Richard Hamilton : part two

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

It’s like corporations and privately funded poetry organizations with huge endowments have set the tone for writing in the age of MacArthur Genius Awards. The competition is stiff. It would follow, for some, that the pressure to write to establishment tastes is grave. Or conversely, the push to make writing uber-strange, to stand out in a crowded field is paramount to increasing one’s chance at licking the money pot. I have to remind myself of the subaltern network of independent publishers and writing that is not looking for literary citizenship. It knows that many of us are born to a republic and “sacred” constitution shot through with racism. In the US, some of our greatest heroes were impugned by Joseph McCarthy and his ilk for leading international movements to expose the racist and anti-working-class interests of the keepers of American law. I would say writing in this age requires you know what’s afoot in the industry while somehow not being consumed or crippled by what might read as corruption or corrupting forces.

Maryann Corbett : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I’m going to interpret “changed” to include “allowed to begin again.” After busy decades of full-time work and parenting, I went through some life changes and emotional upheavals when I hit the empty-nest phase, and I began putting those upheavals on paper. At the same moment, I met a real poet, Anna George Meek, and had many opportunities to talk with her about poetry. And I discovered online poetry communities and online journals, and those supplied the support and the awareness of an audience that fired me to write again. I also began, barely, to catch up with the years of contemporary poetry I’d been missing.

I worked with as many as seven online poetry forums in those early years, and I owe them all; I’ll mention in particular The Gazebo and The Waters. But my greatest debt is to Eratosphere, and especially to the formal poets who frequented that forum from about 2006 to 2011. Their discussions of midcentury poets like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and W.D. Snodgrass persuaded me that I wasn’t crazy to prefer rhyme and meter. I’ll always be grateful to the late Timothy Murphy for his early encouragement.

I’m still in touch with most of my poetry-board contacts in various social-media ways. Poets I met on those boards and am still reading include A.E. Stallings, Aaron Poochigian, Rhina P. Espaillat, Susan McLean, Catherine Tufariello, A.M. Juster, R.S. Gwynn, and Wendy Videlock. And maybe I should stop there, apologizing that in my forgetfulness I’m leaving out dozens of people . . .

River Elizabeth Hall : part three

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

Other writers are absolutely essential to my practice. My work enters the world in two ways: either on my own in my regular writing practice or in dedicated writing groups. Nearly all of the pieces I generate alone, will be critiqued by other writers at some point down the line. 

Since I was a teen, I have participated fairly regularly in Amherst Writers and Artists writing groups (www.AmherstWriters.org). The AWA method was created by an extraordinary teacher and writer named Pat Schneider. These writing groups are focused on generative prompts and positive feedback.

At the moment, I participate in two different AWA style groups. One is through the New York Writers Coalition (www.nywriterscoalition.org) and the other is led by Nicole Zimmerman (www.nicolerzimmerman.com). In 2020, I became a trained AWA workshop leader and I now lead two groups of writers through my organization, Seattle Writers Circle. More about my groups can be found on my website RiverElizabethHall.com .

On top of these groups, I am also in the second year of a poetry tutorial with my mentor Jeanine Walker. Myself and three other poets have been working together closely for the last year and half. We workshop and discuss our poems on a weekly basis, read and discuss craft essays, and all four of us are working together to assemble our full-length collections.

Matt Robinson : coda

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 don’t have a particular writing group or community that I am regularly connected with in a tangible way at present. The last time I had that was likely back when I was doing grad work at UNB and I was immersed in that program and the writers and poets who were there.

Now, I mostly write and read and edit in a more solitary, arms-length manner. BUT there are a few key folks I share drafts with when they reach a certain point. My wife or one particular poet I know are usually the “first readers” of drafts when they hit a certain point. Other than that, Andrew Steeves at Gaspereau Press, which whom I have done an annual poetry broadside for years and years is most likely to see things first. 

Mostly, though, I get to a point where I start sending poems out to journals for potential publication. So: I guess Submittable is often the way my work first enters the world. My dog and cat also listen to me grousing over poems at times, and certainly listen to me recording them to review how they sound. And they seem generally supportive, but their feedback is pretty hard to parse, most times.

Kenneth M Cale : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

Very. I love music and listen to all sorts of stuff. It inspires a lot of ideas and language for my writing. As for my work specifically, I think it’s musical in a different way to a lot of poetry. Just as most songs have two elements, music and lyrics, my work also has two elements, collage and text. I try to play around with the dynamic between these elements the way a songwriter might. Sometimes the collages and texts complement each other; sometimes there’s a tension or dissonance between them, just like in a lot of songs, where maybe the music is upbeat, but the lyrics contradict or complicate that mood. Also, as my collages are built up from layers of visual samples with words over the top of them, I see an oblique hip-hop influence in it too.  

Marcus Slease : part one

Born in Portadown, Northern Ireland, Marcus Slease has made his home in Turkey, Poland, Italy, South Korea, the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom – experiences that inform his surreal-absurd prose poetry. His writing has been translated into Danish and Polish and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net. His stories, poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in various anthologies and magazines in Europe and North America, such as Tin House, DIAGRAM, Conduit, Fence, Poetry, New World Writing, The Lincoln Review, and Best British Poetry 2015. His latest book, Puppy, a chapbook of prose poems, is available from Beir Bua Press, his novel in microfictions, Never Mind the Beasts, is available from Dostoyevsky Wannabe and his book of surrealist prose poems, The Green Monk, is available from Boiler House Press. He is a bisexual writer from a working class background and currently teaches high school in Barcelona. Find out more at: Never Mind the Beasts and follow him on Twitter @postpran

What are you working on?

I am currently working on three manuscripts. I am doing a final revision (hopefully) of my second novel Hermit Kingdom. It is an experimental novel in its form (prose poems and microfictions). Half of it was written after moving to Spain in 2016 and the other half takes place during COVID lockdowns in the Barcelona area. A surreal-absurd novel. 

I am also working on two books of surreal-absurd prose poems: Smashing Time and Void & Quagmire. 

I have been working on those three books for the last six years or so. I think they should all be ready to send out to publishers very soon, but who knows. 

Hollay Ghadery : part two

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

I always return to Bronwen Wallace’s collected works. Reading her poems is like coming home, but to my childhood home, where everything is brighter, clearer, more beautiful, and also more devastating — as childhood often is. Wallace's poems lift the veil and bring me closer to that unfettered, raw self I knew when I was younger. I feel like I spend most of my adult life trying to talk to that little kid.