Elisabeth Horan : part six

How does a poem begin?

At 3:00 am with a line. Wakes me up, repeats itself… “there is Wellbutrin in my Brain”... forces me to get up and give it a life. Does not rest until it is finished. The reason I usually have eye twitches and anxiety. :)

Cassidy McFadzean : part five

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Lucie Brock-Broido is a poet with a singular vision and aesthetic. I was so grateful to encounter her work early in my career, and realize that I could write to my obsessions and follow my curiosities wherever they make take me.

Wayde Compton : part five

Why is poetry important?

It thrives outside the market, so it can set right the relational distortions of capitalism ungrudgingly.

Darren C. Demaree : part one

Darren C. Demaree is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Two Towns Over, which was selected the winner of the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press.  He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry.  He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

What are you working on?

I’m currently eighty or so poems into a sequence called “bone requires bone”.  I wanted to find a way to address the world of abuse and abusers.  I have had my own experiences with violent men, and it felt like a long meditation on the subject might be cathartic for me and maybe for others that have had similar experiences.

Molly Cross-Blanchard : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

A poem is never finished!... says every poetry professor ever.  Though there is some merit to this mode of thinking, I do believe you can get a poem very very very close to finished. I usually consider a poem ready for public consumption when I go back to it several months after the last time I tinkered with it and read the whole way through without cringing even once. Those are really good days.

Sennah Yee : part five

How does a poem begin?

From a place of anger, delight, or confusion – and sometimes a mix of all three. Oh, and always from a place of procrastination!

MLA Chernoff : part one

MLA Chernoff (@citation_bb) thanks u for visiting their profile. A recovering flat-earther, MLA now lives a quiet LIEf in “Toronto” (awful condotown), where they collect and care for rare fidget spinners, which isn’t just a fad. They are a PhD candidate at The Neoliberal University of York University; the velocity of this bio is their dissertation––a morose serendipity in the key of “ooooo that’s a spicy discourse!!!” MLA’s debut collection of pomes, delet this, was recently published by Hybrid Heaven and is available everywhere fine books are sold (but hopefully not Indigo, I really don’t know lmao). If you’re in MTL, you can pick it up at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.

Photo credit: Syd Lazarus

What are you working on?

Literally just myself. And my dissertation lmao *** shrug emoji holding multiple copies of Das Kapital and Let Us Compare Mythologies in each stinky hand ***

I’m hoping to start and finish a full-length collection of new, (un)original pomes this summer.