Dante Di Stefano: “My mother is an exceptional woman, who has done more for me than anyone. And yet, for some reason, I find it difficult to write poems for her. This poem started as an attempt to write a single sentence sonnet like Frost’s ‘The Silken Tent,’ only for my mom. Hopefully, it gets at some of the unbounded gratitude I feel for her and have a hard time articulating on the page and in every day life. Also, I hope it expresses my profound reverence for all mothers, and my gratitude to my wife for being such a great mother to our two children.”
Chloe Ortiz: “I like to write poetry because when I read a good poem, it makes me feel good and I smile. I would like to make other people feel good too.”
Nancy Miller Gomez: “My childhood home was on a small lake in Kansas. I spent many happy hours there fishing with my brother. But I was terrified of the catfish. They looked like nightmares dredged up from a bad dream with their slimy, mottled skin, wide-set, gelatinous eyes, mouths open and groping and all those tentacle-like whiskers. I don’t know if my brother ever convinced me I could bring a dead thing back to life. Perhaps I have mis-remembered it. But ‘Resurrection’ is an attempt to capture my child-desire to believe in myself.” (web)
Marianne Kunkel: “My high school English teacher dropped a Marianne Moore poem on my desk after class one day. At the time I liked reading poetry, but it took realizing I shared a name with a famous poet for me to see myself in it. I started writing.” (web)
Nancy Miller Gomez: “According to Michael Anderson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, with ‘motivated forgetting’ you can forget with intentionality and sculpt your painful memories into something beautiful. In a New York Times article, Anderson says you can get better at this with practice. ‘How to Forget’ grew out of a thought exercise where the narrator is lining her memories up and making choices about which ones to kill off, and which ones to keep and reshape.” (web)
Prompt: Write a poem with a single word as the title, in which our understanding of that word shifts by the end of the poem.
Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “The brilliant economy of language in ‘Credit’ helps this poem knock on our door with authenticity. James further weaves us into the narrative with bold images, such as the upside down Yellow Pages and the cotton entrails of the cushions. When the dialogue hits and is allowed to hang in the air without much exposition, we too feel the slap, which reverberates with the transformative title.”
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)
