Klara du Plessis : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

The lack of apparatus. Volunteer culture lends itself to the hobbyist. Limited structures of support, paid opportunity, and the non-existence of a sustainable career as a poet forces the serious writer to split their attention in order to survive. By default, a poet has at least two careers; if lucky, they can feed into each other and support each other, but the luxury of being permitted, through the systems of self-reliant capitalism, to prioritize poetry for more than short periods of time is a fantasy. I listen to friends working in other creative fields and they have unions that insist on certain, realistic payment rates, overtime compensation, mental health time off, and so on. The reality is that were one to enforce certain rates onto the poetry community, a lot of the most interesting projects wouldn’t be able to function. That said, though, valorizing poetry as relevant social discourse and not normalizing free labour would be a huge step forward.

Nathan Alexander Moore : part four

Why is poetry important?

I can’t say unequivocally and universally why poetry is important, or why it should matter for everyone. I just know for me; poetry has really taught me to care about language on the most minute, almost microscopic level. It’s made me conscious of how and why and when the best time is to say something. I really think that poetry can teach people to be careful with language, to be precise and nurturing. Poetry makes me think of how to say the most impactful and honest thing with a few words as possible. It’s really about the economy of language, of paring things down to their most beautiful, evocative, and honest expression. For me, all poetry is about is care and using words with discretion and precision. To me, that’s why poetry is important, for the way it makes me slow down and be careful, to be mindful of what I’m saying. 

Melinda Thomsen : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing? 

Bill Matthews was my professor at City College in the late 1990s. I applied to City College because I loved his poetry. However, I found a brilliant teacher, too. His vocabulary and knowledge of literature blew me away.  He taught me that writing was not just throwing it up on the paper, but being well read was equally important. I had that creative spirit in my poetry, but without the analytical ability of a well-read mind to craft it, the poem was limited in its reach.  As my reading grew, I built a toolbox of resources I could use to connect more events, people, stories, images, and vocabulary within my poems. 

At our first class, Bill referenced at least twenty major works, which made me realize the extent of my literary ignorance. So, after that workshop, I set a goal to read fifty books a year.  My library card melted.  I read classic novels from Middlemarch to Anna Karenina and poets from John Donne and Phillis Wheatley to Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath. Any writer he mentioned in my classes, I checked out their books from the library.  

I not only read to expand my vocabulary but to discover poets who resonated with my way of writing and made me feel less alone in the world.  Poets like Bill Matthews, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, and Richard Wilbur taught me how to accurately describe images and address the more difficult subject matter I wrote about.  

Stella Lei : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

Past Lives Future Bodies by K-Ming Chang: There are so many amazing, quotable lines in this chapbook, my favorite of which is “My mother says / women who sleep with women / are redundant: the body symmetrical / to its crime.” The line breaks are genius, and Chang’s use of language reframed my understanding of poetry and continues to inspire me every day.

Crush by Richard Siken: This is the book that made me fall in love with poetry—it fully deserves its reputation as a cult classic. There is such gorgeous rhythm and visceral emotion throughout, and several poems consistently make me cry.

Space Struck by Paige Lewis: I adore how human and tender this collection is, and so many lines deliver gut punches that leave me reeling days later. One I always come back to is “The moment I saw a pelican devour / a seagull—wings swallowing wings—I learned / that a miracle is anything that God forgot / to forbid.”

Deborah Rosch Eifert : part one

Deborah Rosch Eifert (@EifertPoetry) is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and the author of the newly released chapbook Sewn from Water, from Uncollected Press. Her work has appeared  in Whiskey Island Quarterly, Constellations, Cathexis Northwest, Persephone’s Daughters, as well as other literary presses, and is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic and Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art. Her work also has been published in several anthologies. She has received an Editor's Choice award from Formidable Woman Sanctuary Press, was named Poet of the Month by Flying Ketchup Press, was a semifinalist in the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition and was First Runner-up in the 2018 Esthetic Apostle Chapbook Contest.  

How did you first engage with poetry?

I started reading and writing poetry as a teenager. I had some very chaotic aspects to my home life including various kinds of violence I experienced throughout my early years. I was consumed by a constant tension between feeling compelled to communicate and being desperate to keep my reality secret. There was also a constant push-pull between the beauty I saw in nature and kind people against the ugliness and cruelty in humanity’s constructions and in people who bully, abuse, violate. Another dichotomy I lived out was that I was partly wild and reckless (I didn’t care what happened to me from anything I did) and partly an extremely timid ‘good girl.” I think poetry is dramatically well suited to showing and reconciling dichotomies, in indirect and startling ways. The first poets I really had much exposure to were confessional poets – Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin. I felt like it gave me permission to write, particularly Plath. Oddly, the things I loved by Plath 40 years ago I don’t care for as much now, and the things I disliked then, I really feel admiration for now – like “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” In college, I read “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Her Kind” compulsively. Then I mostly stopped writing for 35 years while I went to grad school in clinical psychology, went through a first marriage and raised my daughter. Moving back home to New England, frequently writing again, publishing my poems and hitting my mid-fifties all happened at about the same time.

Monty Reid : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I’m afraid I don’t know. They never seem finished to me, but part of that ongoing conversation/argument you have with yourself.  Sometimes you just have to shut up and let them talk.

Sunny Vuong : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I used to view poetry as a rest stop, of sorts—a liminal space with endless potential for catharsis and soothing stagnancy. A way to make something alive that didn’t have to be anything other than what I needed it to; there couldn’t be any harm found in exploring the self in an already familiar terrain of stanzas.

My relationship with poetry has changed since then, more so reflective of viewing it as a vehicle: something that aids in exploration beyond the self. A means of discovery and experimentation, rather than just reimagining of the familiar. Something that could be anything—perhaps even more than what I needed it to be.