How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
With my haiku, almost instantly, on FB. That is what most gratifying about writing haiku on FB. With other poems, it’s the usual process of submitting to a magazine editor or book editor to have them read and critique and put together in a collection with other poems. I don’t have a writers group for poetry, per se, but I do collaborate with others for translation.
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
I have always been an image driven poet, so I had little capacity and interest in developing the musical side of poetry in terms of rhythm, rhyme, meter. I also was a poet of the page; in other words, I felt poetry was something you wrote that someone read silently to themselves on the page. Now, I think more ‘three-dimensionally’ about poetry – it’s still all about words – but ‘words’ spoken, performed, read, sung, translated. This wider understanding of the ‘word’ has expanded my view of poetry since I began writing it.
How do you know when a poem is finished?
When it’s been read and there’s been some feedback given on it by an editor, or a writing friend. After it’s published, I don’t go back to it.
How did you first engage with poetry?
I had a dream when I was in high school and when I woke up, I wrote it down as a poem. That was my first engagement with poetry.
Photo credit: Warren Cariou.
What are you working on?
I work in different genres so I’ll answer what I’m doing as a poet right now. I’m teaching a creative writing poetry class so I try to do the exercises I assign my students as a way of generating my own work. I also try and write a haiku-a-day on Facebook, usually after taking a walk outside. I work on translation of poetry peripatetically with friends – namely, my Japanese aunt when I translate from Japanese, and German-reading poet friends when I translate from the German.
