on?

I don’t have a specific project in mind, I never do, the “project” is almost always discovered after the thing is completed, but I am attempting to write a poem a day in 2021. I say this at the beginning of the year, with full awareness that it is a terrible thing to make a public promise you are unlikely to keep. With these first poems, there is the undercurrent of our present tumultuous moment in time, it’s unavoidable, but I’m trying to come at it slant: an investigation into slow time or a foray into the interior lives of household objects.

Jamie Townsend: part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I start first as a reader and in fact didn’t start a regular writing practice until I was a senior in High School. Reading poetry is still the number one fuel for writing my own, so I am seldom in a moment of sustained writing without also reading a variety of things at the same time.

Poets who really changed my conception of what poetry could do started with reading people like Charles Olson and George Oppen. Discovering these writers lead me to apply for the writing graduate program at Naropa University, where there were an abundance of classes were specifically focused on contemporary experimental writers (I love their commitment to teaching poets who were/are still actively writing, younger writers with a sometimes slim publishing history, and supporting underrepresented individuals and communities within poetry world). Naropa introduced me to New Narrative writing, which has subsequently become a central influence on my work. Also, while I was a student there I studied with Bhanu Kapil, Anselm Hollo, and Bobbie Louise Hawkins, among others, who introduced me to the New York School and the Berkeley Renaissance. Today I still read a lot of writers within those eras, particularly James Schuyler, Tim Dlugos, Hannah Weiner, Bernadette Mayer, Lewis Warsh, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, etc. 

Moving to Oakland 6 years ago helped me immensely in connecting with a group of younger writers, among whom are some of my favorite contemporary writers: Ivy Johnson, Sara Larsen, Wendy Trevino, Lauren Levin, Laura Woltag, Angel Dominguez, Ted Rees, Oki Sogumi. I tend to like writers who start from personal inquiry/narrative and use that to connect to larger systemic social issues or concerns; a lot of Bay Area writing fits this mold.

If I were to pick one poet who is my main source of inspiration as a writer it would have to be John Wieners. If I were to pick two I would add Kevin Killian.