Tony Gloeggler: “I started writing poetry because I was always pretty quiet and no one was really talking about things I was feeling and thinking. Trying to turn my thoughts into a poem helped me understand myself and how I fit and didn’t fit in the world. That’s still what I’m doing whenever I write. This one’s about the guys in the group home I managed (the place I fit best, where things made the most sense) and how so few people outside the residence viewed them like they viewed anyone else, how they’re mostly just like everybody else. A little nicer or nuttier, funnier, weirder, less guarded. How a couple of them are two of my favorite people ever, how they could sometimes annoy the crap out of me. And how I miss them (apologies to Lee and Florencio for not letting them in the poem but luckily they don’t read poetry just like nearly everybody else) and the staff. Especially Larry.” (web)
John Arthur: “The Lakers lost in the NBA playoffs and my news feeds have been inundated with debate over whether Lebron James is the greatest basketball player of all time or whether it’s Michael Jordan. That prompted the ‘I’m the Lebron James of local bureaucrats’ opening, and the rest of the poem just came out basically as is. By the way, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the greatest of all time.”
Lynne Thompson: “Although I was a civil litigator for more than fourteen years, the practice of law seldom, if ever, enters my poems. It’s as though that person has gone off for a long (and well-deserved) sleep and this poet—always bemused—has taken her place. I like her.” (web)
Luigi Coppola: “While unpacking some (decade old?) boxes since our last house move (the scene from The Incredibles springs to mind), I was inspired by the title and headings used for an article from the HomeOwners Alliance website to write about the process, the headaches, the joy of a new house and then home. Various memories came flooding back, from childhood to adulthood, all compartmentalised but through various literal/metaphoric/symbolic lens, recalling Marianne Moore’s ars poetica within the longer version of her poem ‘Poetry’: ‘imaginary gardens with real toads.’” (web)
Amy Chan: “Adrienne Rich writes that poetry (art, really) ‘ask[s] of us a grace in what we bear.’ That sums it up quite nicely for me—I write poems to find ‘grace in what we bear.’”
Note from the translator Yana Kane: “Week after week, month after month, year after year I hear about Russia’s relentless attacks on Ukraine. Kharkiv is the city that has been subjected to especially vicious bombings. Yet each time the citizens of Ukraine, the citizens of Kharkiv respond with resilience and courage; each time they push back the darkness with their love of life. One of the ways I express my solidarity with them is by translating contemporary poetry written by Ukrainian authors. Dmitry Blizniuk is a Kharkiv poet who chronicles his city’s suffering and the indomitable spirit. Note that ‘we are being freed of freedom and our lives’ is a reference to Putin’s claim that he started the war in order to defend the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine against the discrimination by the Ukrainian government.”
Hayden Saunier: “I love the way objects and people and ideas find their way together in a poem. An old friend sent me an outrageous pound cake at Christmas and when I described it as sugar-dusted, lemon-glazed, the story of the boy in this poem, told to me years ago, came straight to my mind and stayed there. It was all in the cake: that sunny yellow circle with its center missing, dense, empty, bitter, sweet, the gestures we make too late, the child’s ability to take in everything at the same moment, at once and complete: It was all in the cake.” (web)
