Canadian-American poet
James Arthur is the author of
The Suicide’s Son (Véhicule Press 2019) and
Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press, 2012.) His poems have also appeared in
The New Yorker,
Poetry,
The New York Review of Books,
The American Poetry Review,
The New Republic, and
The London Review of Books. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Northern Ireland, and a Visiting Fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford. Arthur lives in Baltimore, where he teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Photo credit: Summer Greer
How does a poem begin?
My poems usually begin in a word or a phrase whose sound I like, but whose full significance becomes clear to me only as I write the poem. Occasionally I begin by wanting to express a particular theme or idea, but not often, and when I do, the process of making the poem usually involves letting go of that first idea so the poem can grow in directions I haven’t anticipated. That’s part of the pleasure of writing: being surprised by what emerges on the page.
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