Henry, Waldrep, Harrison, et. al.
DeWitt Henry regarding ‘On Shadows’: I’ve been writing in the DMZ between lyrical essays and poems for the past few years, starting with a salient word and free-associating to explore its field of meanings (in pop culture, literature, science, and personal experience). “Shadows” began with a notebook memory from when I was a graduate student and felt insubstantial and prone
Morris, Campo, Kolbe, et. al.
Sawnie Morris on ‘Signaling to You’: “Signaling to You” began with a dream. I had no idea what the dream was “about” and felt an urgency to explore it. The dream caught my interest because in it two realities existed in the exact same time and place. The dream also caught my attention because it contained a wild creature behaving
Bakken, Kallet, Weaver, et. al.
Christopher Bakken on “Goat Theology” In the past few years, I’ve divided my summers between the islands of Crete and Thasos, places where the goat has always ruled. Whenever I encounter goats in those wild places, I am charmed by their mysterious and fearless behavior. What, this poem asks, is sacred to the goat? To the goat who answers
Svoboda, Lowe, Houlihan, et. al.
Terese Svoboda on”Wrapped in Paper and String” I was thinking of how immigrants appear to so many brains as frightening – alien – and how the self is an immigrant to the self, and how you’re always in a foreign land. At the time I was experimenting with VR, feeling very astronaut with the helmet on and experiencing new totally
Silberblatt, Harrison, Armantrout, et. al.
Neil Silberblatt on ‘Hagstrom’: As a result of several surgeries in 2016 – to remove cancerous tumors from my colon, then to remove much of that tubing, and then to reconnect what remained of that tubing – my abdomen now resembles a scarred landscape. For the longest time post-surgery, I could not bear to survey that landscape. This poem –
Grae, Starzinger & Brehm, et. al.
Tanya Grae on “The Path of Non-Attachment”: A few months after Hurricane Andrew hit, some people began calling it Saint Andrew. As a Category 5, it caused such total destruction that insurers wrote checks for the maximum policy value of homes and their contents. Everything people owned, new again, as if nothing happened. Of course, that wasn’t the case
Buckley, Friman & Barbarese et. al.
Christopher Buckley on “Post-Structuralism” Well, my title is freighted with irony, of course . . . never a subscriber to Derida, deconstruction, and the theory-driven. Hence the glib line from the ‘50s TV game show, What’s My Line, with John Daly, celebrity crew— Bennet Cerf, Arlene francis, and Dorothy Kilgallen—and the mystery guest signing in. Linguistically, logically in literature, I
Jollimore, Newell, Cooley et. al.
Troy Jollimore on ‘Synecdoche’: Roger Ebert once said that no great film is depressing; only bad films are depressing. I agree with him, or thought I did until I saw Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. This challenging, despairing, thoroughly bleak film is undeniably depressing, undeniably brilliant, undeniably great. It is depressing and exhilarating at one and the same time. Quite an
Lea, Skloot, Pankey, et. al.
Eric Pankey on ‘Melancholia’ and “Trouble in Mind’: These two prose poems, as with most the prose poems I have written over the past twenty years, were written to prompts generated by my graduate students in a course on the history of the prose poem. We read poems by Bertrand, say, or Stein, or Baudelaire, discuss their innovations upon the form.
Lehmann, Kenney, Withiam, et. al.
Nin Andrews on ‘Soul Mate’: Years ago, I heard a speech by the late Tibetan lama, Gehlek Rimpoche (Allen Ginsberg’s teacher), in which he made fun of the American interest and love of the concept of reincarnation. He wasn’t sure he believed in reincarnation himself, but he said that if it happens, he was pretty sure that it’s nothing like
Culhane, Dow, Nazarene, et. al.
Brian Culhane on “The Immortality Ode” Often, I turn to solo piano music for inspiration, with the great Bill Evans always high on my list. I owe this poem to him, as it came into being when I began one of his recordings and pictured his hands above the keyboard, waiting to enter the melody. That image, in turn, led
Clinton, Sholl, Aronson, et. al.
Robert Clinton on “Caroline” The woman Caroline was entirely different from the woman described in the poem “Caroline,” except insofar as she was attentive to her property and fond of the poet. The poem with its deceptions happened very quickly. I didn’t want to make an anti-Caroline, and I’m glad that, although nothing in the poem happened as written, everything
