Troy Jollimore: “After O Brother Where Art Thou, a reporter asked the Coen Brothers what their next movie would be about, and one of them—I think it was Joel—said that it was about a barber who wanted to be a dry cleaner. Everyone laughed, assuming he was joking, but of course with The Man Who Wasn’t There it turned out that that was an entirely accurate, if slightly misleading, plot summary. I find this film, about a man who resists his role as barber his entire life and then realizes, at the end, that in fact he is the barber, intensely moving and beautiful, not to mention unspeakably funny. Its hero, Ed Crane, is a man who has a vast number of things to say and who almost never speaks because he finds the language that was given him—the language that has been given to us—to be inadequate to the task. I suppose I think of poetry as an attempt to render language more adequate to the task of speaking about the ineffable things that our truest and deepest selves want to speak about. Anyway, the poem is, in essence, based on a true story; I did get a haircut recently.”
Richard Jackson: “I usually collect a bunch of images, observations, sayings, clippings that attract me and so have something to do with my unconscious, and then something sets off the poem, the first line, and I go to those notes which then generate others. What set off this poem was the news of my friend’s disease—the poem came pretty quickly then.”
Wendy Barker: “I can’t not write poetry. I’ve written essays, even scholarly work, but it’s poetry I always come back to. If I’m not working on a poem, I’m in trouble. Something about placing the words, the phrases, the lines, the images, the sounds on a page brings me alive. Alive in the moment. Writing poetry is also a way of examining conflicts or trouble in my own personal space and in the wider world. I’d like to think poems can make a difference. I guess I’m always in thrall to Rilke’s great line: ‘You must change your life.’ And I like to think of Auden’s lines in his poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’: ‘For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / would never want to tamper, flows on south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, / Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.’ I guess I keep on going because of all those mouths that came before me and that surround me, continually feeding me. And I long to provide a little something for those who are also hungry, so that we can feed each other.” (web)
Ayelet Amittay: “I was moved by this article on Bindi Irwin’s struggle with endometriosis. As a nurse practitioner I work with many patients who have this condition, which is rendered invisible by society’s refusal to talk about periods and other ways women’s health affects us all. I wrote this poem as a testament to those patients, including Bindi Irwin.” (web)
Sarah Snider: “I read this headline and thought to myself, has he not responded enough? Have I not heard enough? Did I want to hear more? At the time my dad was very ill, and over the next few months became so ill that he passed from it. I thought of the comparison of importance, and blended the shocking absurdity and violence of one with the shocking pain of the other. With the Oscars rapidly approaching, I felt compelled to share.” (web)
C.K. Williams: “About my poem: The thing that interests me about it, and what made it really possible to write, was the great disparity between the poem’s two themes, children playing in gravel, and men aggressing my wife on the subway. I wanted to write about what happened to her, but wasn’t able to until I found that frame to give some emotional distance from me. Maybe that’s what poetry is all about, pretty much?” (web)
