Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor: “I am tethered to podcasts and news these days and I keep hearing ‘at the end of the day’ as a way to sum everything that’s been said up, as if there could be any end to the nonsense and terror. I took this idiomatic expression and used the ghazal form to twist and turn it. How does the day end, where, and for whom? As a professor of TESOL and world language education, the ghazal helped me explore the meaning that’s lost by cliché, as well as what might be newly found.” (web)
Leila Jackson: “For a few years now, I’ve been tracking major storms, and I was watching Beryl this week. I have family from the South and close friends from the Caribbean, so I’ve heard many firsthand stories about the devastation that Andrew, Katrina, Maria, etc. wrought on peoples’ homes and livelihoods. I wanted to personify a hurricane here because, unlike much of the other news we see, it’s completely out of human control (outside of the steps we can take to mitigate climate change).”
Iris Cai: “I like to write poetry because I’m in love with words, people, books, and things. I love English, which is not even my first language. Even now, I’m unacquainted with the feeling of these words on my tongue, but when I am writing poetry, I can create a syntax that is entirely my own. It’s a kind of empowerment: I can put a name to all the complex, confusing feelings I otherwise could never express. What comes out is small and pulsing and jagged with line breaks, but it is an ode to all the people who have made me, all the books that have sustained me, all the words I know and will never know. For me, poetry is the next closest thing to love.”
Anna Lucia Deloia: “Most of the best things I know, I learned from elementary schoolers: for example, that enthusiasm is a superpower and that we can approach even the biggest ideas with playfulness. I try to live up to those lessons in my poems. When I’m not writing, I make things for/with kids and families—especially things to help us all take better care of each other.” (web)
Traci Brimhall: “I was born in Little Falls, New Mexico, although all I remember is the library, playground and Dairy Queen. Now I live in New York City where there are still plenty of books, parks and ice cream. As a child, my grandmother recited Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ every time I stayed with her. I don’t know if I knew I wanted to write poetry then, but I did learn that marriage is an arduous journey filled with talking animals.”
Rohan Buettel: “I like writing ghazals, like sonnets, because they have strict formal requirements. There is a pleasure in meeting the challenge of writing a formal poem complying with the requirements. Then there is the pleasure of writing more contemporary poems dispensing with some of those elements (such as rhyme). As there is no metrical requirement, there is also the pleasure of experimenting with different meters or free verse. I see the ghazal as the equivalent of the sonnet form developed in the Middle East. Some ghazals in English work very well when they incorporate sonnet-like aspects, such as a strict iambic pentameter. I have always felt uncomfortable using my own name in the last stanza, so use a more self-effacing reference.”
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: “I think I write poems to try and discover what I feel. Try as I might, I’ve never found another vehicle that does as well. I live in Armonk, New York, with my husband John. We share four children, Ben, Angie, Kaitlin and Fiona.” (web)
