This week we’ve been finding out a lot about how accomplished poets feel about their earliest published work. We’ve asked Beth Ann Fennelly, Eavan Boland, Linda Pastan, and Stephen Dunn what they think about their first book now and how they went about creating their first collection. Today, we simply wanted to find out which of their early poems still stick with them to this day. Here’s what they had to say:
Yesterday we asked four poets how the feel about the work they published years ago. Now, the same four poets tell us how they struggled to find the best order for the poems in their debut collection. The methods range from rudimentary to abstract, logical to magical. There seems to be no right way, but in each case the poet knew the moment it felt right. Here is Beth Ann Fennelly, Stephen Dunn, Eavan Boland, and Linda Pastan looking back on their first book of poetry.
The recent publication of Gerald Stern’s Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992 made us curious about how poets feel about their early work. Would they agree with Pericles when he said, “Time is the wisest counselor of all?” We got in touch with Beth Ann Fennelly, Eavan Boland, Linda Pastan, and Stephen Dunn and got the scoop on how they react to their early poetry now that a few years have passed.
Just over two weeks ago we started a new series on Poems Out Loud called “Letter from a Young Poet” which aims to chronicle the experiences and insights of young poets as they find out what it means to call oneself a writer: from contests and rejections, to themes and obsessions, to what bids each of them to write. Now we are happy to bring you the second installment of the series in which we chat with Malachi Black, a recent winner of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship.
Rainer Maria Rilke told the young poet “search for the reason that bids you write.” Now more than ever, writers must take this charge upon themselves. Dana Gioia asked, “can poetry matter?” and the hesitant response from those concerned, calling from the last century to this one, was we certainly hope so.
This interview is the first entry in a new topic we are starting on Poems Out Loud that we are calling “Letter from a Young Poet” in which we will chronicle the experiences and insights of young poets as they find out what it means to call oneself a writer: from contests and rejections, to themes and obsessions, to what bids each of them to write.
Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, has written a new memoir called The Ticking is the Bomb that will be in stores in January. Poems Out Loud got an early look at the new book and had the opportunity to ask Nick if he would participate in a one-question interview. He graciously agreed.
This is a guest interview with Ravi Shankar by Nicole Lalime.
I have had the pleasure to both study under and work for poet Ravi Shankar at Central Connecticut State University. I took Ravi’s semester-long poetry workshop three years ago, and afterwards he asked me to help him finish piecing together what was at the time an anthology-in-progress, Language for a New Century. The anthology, which Ravi edited with poets Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, was conceived as a rebuttal to the misrepresentation of the Middle East and Asia by the mass media after 9/11.
Jill Bialosky is the author of three volumes of poetry (Intruder, Subterranean, and The End of Desire) and two novels (The Life Room and House Under Snow). The following interview focuses on Intruder, Bialosky’s most recent work, published by Knopf in October 2008.
Poems Out Loud: When I read “Music is Time” in Intruder, I thought of Robert Frost and his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Like all your poems, “Music is Time” is very accessible, and so someone without much experience reading poetry could easily appreciate the sound and rhythm of the lines, but a careful reader is able to marvel at the deceptive simplicity of this work. With that said, I have to ask you—because I feel his presence in your poems—whether you see Robert Frost as an influence on your aesthetic.
Cole Swensen and David St. John are the editors of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. Their goal in this anthology has been to articulate the dramatic changes in American poetry over the past twenty years. So how to describe those dramatic changes? Put simply, American poetry is no longer dominated by the “two camp” model; instead, today’s poets are working in hybrid modes that inherit from both the experimental and the conventional. The result is energetic, challenging, and entirely committed to the human project of enriching life and our ways of understanding it.
W. W. Norton Vice President and Executive Editor Jill Bialosky is both a distinguished editor and widely admired poet. The Editors of Poems Out Loud felt that Bialosky’s two passions, editing and writing, merited a two-part interview. In this segment, Bialosky talks about her life as an editor. Next week, we’ll post Part II, our conversation with her about her latest volume of poems, Intruder.
Poems Out Loud: How did W. W. Norton end up among the leading publishers of American Poetry?
