Ron Offen: “One day, sitting in my high school library writing doggerel to pass the time, my best friend whispered suddenly, ‘You know what we should be? Poets!’ It was one of those revelations one instantly knows is momentous and right; and I have not stopped writing poems since. A few lines of the poem presented here arrived about 3 a.m., forcing me to get out of bed to set them down.”
Amy Newman: “One summer after graduating from college, I was working as an assistant to a stylist in Manhattan, dressing models for photo shoots and television commercials. It sounds glamorous, but I felt very alien in that world. One morning, I was on location in an apartment on the Upper West Side, surrounded by people bustling about and by shopping bags full of items to collate and eventually choose to dress the talent. I noticed, on the coffee table, an issue of the The New Yorker, opened it, and turned to ‘In Passing,’ a poem by Stanley Plumly. I had studied poetry in college, and I had thought all of that—reading and drafting poetry—was behind me. But as I read the poem, everything changed for me: the studio, the bustling, the feverish atmosphere, all fell away. After I read the final line, I looked up from the poem again, and I was surprised to be back in that studio. I felt so moved, and so found for that moment, that I decided to go back to college to study poetry.” (web)
Jan LaPerle: “I’m a new mother. There’s hardly much to say after that (and a whole lot more, too). I write this in the springtime, which means I’m feeling like buying new clothes and cutting off my hair. Daffodils are blooming outside my kitchen window. My husband and I just moved into a new (old) house, which we’ve been working on. We are a team, and I love that about us (and everything). He cooks for me; all I have to do is watch the daffodils. I love watching the top of my daughter Winnie’s fuzzy head when she eats. Poetry comes in the smaller moments. My baby smiles at the dog. The dog smiles at my husband. I just smile at them all.”
Steven Monte: “This poem came to me as a wall—a line of separated rhyming couplets. That’s often the way it is for me: content suggests a form to me, and then the form influences the content in turn. Starting with the idea of ‘The Wall of China’ and Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall,’ along with the notion of separated rhyming couplets, the poem wrote itself, as strange as that may sound. The stricter the form, the quicker the result—assuming that there is a result. It happens or it doesn’t happen.”
Hayden Saunier: “I had lost my bearings inside the poem I was working on and needed something to power and ground it, but I’d made too big a mess. I’d ruined it. So I let the search take over. The tarantula image is an echo from a poem called ‘Fence’ by Janet Poland and became an apt figure for the mucked, grasping mind.” (web)
Charlotte Matthews: “Since the pandemic, life seems chopped into little shards of time. I write poems to try to capture some of the mishmash and glue it all back together, to make something whole that cannot be broken apart. Thanks for reading.”
Dante Di Stefano: “This poem is about the horrible plane crash this week. I send my thoughts and deepest sympathies to the families of all the victims.” (web)