Conversations between writers about their art and craft.
“I work with language (in its many shapes/contexts, e.g., words, the news; visible/invisible; etc.) and towards finding language capable of holding paradox, of holding everything (like a painting, like a house).” âChristine Herzer
“Poetry gives you the room to explore these weird juxtapositions where you’re talking about a transit-oriented development, and you’re simultaneously talking about Athena. She rides a chariot, and we’re riding a bullet train.” âJosh Feit
“Iâm fascinated in thinking about money as an apparition whose haunting drives earthly creatures to do the silliest of actions, to become the strangest renditions of oneself. Every single person I know, including myself, is haunted by this not-love, this not-woods. Iâm just trying not to feel hungry anymore for this kind of haunting, which begins to feel like a part of oneâs skin.” âJessica Q. Stark
“Bianca is less about ‘the speaker getting back to herself’ and more an account of the speaker getting a chance to create the self on her own terms. To control her narrative. And, also, to grieve the younger self she never really got to be.” âEugenia Leigh
“In both of my collections, Iâve tried to write a scene as closely as I can without looking away or dragging something else in to contextualize it. I am interested in how a poem can point itself at a moment without giving that moment background to anchor it.” âTaneum Bambrick
“Thatâs one reason to write poems under fire: to register a human reaction to dehumanizing circumstances. And thatâs one reason to translate: to preserve and convey those vital human responses.” –Boris Dralyuk
We talked about Bernadette Mayer, experimental writing, and courting uncertainty.
“The constant translations and riffs were my attempts to understand my father.”
“The page, for me, is all about the power of return.”
“The moment we give up showing a different way of being with language and the imagination, we have lost.”
