Rebecca Irene : part two

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry? 

Aside from carving out chunks of uninterrupted time to write, beginning & ending a poem are usually the most difficult phases for me. There are those rare moments when an opening phrase or line suddenly materializes (typically when walking with my dog, in the Maine woods), so I try to always have a beloved Viacro pencil & notebook on me, but more often than not, I have to write a lot of horrible lines in order to arrive at a decent start. Then, the middle gush. The poem takes twists & turns, & usually surprises or horrifies me, but I journal everything down initially. This time is joyful, magical, & mostly destined for the silent chambers of my house’s many trashcans. As I begin to transcribe a working draft to my computer, the poem takes form, & wrestles towards that final blessed line. 

David Hadbawnik : part five

How does a poem begin?

A poem doesn’t begin, it just is. I don’t mean that to be flip. I just believe that a poem is always kind of latent in whatever we’re doing as we go about our day, and it’s mostly a matter of being open to it and keeping an eye and ear out and noticing that it’s there. So I suppose you could say it begins in the moment that we notice and pay attention to what’s happening. Very often I’ll have a line occur to me and it goes through my mind and I don’t notice it or barely notice it, and if I have the means and wherewithal to grab a pen and write it down, it begins right there. Otherwise, it’s gone.

Ken Norris : part two

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

Mouse Eggs. When I was a young poet, hanging around with the other Vehicule Poets, we put our poems in a mimeographed magazine called Mouse Eggs. About six months ago, Endre Farkas revived it as an e-magazine. So I started putting the new poems from Hawaiian Sunrise in Mouse Eggs. So it’s an interesting time to be answering this question. In 1975, my freshest poems were in Mouse Eggs. And in 2021, my freshest poems are in Mouse Eggs. Poetically, I’m once again hanging around with the friends of my youth.

Alan May : part three

How did you first engage with poetry?

As a boy, I went to church services at least three times per week. Our songs were sung in a cappella, so everyone had the song book out and was reading all the verses while singing. So I spent a lot of time with lyrics before I was exposed to poetry. And then there was the Book of Psalms, etc., all of the Old and New Testaments in the weird music of the King James Version. I was exposed to poetry at school but nothing really clicked until we got to Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. Then, soon after, we read aloud "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in class and I thought "This is even better than going to the movies.” 

Greg Hill : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

At one point, many of my favorite poets were all old white guys named William: Shakespeare; Blake; Wordsworth; Yeats; Williams; Collins. Throw in more dead white guys: Percy; Edgar; Robert. I was an academic, a student of the Western canon.

The single book that nudged the way I thought about poetry and writing is the anthology The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. I bought it when I discovered it at a bookstore in San Francisco during a work trip in 2003. Nothing in the book was like any poem I had read in any high school or college textbook for any English or poetry class. Reading those poems felt like I had grown up knowing only classical music and was hearing jazz for the first time. 

So chronologically, the poets in that anthology changed the way I thought about writing.

Later, I discovered Christian Bök, an exemplar of constrained writing. His book-length poem Eunoia is my absolute favorite poem. How could it not be? My MFA critical thesis, detailing my discovery of conceptual poetry, focused a great deal on Bök and on Kenneth Goldsmith. (This was 2013, years before Goldsmith would deliver his now infamous conceptual reading at Brown University which ironically—and maybe inevitably—turned the author into a lightning rod for disdain of a movement that purports to make an author extraneous.)

Lynne Thompson : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Patricia Smith for her approach to subjects the reader thinks she knows about; her work is revelatory because of the fresh approaches she takes to her material (see Incendiary Art; Blood Dazzler)

Pablo Neruda for the depth of his passion for the grand and simple topics he approaches (see: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair; Ode to Common Things)

Brandi Spering : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

When I first started writing poetry 11 years ago, I wrote short pieces with the intention of humor, stringing words together in silly scenarios. If one were to extract a line from poem, I wouldn’t have been able to explain it. Now, there is intention behind everything, as well as a better understanding of my own style, which borders poetry and prose; I no longer try to force form and I rarely stick to one genre.