Interview |
A Dialogue with Arne Weingart on Concentration
“It’s the built-in problem of the political poem, to find the comfortably uncomfortable place between certainty and doubt, outrage and resolution … I think we’re all shocked and disoriented by how quickly the horrors of the previous century seem to be circling back to us, as if on a demented carousel.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Jesse Nathan
“My process is a kind of deep listening, a hesitating, a holding back as long as I can … the poem comes after a long process of induction — a process of creating the conditions out of which I must speak, need to speak, can’t stay silent any longer.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Jennifer Jean
“The word voz means voice in Portuguese. The poems aren’t so much about what I’m voicing or the fact of voicing, but how I’ve decided to voice — my answer to the lyric by Amalia Rodrigues — Com que voz chorarrai meu triste fado? Which means: With what voice will I cry my sad fate?”
Interview |
“The Miraculous Recompense of Language”: a Conversation with Lisa Russ Spaar
“On the poetic spectrum of transparent to obdurate, I’m hanging out with Plath and Dickinson and Hopkins on the difficult end. But I always try to include quotidian, vernacular, or pop cultural detail — in image, sound, allusion — to give the reader a place to buy in to the poem.”
Interview |
“A Conversation with Alta Price on Translation”
“It’s easy to bring one’s own baggage to the work of translation, and I’m convinced one of my key tasks in this profession is setting all possible presumptions aside before I sit down to work every day.”
Interview |
“I Will Not Walk Away”: A Conversation with Jennifer Franklin
“Anne Carson has famously said that poetry isn’t therapy. I agree. Poetry is better than therapy. It’s always been poetry that has helped me transform the trauma, grief, and suffering of my lived experience into art.”
Interview |
on Dark Testament: A Conversation with Crystal Simone Smith
“In the process of erasure, you’re empowered to change voice, setting, any of the original elements. Erasure in this subject matter worked extremely well because the process of hiding also reveals.”
Interview |
“Making the Unseen Visible: A Conversation With Kelsi Vanada”
‘I feel more keenly the sense of speaking in someone else’s voice when I’m reading my translation of Andrea’s nonfiction — maybe the difference is that when translating poetry, I’m able to speak with someone else’s voice.”
Interview |
“A Kindred Feeling”: a Conversation with Matthew Buckley Smith
“I think a lot about art having a double or triple life. One of those lives is an experience or an idea or an imagined something. Another is the potential pleasure or meaning that can be made out of that. They live together.”
Interview |
A Dialogue with Joy Ladin on Shekhinah Speaks and Gender Transition
“I realized that the Shekhinah – in Jewish mystical tradition, the immanent, female aspect of God who silently dwells within each of us – was both a precise and safely obscure metaphor for my sense of being female despite being born male.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Daniel Olivas & His Story “The Chicano In You”
“Gabino Iglesias was on Twitter talking about his surgery to remove a lump from his neck, and it wasn’t malignant. I then wrote to him to say he had just inspired me to write a new story, and I would dedicate it to him. ‘Nacho’ is about a man who notices he has a lump, has it removed, and puts it in a jar. It eventually grows into his roommate.”
Interview |
“Structure with the Mystery”: A Conversation with Gail Mazur
“I’m grateful when the poem begins with an urgent impulse. Not just the urgency of getting to work, but that the poem is starting already, and you’ve got to get where you can write it, which isn’t always ‘convenient,’ but you have no choice, you’re in it!”
Interview |
A Dialogue With Anne Marie Macari
“My way of working is to let things grow in the dark, to let the unknown do its work, though that’s where all my doubt and impatience arise as well. But really I don’t have a choice — the material has to take on a certain amount of life before I can work with it. And then something triggers the poems to emerge, some sound, word or memory.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Janel Pineda
“Growing up, I internalized a lot of shame around being Salvadoran. Poetry became a space that allowed me to claim this part of my identity, explore it further, and take pride in the people and place I come from.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Michael Torres
“I wanted to write something that pushed back against my own work, and I just went after stereotypes that I wrote with, or through, or into, because I wasn’t sure how to navigate the white gaze back then, and which we don’t learn how to break out of until we get further in our craft.”