Thomas Mixon: “The title and first two lines of this poem come from the warnings that Canada will soon be printing not only on boxes, but on individual cigarettes. I lost a set a grandparents to Big Tobacco and am in favor of anything that can help people quit. But I don’t think anything could’ve made them stop. When I was in 3rd grade, I wrote that what I wanted most for Christmas was for everyone in the world to stop smoking, and if they didn’t I would make them. My younger self would have loved these warnings, but now it just makes me sad.” (web)
Anne Swannell: “I am a mosaicist with Zen Buddhist leanings. I become the plate and the china teapot I smash with a hammer. Then I put myself back together again in the form of a flower, of many flowers arranged in a vase and framed in square-cut tile.” (web)
Josh Parish: “For me, a good poem delivers the same feelings as other small, simple things that surprise you with their potency: ships in bottles, old music boxes, wool sweaters, hornet stings, well-practiced card tricks, 7-Layer Burritos, hangnails, etc. I write hoping to evoke similar feelings, occasion to occasion, in the reader.” (web)
Carlos Cortez Koyokuikatl: “Poetry is the oldest of the arts, outside the art of preparing food, without which there could be no other arts. For me, it is a way of communicating my indignation of the injustices that exist within our human society, particularly that of too many decisions being made by too few people.”
Alicia Ostriker: “I don’t usually write in traditional forms, but this poem somehow asked to be in quatrains. I also don’t usually write about happiness (who does?), so it made me happy that I could do that, and gather past, present, and future happinesses into a single poem, like a little distillation of joy. As Robert Frost says: ‘For once, then, something.’”
Matthew Gavin Frank: “I’ve ran a tiny breakfast joint in Juneau, Alaska; worked the Barolo wine harvest in Italy’s Piedmont; sautéed hog snapper hung-over in Key West; designed multiple degustation menus for Julia Roberts’ private parties in Taos, New Mexico; served as a sommelier in Chicago; and authored a book of poems. Tonight, in the kitchen, I will combine blesbok venison with chocolate, jalapeño, espresso, and blood orange.” (web)
Howard Nelson: “I’ve been writing poems that are a kind of personal archeology—poems of memories from early years, which are also celebrations of cultural figures important to me, and important to the bigger flow of the historical moment I happened to drop into, being born when I was. So, Little Richard. One of the flamboyant greats. Other poems in this vein, to James Brown, Otis Redding, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Ronettes, and others, are in my book That Was Really Something.” (web)