Adam O. Davis : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

I grew up in transit which meant long trips filled with country music and books-on-tape. One of my earliest musical memories was Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler,” which I maintain is a stone-cold classic. As a child, I loved the cadence of the lyric, “he crushed out his cigarette,” and also its specificity. He didn’t put out the cigarette; he crushed it out. Paul Simon’s Graceland was a mainstay during family road trips and his use of repetition fascinated me: “I know what I know/I have said what I said.” I immediately aspired to that rubberband-like fluency and logic. Finally, my hope for every poem I write is that it have the prayer-like intensity and spookiness of Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song.” The song has the bluesman’s skill of making the same lines sound new each time (their initial playfulness giving way to dread), and the atmospherics kill me—there’s something sacred in those acoustics, that pitch-black room in which the singer decries the horrors of his workday knowing the next workday is only a night’s sleep away. All this said, I’m careful to recognize that music and poetry are two separate enterprises—though they can both inspire each other, they can never be each other. As Glyn Maxwell notes in his masterful book, On Poetry, “The other half of everything for songwriters is music. For poets it’s silence, the space, the whiteness [of the page].” Poets have to make the language work double-time to communicate the atmosphere that music does for the song. Plus, a killer guitar solo can make even the clunkiest of lyrics forgivable. Just look at Van Halen.

Jean Marc Ah-Sen : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I went to visit my family in Africa and found all of my cousins’ dog-eared school books from the seventies and eighties. I have thirteen aunts and uncles on my dad’s side, so there was quite a collection of these imposing, dusty hardbacks. The education system there was structured differently, and had a European flavour to it. I found the material to be quite challenging. I took some poetry books back with me and read them on the plane ride home. I started with a compendium of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems. It was the perfect introduction for someone of my sensibilities. 

Sarah Dowling : part five

How does a poem begin?

My poems begin with obsessions, unanswerable questions, and phrases that I can’t get out of my head. For my last book, Entering Sappho, I began with the title of the collection, which is a phrase I saw on a road sign in rural Washington. I couldn’t get it out of my head, and over the course of six years, the whole collection grew out of those two words.

Neil Surkan : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’m always nosing around in multiple collections at a time. Here’re the ones slung over chair arms and tented on countertops right now:

Henri Cole’s Blizzard. WTF. What a breathtakingly unflinching collection. Wham. Can’t praise it enough. Euphoria. Terror. Grief. Sweetness.

Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas. There’s something about this book. It’s always off my shelf. The opening call to “make room in the mouth / for grassesgrassesgrasses” truly, truly amazes me. 

Julie Joosten’s Light Light. I had never seen the word “Agnotology” before. Agnotology: the study of culturally produced ignorances. 

Bradley Willow Trumpfheller’s Reconstructions. This chapbook contains a snap bracelet image that I’ll never forget. 

Nick Laird’s Feel Free. The eponymous poem always gives me swoops of wonder. A great dad poem. 

Mark Strand’s Almost Invisible. I don’t know what makes a prose poem tick. But I really like these prose poems. Some feel like riddles that Strand himself never answered. 

Kirby’s forthcoming Poetry is Queer. There’s a wisdom in it that is rare and so, so vibrant (courage). 

Jessica Barksdale Inclán : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

It sounds right with my eye. I can see its wholeness. It resounds, all of it. It’s a feeling, a done poem. A sound and a feeling. So unhelpful! But I think every poet knows what I’m trying to say—it’s the same thing as when we listen to a completely successful poem while at a reading. It’s like a bell ringing.

Lisa Panepinto : part four

Why is poetry important?

I’ve been lucky to hear poet Martín Espada read in person twice. The first time I was in Freeport and he said to a group of us, “Of course poetry matters! The fascists who imprison and kill poets for protesting oppression realize the power of the written word.” And indeed, just recently several Burmese poets were jailed and killed for opposing a military coup in Burma. 

Artist persecution happens in the US as well. Buffy Sainte-Marie was blacklisted in the 60s when the LBJ administration forbade American radio stations from playing her music—even though she was doing nothing criminal. She was probably targeted just for being an Indigenous woman with lyrics that promote peace and tell the truth about American Indian experiences. I’m deeply inspired by the courage of such people who use creativity to fight for liberation. I recently watched an Alice Walker talk on her website. She brilliantly noted how our minds are constantly under attack by the colonizer, so we must actively protect our minds; she suggested meditation as one method of protection. Walker reminded me that poetry can be another way to protect our minds—the page can become a place of sovereignty, light, exaltation, sanctuary, and justice. 

Andrew McSorley : part one

Andrew McSorley is the author of What Spirits Return (Kelsay Books, 2019). A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at Southern Illinois University, his poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The Minnesota Review, UCity Review, HAD, Birmingham Arts Journal, and many others. You can find him on twitter @andrew_myron, and on the web at www.andrewmcsorleypoetry.com He lives and works in Appleton, Wisconsin. 

Photo credit: Holly Tuyls

What are you working on?

For the last couple of months I have been taking up much more prose poetry than usual. I’m finding that the freedom of enjambment and the line allows me to focus more on narrative, which is something my poetry always wanted to focus on. But, the desire to be lyrical and melodic is too strong for me in the envelope of a form like, say, a sonnet. I love how brief I can be in a prose poem, but how much room I have to explore and jump around naturally, too.