Conversations between writers about their art and craft.
“Bianca is less about ‘the speaker getting back to herself’ and more an account of the speaker getting a chance to create the self on her own terms. To control her narrative. And, also, to grieve the younger self she never really got to be.” —Eugenia Leigh
“In both of my collections, I’ve tried to write a scene as closely as I can without looking away or dragging something else in to contextualize it. I am interested in how a poem can point itself at a moment without giving that moment background to anchor it.” —Taneum Bambrick
“That’s one reason to write poems under fire: to register a human reaction to dehumanizing circumstances. And that’s one reason to translate: to preserve and convey those vital human responses.” –Boris Dralyuk
We talked about Bernadette Mayer, experimental writing, and courting uncertainty.
“The constant translations and riffs were my attempts to understand my father.”
“The page, for me, is all about the power of return.”
“The moment we give up showing a different way of being with language and the imagination, we have lost.”
“What are ways of looking deeply, at a photograph or other archival filament, that allow us in the present to re-enter the past?”
“The important thing is that the work conveys felt truth.”
“The dark, for me, is always a place of brimming; even when it is anguishing and unbearable. . .”
