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 ]

Clarinda Harriss Smartish Pace Reading

Clarinda Harriss, Smartish Pace Reading Series, Introduction by Associate Editor Traci O'Dea, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, June 13, 2008.

Interview with Jeffrey Harrison

Jeffrey Harrison's Feeding the Fire is available from Sarabande Books (www.sarabandebooks.org). Harrison is the author of two previous collections, The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, and Signs of Arrival. Jacqueline McLean: Titling a book of poems seems like a difficult enterprise. I want to ask you to talk about the significance of your title, Feeding the Fire. In presenting this question, I have a few thoughts in mind. First, there is your marvelous line from Kafka which prefaces the collection: "What one writes is merely the ashes of one's experience." This is a particularly apt line for poetry, in which we relive or try to recover something of the essence of what once was. Yet I see a contradiction here or at least an intriguing complication. In a poem like "White Spaces," you recover (without bringing him back) a college professor who continues to compel you. The closing lines of the poem read: Gone now, known too briefly and too long ago for me to bring him back in a poem, though I'd like to think that what he was and what he gave me hover at the edges of ... [ read more ]

I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone

This first book of poems by Anna Moschovakis, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone(Turtle Point Press, 2006), gives a hint of its wit in the title.   Is the tone urgent?  Or a little fed up?  Does it imply the connection between writer and reader has been irrevocably broken?  Who doesn’t dream of being able to deliver perfect, fully persuasive communication?  Or, who does?  The author of these poems is a post-modern, ... [ read more ]