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.”
Lost: one mind. Last seen in childhood. Answers to nobody. Limited vocabulary. If found, please rip out its tongue and return with the last word uttered.
Lew Watts: “In my school in Wales, a poem was read aloud each morning before lessons. And I remember clearly being mesmerized by Dylan Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’ at seven years of age. Nowadays, though the rhythms of ‘Fern Hill’ have stayed with me, I’ve become increasingly drawn to starker prose combined with haiku. I write haibun for its ability to release memories. Sometimes of joy. More often, those buried in the past.”
Craig van Rooyen: “My father is a preacher and I grew up strong on words and Southern cooking. I think the old stories in scripture still can give shape to our longings if we let the words live in our imaginations. The ‘I’ in ‘Reading Exodus’ is not autobiographical. I live with my wife of fifteen years, happily married, on the Central Californian coast—maybe not the land of milk and honey, but pretty close.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.