Shareen K. Murayama : part four

What are you working on?

I’m working on a novella-in-flash. I committed to Jami Attenburg’s 1,000 Words of Summer, and I just finished the first draft at 41,000 words. It’s about the discrimination of the Okinawan silk factory girl workers in Osaka at the end of the Meiji Period. It’s also about sisterhood, filial piety, superstitions, myths, and dreams—both aspirational and nightmares. In my poetics, I’m working on musicality and colors; I’m studying Rick Barot’s “interrogation of the lyric and what it’s supposed to do;” I’m studying Kevin Prufer’s timestreams, “side by side, collapsing an instant of time into lyric meditation.” I also make it a point to read and support tomorrow’s poets, too. Poets, like Gaia Rajan and Lydia Wei, are magical poetry unicorns! They’ll be writing and shaping the future of poetry and its community for the next thirty, forty years! You should definitely keep your eyes on their art!

Klara du Plessis : part five

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Poetry doesn’t finish. A text solidifies into different drafts and iterations—even into the book object—just to become malleable again to transform and reshape itself. I do usually read my poems out loud and if the text feels sustained over the course of that reading, I let it go for a while.

Nathan Alexander Moore : part five

What are you working on?

Mostly my dissertation is consuming my time as of late. I have one more year to defend and graduate, so a lot of my energy is being poured into writing the best document I can and paying homage to these amazing Black artists and their works that I find myself critically engaging. In terms of creative work, I’m slowly but surely putting together a collection of speculative fiction pieces that take the form of prose poems and short stories.

Melinda Thomsen : part three

Why is poetry important? 

Poetry is an art form that needs little to no materials. A pen and paper is about it, so it’s accessible to all income brackets.  It’s also a neat, portable art form. You rarely have to clean up after yourself or require a large place with a furnace to create your poems. All your materials inhabit your brain. Every time I teach a class, I tell the students that their stories are important. Everyone needs to tell their story, so others will listen.

Poetry is the way I tell my story, and how my soul speaks to the world. We live in a harsh world, and so we’re seeing an influx of diverse voices in contemporary poems, and it is about time. George Floyd’s murder definitely affected our poetic landscape, and Amanda Gorman’s poem at the Biden’s Presidential Inauguration gave a voice to those who have been ignored for so long.   

Getting an audience for poetry has always been difficult, but Ross White, the Executive Director of Bull City Press, pointed out at the North Carolina Writer’s Network Online 2021 Spring Conference, “if more people write poetry, we all rise together.” For myself, when I find new poets with vibrant voices like Taylor Byas, Tiana Clark, and Lukas Ray Hall, I am excited because they teach me ways to hone my own voice. The world needs each of us to make it a better place. We inhabit our planet for some reason, and poetry speaks that reason to the world.

Stella Lei : part five

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I always show my work to friends before submitting it. The online writing community is incredibly talented—I learn new things all the time—and I can count on my friends to tell me whether something is effective or not. It can be so hard to see my own writing objectively, so I treasure their outside perspective, and my work always improves for it.

Deborah Rosch Eifert : part two

How does a poem begin?

Sometimes with a random phrase that pops into my mind where there is a melody to the sound, almost song-like. Sometimes there is an image, either imaginary or something I see in the woods or at the shore, and I find I must describe it. Often some science article or video I have run across, like one about trees having heartbeats, may trigger a poem. If I am running dry, I try exercises – create as many non-cliché ways to describe a color as possible; describe an act or feeling but not by saying it in any direct manner, attempt something in form. I will write lists of other people’s lines I love, or just words that have an appealing or interesting sound and something may grow from that. Jericho Brown did an exercise in a workshop of taking a short poem and copying it down but using an opposite of every single word – that got me the line “Today’s glitter pours out tomorrow’s death.” Whoa! There is also an exercise of generating a word pool by going through an anthology or a long poetry collection, turning pages, writing down the last word on the page until you have 25 or so words, and then including them all in one poem. All those strategies or events are ways to lower my net into the river of unconscious words and images that flows bubbling along in my brain. Oh, and reading – reading is vital for priming the pump.

Monty Reid : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

The writing part.