Michael Hettich: “When I was a child, my father would sometimes read poems to me, in the evening before dinner, while he sipped a cocktail. T.S. Eliot was his favorite. Though I didn’t understand what they were about, the cadences and images charmed and moved me deeply. They also haunted me. Then, 15 years later, in a creative writing class taught by James Crenner, I came across Casar Vallejo’s ‘Black Stone Lying on a White Stone,’ in the Bly Knopf translation, and was transfixed and transformed by the language, and by the possibilities. I knew then that I wanted to try to do something like that, someday. Maybe, if I was lucky …” (web)
Matt Dhillon: “There’s been a scary number of shootings in the news recently. It made me think about how often strength is equated to a capacity for violence, especially among men.”
William Harry Harding: “Sometimes, writing poems connects me to my heroes and my demons in ways that writing novels can’t. This poem helped my daughter and me bring suicidal ideation to the kitchen table, where we discuss it as if it was ordinary, like breakfast, and something to be discussed head-on.”
Marc Alan Di Martino: “I didn’t watch the coronation ceremony, though my Twitter feed was full of commentary on the lavish and anachronistic event. I was struck by one person’s comment that all of this looked better in black-and-white, this of course being the first such ceremony to take place in the age of the internet and universally available color broadcasting. The first line came to me and, having wanted to write another villanelle for some time, the rest fell into place fairly naturally. A profile of Charles published in the New Yorker a few years ago makes reference to him as a ‘twit.’” (web)
Diane Lockward: “This poem began as an experiment, an attempt to enter a poem via sound rather than subject. The lead word ‘plum’ was used to create a vertical list of rhymes and near rhymes. The words in the list then became line endings.” (web)
Kim Hansen: “My father calls me to tell me what he is writing about. Sometimes it is about washing dishes or how his father and uncles looked falling asleep in social situations, acting as if they were pushing their hair back or giving their necks a whip. Then we read each other a few poems by our favorite poets, and I get back to writing about how we move and operate in spite of or because of gravity.”
Andrea Defoe: “I must’ve been about fifteen, in the middle of a forest, when I happened upon a gravestone inscribed, ‘Outward sunshine, inward joy: Blessings on thee, barefoot boy!’ I was amazed at how the right lines in the right place could elicit a gut response from me.”