My Favorite Conversations This Year
Wisdom from 10 exceptional poets.
“Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.” ―Samuel Beckett
Interviewing poets about their work is a great privilege. It’s always a little sad that those conversations go so quickly into the archive, so I’m taking this end-of-year pause to savor them. Here are some highlights from this year’s Poet to Poet interviews, January to December. Enjoy!
In January, poet Steven Cramer and I talked about the unique process behind his seventh poetry collection, Departures from Rilke:
“I don't believe in the soul, but I do believe in the self, in consciousness. Conscious experience is all we have. It’s how we decide what's good and what's bad. Rilke’s ferocious attention to the individual life is a kind of a counter to the collective. The cultivation of collective experience now seems to take place on social media.”
Breaking Norms: Departures from Rilke
J.D. Schraffenberger, editor of the North American Review, on the process behind his chapbook American Sad:
“You engage in the process of allowing whatever comes, of relinquishing control and letting it emerge, and then acknowledging it as part of yourself, part of your psyche, and refraining from revising because it's unsettling. Allowing yourself to do that can lead you to dark and traumatic places, painful places. This book is titled American Sad, and I won't beat around the bush. However, I'm not a sad person in my daily life. This collection, I believe, contains an inherent human sadness.”
Hiding Beer in the Piano
Tina Carlson discusses the iterative, intuitive, collaborative process of building her second solo poetry collection:
“We have these scripts that we're born with generationally and culturally. If we just live according to those scripts, we don't evolve very much. It can feel at times hopeless because those scripts can be constricting. I want to expand the story. We’re capable of transformation. How we manifest that can't just be through logical, linear mind. Mystery, the artistic, creative imagination, gives us so much more.”
Unlatch the Tongue, Speak More Truth
Luke Hankins, poet and editor of Orison Books, reflects on his latest book, Testament, plus shares advice on poetry manuscripts:
“If you're approaching the poem with a predetermined agenda, the poem can become preachy or feel flat. When I'm teaching poets or talking with other poets, I think it's really important to emphasize the process of discovery, letting the poem develop itself and seeing where it takes you. Robert Frost describes a poem as a piece of ice melting on a hot stove. The ice moves in all sorts of different directions that are organic. You can't predict exactly where it's going to move next.”
Should We All Write Project Books?
Katherine DiBella Seluja on the creative process behind her latest collection which explores ancestry and immigration:
“Many of the stories in the book are biographical, based on oral traditions handed down from my mother, grandmother, and godmother. I took artistic license to fill in the pieces I didn't know, because those individuals are no longer with us. The backbone of the book are stories that I was told. I wanted to memorialize and honor our family stories within the realm of poetry.”
Dreams, Ancestors, and Points of Entry
John Brehm reflects on his collection, Dharma Talk:
“I never sit down to write with a theme in mind. It's more an experience or an idea like "Dharma Talk" that guides me. A line will come to me and take me in a certain direction. I'm reading and practicing. Themes of compassion, emptiness, non-separation, loving-kindness, and aging run through my life. I write about them because they are most prominent in my day-to-day experience. Naturally they show up in my poems. When organizing the book, I became more aware of recurring themes like emptiness.”
This is Not a Guidebook
Sasha West on her new collection, How to Abandon Ship:
“One of the things I love most about art is its ability to contain contradictions. When thinking about climate change, I see myself both as a victim and a perpetrator in my own small way. I'm inside these systems, so I can't stand outside of them. I feel a lot of grief and hope, which seem like opposite things. I also feel anger and guilt. There are so many contradictory emotions, and poetry can contain all that. Poetry can hold up these moments against each other, almost like a collage, and knit things together.”
The Art of Interdependence
Leslie Ullman about her collection Little Soul and the Selves:
“Our anxieties push us beyond our limited views. As a writer, you probably feel this too—that you have to reach beyond what feels limited. When you're afraid you haven't done that, something happens, and you see a way to get beyond it. You try, and it may or may not work. As I was writing this morning, I had that feeling. Maybe I hadn't named it as a desire to go beyond, but I do feel a sense of claustrophobia in a work if it hasn't happened yet. Sometimes I will abandon a poem or a project because it feels too myopic. But I don't throw them away.”
Poems Flow One to the Other
Cyrus Cassells shares the process behind his latest collection—Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?
“The experience of falling in love is like entering a new world, willing to risk a new perspective that the beloved represents. It’s about being open to learning and risking something unfamiliar. I was thinking about Terrence Malick’s movie The New World, where John Smith and Pocahontas look at each other with this mystery, like, "Who are you? Why am I drawn to you?" It’s the same sense of discovery, both in the landscape and the person. Sometimes you fall in love with someone from another place, which brings the potential for travel, learning, and exploration. That’s the spirit of the book.”
Earth is a Place of Passion
Joanna Fuhrman discusses her seventh collection of poetry, Data Mind, which explores the internet's role in culture and personal experience:
“I didn’t set out to write a book about the internet—I was just writing poems, and the word ‘algorithm’ kept surfacing. At the time, I was writing in a kind of mad, late-night state, typing random thoughts on my phone while trying not to wake my husband. Later, I’d look at what I’d written and realize it was all about digital life. I started asking, ‘What does writing about the internet mean to me?’”
Poetry Predicted This
Also …
I had so many delightful conversations with good folks at events for Pine Soot Tendon Bone. My friend Cindy Huyser asked in this interview:
For me, this book’s title is redolent of the bodies of trees and animals and the
transformative work of fire, though I understand its origin to be in the elements of inkstone used in the Japanese painting technique known as Sumi-e. How did you select this title?
“Pine Soot Tendon Bone comes from a line in a poem about a watercolor painted by Japanese American artist Kakunen Tsuruoka while he was interned during WWII. I happened on this painting during the first six months of lockdown during the pandemic. The inkstone Tsuruoka may have used, if traditionally made, contained pine resin, soot, and glue boiled down from animal tendons and bones. For me, those ingredients are a powerful metaphor for the elements of poetry, which draws on nature and the body, the transformative changes wrought by circumstances. As landscapes are transformed by fire, our psyches are transformed by suffering. That suffering isn’t only destructive. It becomes the basis for a creative response. The ecosystem revives.”
The Poet’s Mind is Mycelial
Wishing you light, love, happiness, and rest—most importantly REST for your beautiful poet brain. See you in 2025!
Love,
Radha
Really appreciate this annual summary and recap - I found myself re-hearing things from some of the interviews that I missed before. These are richer the second time perhaps, or maybe it’s the cumulative effect of reviewing them all together.
Thanks for the skill of interviewing, and the smart choice to provide written summmaries but encourage us to listen to the full interview and the showcasing of the writers’ work.