William Trowbridge: “I’ve spent most of my years as a poet writing free verse, though lately I find myself turning toward form. Unlike those who see formalist verse as dry and effete, I find it can generate power by means of barriers to play against—‘the net’ as Frost put it, by which he also meant boundary lines. If you pour gunpowder in a pile and light it, a mere flash occurs. But pack it tightly into a container, and you can get something more powerful. And, as opposed to the notion that form is restrictive, I agree with Richard Wilbur that it often liberates one from choosing the easy word in order to discover the better, surprising one. I haven’t moved into this part of town yet, but I stop there more and more.” (web)
Mark Evan Johnston: “A few years back, when I would visit my daughters outside Pittsburgh, I stayed at a small motel. It had the air of being the sort of place where someone might have been murdered once, or would someday be murdered. I realized as I thought about it that this impression was created by the expectant silence of the place, a silence into which random sounds would occasionally intrude. In ‘Motel Night Attendant,’ I have attempted to register how these small intrusions might strike the speaker of the poem.”
Luis Torres: “The poem is an exercise in breathing. I found myself, as I wrote it, calling back to phrases I had written a line or two before. I merely allowed a breathing rhythm to take place. The exercise is meditative, and it grounded me not only in the ‘moment’ but in something much larger than any one moment concerning that individual, Luis. ‘We are always more than ourselves,’ cautioned J.P. Sartre.” (web)
“Allen Ginsberg’s Dead” by M.L. LieblerPosted by Rattle
M.L. Liebler
ALLEN GINSBERG’S DEAD
Why, to write down the stuff
and people of everyday,
must poems be dressed in gold,
in old fearful stone? …
I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness.
—Pablo Neruda
M.L. Liebler: “When I’m in the second grade, I start scribbling stuff. It’s—you guys know, being poets and writers—it’s in there; you can’t do anything about it. But I had no idea, and I would get in trouble for it. They would call my grandmother and say, ‘He scribbles, and we don’t know what it is, but he’s scribbling again, so you pay for the book.’ When I got to the fifth grade I was doing this all the time, scribbling on paper and notebooks and so on. I remember having a big English textbook that had a pelican on a post in the ocean, and when I opened that book I noticed that it had things in it that had a lot of white space around them. When I saw that, I thought, ‘That’s kind of what I’m scribbling. What I’m scribbling has a lot of white space around it.’ So at that point, that’s when I was first able to say, ‘Oh, it’s a poem.’” (web)
Anne Rankin: “Although it’s likely Weldon Kees died years before I was born, somehow, he knew me. Or at least, that’s how I felt after reading ‘Small Prayer.’ The way he captured the anguish of languishing in the depths of major depression—and all in six lines—amazes me still. (In truth the poem speaks to any experience that leaves one feeling grievously wounded.) Later I read more of his work (as well as James Reidel’s biography, Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees), and could easily relate to his struggles with one disappointment after another. Nothing would please me more than for others to discover Kees’ work. He’s worth exploring. As for my own work, in general I’m trying to eradicate loneliness—yours, mine, and ours—one poem at a time.”
Al Ortolani: “I write a lot of poems about my dog. Some are mushy if not downright maudlin. Maybe it’s a flaw in my character, one I can attribute to my age. As a kid, I never cared much for Thanksgiving. Except for apple pie, I considered it boring. The holiday means more to me today. I still don’t care much for turkey, and no one has mastered grandmother’s apple pie recipe, but that’s not the point. Is it?”
Patrick Ryan Frank: “I spend a lot of time thinking about the education of emotion. Where do we learn how to feel? Movies, television shows, pop songs, novels and poems. More and more, we act like actors starring in our own life stories.” (web)
