James Cushing: “The question ‘who you are and why you write poetry’ is quite relevant to this poem. I wrote this poem for, and about, a dear friend and fellow-poet who teaches with me in the English Dept. at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. His name is Kevin Clark, and he also has a poem in this issue. I think we are wounded into poetry. Something unexpected rocks our developing world, and we (some of us) find language as the healing, strengthening tool. Kevin Clark has told me that the death of his father, Allan was the starting-point for his poetry—that loss, at age twelve—and that this loss has been a factor in his career as a poet. When I learned that describing his response to that loss was also describing myself, the poem took shape.”
Rayon Lennon: “In golf, the ultimate sin is to hit a shot while another player—playing a hole ahead—is close enough to be hit by the ball. This happened to me this week; I was struck by how cavalier the offending player seemed to be about the incident as though he had hit the shot in my direction because I were invisible to him. And so when I knelt to read the putt, it brought up prayer and George Floyd’s cruel death by a policeman’s knee.” (web)
Tyler Mortensen-Hayes: “I read recently that 39 U.S. states require their schools to hold regular active shooter drills. Imagine that. A country where we have to prepare our children for mass violence as if it were a fire, or an earthquake—unpredictable, unfathomable, yet entirely feasible. As if it comes from out of the very ground on which we raise them to walk.”
Amy Miller: “I was in Kim Addonizio’s private workshop for about a year. This was in 2001, and I took several of her multi-week courses. Kim was a fair-minded but tough critiquer; she had a way of cutting right to what she called the heart of the poem, the thing that gave it life, and pointing out lines that dulled that heart’s impetus or drifted too far away from it. Her toughness, more than anything, had a lasting effect on my writing. I learned to revise brutally, to sift through workshop comments just as dispassionately, and to stick up for a poem when its unique voice or vision was getting lost in the rewrite. Her workshop was a sort of crucible, a hot forge that made me stronger as a writer, a better judge of my work and others’, and I think it’s very hard to keep going as a writer without that kind of toughness. I know I just said ‘tough’ about five times. I loved that about Kim.” (web)
Laura Kasischke: “All the little whispered sentences being passed around in other rooms when I was a child: there were so many things the adults discussed in such hushed tones. I knew I’d never be able to hear them, but I couldn’t ignore them either. Those words were being spoken in a tone that told me that what was being said was too terrible or too dangerous, or too powerful perhaps, to allow some child to hear. So, I filled in the details myself, and I’ve been doing it ever since, and especially now that it feels more urgent and transgressive than ever, since they’re all dead, and together, and they don’t even need a door now to shut me out forever.” (web)
Courtney Kampa: “Charlottesville is where I fell in love, both with the man I married and also with writing, as a student at UVA. Everything I am thankful to have, I owe to Charlottesville. It’s difficult to fully express. That affront to everyone’s humanity was not just evil, but deeply personal. It was in our backyard, and the backyards of those I love so utterly much. So I wrote the poem. It took five months to make sure that what I had written had done its best little attempt to get it okay. It’s still not okay, and it never will be.” (web)
Chris Anderson: “I’ve been reading a lot lately about science and religion and about environmental theology, and that led me to Darwin and to this wonderful biography by Janet Browne. It’s so beautifully written, and Darwin comes out of it as such a fascinating English-country gentlemen. I found myself oddly identifying with him, even though—and then exactly because—I realized that in the poems I started to write, in this sequence, I was getting him wrong, sort of turning him into a believer when he wasn’t. That became the theme of the sequence. Darwin became a way for me to explore the border between science and religion in myself.” (web)
