Wednesday 17 November 2021

Angelo Mao : part three

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

I love the energy from reading young, contemporary poets. To somehow respond to each other, whether stylistically or in terms of poetic subject, is, I think, a healthy and energizing challenge.

Partly because I was in her workshop for many years, I revisit Jorie Graham’s poems, if only to remind myself of her voice—not just the voice in her poems, but her “real life” voice reminding us in workshop to attempt what really matters. The challenge is never: write a poem. Instead, try to create a document of being human. I feel it’s a liberating and democratic attitude to take, and opens the space of what texts and shapes of texts to consider.

I also derive a strong sense of renewal from Yeats’s poems, especially those from the second half of his career. I probably have a lot of sympathy with his sensibility, and—although certainly the situations were different—his poems of the Irish Civil War were helpful to me during the Trump presidency.

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