Megan Sexton: “When Maira Kalman’s illustrated Elements of Style came out a few years ago, I was in ecstasy. One of the passages she chose to highlight led me to write ‘In Favor of Union’—I also was thinking about my friend Caroline’s comment from many years ago. She said that she knew that she and her boyfriend were going to last when she saw their underwear comingling on the hardwood floor. Writing poetry is so much fun; that’s one of the main reasons why I do it.”
Emily Montgomery died of cancer December 3rd, 2012, at the age of 34. She is deeply missed by her husband Chris Wakeham; her son, Miles; her daughter, Eloise, born eleven weeks early due to Emily’s illness; her mother; and her many, many friends. A romantic at heart, Emily captured the fleeting beauty and poignancy of daily life in her poetry.
James Davis May: “I’ve always liked Czeslaw Milosz’s claim that ‘the purpose of poetry is to remind us/ how difficult it is to remain just one person.’ I’ll modify that quote, though, slightly: The purpose of poetry is, sometimes, to remind us how difficult it is to be a person. That is, by testifying what it’s like to be a person, poetry defends (both justifies and protects) that flimsy—some say mythical—thing the self.”
Anis Mojgani (Louisiana & Texas): “I took a poetry class at the end of high school with Ms. Jean Gill, which first opened my eyes to the possibility of writing poems. The first poem I wrote for her was about summer in New Orleans. The second was about my grandfather’s aftershave. After seeing the poet Jeffrey McDaniel perform in my freshman year of college and buying Jeff ’s book Alibi School, my brain and heart opened further to what poetry could do both on the page and when being spoken.” (web)
Dominika Wrozynski: “I often look at my own work as a poetry editor looks at submissions (since I’ve been a poetry editor for various journals for almost ten years). As an editor, I always want a poem that makes me want to go into the editorial meeting and put up a fight to see the poem in print. Give me an arsenal of surprising images, unusual word choice, and a critical awareness of what it means to be human. If I’m going to take the effort to fight for a poem, I want it to win. As a poet, I hope to write poems for which I’d put up a fight.”
Richard Widerkehr: “You ask why I love poems. I think of the woman in Fiddler on a Roof who said, ‘I’ve cooked his food, shared his bed, given him children. I must love him.’ In poems, I wrestle with water, sticks, dreams, stones, syllables, and stories. I wrote ‘In the Presence of Absence’ in a workshop led by Ellie Mathews at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington, in the summer of 2007.”
Holly Welker: “I grew up in southern Arizona, the descendant of dour Mormon pioneers I always praised for having the sense to get the hell out of Utah soon after they arrived there, which made things a little awkward when I ended up living in Salt Lake City. I began writing as an eleven-year-old because I was promised an audience of angels if I shared my deepest thoughts in a journal. Eventually I gave up writing for angels; it’s plain old human beings I want to connect with now.”
