Enjoy the old Q&As! Maybe we'll do this again one day, soon. 

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

Archives:

Joseph J Capista Poetry Reading - May 12, 2019

Watch his reading here!  [ read more ]

Clarinda Harriss Poetry Reading - May 12, 2019

Watch her poetry reading here!  [ read more ]

Bob Hicok on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

Bob Hicok discusses economic hardship in Michigan and reads a new poem.

Interview with Harvey Shapiro

Harvey Shapiro's newest collection of poems, How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems, will appear in 2001. Born in Chicago in 1924, educated at Yale and Columbia, an Air Force gunner during World War II, Shapiro settled in New York and worked as a journalist, serving for eight years as the editor of the New York Times Book Review and eventually becoming a senior editor of the New York Times Magazine. In his Introduction to Shapiro's Selected Poems (1997), James Atlas, his colleague at the Magazine, observes the "rare unity" in Shapiro's life and work: "He has lived in the same place, Brooklyn Heights, for nearly his entire writing life; he has immersed himself in the rituals of his own neighborhood with an almost religious intensity." Mentored by the Objectivists but belonging to no one school, Shapiro is often regarded as a quintessential New York poet, tough but compassionate, jazzy and modernistic, but almost classical in his humane skepticism. His lyrics have the sound of chastened conversation-and his conversation produces a kind of punchy lyricism that is, for his interlocutor, both chastening and immensely pleasurable. This interview took place on March 17, 2000, at the home of Galen Williams ... [ read more ]

Oracle Figures

Eric Pankey's new book, Oracle Figures, opens with an attempt at opening. The speaker of this, and of all these poems, is one looking for a way in, but "The gate cannot open in the overgrown grass." He continues:        But the way, lit by foxfire and firefly,        By the flint-flash of grit at the pearl's heart,        Is a past words cannot return to history,        To what the swallows inscribe ... [ read more ]