Saeed Tavanaee Marvi : part one

Saeed Tavanaee Marvi is a poet and translator born in the city of Mashhad in 1983. His books include The Woman With Chlorophylic eyes, Verses of Death: An Anthology of American Poetry and a translation of Richard Brautigan's Tokyo Montana Express.

What are you working on?

Working on a new book of poems: Criminal Nights. With an episodic structure in narrative and noir in tone and atmosphere. Better to say it is detective poetry.

Kenneth M Cale : part four

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I’m not sure you ever do, but the more you engage with poetry as a reader and writer and – if you’re fortunate – as an author, the more you get a feel for when a poem might be finished. A combination of instinct and experience, I suppose. But it’s not an exact science, and I’ll often find myself wanting to ignore what my gut is telling me just to be done with a particular poem. If I decide a poem’s finished, but the piece itself has other ideas, it’ll quietly nag at me until I work out what it wants. Once I’ve figured that out, the poem goes into a drawer for a while I write others and/or make collages. This gives me a chance to look at each poem with a fresh eye later on and make any eleventh-hour adjustments. 

Marcus Slease : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I used to think poetry had to have a lot of density and sound poetic. Thick and/or gloopy. Also backward looking. Poems of loss. Elegiac. Since about 2010 I have learned the light touch via NY School poets and various surreal-absurd writers, artists, and musicians. I am very attracted to the light touch. It is a lifetime project. Also I did not know about prose poetry. Now it is my main consideration when writing poetry. But prose poetry attuned to stories, essays, and music. So you know, hybrids. I am into hybrids, of various kinds. 
 

Hollay Ghadery : part three

What are you working on?

A collection of flash fiction that explores how fantasy and fantasizing subverts and challenges the expectations placed on women. Many of these stories trend toward the lyrical and fall into prose poetry of sorts. I'm also refining my collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, which will be coming out with Radiant Press in spring 2023. 

Simon Brown : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Well, the two are very intertwined for me… my first serious forays into creativity as a teenager were self-taught musical experimentation, DIY recording, tape-trading and that sort of thing, and I think most of the little twists and turns of my creative process were born at that time. So many of those inclinations and instincts still guide how I go about things creatively: repetition/looseness, continuity/rupture, consonance/dissonance, and (probably most of all) the importance of improvisation/listening, and all it implies. 

 

H.E. Fisher : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I love this question. It is an entirely mysterious thing to me. I’ll get a feeling, a sense of wholeness, when a poem is finished. Which sounds far too highfalutin. It just means that a poem feels done. Conversely, when a poem isn’t finished, it bothers me; it feels off and can keep me up at night. Is the form right and does it serve the poem? Is each word the right word? Is the lineation correct? Etc. I spend a lot of time reading each draft of a poem out loud to see if it sounds right to me. On the other hand, maybe poems are never done.

Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

One of my earliest memories is of being on a tire swing in my backyard in South Carolina singing songs I made up; I must have been five or six. I remember that’s where I went to invent—on that swing, by myself.  Something about the motion of my tiny body moving through space, back and forth; I remember pumping my legs back and forth as hard as I could while looking up at the lacy branches umbrella-d over me, the clouds, the birds, and singing songs about wanting to be up there in the sky, flying over everything.  I think that’s a good metaphor for what attracts me to poetry or, maybe, just evidence that I’ve always been drawn to the power of poetry---its roving eye, the suspension of the writer between heaven and earth, the necessary loneliness of it, too.  I had a noisy, chaotic upbringing and poetry was a way for me to separate and make sense of my world…or if not make sense of it (because does it make sense?) empower me with the ability to voice my truths, to embody in words the human impulse toward sense-making.  It’s a good thing I was satisfied with writing song/poems, since I’m a terrible singer and even worse musician (just ask my 7th grade band director who asked me to pretend to play my flute during concerts)!

My grandmother and my mother both read to me and my siblings from the time we were very young. Lots of Dr. Seuss, of course. And Shel Silverstein.  Those silly, rhythmic, witty poems are still there in my own poems, I think, in my attraction to satire and persona.   

Much later, when I became an English Lit major in college, I engaged with poems as cultural artifacts, as objects of study.  I was studying early British women writers and asking questions about how they used poetry to challenge society and their role in it.  I loved uncovering the rebellion in their words. The more I read, the more I saw contemporary women writers in dialogue with that maternal heritage and, of course, with each other. I wanted to be part of that conversation.