Andrew Hemmert : part one

Andrew Hemmert is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (forthcoming, Pitt Poetry Series) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He won the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Contest. He earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and currently serves as a poetry editor for Driftwood Press.

How does a poem begin?

My poems usually begin as fleeting thoughts, little observations or images. There’s rarely a larger vision attached to these first impulses. Often I’m less interested in the ideas than I am in the music that accompanies them (assonance, alliteration, internal rhyme). Any metaphors, similes, or other associations that surprise me are good candidates for providing an entry point into a new poem. Frequently I wait months before returning to these fragments. Distance allows me to see more possibilities for revision.

There are certain themes and obsessions I return to again and again. Climate change, work, what it feels like to belong to a place, how distance changes that belonging. It’s the images and observations that naturally elicit these ideas that seem to engage me the most. And this is of course a trap. What I really want are strange notions and associations, avenues for engaging with themes and subjects that I haven’t yet engaged with in poetry.