Valerie Witte : part three

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

Usually through performance. I participate in collaborative readings and events fairly often, usually in Portland or the Bay Area, where I used to live. I am also a founding member of the Bay Area Correspondence School, and we produce events periodically, which by definition have a collaborative component. I love incorporating different kinds of media into my performances. For example, I sometimes record audio of myself reading the poems and then play the audio as I read live, creating overlaps and dissonances to enhance the audience experience. I recently created a slide show of images to accompany the audio. It’s definitely a goal of mine to create an experience that is “not just a reading,” that will surprise and hopefully delight the audience, engaging them in ways they wouldn’t typically experience or expect at a poetry reading.

Charlie Baylis : part four

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

Poetry can certainly be draining. Not necessarily the sitting still, writing part but the aftermath of looking for a place for a poem, looking for readers, all the peculiar nonsense that comes with it. When I’m tired of poetry I don’t look to poetry for help. Do not give the alcoholic more alcohol! I might focus on things like playing chess, reading novels, watching stupid youtube videos. I also like rollerblading, swimming, football, nature.

Tldr: Rumi

A.H. Lewis : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

When I found the poetry of Lang Leav and Nikita Gill and Lauren Eden, to name a few, I was blown away by the sense of empowerment some their poems emulated. I’d never come across poetry that succinct and powerful before and it made me want to write my own poetry in a similar vain. There are also a number of poets, whom I will not name, whose poetry I absolutely cannot stand because of how little I agree with their messages/form/etc. and their work instilled in me that if I want a poet to represent my voice more accurately, that poet would have to be me.

Sarah A. Etlinger : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I know when a poem is finished when my coach/mentor says it is! To be less flippant, though, it’s finished when I stop thinking about it. Though many of my poems get revised months and even years later, and there is always potential for revision, I find that if I’ve stopped thinking about the poem, it’s done.

I think it also depends what we mean by “done”. As I often tell my students, there’s always room for improvement or clarity. This was especially true when I was editing my last book: I revisited each poem—all of which were “done” many senses of the word!—and worked on fine-tuning language, finessing line breaks, etc. Some poems did wind up almost exactly the same, and others did have some re-working where lines were re-worked or stanzas moved, taken out, etc. However, I’m not sure this counts as “finishing” because the idea(s) of the poems were not adjusted. If we consider “done” as “no changes, ever” then my poems are done when I have no more control over them. If we consider “done” as something else; as the idea is clear and it’s just a matter of execution, then I think it might be a different story.

Stephen Furlong : part five

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

When I try to say something worth breath, I struggle with doubt. And it’s not just a poetry thing, but it definitely comes out when I’m working with words. It’s like a shadow in the room and when my head gets loud, it overtakes the bookshelves, the pens run out of ink, I crumble up paper, and I sit seemingly defeated. And that happens more and less now that I have a chapbook out in the wild and I’m doing the wonderful, scary, exciting, terrifying thing that is sending out my full-length. But there’s an old song and one of the lines is this: My fears have worn me out. And I’m choosing more often than not to not get worn out by my fears because they are exhausting—and there is so much light to be found, and when there’s light, I feel like I can do just about anything.

Natasha Sanders-Kay : part five

How does a poem begin?

As a feeling. I’ll see something that pisses me off or something that puzzles or inspires me and that feeling will follow me around until I’ve externalized it, propelled it onto the page and into plain sight.

Lesley Wheeler : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’m writing about Samiya Bashir’s Field Theories, from 2017. Two new books that left strong after-impressions are Paisley Rekdal’s Nightingale and Hai-Dang Phan’s Re-enactments.