Sacha Archer : part three

What are you working on?

I am finishing a manuscript titled Montage of Abrasions which is a mess of prose reflections (some autobiographical, some otherwise) mashed together with poems both visual and not. It has been an attempt to write something perhaps more conventional than I’m like to do—but I’ve probably failed miserably at that—which is good, and bad. Good in that I find it powerful and interesting—bad in that the same question arises that accompanies all of my longer works: who is ever going to publish this? The work developed with the loose theme of that which we read out loud and that which we read silently.

I am also at work on a manuscript which collects a number of series in which I engage/ collaborate with the landscape directly to discover poetry. I began it in 2016 with my Ghost Writing series where, in one part I facilitated asemic writing by trees, and in another part I wandered, collecting rubbings as poetry. This year I completed the next series which is titled The Nature of Language. In this work I regard natural specimens as found poems in and of themselves—the development of form (body) as a mode of writing before us. I want to round off the manuscript with a third series for which I have a few ideas bouncing around in my head.

Also, at the moment, I have starting sketching rooms in my home on my gestural keyboard on my phone.  Of this I have little to say at the moment except that I am finding it a fascinating way to write and it is producing some expectantly odd-ball texts.

Sarah Rosenthal : part one

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and several chapbooks. A collaboration with poet Valerie Witte is forthcoming from The Operating System. Sarah edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction has appeared in numerous journals and is anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-garde Poems, Plays, and Stories for Children (Black Radish, 2013), Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim (P-Queue, 2008), Bay Poetics (Faux, 2006), The Other Side of the Postcard (City Lights, 2004), and hinge (Crack, 2002). She has done grant-supported writing residencies at VSC, Soul Mountain, Ragdale, NY Mills, and Hambidge, and has been a Headlands Center Affiliate Artist. She lives in San Francisco where she works as a Life & Professional Coach and serves on the California Book Awards jury. sarahrosenthal.net

How important is music to your poetry?

When I’m working at the top of my form, my ear drives my work. Image is important but probably second in line. I grew up surrounded by music and musicians and played the piano and flute—this has seeped in, along with the musics of multiple languages I heard as a child and my parents’ love of wordplay. Zukofsky’s maxim is always in my thoughts: upper limit music; lower limit speech. I feel compelled and designed to write poetry that means, not only in the way that sound, at the radical end, communicates its own meaning but also in the ways that we usually think of words communicating.

Sarah Nichols : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?  

The last book of poems that I read was Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, which is just so, so good, Minadora Macheret’s chapbook, Love Me, Anyway, which is so beautiful and layered, and Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen, which I think has opened up a new way of approaching ekphrastic poems, with its investigation of the designer Alexander McQueen and his work. It creates a way to write about fashion, which is often neglected as art, ekphrastically, and to write about the artist, and finally, Jennifer MacBain-Stephens’ Vitamix and the Murder of Crows, which is gloriously absurd, but at the same time lingers and makes you want to know more about how the poems came to be.

Shara Lessley : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Frank Bidart, Carl Phillips, George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Wisława Szymborska, John Donne, Kathleen Jamie, Shane McCrae, Spencer Reece, Federico García Lorca, Emily Berry, Louise Glück, Dunya Mikhail, and on and on and on...

Kara Goughnour : part five

What are you working on?

As 2019 is on its way, I’m working to end this year with one-hundred written poems. I want the importance of daily writing — profound or uninspiring — to be ingrained into me. As far as books go, I’m finishing up my second collected work, or mixtape if you will, written using blackout on the lyrics of all of my favorite albums. I wanted a piece that expressed what music has meant to my poetry, and I thought that there wasn’t any better thing to do than to pay homage to each album that held me up on a dark day. I also am working on some more long-form pieces for a video project. I want to return to my beginning in spoken word poetry for a brief moment in celebration of my one-year anniversary of submitting and being published — upcoming in June.

John LaPine : part five

How does a poem begin?

Sometimes with a title, sometimes with an image. Sometimes I’ll say, hear, or think a phrase that feels like it belongs somewhere in a poem, so I’ll write it down and try to shape it into art later. Sometimes this works, but most of the time, the specific phrase will end up on the cutting room floor. In this way, a phrase works as scaffolding.

Lenea Grace : part one

Lenea Grace is the author of A Generous Latitude (ECW Press, 2018) and her work has appeared in The Walrus, Best New Poets, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. Lenea is the 2017 winner of The Walrus Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award for her poem "Echo". She lives in Gibsons, BC.

What are you working on?

In particular, I’ve been labouring over a heroic crown of sonnets – a series of 15 sonnets linked through first and last lines. The last sonnet is comprised of the opening lines of the first 14 sonnets. It’s a long, winding, non-linear fever dream with a whole lot of Texas, Linda Ronstadt, push and pull.