Jamie Evan Kitts : part one

Jamie Evan Kitts (she/her/hers) is a Co-Managing Editor of Qwerty Magazine, a member of the Egg Poets Society, a settler on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik People, and a trans woman. Her work has appeared in Poetry Pause, The Malahat Review, Augur Magazine, and elsewhere.

What are you working on?

I am currently Co-Managing Editor of Qwerty Magazine, so right now I’m preparing the launch of issue 46. We’ll soon be entering our reading period for issue 47. I’m also figuring out how Qwerty can expand into chapbook publication. The goal is to publish two chapbooks with the judges and the winner of a chapbook contest under a new imprint. Personally, I’ve been working on a zine of food poems which I’m excited to launch in 2023 through itch.io. I’ve been thinking of it like a demo tape or an EP which collects the single poems I’ve had published in the last couple years.

Lee Ann Roripaugh : part one

Lee Ann Roripaugh’s fifth volume of poetry, tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), was named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library, selected as a poetry Finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, cited as a Society of Midland Authors 2020 Honoree in Poetry, and was named one of the “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections in 2019” by Book Riot. She is the author of four other volumes of poetry: Dandarians (Milkweed, Editions, 2014), On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), Year of the Snake (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), and Beyond Heart Mountain (Penguin, 1999). She was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The South Dakota State Poet Laureate from 2015-2019, Roripaugh is a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as Director of Creative Writing and Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review. Roripaugh served as one of the jurors for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and was appointed as the Mary Rogers Field and Marion Field-McKenna Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at DePauw University for spring 2022.

What are you working on?

I’m currently in the process of finishing up my sixth volume of poetry, a manuscript titled Kaze no Denwa / The Wind Phone. While conducting research for my prior book, tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, I learned that a man named Itaru Sasaki had placed a phone booth with a disconnected rotary-dial phone in a hilltop garden overlooking Otsuchi, Japan—a century-old town decimated by the 2011 tsunami. Sasaki originally used the phone to process his grief over the loss of a beloved family member. He described these conversations as phone calls made “on the wind.” After the tsunami, survivors who’d lost loved ones started visiting Sasaki’s phone booth from all along the Tohoku coast—making pilgrimages to speak to their dead on what became known as the kaze no denwa, or “wind phone.” Apparently, visitors would share their daily news, or express their regrets. Sometimes callers would plead with their deceased to please come back, or beseech them to look out for one another. Sometimes they’d simply say that they were lonely. In the most heartbreaking phone calls, callers would apologize for not having been able to save their dead. 

Needless to say, I found these accounts of the wind phone resonant and incredibly moving. But also, because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about intersections of loss (environmental loss; personal loss; parental losses due to aging, death, and dementia; losses due to trauma; losses due to disasters such as COVID-19 or climate change), I began to ask myself what it might mean to write a “wind phone” poem. And so I began drafting direct-address elegiac poems that speak to these types of grief, putting them in conversation with one another: my father’s death, my mother’s Alzheimer’s, extinction, climate change, COVID-19, as well as psychological and emotional losses due to abuse, illness, or trauma.

These direct-address poems are interspersed with poems written in five parts that circulate associationally and linguistically around a single word, or concept. I’ve been thinking of these poems as “mappings.” I also wanted to set these mappings in dialogue with an ancient Japanese map called “Jishin-no-ben.” “Jishin-no-ben” represents an ouroboros, a dragon eating its own tail, circling around a geographical area in Japan. This map was apparently meant to serve as a visual explanation, or warning, for the earthquakes and tsunamis that had occurred there. These are poems in which I map out a larger context for the disasters creating the griefs, or losses, that are spoken on the wind. Each section also contains a hybrid prose poem/lyric flash essay “notes” piece that unpacks some of the related psychological underpinnings, or fallout, of trauma. 

Sara Henning : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing? 

Early on, confessional and post-confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Kim Addonizio, Mary Oliver, and Dorianne Laux gave me permission to write about how I experienced the world. Poets who position themselves between narrative and lyric modes continue to teach me how to conceptualize experience and its music: poets like Lynda Hull and Mark Doty, Lee Ann Roripaugh and Larry Levis. Early on, I encountered the metaphysical work of Charles Wright—works from his trilogies like Negative Blue blended place, philosophy, and the self in ways which made the hair on my arms stand on end—but lately, I find myself being shattered in all the best ways by poets engaging with new possibilities for poetic form. Poets like Allison Joseph (My Father’s Kites made me fall in love with the sonnet all over again), Patricia Smith (Blood Dazzler and Incendiary Art are necessary reading), Diane Seuss (frank: sonnets just won the Pulitzer Prize), Danez Smith, and Terrance Hayes (the creator of the golden shovel and whose collection of sonnets, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, is one of the best collections of sonnets published in the twenty-first century) teach me how poetic form—once a gatekeeping device—presents constant possibilities for advocacy, witness, and innovation.

Diane Tucker : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

No other form distills language to its musical and lexical essence like poetry. It’s like the concentrate of a substance found in other writing in diluted form. This is why it was considered for millennia, in the west anyway, to be the highest form of writing. I certainly wouldn’t make that claim anymore, but its uniqueness remains. Because the best poems require the most precise language in its most mellifluous order, poetry remains the headwaters of expressive language.

Because of this I think it can, as well, slow us down and make us pay attention to the world in a way that’s much less encouraged now, and less do-able. When we have an hour, our minds race with achievements or tasks to be finished and cannot be still. Poetry offers this stillness, often by way of prolonged, focussed attention.

Tanya Standish McIntyre : part three

How important is music to your poetry? 

Poets once were bards - there must always be music in poetry. To me, it is requisite that a poem reads with musicality. My first love was music and song, and I am extremely drawn by the heart and depth that lives in ballads and folk music in particular. In all genres of music, the best examples are doors to an experience of the world that is immersive on all levels of being. Music is empathy, which poetry is as well - they are two streams which pour into the ocean from the same mouth.

Sarah Ens : part five

What are you working on?

I just published my second book, Flyway (Turnstone Press), which is a long poem that’s occupied me for the past four years. I’m not entirely sure what’s next. I do feel energized, though, writing discrete little poems again and seeing where they take me. 

Matthew Kosinski : part five

How does a poem begin?

Sometimes with a ghost, sometimes with a joke. Although before that, before the immediate inciting incident, there is a slow and steady accumulation of fragments: overheard phrases, unbidden ideas, resonant texts, facts that scream to be made into metaphors. I spend my time moving through the world and collecting these little fragments, jotting them down in notebooks, suspending them from the rafters of my brain where they can sway and sing together.

And then, the inciting incident: A hypothetical question about eating your clone, for example. That gives the fragments something to coalesce around. It gives them a shared premise. It illuminates their similarities, heightens their differences. They all begin casting light and shadow on one another, melting into one another, gesturing toward other fragments, morphing into strange new entities with many faces. It’s all quite chaotic. 

So what you need to do, then, is find that line or phrase to anchor them – like binding a spirit to a cursed object. That’s the first line – maybe not sequentially in the finished poem, but temporally in the poem’s life. And the rest of the writing process is about cultivating that line so that it twists and grows and ramifies into the poem, with branches of the right length and heft to support the constantly shifting weight of all those fragments.