Gabby Wenzel: “In a poem, I can run without legs and be in the sunshine under the clouds. My imagination does the thinking and my hand does the writing. It’s so fun!”
Jeff McRae: “I’m a semi-pro musician born into a family of musicians, music teachers, and music lovers. But I’m the only one of us who also writes. I play all kinds of music—from traditional jazz (dixie) to theater—you name it. I gig maybe 50 nights a year. Music and poetry are intertwined in so many obvious and subtle ways. I love how music and poetry are both structured and improvised, sometimes simultaneously. I love how poetry is so often described by the language of music but it is music that captures the ineffable serendipity of life in a way poetry never quite can. In my own work (and life) music and musicians have been inexhaustible, thought-provoking primary sources. I grew up surrounded by Bach, Beethoven, the Beatles, and by the music my parents made. I idolized the guys in my dad’s bands. I devoted hours and hours and hours to study and practice—both poetry and music. They cross-pollinate. I found my footing as an adult on the bandstand when I realized I could hold my own, had something worth saying, worth listening to—when I realized I could play—and it continues to be the arena of becoming. Same for poetry. Playing with words sometimes results in interesting connections and ideas that make sense, too—where I figure out who I am. Poetry and music have been through lines, horizon notes for me. Now, one of my great joys is listening to my kids mess around with Bandcamp, improvise on our piano, and pick out songs on the same guitar passed down to me all those many years ago.”
Eric Kocher: “A little over ten years ago, my friend Mark made a joke. He said that I should try to be the first person to publish a poem in Sky Mall Magazine. There was something about shopping for the most inane, kitschy stuff on the planet while flying 30,000 feet above it, just to avoid a moment of boredom, that seemed to be the antithesis of poetry. The words “Sky Mall” got stuck in my head—lodged there. This is almost always how poems happen for me. Language itself seems to be in the way just long enough to build tension before it can open into a space that pulls me forward. These poems finally arrived while I was traveling, first alone, and then the following year with my wife, as a new parent in that hazy dream of the post-pandemic. Writing them felt like going on a shopping spree, of sorts, so I tried to let myself say yes to everything.”
Clint Margrave: “I bought the guitar off my friend for $400 back in the ’90s. At the time, music was the most important thing in my life. I played in bands and like a lot of young people in their late teens and early twenties, awaited certain rock stardom. The friend I bought the guitar off of did end up playing in a famous ’90s rock band later, and even borrowed the guitar to take on tour with him. For years I watched it travel the world, be played in front of arena crowds, make appearances on television before finally coming home. By then, I’d already switched to playing a different kind of instrument, one whose strings were words.” (web)
Diane Seuss: “I was raised in a place that seems to me now to have been the maternity ward where archetypes were born. Bull snakes and milkweed pods, vitamin factories and cement churches with ‘God’ stuck over the door with vinyl mailbox lettering. I was saved, and saved again, and saved again and again, but it never took. Then I fell in love and in love again, and again. I was to be married on the Vernal Equinox on the Bowery in NYC, but I walked away. Things tumbled from there, as if love is ruled by the laws of physics, which it is. I now live in the gut of aloneness like a tapeworm. I quite like it here.” (web)
Sue Fagalde Lick: “I have been playing music as long as I have been writing poems. I have lugged my guitar to theaters, clubs, galleries, senior centers, and street fairs, offering my original songs and covers of others. I have sung and played piano at weddings and funerals. I led the choirs at church for pay and for free. The rhythms and sounds can’t help but seep into my poetry. It’s a good line, but can I sing it?” (web)
Lexi Pelle: “Frank X. Gaspar wrote, ‘It’s never the aboutness of anything but the wailing underneath it.’ This poem, although based on a relatively uncharged article, was a slow settling into that wailing.” (web)
