Conversations between writers about their art and craft.
I’m back again to the notion that we might all act as carriers of strangers, worshiping the others around us and working to cultivate new senses of self, connectedness, joy, and responsibility.Â
“Translation is such a beautiful act of service. I’m not very good at learning new languages, but I feel like as a poet and a researcher, at least I can become a conduit of the text and hopefully offer what I find between the lines and within the etymology in a way that can be meaningful to people, even if they haven’t sat and done these years of study.”—Jessica Jacobs
A Conversation with Brittany Rogers
A discussion with contributors to the new anthology from Fonograf Editions
“o, yes, there are gaps in all archives, both private and public. The question is what is our responsibility toward those gaps? Sometimes we have an impulse to “fill them in,” but that can perform a double erasure—erasing the erasure, hiding the violence. So can those gaps become sites for the imagination, sites of possibility and play?”—Elizabeth Hoover
“I do believe the poet is the perceptual instrument of a poem. Not exactly an empty vessel, but a vessel that has been prepared to receive the poem.”—Sarah Mangold
“Hope is projecting into the future, but joy is almost a temporary eradication of past and future, an insistence on a present tense pleasure.”—Tracy Fuad
“I demand this of my own poetry. It has to be intellectually rigorous. It has to be about something. It has to have emotional resonance. It has to have musicality and it’s got to have an artistic edge.”
“I can’t let go of the poem until it lets go of me, I suppose.” —Sarah Ghazal Ali
“Collage has always made sense to me as an approach to composition. Peering into another person, into language, into a material. Seeing what’s before me, holding it, considering its potential force and its textures. I take it in and then I pour it back out as something I’m also woven into.”—Danika Stegeman
