Jake Byrne : part one

Jake Byrne is a queer writer. His poem “Parallel Volumes” won CV2’s Young Buck Poetry Prize for 2019. His work has appeared in Bat City Review, PRISM international, Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight, The Puritan, and The Fiddlehead, among others. His first chapbook, The Tide, was published by Rahila’s Ghost Press in 2017. He is a Settler based in Tkaronto, on the traditional meeting places of the nations of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, the Haudenosaunee, and the Missisaugas of the Credit River.

What are you working on?

I’m shopping around my first manuscript, wrapping up my second + dismantling it into a couple chapbooks, and the forever-work of trying to maintain a happy balance of life + work.

Jeffrey Harrison : part one

Jeffrey Harrison is the author of six full-length books of poetry, most recently Between Lakes, published by Four Way Books in September 2020. His previous book, Into Daylight, (2014) won the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press, while Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way, 2006) was runner-up for the Poets’ Prize. His first book, The Singing Underneath, was a National Poetry Series winner in 1987. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, and his poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize volumes. He lives in Massachusetts and can also be found at jeffreyharrisonpoet.com.

How did you first engage with poetry?

I’m sure it started with nursery rhymes, or with my mother reading me some of the poems of A.A. Milne. The poem of his that she most liked to recite, and the one that stuck with me, is called “Disobedience” and begins, “James James/ Morrison Morrison/ Weatherby George Dupree/ Took great/ Care of his Mother,/ Though he was only three.” The poem has a sense of fun that offsets its darker side about the mother’s disappearance. Maybe it was an early lesson in the way form and content can play off each other in interesting ways. And, as we all know, disobedience is much more compelling than obedience. I later found it in other poets too—Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Philip Larkin, etc.

Kristine Snodgrass : coda

I have been thinking, for a while, on the idea of ecstasy. How it is fleeting and yet everlasting. The momentary phenomenon often that drives us into a poem or visual piece. I am addicted to ecstasy. I think that is the driving force in my obsessions (poets talk of obsessions so much, you know?). Even if I cannot find the ecstasy, that too is a moment that has to be brought into a poem, visual or not. The act of asemic writing is so founded for me in a present moment. There is “no meaning” semantically, yet I am thinking as I write. It is like a psychic connection that I hope the reader will get—maybe that is abstract expressionism. I used to think that asemic writing was really a dismantling of meaning, but it is so much more than that. The experience of the language is ecstasy. The hand, so gracefully (have you ever really watched anyone handwrite?) so sexually scratches and pulls. What a dream. When the piece is over, we move on to another, or even lament the loss of the past. I am always driven, in search of that.

Regan Good : part four

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I can reread it and not feel as Lowell said “paralyzed by fact”…the poem doesn’t feel lurid, garish or grouped.  Words aren’t laid or pasted down, instead the pressurized words form a matrix, a world, and you need to interact with it and be in that mess of potentiality.  If I think I’m beginning to think too much, I stop writing and walk away.  So years may go by before anything is finished.  But when I close them down, I still want the feeling of “no conclusion.”  I was editing someone’s poem the other day and she asked, “Are you as hard on your own poems?”  Oh my God, yes.  Worse.  I have a Supreme Court Justice of Poetry in my head, always, always.  

Vik Shirley : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Definitely. I'm into, what I guess you would call, anti-poetry, now. When I started writing, I thought it was all about displaying techniques, and that you had to have stanzas and rhymes etc, I didn't realise you could subvert the whole damn thing, that a poem could be an absurd parable, a list or a marking scheme (not the first time I've referenced Matthew Welton in an interview.) I'm mainly interested in irony now and subject matters that are considered unworthy of poetry. Although I can appreciate more traditional types of poems, I like ones that don't behave like poems. I find writing poems specifically "about" something tiresome and think of writing as either play, an experiment or a delve into the subconscious. I'm also interested in insouciance, aleatory and irreverence, all of which were celebrated by The New York School of Poets. I find poems that highlight the absurdity of our rituals and mock things we hold dear infinitely more interesting than poems on nature.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

Music is essential to how poems happen in me. I’d called myself a lyric poet, and I’d also say that my visual art lends itself to the space of what would be called “lyric.”  My ear is my greatest editor – actively listening helps me open and cut the language at the same time. Whenever I’m writing anything rhythm is critical. For me, voice must also be inseparable with the poem’s questions and desires articulated by language.    

Dennis Cooley : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I was mature when I started seriously to write. At that point I had read and taught and read about and written about a lot of poetry, especially twentieth-century poetry, so I was exposed to much that had been done or was being done. Since then I’ve developed a stronger sense of the page as a graphic surface, the letters as scores, the text as digital creation. Poets have lived at the membrane where poetry follows the ear and the eye into music and graphic art. New constituencies have proliferated in the literary world, following their own aspirations and strategies.

There are new opportunities too. The interent has opened exciting new opportunities to do dazzling new things, or things that once could be done only at great expense and effort. In a split second you can reach audiences and in ways that only a few years ago were virtually impossible. That is really encouraging.