Julie Price Pinkerton: “I am a poet of faith. I’ve never written that sentence before. I was raised in a Baptist church on a gravel road on the outskirts of Brazil, Indiana. All of Brazil, Indiana, is kind of an outskirt. The church of my childhood was weird and toxic. Long story. At the center of it: Our pastor’s son (who became a pastor himself) was a pedophile. Nobody knew this until many years later, but something was off there, and I could tell. I hated going there. I stuck with my faith, though. Went to a really small Methodist college, the University of Evansville. A battering ram hit my faith in God when I was a freshman and our school’s entire basketball team was killed in a plane crash. Among the lost was the boy I had just started dating. But faith was still there, flailing. Post-college adult stuff. Marriage, divorce, the switching of churches, the switching of denominations (within Christianity), jobs, cities, marriage again, and hobbling along with my belief in God, which never leaves, but baffles me repeatedly like a train I can hear blaring somewhere in the woods but I cannot find the tracks. I’m 54 now. And Christ is still the only thing that makes sense to me. My atheist friends find this quaint. That’s OK.”
C. Wade Bentley: “There are three things I can count on to make me happy: playing with my grandsons, hiking in the mountains, and writing poetry. Even when the end result of my poetic effort is crap—as it often is—I am never quite so happy as when lost and wallowing in the mud of a possible poem, trying to write my way out. And when the alchemy actually works, that’s a bonus. That’s magic.” (web)
Image: “Paradigm Shift” by Morgan Reed. “My New Dress” was written by Sarah Carleton for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, November 2024, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
Comment from the artist, Morgan Reed: “What a difficult decision! There were many interesting and imaginative poems submitted, including a few that were remarkably parallel to my own thoughts in making the painting. ‘My New Dress’ takes the image in a different direction, but in the end, I was charmed by its freshness, sensory joy, and closing flourish.”
Scott Withiam: “I wish this was one of those poems about which I could say, ‘It wrote itself.’ That would nicely distance me from any uncomfortable personal associations with the incidents portrayed in the poem, and with poems I write that I am often too quick to judge as self-absorbed therapy poems and then drop before finishing. I long knew, however, that my father had struck my mother more than once, and increasingly disturbing, the longer this remained buried the incidents turned insignificant, minor. Too much of that (increasingly disturbing, the longer this remained buried the incidents turned insignificant, minor) going on these days. The imagery poured out as soon as I went back to that childhood kitchen, but it, and the various scenes found in the poem, came out disjointed. Much like the feeling after trauma or reasoning with trauma or the nature of any recovery, at any level, I soon thought, ‘so maybe use that in the poem.’ The images, meanwhile, felt alive with possible meanings or directions and seemed to, in subsequent drafts, begin to fit within shifts, or sometimes both shift and image worked together, heightened each other. Those are the highlights of how this poem seemed to come together, and that description may sound as confusing as the poem started out. Anyway, finished, I thought the poem came close in its portrayal of the confused sense of a helpless witness and the hidden magnitude of destruction to ourselves and others.”
Denise Duhamel: “I started writing the poems from In Which after reading Emily Carr’s brilliant essay ‘Another World Is Not Only Possible, She Is on Her Way on a Quiet Day I Can Hear Her Breathing.’ (American Poetry Review, Volume 51, No. 3, May/June 2022) Carr borrows her title from Arundhati Roy, political activist and novelist. In her delightfully unconventional essay, Carr talks about rekindling intuition in poems, offering ‘a welcome antidote to whatever personal hell you, too, are in.’ Carr’s invitation to be unapologetic, even impolite, gave me new ways of entering my narratives. Soon I was imagining I was someone else completely. Or sometimes I looked back at my earlier self, at someone I no longer recognized.”
Chase Twichell: “I have a very low tolerance for decoration in poems. And some people love it; they want to read pages and pages of how the everglades look in a storm and so on and so forth. But I increasingly am of the school or the belief that we don’t have very much time and poems should do their work fast and get out.” (web)
Stuart Watson: “This poem was inspired by the image of joyous citizens of Damascus carrying the severed sculptural head of what I assume was once part of a statue of Bashar al-Assad. Nothing in all the coverage captured for me the essence of the story.”
