Q&A with Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith

M: Can you talk a bit about what inspired your close look at the American sonnet? What, as you see it, are the strengths of this prescribed form?

D/L: From the start of this project, we were both struck by the current explosion in the contemporary sonnet—in variety, form, and sheer number—and wanted to place this proliferation in some historical context. Poetic influence is hardly a straight line; we wanted to gather threads and weave the plurality of American sonnet writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Wanda Coleman, Adrienne Rich, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Emma Lazarus and so many others into conversation with each other and with our moment.  

As this book first started to take shape, we were both teaching sonnet courses and we knew that we were equally interested in the political and aesthetic potentials of very traditional and very experimental approaches to the sonnet. We also wanted to complicate perceived boundaries and delineations between those approaches. Part of the strength of this prescribed form is its own deep history, that sonnets are always layered over other sonnets, so each sonnet gestures toward this history. In some sense, all sonnets become metasonnets. The tradition is on one hand a lot of metatextual clutter, but it's also a lot to draw upon, pieces you can use.  

We created the kind of book we were hungry for as teachers, but also as readers, writers, and scholars. The familiarity and identifiability of the sonnet also makes it a great form for subverting expectations; we hope a collection like ours similarly offers the opportunity for both recognition and provocation.

M: What trends or patterns (or lack thereof) did you notice as you curated your selection of sonnets?

D/L: We always knew that we were interested in telling a story about the way the sonnet form appealed to and was an important tool for marginalized writers: women writers and Black writers and immigrant writers and queer writers of sonnet, for example. We also knew early on that the container of the “American” was problematic but also useful, and I think you see that sense of “but also” all over the book. There's an American story here to be told, but it constantly stretches toward the international—connecting to colonial histories, migration, diaspora—and so the American sonnet is a rubric we chose to retain, with the reservations, complications, and nuance that we hope come through in the book.

In terms of patterns that emerged as we were building the collection, one of things we see clearly in this collection is the distinct lineages—we anticipated a lesbian sonnet, an African American sonnet, a women's sonnet, a jazz sonnet, but there are also lineages of the immigrant sonnet, the diasporic sonnet, the labor sonnet, the minimalist and maximalist sonnets, the narrative sonnet, the prose sonnet. Essayists and poets in this collection center disability and neurodiversity; they celebrate—and, perhaps more notably, question and renounce—Americanness; they translate into and write outside of English. And we hope our collection underscores the fact that these are not innovations and conversations new to the 21st century. The subtraditions and their lineages became an important story here, as did these traditions of troubling and experimentation in form.

M: What most surprised you as you worked on this project? (Any new discoveries about the form?)

D/L: We knew we had a lot to work with going into the project, but as we began to compile lists, the number and range of sonnets was truly staggering. The final book was able to contain just a tiny fraction of what we had compiled. And then we each had individual finds: new sonnets, new sonnet scholars who we weren't familiar with before the project. We hope the book contains surprises for the reader as well: for example, Emma Lazarus’s iconic sonnet “The New Colossus” alongside her sonnet “Assurance,” which remained unpublished until 1980.  

The community that gathered in and around this volume was also a wonderful surprise.

And about the form—we knew this form was capacious, but it is even more capacious than we thought it was. That's a simple thing to say, but it's true. The essays’ various methodologies also yield surprises about the sonnet, so readers should come away with a wealth of approaches not only to how one might write a sonnet, but how one might read a sonnet.

M: What do you hope general readers will gain from this anthology?

D/L: We think that poetry lovers already know that the sonnet is in an exciting time, and we hope that the book adds to that excitement and the sense of the possibility there. But general readers, or student readers, don’t necessarily know this. So, for general readers and students, we hope they get pleasure and surprise from the poems, and that the essays help readers access even more pleasure. And we believe that the sheer aesthetic and historical range of the collection will yield new discoveries and connections for even the most avid reader of sonnets.

Q&A with Tayi Tibble

M: Can you tell us a bit about the title of your collection?

T: Poukahangatus is a transliteration of Pocahontas, articulated in Te Reo Maori phonetics. It doesn’t have an actual or complete meaning in Maori, but broken down, ‘pou’ means a pillar, a column, a totem, and ‘kaha’ means strength or bravery, and I like those meanings being present in the title for the collection.

The title is also lifted from the opening essay, ‘Poukahangatus: An Essay about Indigenous Hair Do’s and Don’ts’ and just as the essay explores, I think as a title, Poukahangatus suggests themes of indigenous representation, appropriation, story sovereignty and reclamation, which are recurring and the undercurrent of the collection.

M: This was your debut--what was it like shaping it, and what have you worked on since?

T: I wrote Poukahangatus while I was studying towards my MFA at the International Institute of Modern Letters, so it was shaped through workshops, supervision and a year of concentrated study which was all super helpful to both the book's development, and my own development as a writer. It was an intense but very rewarding experience — it was the first time I had ever explored my culture, my family, the history and impact of colonization in my writing and in New Zealand at the time, there was a bit of a gap in our literature that held both Te Ao Maori (the maori world) and the modern, globalized world of pop culture and the internet, so writing into that space was very fertile, but in part, sort of vulnerable too.

Since then, I wrote a second collection Rangikura, which will also be published by Knopf at a later date. It’s similar to Poukahangatus with its themes of family and colonization, but its parameters are a little tighter, and the intensity turned up — it has an undercurrent of climate change urgency; exploring the relationship between the desecration of the earth and desecration of indigenous women. I’m currently also starting a third collection, but it’s taking its time to reveal itself.

M: There's a range of forms in your first collection. Can you talk a bit about the prose poems that anchor the opening and appear throughout?

T: I’m interested in prose poems because I am interested in storytelling. I write poetry of course, but I also consider my poems to be, and want my poems to serve as, a form of indigenous storytelling; a way to capture and articulate our indigenous knowledge and experiences, and pass them along through generations.

I guess I like how prose poems invite density, generosity, and exploration while also offering the visual cue or expectation that there might be a narrative drive or a story. Many of the prose poems in Poukahangatus have a narrative drive or tell stories. For example, ‘Tangi in The King Country’ is a series of prose poems that tell the story of two small children returning to their marae or ancestral lands for the first time. In another poem titled ‘Pania’ a relationship between an exotic dancer and her client is told over three blocks of prose, which also draws on the traditional myth of Pania of The Reef, a sea maiden from the Ngati Kahungungu tribe of Aotearoa. It’s important to me as a writer to share the stories of my people, and prose poems are a functional way to do this. I like playing with dense blocks of text, but still working the language enough to make it feel light and sing like poetry.

M: Are there any other books or works of art with which you feel your work is in conversation?

T: I’m not sure if they're in conversation with, but the books that spoke to me as I was writing Poukahangatus, and in turn helped me to find my voice and speak with courage and confidence were Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire and Fale Aitu by Tusiata Avia. They sort of formed the atmosphere I wanted to write into, these passionate wahine writing about power and ancestry with truth and reclamation

Q&A with Phillip B. Williams

M: This is your second collection, five years after Thief in the Interior. In what ways do you see your practice having changed, or your concerns shifting or developing, from your debut to today? 

P: I am a lot more patient and have mostly lost interest in wanting to have poems floating in the world just cause. It's much easier for me to keep tabs of the poems I am working on when I am not also considering where to house them in journals and whatnot. Focusing on creating and letting the Po-biz part of it wait for as long as I can has been a tremendous help in prioritizing what matters: the artform itself. I've gotten much better at writing poems and putting them away for another time, which could be weeks or months from starting them.

My concerns it seems have remained pretty much intact. I am still deeply concerned about social issues, sound and form, mythology, and allusion. What has evolved a bit is me wanting to focus more on Afro-diasporan culture as my references for mythmaking and citation. Eventually I want to write a book that is completely devoid of Western allusions.

M: Can you talk a bit about your use of form and repetition across the book?

P: I see form and repetition as vehicles for emotional clarity and expression. Repetition has with it not only the recalling of a sonic experience but also a logical one, where in the latter said logic can be modified when imbued with different meaning each time. So the word red appearing once may be experienced by a reader as only the color. Cover the entire page with the word red and denotation gives way to connotation, interpretation, the whelming of the visual sense. Is red violence, now? Blood? A garden of roses? Form works similarly inasmuch as it supplies a pattern that can enhance and modify a given feeling.

M: The book ends with the poem "In the Beginning." What was it like ordering the manuscript? Did it go through multiple iterations before it found its final shape? 

P: The final shape came relatively quickly because I decided I didn't want sections. It was my most adamant decision which locked many of the poems in place in my mind. I moved a few pieces around here and there when I added some poems in the latest draft of the book, but ordering went mostly by feeling how the poems communicated with each other as a chain. How does poem A bring us into poem B and what does that feel like? How does the relationship between A and B make a bridge for readers to better grasp C? How am I teaching people to read the book? I wanted it to be as organic an ordering process as possible. Intuitive might be a better word. Before going to print, there was a brief discussion about putting the book in sections, and I just couldn't see it. Still can't haha.

M: Are there any other books or works of art with which you feel this collection is in conversation? 

P: Quite a few. There is a poem in the book called "Mastery" that alone has about 25 or so references in it. A few are Beloved by Toni Morrison; Native Son by Richard Wright; The Known World by Edward P. Jones; "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes; Jazz by Toni Morrison; and quotations/paraphrases of Margaret Walker, Carl Phillips, and Zora Neale Hurston. The book In the Wake by Christina Sharpe inspired some of my thinking in the book writ large as did ZONG! by M. NourbeSe Philip. It was a fun book to write in this way because I got to use many of the books that I knew and loved as foundation to my own work. Some stories that I grew up with make their way in too, like the story about the flying African, which is based on the historical revolt at Igbo Landing, where enslaved Igbo people took over a boat and were never seen again after. Some say they returned to the water to go home. Others say they escaped into the wilderness and lived as maroons. I hope MUTINY is a door for many who respect these stories to connect more deeply with them.

Q&A with Rita Dove

M: Your first collection appeared in 1980. Since then, you have produced ground-breaking work across genres. What do you feel has changed most in your poetic practice since you first began writing?  

R: Poetic practice can also mean how the writing gets done. When I was a fledgling poet, I wrote to a world that didn’t know I existed, basically calling out: “Here I am! Is anyone there?” And with every response – a stranger writing a letter or attending a reading – I could feel the tribe growing larger, stronger. As I continued publishing, teaching, and giving readings and lectures, my audience grew. Now I’m fortunate to have an readership that appreciates my work, which is wonderful; but when I sit down to the blank page, I can’t assume to know who’s in that audience or anticipate what will move them. A poet addresses the void and hopes someone is listening; the poem is both a shout into the cosmos and a whisper into a stranger’s ear. I’ve been called a public poet, but for me the act of writing is a very intimate – nearly illicit – undertaking; to be aware of all those incognito readers, waiting, while trying to coax a poem into being is to become self-conscious in the worst way – inspiration either flies right out the window or chokes on its own sputters.

Which brings us to changes in my physical poetic practice over the years.  When I was young with a myriad possibilities before me, I could write anywhere – in a coffee shop or on a park bench, at a card table with a 12-inch TV blaring from the corner of the room. But the world's racket seems more dissonant now, and I yearn for quiet. I try to carve out as large a chunk of uninterrupted time as I can finagle and retreat into a near-monastic seclusion, far away from the clamoring voices, until I can finally hear the whispers at my core. Poetic practice becomes a physical escape – shut the door, turn off radio and phone, block the internet – to a desert island of the mind where the cacophony of opinions and expectations has fallen away.

I began as many young writers do – reading voraciously, emulating favorite poets, searching for my “voice” – as if voice were a static quality.  Everything I’ve experienced and lived through has somehow affected my writing, even my passionate pursuit of decidedly non-poetic hobbies like  ballroom dancing and sewing: I pay more attention to syllabic dips and swirls; I relish stitching the parts of a narrative into a three-dimensional garment that can pirouette in the center of a lyric moment. Collaborating across genres – with composers, visual artists, architects, dancers – has enriched my poetic intonation and pacing. But I would say that being a practicing musician has been the greatest game changer. I started playing cello in fourth grade, around the same time I began writing poems and science fiction stories. And it’s fair to say that the poems in my earlier books were written by a cellist; I liked working those lower registers. But when my professional life began to speed up and my schedule grew too busy to accommodate dragging a cello along on book tours, I took up classical singing, reasoning that at least now I could carry the music with me, inside me. I discovered that I was a soprano, which meant if I wanted to make music, I had to lead the choir; so I learned to relax in that thin upper air and float without looking down.  Over time, some of that chutzpah has rubbed off on my poetry. Quite a few poems in my latest book could have been sung by a dramatic soprano; there’s a conscious vocal projection, conveying the melodic line.

M: Thank you so much for that extraordinarily thoughtful perspective. I love learning about your process. 

We are living in a distinctly troubling and fraught moment, as the title of your newest collection suggests. What themes and threads were particularly on your mind, and where might we locate hope at this time?

R: This question touches on so many threads! The key word in my book's title is not “apocalypse.”  When we hear of an apocalypse, we think of the dismantling of everything we hold dear – absolute destruction, the end of days, perhaps even the troubling times we’re living in. But an apocalypse can also refer to a resurrection, the notion that a revelation will be born from the ashes. I hoped the reader would bear both meanings in mind, to learn and rise from the wreckage.  

Yet this is no doomsday collection of poems! The organizing principle behind my book lies in the word “playlist.” Just as you might assemble a playlist of songs to accompany you through the day, buoying your shifting moods – soothing tunes when you hit a rough spot, ebullient when celebratory spurts are called for – the poems in Playlist for the Apocalypse are intended to serve as companions for their readers, charting the ups and downs, even the tangentials of life in the here and now. Some provide comic relief, in the vein of “laughing just to keep from crying”; others rage or simmer or grieve. It can be a solace to remember that civilizations have weathered these kinds of disruptions and terrors before, so hopefully we can do it again; then we catch ourselves thinking: Why haven’t we come further, why do we keep repeating our mistakes? All these ambivalences, the solace and the warnings, resonate with Playlist for the Apocalypse.

I like your turn of phrase in “where might we locate hope” – the idea that gaining hope requires some effort on our part, rather than expecting hope to be bestowed. Any great work of art, anything achieved by sheer human enterprise pushed to its limits, is a location for hope. To create something beautiful, even if the subject matter springs from horror, means that the artist was able to articulate difficult emotions. Identifying an injustice or injury is not enough; but conveying that outrage and anguish so that others comprehend and empathize – that is where hope resides. It means the human spirit has found a way to grapple with its demons and lived to tell the tale.

M: How does historical and etymological research figure into your work? What is the process like as you think and weave these subjects into your drafts?

R: I’m an African-American female, so I grew up sandwiched in by history’s many layers: History with a capital H was anything from the past deemed worthy enough to make it into the books I was required to study; current events were played out on television with ongoing interpretations tumbling from the mouths of pundits. But there was also a lost history passed down through generations, tales gone blurry from the retelling, adults snorting at news coverage, outraged whispers over yet another injunction or beating. So I grew up witnessing the extraordinary struggles of ordinary people – acts of quiet valor and sacrifice, their muted anger and steadfast resolve – and I realized that the official version of events rarely dished up the whole story and was often far from the truth.

It seemed inevitable that I’d end up exploring these suppressed chronicles – what I call the underbelly of history – in my writing. Which means I do research, lots of it; though I’m not after facts per se. I want to bring the facts to life, to restore three-dimensionality to individuals who have been flattened by hatred, caricatured into anonymity.  

I’ve always been drawn to the voices that have not been heard. For instance, the poet Sarra Coppia Cullen, who lived in Venice’s Jewish ghetto in the 16th century; because of her religion and gender, she hasn’t been accorded the recognition she deserves. Or from another section of my book, the spring cricket singing in the hedge, who knows he’s considered “merely an annoyance” by the very human beings he’s been observing from his hidden perch. There are victims and villains of the Black Lives Matter movement – some anonymous, others whose names have joined the bitter daily count – who have become part of our tragic news. All this is in the warp and weft of my poetry.

Although I’ve written quite a few poems dealing with history, I rarely go out looking for an event or person to write about. It’s more like the subject finds me; it’s almost like being haunted.  Sounds like sorcery, but it’s not, really; I’ll stumble across an intriguing nugget of information and curiosity pulls me in deeper. I’ll wonder what this person saw when they looked out a window, what their bed linens felt like, what they ate for breakfast. As I become more familiar with their environment, the more I find myself living in their world, too. Only then will my protagonist begin to speak to me, through me.

Most of my persona poems begin this way.  I know more about crickets than anyone who's not an entomologist needs to know – how long they live, what they eat, the various sounds they produce and what those sounds mean; I even got down on the ground to approximate the view from a cricket’s vantage point. In the poem “Bellringer”, the speaker is Henry Martin, a slave who was born on the day Thomas Jefferson died; for years Henry Martin tolled the hours at the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson’s “academical village”. The irony of this serendipity moved me to read everything I could find about his world – tidbits about the lack of discipline among students (each of whom was permitted to bring one slave to the university), where the best food was to be had, and so on. Once I actually began writing the poem, I put the research aside; and when I got stuck because I couldn't hear the sound of the bell as he hear it, up there in the belfry, I put the poem aside and did more research on the casting of bells, what metal composition produced the roundest tones, the architecture of bell towers, until I could hear that molten stroke. It's one of the most exhilarating aspects of writing –  that dance between fact and imagination.

Which brings us to the etymological side of language. The shadow side of our discourse – what’s murmuring underneath the words we toss about each day –fascinates me. Of course, as a poet I love everything about words; words are my medium, my clay, the piece of earth out of which I fashion my vases.  And sometimes going back to the origins of a word can tell you so much about the emotional energy it churns up when it is uttered; even if that bit of information’s no longer apparent in the word today, it somehow still resides at the core. So if I’m stuck in a poem, I’ll look up the roots of words that are bothering me, and often that will push me through. I'm an unabashed etymological junkie.

M: Are there any other books or works of art with which you feel the book is in conversation?

R: Oh, so many! The section called “After Egypt” has been guided by the voice of the aforementioned Sarra Coppia Sullam, whose poems and letters articulated outrage with an exquisite balance of grace, despair, hope and retribution. She reminds me of Muriel Rukeyser, whose voice also infuses this work. On the other end of the outrage spectrum there’s Sylvia Plath. No one does anger better! Those deft tonality shifts, rapier indictments . . .  she’s definitely the patron saint of the section called “Eight Angry Odes".

I finished Playlist for the Apocalypse during the early days of the pandemic. While fiddling with recalcitrant words and settling on the final order, I decided to reread two Italian classics:  Dante’s Divine Comedy, followed by Boccaccio’s Decameron. The Inferno struck a chord in me urgency huge influence – the relentlessness of its reckoning, but also its thrust of hope. But the release of tension I experienced while rereading the Decameron was surreal. There I was, amusing myself with this massive book of stories in the middle of a pandemic, just as Boccaccio’s young people fled plague-ravaged 16th century Florence and escaped to the countryside, where for amusement they set themselves the task of telling a story apiece each evening: ten men and women, ten stories a night for ten nights – a hundred tales in total, a sort of metaphorical sandbagging against the flood.

Other works of art, other genres? I listened to a lot of blues, a lot of  Leonard Cohen, but also German Lieder – art songs by Schumann, primarily. In both the blues and Lieder there’s something about the length of time allotted in which to express emotion, an extreme stage of being, that implicitly shaped some of my poems.

Music was both the inspiration and the scaffolding for the section called “A Standing Witness”, which was conceived as a song cycle in collaboration with the composer Richard Danielpour. Knowing that this song cycle, which spans the past six decades of American history, would be premiered by the incomparable Susan Graham – knowing that this amazing mezzo soprano would be singing the words that I was writing – definitely had an influence on the sequence evolution, simply because there’s an unmistakable gravitas to the mezzo soprano voice. The soprano range suggests a clarion call issuing from the empyrean – but additional layers of the mezzo register triggers echoes deep beneath the surface; it compels us to listen. So I’m back to being a cellist again!

Q&A with Robert McCrum

M: What most surprised or struck you about The Gloucester Notebook?  

R: Perhaps how contemporary it feels. This notebook could have been bought in any upscale stationery store in England or the US by an aspiring poet in 2021. More importantly, I was struck by the strong sense it conveys of Eliot's intentions as a young poet making his debut. These are not rough drafts (though that's how we must treat them, of course), but work-in-progress by a poet with an authoritative voice. Here, he's saying, is TSE!

M: What insights might readers gain from looking at drafts of Eliot's early work?

R: There's the fascination of reading some famous lines (especially from Prufrock) that are already set in marble, and other lines (deleted) that won't survive Eliot's sure-footed and ruthless editing. There's also the sense we get of Eliot's artistic coherence. Somewhere else he writes, of Shakespeare, that the whole of the poet's work is essentially "one poem... united by one significant, consistent, and developing personality." The same could, I think, be said of the poetry in the Gloucester Notebook.

M: In your forward, you mention the invaluable nature of manuscripts. Of course, something like the facsimile of Pound's edits on The Waste Land has proven to also be an indispensable teaching tool. What would you say are some of the most valuable, or perhaps even useful aspects of having access to a writer’s notebooks in facsimile? 

R: The wonderful thing about a facsimile edition such as this is the potent, and very urgent, reminder it provides of the singular and solitary nature of literary work. In a digital age, it's good to be reminded about the ageless business of black on white...The reader can experience and enjoy - as it were - the tangible sense of Eliot's handwriting, actually in royal blue ink, shaping the lines that will eventually become part of our great tradition. This is what you get with original manuscripts, and it's thrilling!

M: What, if I may ask, is your next (or perhaps current) project?

R: My current project is the American launch of my new book, Shakespearean (Pegasus Press). My next project is still a voyage too speculative to deserve description, but I am beginning to feel some wind in my sails...

Q&A with Mary Jo Bang

M: How would you describe the difference between working on Inferno and Purgatorio?

MB: I’ve learned a great deal about translation over these fifteen years, first by translating Inferno, but after Inferno was finished, by translating Purgatorio while simultaneously co-translating The Poetic Experiments of Shuzo Takiguchi 1927–1937 with Yuki Tanaka and translating Colonies of Paradise by Matthias Göritz, with input from the author (those two books are as yet unpublished). I’ve come to hold myself to an extremely high standard in terms of accuracy in translation while remaining determined to find ways to do that without compromising the need to make a poem that is every bit as complicated and/or radical as the original. I think with Inferno, I was only beginning to see how that might be done.

Purgatorio is a more rigorous translation, partly because I’ve become more skilled, practice will do that, but also because there are so many internet modalities now that I’m able to use. I often use Wiktionary, for example, to trace the etymology of the word, plus there are online concordances of every word in the Divine Comedy, which means it’s possible to track how the same word is used in other contexts throughout the three canticles. We reveal ourselves by how we speak and by listening to this poet, Dante Alighieri, speak through his characters, I’ve gotten to know him. The same is true of Takiguchi and Göritz. I’ve listened to them very carefully and know how they sound. I try to recreate that sound in English. Of course, when I say “how they sound,” I know that is “how they sound to me.” I’m aware of the egocentrism, and ethnocentrism, of my assertion but I try to mediate my shortcomings by working with others who are native speakers of the language and who have an intimate knowledge of the poet’s personal and cultural history. In the end, I fall back on those exchanges with others, and on research, and finally, on what I know as a poet.

M: What is the most surprising thing you've learned while undertaking this multiple-book project? 

MB: I’ve learned how important translation is, how much it matters in terms of keeping important books alive. I thought I knew that before but now I know it in a more visceral way. One could argue, however, that I need to believe that because I’ve just spent fifteen years of my life translating two-thirds of the Divine Comedy!

M: I'd be remiss if I didn't ask what your plans are for the Paradiso...

MB: I have begun Paradiso and have a rough draft of the first five cantos and have completed the notes to the first two and a half cantos. Which leaves a lot of work yet to do! I want to do it, the question is, how to find the time?

M: I usually finish by asking which other works of art the book is in conversation with, but of course Purgatorio is rich with allusions of all kinds! So, perhaps a better question is, what did you read in preparation, apart from Dante? Are there any other texts you'd like to draw our attention to?

MB: Reading and translating Dante, and working on the notes, has put me in touch with so many texts that I had never read, Ovid is just one example. For a reader to follow along, it might be like playing a game of chance since for any single note, multiple roads lead off into the literary distance. I think I’d rather send readers to other translations that are reinvigorating ancient texts. The Odyssey, for example, by Emily Wilson, who is now, I understand, working on a translation of The Iliad. Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Also, the recently published translation of Beowulf (FSG, 2020) by the novelist Maria Dahvana Headley. It’s amazing how exciting it is to read her translation. It appears that women may be less in thrall to the traditional ways of antiquating and elevating these texts. The result is that these works now seem so alive, as they must have been to their original readers—or else they wouldn’t have lasted this long. And the fact is, ongoing scholarship makes these texts quite fluid. I’m continually surprised by how much is still unsettled in Dante’s work. William Warren Vernon’s prose translation of the Comedy (1889–1900) traces the commentary back to Benvenuto, who wrote his commentary sometime between 1373 and 1388. Reading Vernon, you see, over a five-hundred-year span, the evolution of ideas about the meaning of various words, phrases, or allusions. And now we’ve had another one-hundred-plus-years, during which scholars have continued to consider those same moments in the poem and have sometimes arrived at different conclusions. And even so, those conclusions may yet be revised in the future.

Q&A with Kaveh Akbar

M: How was your drafting process similar/different from your first collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf?

K: I wrote my first book in the throes of early recovery, and the poems very much reflect that frantic, desperate state. I was living in my poems because I couldn’t live in my life anymore. The poems in Pilgrim Bell have had more time to grow with me and mature. I became very interested in how I could build poems out of silence, poems where the language is the negative space poured around a mold of stillness to give, to reveal, silence’s shape.

M: The book's epigraph is spread across two pages. The first, "Any text that is not a holy text is an apostasy," while the subsequent page declares, "Then it is a holy text." At what point in the drafting process did you arrive at this opening, and to what extent do you see it as setting the tone for what follows?

K: That opening was one of the first things I set in place for Pilgrim Bell. I’m so happy you mention it, that it stuck out. I’m fascinated by apophatic theology, defining the divine by what it is not. Maimonedes wrote that the God of his understanding was, “beyond the capacity of the mouth to express, beyond the capacity of the ear to hear, and beyond the capacity of the heart of man to apprehend clearly.” That seems true of any divine worth writing about—this language is just not up to the task. So what is holiness? What is holy? I have no idea. But I know that what I’ve written is not apostatic. And if there exists this binary between apostasy and holiness, and I know the book is not an apostasy—well, to me, that has interesting implications.

M: Can you talk a bit about the "Pilgrim Bell" sequence from which the book draws its title? What role do you see these poems playing in the collection?

K: The book plays so much with recursion, with repetition. Those poems are integral to that. The repeated ringing of a bell. The way its sound continues after you stop hearing it. How the grammatical imposition of certainty (the period) is stripped of meaning by the stubborn persistence of the enjambed syntax. It sounds silly to say, but that was so humbling to me. To resist my vain and doomed certainties. To watch the language teach me how.

M: That’s a fantastic description. Are there any other works of art with which you feel the book is in conversation?

K: Oh the list is endless. Every book I’ve ever read. Every painting, sculpture I’ve ever seen. Every person who ever fed me, every person I ever fed, loved, all my histories genealogies cosmologies. Everything inflects it. Li-Young Lee says somewhere, “Syntax is identity.”

More usefully, though: Rabi’a, Anne Carson, Keats, and Robert Hayden all feature prominently in Pilgrim Bell. I’ve been obsessed of late with the visual art of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, the novels of Andrés Barba, the acting of John Cazale, the music of Kristina Esfandiari. I’m trying to answer quickly to avoid getting too precious about my selections. I’ve been painting a lot lately too.

Q&A with Carrie Fountain

M: Can you talk a bit about the epigraph in relation to the poems? Did you know right away that this passage from Rilke would serve your purposes?

C: Epigraphs are mysterious. I’ve never once intended to include an epigraph in a book, yet here they’ve always come, trotting across my path. I love when they do. It’s as if the humming universe of other writers, voices, thoughts across the ages, asserts itself. Hi there! And it’s a comfort to know that, whatever thread I’m following has been followed before, in a totally different way, unique to another, yet utterly recognizable.

When I came upon this passage in reading Rilke, I had that experience, that thwack of recognition. This bit addresses the tension—the “ancient enmity,” as Rilke puts it—"between our daily life and the great work,” that centers the question at the heart of my collection: What is holy?

The epigraph came after a first draft. It helped me navigate through subsequent drafts.

M: I love the idea that an epigraph can do that. What was your writing and revision process like for this book?

C: I wake very early, before my children, and do my poetry reading and writing then. These poems mostly came out of that morning practice: writing in the dark, sipping coffee, letting whatever comes come. Some of these poems, like the poems “The Jungle” and “Self-Help” carry a little of that actual practice inside them, as narrative.

Here is a very simple, perfect practice I learned from the poet Naomi Shihab Nye: write down three things you remember from the last 24 hours that you’d forget in the next 24 hours if you didn’t write them down now. If there is a more elegant spiritual exercise for planting one’s self in the moment while simultaneously accounting for the fleeting, groundless passage of time, I have not found it. I recommend this to all my students first thing. There is no beginner who cannot benefit from this practice. There is no master who cannot benefit from this practice.

During other hours of the day, I can often eke out work on other writing: novels, screenplays, kid’s books. I’m writing a TV show with a friend and I can dip into that world any time of the day, whenever our schedules align and we can huddle for a while in our respective writing rooms, he in New York and me in Austin. I can revise poetry in the afternoon, if pressed. But the focus and attention that is required of writing, for me, wanes as the day goes on. That attention is concentrated in the morning hours, between 5:00 am and 8:00 am. That’s why the morning hours, for me, are for writing and reading poetry.

M: God and the spirit figure prominently, and yet the poems are very much rooted in the daily--a pitch-perfect balance between the concrete and the abstract. How do you see the two relating to each other, the physical and the spiritual, on the page?

C: I’m a disciplined writer when I’m disciplined. Disciplined enough. When I’m not, I am waiting to be. Waiting feels wrong to me, and it makes me uneasy. It doesn’t feel like work, even though it is likely the most important work: the work that happens beneath the mindscape of everyday life.

Now that I’ve been writing this long into my life, I’ve lost the utter fear that used to accompany long stretches of Not Writing. I’ll never write another word. This fear used to grip me hard, especially in the time right after a book came out. And it still comes around a little even now. But not as existentially. I think that’s probably because I’ve come to understand writing and revising in a different way.

It’s hard to articulate, and it feels vulnerable because part of me still finds it ridiculous, but for me, the discipline that returns with my writing practice is a spiritual discipline. When I’m awaiting it, I’m awaiting the spirit. When it’s here, I’m attending to the gifts of the spirit. It’s not really about making books, though of course it is. But, more essentially, it’s about returning to the attentiveness of that discipline. Which is merely taking a breath and feeling it. Looking around and seeing. It’s the easiest and the hardest thing to do.

What is holy is all around. Isn’t that the most difficult thing to come to terms with?

It’s all around and all the time.

The discipline is hard for me to come to. Like sleep, it is about relinquishing. You can do lots of things to make it easier to fall asleep, but you cannot force yourself to do it. Writing, in some ways, contains the same elemental conundrum. It requires a step back. A release. An assessment of the Worst-case Scenario.

When my daughter, who sometimes has trouble falling asleep, starts to get panicky as the hours get later, I ask her: Has anyone ever died of not sleeping? I ask myself the same question about writing: Has anyone ever died of not writing? And somehow knowing that the answer is no gives me the solace—the release, the emptying—I need to stay in the vicinity of my writing practice.

M: Are there any other works of art of texts with which you feel the book is in conversation?

C: Oh yes—don’t you think all our work is in conversation with others? I’m very glad that I really like reading poetry, as much as I also love writing it.

Some of the books I read while working on these poems surely informed their creation. I was really taken with Ada Limon’s The Carrying. I read through both Merwin’s and Clifton’s Collected while working on these poems, reading a bit each morning. I read Rilke, of course—and it’s strange, because I am never particularly drawn to Rilke, and yet here he always comes to shake at my soul. I’m always reading Jane Kenyon, who didn’t live long enough to fully express her gifts, which is a tragedy on top of the tragedy of her death.

A poet I’ve read all my writing life, who is scarcely translated into English, is the Brazilian poet Adelia Prado. During the time between my last book and this one, she had a second collection translated by Ellen Watson. I got to meet her when she visited Austin with Watson. I can’t explain her poetry and what it means to me. But she is a spiritual master, and reading her poems feels like a visit to church. Full. Complicated. Nourishing.  

Q&A with Andrew Motion

M: How has the move to America informed your poetic practice?

A: At the end of my time as Poet Laureate in the UK (2009), I thought that if I put myself in a new situation geographically, politically and poetically, then I might also find new ways forward as a writer. So I moved to America. I expected to start writing poems that engaged immediately with my new reality - but like many exiles before me, I found that my first instinct was in fact to write about the things that I’d left behind. The first thing I wrote was a long poem about my dead parents, called Essex Clay. I’d had the idea and the basic structure knocking around my head for a long time, but hadn’t been able to work out how to deal with the narrative element. When I got here, I felt able to treat the subject in a much more broken-up way than anything I’d written previously, as though America had acted like a mallet, and broken me out of the stricter patterns I’d previously been using. In other words, I felt liberated into doing something new while I was writing the poem, even though I was dealing with subjects that lay in the familiar past.

M: “How Do the Dead Walk,” the second long poem in Randomly Moving Particles, deals heavily with violence. What are the poem’s origins?

A: After I’d finished Essex Clay, I began turning towards the new subjects that America offered me, or confronted me with, and the largest of these had to do with violence - because I was now living in a country with gun laws that were completely unlike any I’ve previously know. And, moreover, I was living in a city - Baltimore - which has a very serious problem with violence. But while the subject felt urgent, I was wary of it. I didn't want to seem presumptuous, or give the impression of seeming to understand completely something that was still new to me. So I looked for a way to approach it that would draw on things in my past that were better known to me.

I’d been brought up in the wilds (as they then were) of East Anglia, in England, and in the village down the road from where I lived, a notorious murder took place which cast a long shadow over my childhood. The story of that murder is essentially the story I tell in “How Do The Dead Walk.” But to make things more interesting, and I hope resonant, I cross-fertilised it with the narrative of Euripides’ play Herakles - which begins with Herakles underground, finishing the last of his labours, before returning to the surface of the earth only to find that his wife and children are being terrorised by a usurper. Herakles disposes of this tyrant, but is then visited by the figure of Madness, and murders the wife and children that he’s just saved. Why? Like a lot of plays written during the golden age of Greek drama, the answer seems to have something to do with what we now call post-traumatic stress, and I wanted to investigate that as a possible motive. But I also wanted to think about bad things happening with no motive - or motives so deeply buried in the psyche that they are largely invisible to onlookers, and perhaps also unknown to perpetrators themselves. your third question

M: How did you decide on the shape of the collection (two long poems with three shorter pieces in the middle)?

A: I was interested in this collection in exploring different kinds of story-telling. Like every lyric poet, I’m generally drawn to small scenes, quick glances, brief episodes, rather than to more developed kinds of narrative. But also like most writers I want to challenge myself - and as you can tell from what I’ve been saying about “How do the Dead Walk,” the challenge here was to try something that included a larger sense of sequence, and of more obvious links between cause and effect. But having done that, I then wanted to go back to more fragmented kinds of apprehension - and develop those a bit too. To push them, in fact, into the service of a poem that quite deliberate avoids having a coherent narrative - which is what happens in the title poem. Its structure is more like a fugue than a story, and its themes circle and return (themes to do with migration, exploration, homesickness, mortality), so as to give what I hope is a kind of swirling and immersive mind-picture. A mixture between a meditation and a developing melody. I should also say there are three other shorter poems in the book, which have their own slightly different ways of accommodating event. So as I say, I hope readers will think about the business of “telling” in poems while they’re reading the book, even while they’re mostly occupied with things being shown. M: Are there any other works of art or texts with which you feel the book is in conversation?

A: My first loves as a writer were almost all people who these days are associated with “the English line” - Hardy, Edward Thomas, and Larkin: they’re all people I’ve written about at some length. But I’d be sorry if this gave the impression that I was only interested in such writers. I have an equally strong appetite for Modernist and post-Modernist writers - an appetite that America is helping to foster, and that I quite deliberately came here to foster. In fact it’s probably true to say that when i was writing the title poem of this new book, “Randomly Moving Particles,” the poem that loomed largest in my mind was The Waste Land. It may be almost exactly a hundred years old, but for me as I’m sure for countless others, it continues to “make it new.”

Q&A with Ruth Padel

M: What inspired you to undertake this project, and how did you come to settle on an arc and shape?

R: Inspired isn’t quite the word. It snuck up on me. Seven or eight years ago I was commissioned to write poems to read between movements of Haydn’s Seven Last Words string quartet. I loved doing that, I grew up playing in string quartets myself - on viola, Beethoven’s own instrument – and the crucifixion sequence I wrote became the heart of my 2014 collection Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth. I performed that sequence later with the Endellion String Quartet and we clicked, we did others, I wrote poems for a Beethoven concert they did, to read between an early and a late string quartet. I focussed on the twenty years of Beethoven’s life between writing the early and the late and it went great in performances, audiences said the poems really deepened their experience of the music, which was wonderful, and a great, very unexpected compliment.

But I knew the poems weren’t finished and kept them on the back burner while I wrote two other collections. Writing those, one a poetry narrative called Tidings, the other lyrics on my mother’s death but recalling her life, fuelled me to tackle the story of Beethoven’s life.  

I began by visiting his birthplace in Bonn where I realised his 250th anniversary fell in 2020. My editor thought we should publish it then, so I had a deadline, and wrote the book in 2019, on a sabbatical (from King’s College London, where I teach) in New York, with a month at Yaddo. It helps to put a perspective distance of some kind between the experience and the writing of the poem. 

In Yaddo, I re-worked the original poems completely, responding to his life but also his evolving work, in four sequences like the four movements of a traditional quartet. I whittled these down to twelve poems in each section, thinking of the architecture of a quartet but also inspired by something my editor said, that his legacy mattered too. I decided to use myself, and my own quartet-playing, as an example of someone influenced by Beethoven, lifelong, by playing him. So I threaded through the poems glints of my own musical life, and added an introductory poem, ‘Listen’ (the thing Beethoven became unable to do but which is absolutely crucial in playing together) about the way my parents met, through playing music.

The structuring principle became four. The four voices in a quartet, the four traditional movements of a string quartet. I followed the poems with a prose coda of Life Notes. I wrote them at first just to underpin the poems, historically, but they mutated into a prose sequence on their own, a narrative which does function as indirect commentary or supplement to the poems, but is also a standalone mini-bio.

M: That is all quite fascinating. Can you talk a bit about the research behind these poems? Did you read about Beethoven's life and write at the same time?

R: I did a lot of reading! Amazing, when you consider how long ago it was and how much is written about him, and by him. Sketch-books, journals, conversation books. But I did field research first. I drew on memories of playing string quartets across Europe myself, especially in Prague, where he had his mysterious fateful tryst with his ‘Immortal Beloved’, but I wanted to get into his life, right from the beginning, through the intensities of place, and the material things by which poems live.

Growing up on a street which dead-ended at the River Rhine, he used to gaze through a telescope from the attic at the river and the Seven Hills beyond. He was fascinated by the largest, the Drachenfels, which he eventually climbed. So I crossed the Rhine and climbed that too. Then I followed him to Vienna. He went there as Austrian armies were mustering to fight Napoleon and the Europe he’d grown up with was changing very violently.

So was mine, it was the year before Brexit, with right-wing factions, primed against immigration, growing in Austria, Poland, Hungary. The dark rifted history of that glittering imperial city, ancient heart of Europe, gets into the poems everywhere. I also went to Silesia, to the castle where he had a row with his great patron Prince Lichnowsky.

So when I finally sat down to write the poems, concentratedly, in snowy Yaddo and then in a tiny loft carved out from Ad Reinhardt’s old studio on Broadway opposite NYU, I had all that experience of place salted down and singing in my veins. At night I re-read the biographies, diaries, letters, and listened to music, especially things I didn’t know before, like the trombone quartets.

M: I'm always curious about this with book-length projects--did you find yourself occasionally writing poems on other subjects that did not fit the sequence? If so, did those poems get pushed back to a future collection?

R: Never a whole poem, I felt I didn’t have time, there was an urgency, everything driving to an end-point, like sharpening a pencil. But there were poems that didn’t make it into the collection.  

M: Are there any other books or works of art--aside from Beethoven's--with which you feel your book is in conversation?

R: It is very focussed on the music. I include a chronological list of relevant works at the back so people can check where a piece they love came from in his life. But above all I tried to be in conversation, if that’s the right word, with his personality. I wanted to get across the vivid counterpoint between his cut-offness (he was ruthlessly focussed on creating), his suffering, impatience, rows with everyone and devastated disappointments and deafness, but above all his warmth! His liveliness, love of conviviality and jokes.

He also loved poetry, especially Schiller, he had wanted since he was a teenager to set the Ode to Joy which he finally set in his Ninth Symphony at the end of his life. He was very excited to meet Goethe, too. And at the darkest point in his life, in his forties, after giving up love, ending it with the Immortal Beloved, he read a translation of the Sanskrit playwright Kalidasa which I knew through an Indian friend, a poet who is also a Sanskritist. So one poem quotes a little of that. A painting gets in too, a portrait of his grandfather, whom he adored and idealised, who died when he was three. He kept that painting with him everywhere he lived, while he kept changing the apartments he rented in Vienna.

But I guess the other main art my poems respond to is architecture. All that glamour, the gilt, creamy space and carved stone curlicues in the great palaces of Vienna and Prague, the country castles of rich nobles who commissioned, for example, the Fifth Symphony, or most of the string quartets. Musicians rehearsed and played in those spaces, then went back to their own poor dark homes. A lot of that wealth came from mines of Silesia. A whole hidden history of social injustice, exploitation, the inequality Beethoven railed against all his life - he yearned and burned for humanity to be free of it - is built into the beautiful architecture he walked through every day, and the very fabric of those wonderful cities.

Q&A with Raymond Antrobus

M: The book centers on language spoken and signed. Can you talk a bit about how this theme and tension is enacted in these poems? And indeed, how it might relate to the epigraph, "There is no telling what language is inside the body"?

R: That epigraph is a mishearing of a Robin Coste Lewis line, "there is no telling what languishes inside the body". It wasn't even intentional and I hadn't known I had heard it wrong until I did a reading with Lewis and was told I'd heard it wrong. I really wasn't trying to be clever! Still, it captures perfectly what it is like to have spoken, signed and written language available to you. My entry into being a (public) poet was Slams, open mics and the London Spoken Word in the mid-2000's. I'd noticed the hierarchy there between "stage" and "page" poets, which reminded me of the world I was navigating at school (the Deaf and hearing school). In the hearing school I once had an English teacher accuse me of plagiarism because she couldn't believe that I was capable of writing well, given my background and how academically disengaged I must have seemed to her. I think ableism, race and class played into her assumptions, so this misheard quote perfectly encapsulates the assumptions that one can make from language, how it's used and how different it can be experienced internally (thought) outwardly (speech) and physically (body language / sign). In terms of themes and tensions in the book, following the epigraph, the first poem in 'The Perseverance' is called 'Echo' which sets up the reader to think about sound, but it also sets up the idea of repetition. Yes, repetition is a poetic device used in a lot of the poems but it is also something true to the experience of being D/deaf or hard of hearing in a hearing world. You're often asking people to repeat themselves. Growing up I've had numerous people tell me "I don't look deaf", as many people tell me "I don't look Black", as many people tell me I don't look like a "poet" etc, but that epigraph is the sentiment I want to respond with to all of those people now and I want to keep saying it and showing it in as many ways as I can. M: "The Perseverance" is the name of a bar in the title poem (which I loved). And, of course, it serves the book on multiple figurative levels. Was it intuitive choosing the title, or did you play around with others before you arrived at it? R: I had actually finished the book with a different title. Live readings are a big part of my process and 'The Perseverance' as a poem seemed to resonate with people, so I recognized the power of the poem when I saw and felt it connect with audiences at readings. The more I thought about the word "Perseverance", its etymology as well as its dictionary meanings, it just worked on every level and felt immediately like the right title for the book, so I ditched the other title, which I can't even remember now what it was...

M: This is the book's American debut with Tin House. It was released in 2018 with Penned in the Margins. You've lived with it out in the world for a few years now--what is it like seeing it released anew stateside? And are you at work on the next book?

R: The world was very different in 2018 and 2019. I was touring the book around the UK and Europe for most the year after it was published as well as visiting schools and universities. I had been dreaming about publishing 'The Perseverance' years before it finally happened, but I do feel like a different person and poet now. I'm still proud of 'The Perseverance', I was in my late twenties when the book was finished, I'm 34 now, so I'm also quite removed from it and I like to think that my work has matured more now. I'm married to a US citizen now and I'm living in the US, which is a foreign country to me, and I have been writing all the way through that transition. My next book will be out with Tin House in November this year; it's called 'All The Names Given' and rehashes a bit of ground that was explored in The Perseverance, but focuses more on my mother, Englishness and what intimacy looks and feels like through that lens. 

M: Are there any works of art or texts with which you feel The Perseverance is in conversation?

R: Great question! Yes, have you seen Christine Sun Kim's work? She's a sound artist as well as a visual artist, but so much of her work has been equally cathartic as it has been intellectual to me. That is something explored more in my next book too, as she inspired a form that I use throughout that book. I saw a Frank Bowling exhibition at the Tate and that shifted something in my language. I wrote the poem 'I want the confidence of' that same week as I was inspired by the boldness and the energy in the colours that Bowling got out of London, which is often seen as a gloomy landscape. In terms of text, too many to mention them all, but poetically James Berry's 'Hot Earth Cold Earth' and Grace Nichols 'The Fat Black Woman's Poems', academically, 'What The Mind Hears' by Harlan Lane and 'Reading Victorian Deafness' by Jennifer Esmail. 

Q&A with Alex Dimitrov

M: This is largely a book of praise and joy, even within despair. I wonder what it felt like to write it. Did it feel qualitatively different from your previous collections?

A: It did feel different, but mostly because it's such an aesthetic departure from my second book, which was itself an aesthetic departure from my first. The voice in Love and Other Poems is more accessible and democratic. I wrote it with people who normally wouldn't read poetry, or don't read poetry, in mind. I also found the constant doom and gloom of the media and Twitter completely unsustainable in the last four years. I wanted to give people hope. I didn't want to add to the screaming and negativity. Art can provoke but it can also bring pleasure. It can also be a companion and I think people are looking for light. I know I am. 

M: What was it like organizing the collection? How did you decide on the arc for the book?

A: I don't really decide on those things consciously. I feel them out. It's intuitive. I'm not sure how to describe it but I just know, once I have everything, where it should go. When I wrote the first month poem, which was "September" (and every month of the year has a poem in the book), I knew that the book would be structured around the concept of time. In terms of order, I happened to begin in June and end in May. Those two months are my favorite months of the year. In my mind, they hold possibility the longest. I also knew that the poem "Love," which could really go on forever (and does on Twitter at @apoemcalledlove, where I add one line a day), would use the months of the year as an organizing principle. There's a line for each month in that poem. The arc of the book is really inside it. There are also many poems that are pairs. "Yes" and "No." "Full Moon" and "New Moon." I also did that in my second book with "Champagne" and "Cocaine." "Alone Together" and "Together Alone." I'm not sure why. My brain just works that way. I like an off-center symmetry.

M: Can you tell us a bit about the generative/revision process for "Poem Written in a Cab," which is the last section of the book? 

A: I had just quit my nine to five job because it was preventing me from writing and because I felt like they didn't care about me being a poet, which really depressed me, especially since it was a poetry nonprofit. I was taking more cabs than I should have and I felt really guilty. I couldn't afford them. They were all going on my credit cards. So I made a deal with myself that whenever I was in a cab, I would be working. I would be writing poetry. And so I opened the notes app on my phone one day, stuck in traffic, and I just started writing "Poem Written In a Cab." And then the next cab ride I picked it back up. That's why the lines in that poem are so short. That's the length of line I felt comfortable with while moving. And that's why the poem is so long. Because I had to keep working through all these cab rides. So really, it came out of worry and guilt. I was constantly worried about healthcare, which I didn't have. And so another trick was, well if you are inside a poem, if you are writing, you can't worry about healthcare because writing poetry is just too hard to let you worry about anything else. M: Are there any works of art or texts with which you feel the book is in conversation?

A: Parts of the book are in conversation with Frank O'Hara, in the same way that parts of my second book were in conversation with John Ashbery and Baudelaire and Rimbaud. And my first book with Barthes and Fitzgerald and Godard. 

But really, this book is an homage to endurance and to love and to New York City. New York City is the ultimate symbol of optimism to me. It never stays down for long. It always changes. It always makes it through. That's why I dedicated the book to it. 

Q&A with Kim Addonizio

M: I grew up listening to Leonard Cohen, so I have to ask about the epigraph: "Everybody knows that the captain lied." How did you come to it, and in what ways would you say that it speaks to the collection?  

K: Leonard Cohen has always seemed to me one of those great spirits—as an artist and a human—whose life and work speaks to so many. He was as vital at eighty as he was at twenty-five. That quote, of course, is political, and maybe more resonant in the past four years in America than it has ever been. That’s one pole of the book—the political—and the other epigraph, which I think can be read in that context, is Elizabeth Taylor’s “Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.” Though masks and lipstick aren’t very compatible. Still, for me those are the magnetic poles of the collection.  

M: Absolutely—both epigraphs speak beautifully for what follows. What is your writing process like, and how did you decide on a shape for the book?

K: Sometimes it’s just slogging along writing crap for days on end and thinking, Why don’t I do something useful or productive? At other times, it’s the best drug imaginable. Mostly I read and read and read, waiting for something to trigger me—a subject, a rhythm, a metaphor. I feel terrible when I can’t write for a couple of weeks. Like an athlete laid up with an injury, only it’s some kind of psychic one. This book actually came together very quickly, when I realized I’d accumulated a number of pieces that seemed to form a kind of constellation in my head.  

M: “This is where the seams begin to loosen, where you can…almost forget the shame of being human” you write in "High Desert, New Mexico." Shame seems to be, implicitly or explicitly, a central concern across these poems. Could you talk a bit about the role of shame in your writing?

K: I do feel that particular existential “shame of being human,” knowing what our species has done to the rest of the inhabitants of the planet, to the planet itself, and to each other. I think one project, yeah, is to get beyond another kind of shame, or at least the ways other people try to shame us (“us” being, especially, women). I’m not good enough, smart enough, young enough, pretty enough. Whatever—just not enough. What we internalize as our limits, our faults. Young women, especially, struggle so much with this. In a lot of ways, I feel big chunks of this book are meant as a kind of gift for them. Please don’t kill yourself. You’re not alone. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Don’t let other people define you.

M: Are there any works of art or texts with which you feel Now We're Getting Somewhere is in conversation?

K: A lot of writers are mentioned, invoked, talked back to. My memory of Susan Sontag’s essay “The Pornographic Imagination,” which I read maybe twenty years ago, had a lot to do with the section “Confessional Poetry.” Then there’s Whitman, Keats, Dorothy Parker, Jean Rhys…You know that idea of the “literary sublime”? Maybe there’s a kind of “literary abject” as a way to get to something else. I find it in Parker and Rhys, in Millay, in Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. In my mind, at least, this book is at a dinner party with them and we’re all getting shitfaced, laughing and weeping together.

Q&A with Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris

M: "Loss is the tune of our age, hard to miss and hard to bear," you write early in the book. I was so moved by this passage, particular as its audience--in part, though not in whole--is children coming up in this age of new extinction. How does this play on your mind as you write? 

R: EO Wilson coined the idea of the 'Eremocene', the 'age of loneliness' which we are creating and entering, in which we have so depleted the world of its wondrous more-than-human diversity that we're left solitary, unsurrounded by the company of other creatures... What a chilling idea that is. Robin Wall Kimmerer memorably calls it 'species-loneliness'. The Lost Spells, though--like its big sister The Lost Words--approaches this possibility not from a perspective of fear and threat, but rather by celebrating the glorious convivium of nearby nature, the calls, cries, voices and languages of the trees, plants, animals and birds with which we share our daily lives, and which lift our hearts and shape our dreams, hour by hour, week after week, whether or not we notice them doing so. More prosaically, my children--now 17, 14 and 7--have also been among the first readers of the spells, and they've been rigorous testers of how the language falls upon the ear of the young. My 7 year old in particular--whose spirit animal is surely a wolverine and whose name, appropriately, is Will--has been ruthless in his indication of interest or boredom with regard to the spells. My most merciless editor...

M: There is so much I love--and fear--in this response. (And: I fully believe in the power of child editors!) I was equally moved by the fox's assertion "Red is my fur and red is my art, / And red is the blood of your animal heart" in answer to the question "Why do you need me?" What was the guiding principle or arc as you worked and ordered the book, and did you know right away you wanted to start with the fox's plea?

R: The fox strolled into my mind in Scotland in the late-winter of 2019. I was climbing in the mountains of the far north-west, and on a sunlit rest day we went to a deep-cut river gorge near Glen Cannich. I sat for an hour or so on a boulder by the river, and--in a notebook already illustrated with foxes by Jackie --our 'bold as brass' fox appeared in words. The spell speaks at once to Jackie's art ('the tip of a brush'), and to the boundary-crossing, category-collapsing presence of the fox in our landscapes and cultures ('garbage-raider, space-invader'). At the end of the spell, the fox looks piercingly out of the page at the reader, and turns language back on the reader too: 'red is the blood of your animal heart'. We are creatures too, and our forgetting of this is at the root of much of our calamitous hubris.

M: Jackie, how did you decide beforehand which words from the natural world you would bring to life? Does it usually begin with the word or poem, or do you sometimes feel inclined to paint something in particular, and go from there?

J: Sometimes there’s a desire to paint a creature. Some, for The Lost Spells, came before there was an idea for a book. I had hoped to work on an exhibition with Robert, with him writing over my paintings. I still want to do this. But also, there was a Barn Owl, for Suffolk Wildlife Trust, who gave copies of the book to all schools in Suffolk. I asked Robert for a Snow Hare. Birch began because we both love birches and Rob knew i loved painting them, but took months to settle into its lullaby form. Gorse I think came from Robert, and Thrift, but both are found richly around where I live. And Red Fox, the spark that lit the tinder for the book, came as a result of The Lost Words Prom (Prom 49, BBC). It was commissioned as a very obvious creature that links the wilder landscape to town, village, and city.

M: Many of these poems are acrostics (by stanza rather than line) and seem to quite literally embody and enact the compulsions of the living creature described (the swift poem/images behave like swifts!). How did you come to poetry, and which, if I may ask, is your personal favorite creature or plant in the book? 

R: Thank you! Well, as anyone who reads The Lost Spells or The Lost Words will detect, I have drunk deep of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins, drawing on Duns Scotus, forged a philosophy of 'haeccitas' or 'thisness' which was his version of what you finely call 'compulsions'. So there is something of that in each spell--a wish to allow the spell's subject to perform itself in language, to be conjured somehow to presence in ear-sight or eye-shot by the speaking aloud of the spell. My favourite creature in the book is, I think, the curlew; that's who I'd be for a day or a year, I guess. Bird of shore and moor, sea-crosser, world-girdler, and a high, bubbling cry that sends an eerie shiver down the spine. But my favourite spell? I think that would probably be Jackdaw, and here we are back to theconvivium again: these sociable, chattery, noisy, unruly tremendous corvids have kept me company in many landscapes and times here in the UK and beyond. I love them for their good cheer.

Q&A with Kevin Young

M: This project was, in part, one of recovery, finding voices that have long been silenced or omitted. How did you begin, and did anything surprise you as you worked? 

K: I started the anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song about six years ago, and began at the beginning: with Phillis Wheatley. One of my first decisions was to start with her, rather than the other Black poets who composed poems before her 1773 poems, whether orally like Lucy Terry or for magazines like Jupiter Hammon (though both appear later in the anthology). Once I realized Wheatley started publishing her poems 250 years ago I was struck by the quarter of a millennium of African American she inaugurates, and the ways that she set up some of the themes that govern us even today, from myth-making to community to protest, subtle or no.  From there, the rest was a kind of recovery and recontextualization of poets, placing them in that long conversation across the centuries that Black poets have been having about history, community, and poetry itself. Some of those lesser-known names, from Mae V. Cowdery to N.H. Pritchard, make their way into the book.  

M: What is one under-read period you hope readers will come away with a new appreciation for, and why? 

K: I’ll say two, with one not so much underread as misread. By that I mean the Harlem Renaissance, which many people know the biggest voices of, like Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, but contains many excellent lesser-known writers, especially women writers such as Cowdery, Helene Johnson, and Anne Spencer.  The other underread era may prove surprising given its recentness--the 1980s are a lean time in the publishing of Black poets after the richness of the Black Arts movement and Black presses of the 1960s. But the 1980s contains many major voices, including Christopher Gilbert and Sherley Anne Williams, who are worthy of praise. These are the very poets I first came to in my haunting of used bookstores back in the day, and I hope readers will discover them much the same urgent way I did.  

M: Who were some new discoveries for you? 

K: New to me were some of the earlier poets, though I was aware of the richness of the nineteenth century in Black poetry as a whole. I include for instance Les Cenelles, the name of the first African American poetry anthology, published in 1845--the writers were New Orleans Creoles writing in French, and were later translated by Langston Hughes and others. My family is from Louisiana; Les Cenelles could be my cousins! These and other poets like Afro-Puerto Rican poet Julia De Burgos remind us that African American poetry isn’t always in English. 

M: What is something you hope readers will take away from seeing the work collected and anthologized this way? 

K: I hope readers emerge with the breadth and depth of African American poetry, and the ways that it is both timely and timeless. I have personally found the anthology a real balm in this turbulent time, a time the poets have in many ways predicted—a time they know how to speak of and also how to survive. For generations Black poets and people have made song out of struggle, as Lucille Clifton writes: “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.”

Q&A with Pascale Petit

M: There is a family narrative that runs through the collection, as well as the underlying theme of environmental catastrophe and extinction. Can you speak to how these two concerns parallel or amplify each other? P: I write intuitively, guided by images, the song of the line, its dynamic, and by my excitement towards the subject. The draft has to feel true. When I write well, I am playing with all these elements, it’s a serious play, but I am in a childlike tranced state. The themes that emerge in the book appear almost as a by-product – they don’t lead it.

Tiger Girl reveals the cruelty of human beings in their treatment of non-human life, and each other. If I look back on my books, I suspect that most of them are asking this question: are humans essentially good or bad? Perhaps that’s why I’m driven to examine the way that people in power treat the powerless. I’ve tended to do this by holding a magnifying glass to my dysfunctional family, in particular on my parents and difficult childhood. In Tiger Girl I focus on the benevolence of my Indian grandmother, who took me in as a baby, then later, from the age of seven until fourteen. She didn’t have to do that, so in Tiger Girl she is a force for good, and the book is in a way a series of grandmother love poems. She is this saviour, who herself was saved. Her origins are a mystery, but I’ve been told that in Rajasthan where she was born, she was taken in by her father’s white family, while her real mother was the maid. I wanted to explore her heritage, her country, but most of all – I wanted to see a wild tiger as she had done as an infant, when one walked into her tent. So, I went to India to experience the wildlife, and fell in love with it; the national parks are brimming with animals and birds!

Going into the tiger forests in open jeeps is addictive! I’d wake at four, and be at the forest gate by five, waiting for it to open. Then the rush to find tracks, to catch a tigress patrolling her realm, the theatre of alarm calls that we’d be in the centre of, a sensurround of barks started by langurs at their treetop lookouts, and taken up by the deer. The tiger hidden, but there! But I soon realised what an immense struggle it is to keep the tigers alive, as well as all the other fauna – elephants, sloth bears, mongooses, owls and Indian rollers. Poaching is a constant threat. The parallel with my family story – how my grandmother was saved by her father, how I was saved by her from more years in an orphanage, and from the “poaching” of my parents on my body and soul, is a testimony to kindness and love. It’s kindness, love and empathy for wild animals that can save them from cruelty and abuse. We only have to empathise with them to know they suffer, and to stop the suffering. The situation in India is complicated, as in many wild parts of the world, by poverty. I’ve heard and read accounts by poachers who became forest guards, who went on to protect the tigers they once poached. Their guard-work is informed by their poaching experience; they know when and where incursions into the forest will occur. But what struck me was the indifference one guard divulged in his former life as a poacher. My account of his poaching methods is recorded in my long poem ‘In the Forest’. He needed the money for food. His need killed his empathy, his victim was just a means to make money, not a companion suffering being. The animal/human predicament echoes the dynamic between a person with power (such as a parent or president) and the powerless. M: That makes a good deal of sense given how I read the book, one image layering over the next in an intuitive, almost subconscious way. What was your revision process like, and how did you determine the arc of the book? P: I started writing Tiger Girl just after the Brexit referendum. My anxieties about citizenship and possible expulsion – I eventually applied and got British citizenship – reminded me of my grandmother’s situation, and how she’d had to conceal the fact that she was Indian. I hadn’t been aware of it when I lived with her as a child. All I could really remember were certain mysteries, her tiger stories, her speaking Hindi in her sleep. I started researching where tigers were in India, and read every tiger book I could find. I planned my first trip to Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan, followed by Kanha and Bandhavgarh National Parks in Madhya Pradesh, the tiger heartland. I went over twice, and would have gone more, but Covid-19 happened. I had no idea there’d be so many animals and birds – imagine discovering your heaven then realising it is under threat of vanishing. This is the situation we find ourselves in on this planet: the wild is a place of awe and wonder, but it’s vanishing even as we discover new species. So, what set out to be a personal quest for identity and heritage, became a story about the forests and their fauna. Of course, now, because of Covid-19, there are new threats to wildlife, not least because it’s a zoonotic virus that it is thought originated in bats, passed through a mammal such as the much-poached and probably soon-extinct pangolin, to humans. My personal experience of cruelty at the hands of parents gave me empathy with the animals that are tortured and killed. Are they the childhood of the planet? I’m terrified that we will end up as the only large mammals on Earth, our companions gone, their homes destroyed. It’s unbearable to imagine a world without forests or animals, so, throughout Tiger Girl, there are flashes of hope, clearings with sunlit birds or rare deer. There is also fire threaded through, simmering in the first poem ‘Her Gypsy Clothes’, becoming a roar in the final poem ‘Walking Fire’. None of this was planned, but as I was finishing the manuscript one year ago, our world seemed to be on fire, from California to the Amazon, to New South Wales.

My revision process varied wildly, some poems wrote themselves whole, especially ‘In the Forest’ and ‘Green Bee-eater’. Others needed many recasts. With ‘The Anthropocene’, I had the moving image of the planet as a bride wearing a peacock dress as soon as I saw the news items of the Chinese bride in hers. The image wouldn’t let me be, so those lines hovered on my desktop. But the song of the poem came later, after I’d read The Night Life of Trees from Tara Books, featuring art of the tribal forest artists, the Gond from Madhya Pradesh. I kept looking at the trees they’d printed, and reading the captions from their beliefs. One tree is called ‘The Peacock’, and the caption said “when the peacock dances in the forest, everything watches, and the trees change their form to turn into flaming feathers”. And that gave me my song. The stepped form on the page felt right and might suggest a bride’s train or poised waves. There was a particularly violent hurricane season last year as I was drafting it, so that became the theme, of climate change.

M: As someone who writes about animals--and who is enamored with them--I share your pain and terror at the thought of a future without them. How do you see the poems in Tiger Girl speaking to the poems in Mama Amazonica?

P: Tiger Girl features my grandmother and her tiger childhood, and Mama Amazonica is a portrait of my mentally ill mother as the Amazon rainforest. These two women hardly spoke to each other in the last years of their lives; they are in many ways opposites.  

Both books juxtapose a family in crisis with the natural world in crisis, and link abuse of women and children with abuse of animals and forests. But I don’t set out to do this, it’s what the poems reveal. If I take the central poem of Tiger Girl, which is for me ‘In the Forest’, and compare it to the central poem of Mama Amazonica, which for me is ‘My Amazonian Birth’, Mama Amazonica is more hopeful of a human’s rebirth in the pristine rainforest, even if that rainforest is sick and broken. What happened between the writing of the two books was Trump’s increasingly anti-eco politics and the rise to power of Bolsonaro in Brazil, followed by the election of Boris Johnson in the UK and a general global rise of fascism and contempt for the natural world. Yet, the personal story in Tiger Girl, of my Indian grandmother saving me from my abusive parents, is hopeful. And there are splashes of hope throughout the book. There has to be hope. The human psychodrama is hopeful, because what my grandmother did, taking me in for two years as a baby, then for seven years as a child, passed her strong spirit on to me and supported me all my life. Yet, even there, there is betrayal, the story of her returning me to my mother, twice, while Mama Amazonica is both my abused and mentally ill mother, and the abused mother-forest. The human drama mirrors the drama that’s unfolding on our planet – a struggle for the oppressed wild to survive. In India, that struggle is an old one, where the plenitude of charismatic megafauna is in conflict with the dense human population and poverty. The only relatively safe forests are in national parks, yet even there, there is poaching. As for my writing journey – the ‘tiger girl’ of my Indian grandmother is a character I’ve rarely written about before, though it is she who opens my very first collection Heart of a Deer, published in 1998, with the poem ‘Mirador’, that also tells the story of her death on fireworks night. In Tiger Girl I wanted to explore her spirit, how nourishing the older woman figure was, who appeared “like a goddess to me”.

M: Are there any particular texts or works of art with which you feel the book is in conversation? 

P: Tiger Girl is mainly in conversation with two artists. As I began writing the book, I discovered installations by the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, and felt very excited by them. I was first attracted to his work because of his installation Inopportune: Stage Two, of nine life-size replicas of tigers leaping through the air, shot and transfixed mid-leap by bamboo arrows. I almost felt at this stage that his work would dominate the book. I wanted to write my equivalents of his firework events. In the end, only two poems remained in my final cut: Ethereal Flowers, which I turned into ‘Her Flowers’, and Sky Ladder, which became my ‘Sky Ladder’. That he worked with gunpowder and fireworks and a ladder made of fireworks that explodes into the sky, felt a direct link to my grandmother’s death on Guy Fawkes night. I watched his film Sky Ladder, and my poem came out of the way he dedicated the event to his 100-year-old granny. The second main artist Tiger Girl is in conversation with is the late Pardhan Gond painter Jangarh Singh Shyam, founder of Gond art, whose tribe know the Central Indian forest secrets. Like him, I’m obsessed with deer and their antlers and how antlers mirror a forest. He died tragically early, but I wanted to honour him, so I wrote a poem for him, ‘Barasingha’, about the endangered twelve-tined swamp deer and how his life was changed after coming face to face with one. My cover art The friendship of the tiger and the boar is by him and I love how my publisher Bloodaxe has wrapped the Gond tree around the back cover.   As well as these two artists, a poem early in the book, ‘Surprised!’ is a response to Henri Rousseau’s painting, Surprised! (Tiger in a Tropical Storm) – I love his work! Other poems, such as ‘The Umbrella Stand’, were influenced by Jim Corbett’s tiger hunting books. William Blake hovers in the background of ‘In the Forest’ and ‘Wild Dogs’. ‘For a Coming Extinction’ is a response to the same titled poem by W. S. Merwin. In the poem ‘Her Staircase’, I managed to write about my grandmother’s fatal staircase through a re-imagining of the installation Staircase III, by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh, which I’d spent hours sitting beneath while tutoring poetry courses at Tate Modern. Two poems are even dedicated to my first love John Keats and his forested worlds.

Q&A with Aracelis Girmay

M: I'm so fascinated by the work that goes into curating a Selected! Where does a project like this even begin? How did you set about choosing the poems and contextualizing Clifton's oeuvre? 

A: The only way I knew how to begin was to read, first, individual collections of Clifton's work. Just the year before I began the Selected I had studied the terrible stories with a brilliant group of graduate students. I had also spent a lot of time reading good woman, which includes her exquisite memoir, Generations. In Generations she writes: "And I could tell you about things we been through, some awful ones, some wonderful, but I know that the things that make us are more than that, our lives are more than the days in them, our lives are our line and we go on." And in beginning the Selected it was the "more than that" that I felt I needed to listen toward. Her work teaches me attention and the poems awaken my sense when I am thinking with them, and so I thought that if I could trust that the poems would teach me how to listen toward different versions of the Selected then I would be able to edit the book. I felt that if I could just read closely and slowly and with immense attention, that a process would begin to reveal itself. I read individual collections, I took notes about structure, themes, questions. I read the Collected (what I describe as a devotion of a book edited by Kevin Young and Michael Glaser). I read interviews. I talked with family, friends, writers. I spoke with one of Ms. Lucille's daughters, Sidney, and asked questions and listened and listened. Sidney and her sisters sent me the titles of some of the songs their mother loved. I listened and listened some more, picturing her dancing with her family. I was so very grateful to speak with Sonia Sanchez who said so many things, but the thing that felt most compass to me was when she talked about an old-fashioned smile that people sometimes get when they hear Lucille Clifton's name. And then she said: "I want Lucille to be seen, not an old-fashioned smile." She spoke about what it must have taken for Ms. Lucille to write her deeply political, livid, aching poems. And I listened and listened. Eventually I started to understand the histories she was recording and making across the work--from the first book to the last. As I say in the foreword: "It was toward such repetitions and echoes that I listened, and out of them I began to see the shape of this Selected of poems rendered with documentary, spiritual, and mystical sensibilities." In the first drafts it was very difficult to narrow the choices down but as my publisher, Peter Conners, said, "This is a Selected." Meaning: this is the version I've gathered for now. There are always possible others. But I made decisions to not include some of her very vital work like the messages from the Ones because it seemed the messages were lengthy and could not be excerpted, and in the end I decided to bring other individual poems in instead of that longer work as deeply important to her legacy as it is. Because it is Lucille Clifton, I knew that anything that was not everything would be a loss--so I accepted that, and I began to trust the resonances I was noticing. As I mentioned earlier: because in her work she paid such attention to it all, it seemed that as a gatherer of this Selected I also needed to pay attention to everything. Every dream with her in it, every time her name came up or someone shared a poem of hers, every memory anyone shared with her or her work in it (it turns out that she is everywhere!)--this was all part of the listening and the gathering. M: I find your response so moving, so alive in its efforts at engaging with her. I’m glad I asked what seems a very basic, potentially simplistic question. Was there anything that surprised you as you spent time with her work in this new way?

A: I'm not sure that it's quite a surprise, but I remain astounded by how radical her work is. To Sonia Sanchez's point, across the years of her writing life Clifton is writing poems out of the truth of her life. I mean, she is writing the truth about her life--with lucidity, strangeness, anger, joy, and complexity. She is insisting that a poem is and can be made with the truth of one's experiences, and in the languages that are your own, with the mind and metaphor and associations that are your own. How lucky are we who come after her, who get to read that knowing! In 1972 she published "the lost baby poem" in good news about the earth, and in the poem she directly addresses the "almost body" of the lost baby, offering up a definite poem for an almost child. In the address of the lost baby is both an insistence on its there-ness and an acknowledgment of its absence. There is no resolution, but instead the clarity and vulnerability of the truth. She writes about and toward Black Life, her coming into her politics (as in "apology" dedicated "to the panthers"). She writes about the conditions and demands of Whiteness. She writes about the deaths of her most beloved people on the earth. She writes about illness, dialysis, cancer. The earth. The flowers. The histories of the land and the land. Her work speaks to the times in which they were written, and speak to me so deeply and fully now, all these years later. 

M: You’re certainly not alone in both your admiration and kinship with her. Can you talk a bit about Clifton's legacy, and the influence her work has had on other poets? 

A: It is hard to know how to begin to answer. I mean, in her lifetime she published 13 collections of poems, a memoir, and more than 16 children's books written for African American children. She was a brilliant and deeply loved teacher. She was a Cave Canem elder. Her work and her person have actually changed people's lives. She has helped people I know to know what a poem can be and might be, but not just that, she has helped people to know what a person can survive, that a person can survive. That love and imagination and memory can last and last. That we can keep on knowing and talking to our beloveds who have passed on. That every thing is kin. In his gorgeous essay "In Praise of Lucille Clifton," Reginald Dwayne Betts describes coming to her work and writes, "...what I was doing when reading Clifton, more than when reading anyone else, was understanding myself." Nikky Finney, in the first pages of her exquisite Head Off & Split, writes "FOR LUCILLE CLIFTON" large and in all caps. And later, "Dahomey woman of light, laughter, language" (no period). In graduate school, 2001, Cornelius Eady met with a small group of us in the library to talk about her genius. And Elizabeth Alexander, just days after Lucille Clifton passed on February 13, 2010, shared these words in her "Remembering Lucille Clifton": "...we were still shocked that she had left us, for I do not think there is an American poet as beloved as Clifton, or one whose influence radiated as widely." In the acknowledgments of How to Carry Water I include quotes from writers and friends on Clifton's work. And part of what moves me is that she speaks so deeply to each of us. It seems so many hold her in the closest places--the poems whispering in the blood. I could go on and on and on. How her poems have been water to drink, water to share. The meeting ground. The moon. How her poems have been the sea to face shoulder to shoulder with so many of my beloveds. 

M: I love those images so much. How has your relationship to Clifton's work--and perhaps even your own!--been shaped by this project?

A: I remain utterly grateful to her for her fierce, tender, elemental poems. Exquisitely revised and honed (as I had the chance to see in the archives)--seemingly polished smooth and yet wild, too, and possessed by the earth. I can say that to have spent so much time with her poems has opened me into a different kind of study with--and of--her work. I've been given the chance to wonder with others--and with other readers in mind!--about some of what feels most urgent and yet mysterious about her work. The focus of this project has given me the chance to feel her voiceprint in such a sustained way that familiarity has given way to new sensing. You know how sometimes that can happen? These breaths feel, to me, new.