Enjoy the old Q&As! Maybe we'll do this again one day, soon. 

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

Archives:

Joseph J Capista Poetry Reading - May 12, 2019

Watch his reading here!  [ read more ]

Clarinda Harriss Poetry Reading - May 12, 2019

Watch her poetry reading here!  [ read more ]

Elizabeth Arnold, Smartish Pace Reading

Elizabeth Arnold reading for Smartish Pace at Artomatic in Washington, DC on June 12, 2009. Intro by Stephen Reichert of Smartish Pace.

Interview with Jeffrey Harrison

Jeffrey Harrison's Feeding the Fire is available from Sarabande Books (www.sarabandebooks.org). Harrison is the author of two previous collections, The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, and Signs of Arrival. Jacqueline McLean: Titling a book of poems seems like a difficult enterprise. I want to ask you to talk about the significance of your title, Feeding the Fire. In presenting this question, I have a few thoughts in mind. First, there is your marvelous line from Kafka which prefaces the collection: "What one writes is merely the ashes of one's experience." This is a particularly apt line for poetry, in which we relive or try to recover something of the essence of what once was. Yet I see a contradiction here or at least an intriguing complication. In a poem like "White Spaces," you recover (without bringing him back) a college professor who continues to compel you. The closing lines of the poem read: Gone now, known too briefly and too long ago for me to bring him back in a poem, though I'd like to think that what he was and what he gave me hover at the edges of ... [ read more ]

Consolation Miracle

Remember that scene from The Jerk where Steve Martin's character is bankrupt and forced to leave his plush California estate? He says something like, "I don't need anything...well, except this paddle-game." But then he comes across another small object, like a pen. He admits he needs this pen, too. Then his favorite thermos, then a chair, a lamp, until we see this sensitive man misunderstood and rejected by the world (a poet?) standing ... [ read more ]