Verbatim

"I find it very hard to say anything complimentary about myself. My parents thought that self-congratulation was gross. The adjectives I might add would include unsure, arrogant, small-minded, controlling, worrisome, and lucky, but I don't spend much time applauding or criticizing myself. I prefer to wash the dishes."
—Ron Padgett on the occasion of winning this year's Robert Creeley Award.

Verbatim

"Give me Tony Hoagland or Brenda Shaughnessy or David Berman. Give me a story. Don’t draw a picture of a bullet using only vowels and then tell me it’s a poem. That experimental shit is for grad students and grants. I want poems to make me laugh then break my heart, borrowing a phrase from Donald Bartheleme."

Mike Spry on what he looks for in poetry. 

Verbatim

"I think if a book doesn’t scare me in some way, if there isn’t something about it that feels beyond my abilities, I shouldn’t write it. I want the book to push me out of my comfort zone. Otherwise I’m just going to be repeating myself."
Michael Crummey discusses the challenge of writing his new novel Sweetland.

Verbatim

"When I begin conjuring the material for a poem, I pretend I’m like a film camera, taking things in from different angles and perspectives. I’m a noticer; I like to turn things over and examine even the most superficially boring aspects of everyday life. Then, sometimes, something mystical and often outlandish enters the room and you get a poem, a real poem that works on different levels."

Alexandra Oliver explains why it takes a village to write a poem. 

Verbatim

"But so far as the big debate prompted by the [Donald] Allen anthology goes—the debate between the raw and the cooked—let me say that if I had to choose between Robert Lowell and Denise Levertov, I’d pick Robert Lowell. And although Don Allen was a good friend of mine and I admire his book enormously, I think there are plenty of poets in that anthology that aren’t very good. Just because they had the right poetics, you see, doesn’t make them good; that issue has always been a problem for me. I can’t admire poets just because they have the right poetics."

Marjorie Perloff, in conversation with Charles Bernstein, assesses the influential anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960 

Verbatim

"The most lyrically free, process oriented, experimental, and/or avant garde writing must be structured, must involve a series of formal choices, because that’s what writing is. The sky’s the limit when it comes to what those choices could be, but they must be made, each an integral component in an overall effect that is not imposed upon content, but that is content. That does not contain language, but that is language. Form and structure build implication, suggestion, and tone as surely as diction and syntax do."
Karen Solie discusses the dangers of "lazy composition."

Verbatim

"When I feel most powerful, as a writer, is not in the art of composition. I feel I am at the mercy of the hour, the moment, or the eccentricities of my own circuitry. As an editor of my own work and others’, that is where I feel at my most powerful. I am Edward Scissorhands."
Lucie Brock-Broido explains her "long-term faith in violent concision."

Verbatim

"Many poets experience a sort of 'Stockholm syndrome' where they begin to let the general public’s distrust of poetry rub off on them, then feel guilty and attack their own commitment to beauty for being indulgent and superfluous. They might feel there is something antiquated and obsolete and irrelevant about what we do. But we are all 'of our time', regardless of what we might think. I think that an apprehension about seeming somehow archaic or old-fashioned is what causes poets to put images and ideas into their poems that strive for a ginned-up sense of the present."

Geoffrey Nutter discusses his concerns about the state of poetry.

Verbatim

"[I]t’s a perfect system with all gears clicking. That isn’t to say that a poem has to be some streamlined over-engineered Ducati motorcycle (Seidel may convince you otherwise). Even the great awkward ones that clank along like a Dr. Seuss thingamajig seem somehow necessary in all their little bits and pieces."
Danny Jacobs considers some of the elements of a "great" poem.

Verbatim

"I grew up with much older parents. My parents were very fun and they were very eccentric, but they were also very mannered. When I was growing up it was the way we got things done—in a mannered but not uptight way. So I think it’s just I feel more comfortable with the constraints, I feel like there’s more freedom. You have something to work within and you can be subversive within that context."

Alexandra Oliver explains her preference for formal poetry.

Verbatim

"As a brattish young man I felt that Dublin was a very important kind of a place, and that going to poetry readings and book launches there would help some of its importance to rub off on me. Hull by comparison is a very unassuming place (not that it hasn’t had a very intense poetry scene of its own). That came as a shock to the system, initially, but a salutary one in the long term. I very much like the advice to young writers to think of something they feel they do well – and stop doing it. Similarly, young writers busy building a reputation might want to think about locating their careerist master plan – and ripping it up."

David Wheatley on the merits of "building a reputation."

Verbatim

"Some little irritation gets hold of me, an idea or a phrase about an experience. Once I have a vague idea about the subject or situation, I start listening for what kind of music the poem should make—dissonant, sweet, jazzy, syncopated, waltz-like. I would love to be a able to write a poem the way Thelonious Monk plays the piano or Jack White puts a song together. Musicians have a direct access to emotion that writers can only envy."

David Yezzi talks about his writing method.

Verbatim

"I can’t think when they, or I, might have surmised I’d actually made any sort of a choice. It all must have looked, to anyone observing (especially parents), like a series of negative choices. Not choosing to continue post-secondary education, not choosing some other obvious skill set. I appeared unmoored and shiftless and directionless and probably extremely unhappy." 

Ken Babstock explains how others saw his "career choice" to be a poet.

Verbatim

"As you move into language, it teaches you something else. It's older and wiser than you; it makes connections you don't or which you consciously don't. Maybe it's a bit like that moment when you're tired and thought mutates into dream, where you're not controlling your thoughts anymore and another agency takes over. And I suppose this is one of the reasons that I've never got on with what's called free verse because I feel that if you're writing like that you're making it harder for that agency to take over. Because you're prioritizing what you normally think; your normal thought-processes, your prose thought-processes. But if you've got any kind of relationship with a white space or rhyme or sound or metre, any of those things, then you're allowing something else to begin."

Glyn Maxwell describes how poems establish their independence from inspiration.

Verbatim

"I constantly meet emerging poets who are afraid of using an adverb let alone making an assertion in a poem, in case they find themselves unpublishable. I read an article in Writer’s Forum the other day that told poets to avoid adjectives. Such nonsensical ‘rules’ deaden poetry—it's fine to make students ask themselves whether they use too many adjectives, but obedience to a narrow list of dos and don’ts is quite another thing, and is leading to polite, dull verse."
Claire Pollard explains the "self-censorship" that afflicts contemporary poetry.

Verbatim

"Maybe the epic poet of Newfoundland has yet to be discovered. She may be out there contemplating sending her first suite of poems off to a literary journal. She may be thinking about taking a creative writing class or may just be now reading the poet that will change her life and draw her to poetry. I’d like to think that she’s the person this anthology was compiled for. A little message in a time capsule that reads, 'Here is your inheritance. Now carry on.'"
James Langer and Mark Callanan discuss their new anthology The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry.

Verbatim

"No, no, not at all. No, stupidity has got nothing to do with it. It’s simply an activity which has been a little overestimated and is regarded as something of major importance. Personally, I don’t believe it is all it’s cracked up to be. It’s one of those human activities that is not crucially important."

Marcel Duchamp comes clean on his feelings about painting.

Verbatim

"I learned that making poems is not just about reading deeply and writing liberally and adventurously, but also about allowing oneself to become an obsessive noticer. Having come from a film background, I started thinking of myself as a roving camera. I’d fall across things, quite literally: a girl eating the pages of a book in the library, a bearded fellow taking his socks off in a waiting room, a dead opossum blocking the entryway to the corner 7-11, a man slapping a sobbing woman in the cab of a pickup. Everything was important and relevant."

Alexandra Oliver writes about the experience of working on her upcoming collection, Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway.

Verbatim

"The thing about a poem is that you’ve got to get it right. And you’ve got to get it all right. If there’s one word wrong, then the whole thing won’t work. It can be a 500 line or 5 line poem, it doesn’t matter. You get stuck on that word that isn’t right. You know the poem isn’t going to be finished until it all clicks into place. It is a kind of weird concoction."

Al Alvarez spells out the extreme sport of composing poetry.

Verbatim

"While good writers are taking their turn winning a prize, there’s a herd of good writers out there writing. Prizes narrow the big picture and it’s helpful to remember that."

Sue Goyette weighs in on our prize culture.