Marvin Artis: “I was an English major in college, and I started writing what I thought was fiction about ten years ago. I said to the person I was working with, ‘You know, this stuff I’m writing looks more like poetry than prose. Do you think this is poetry?’ And he said, ‘No, there’s all kinds of prose. I think you should just keep pushing the prose.’ But about six years ago I started writing what was coming to mind, and it was absolutely poetry. I’ve read great poets, and I didn’t think my poems at the time were in the same universe of great poetry. I knew I needed some help, but I didn’t quite know how, or what kind of help I could get. One day I was sitting in a café, and there was an old New Yorker magazine on the table. At one time I was a subscriber, but at some point I’d stopped. So I picked it up, and it just so happened to be an issue with one of Diana Goetsch’s poems in it. And I thought, ‘This is stuff I really like. This is a room of poetry I’d like to be in.’ So I googled the name, didn’t know anything about her. I saw that she happened to give workshops. I called, and it just so happened that there was a workshop starting. Her workshops really helped me to get my poems more in the form I wanted them to be in.”
