“Perfume Bottles Momentarily Unstopped”: A Perspective on Two Collections of Interviews
One hopes that in this new age, interviewers and editors continue to value the in-person, in-home interview, though they are out of vogue and more difficult to schedule and execute. Tony Leuzzi’s Passwords Primeval: American Poets in Their Own Words (BOA Editions, NY 2012) is a collection of interviews with a wide range...
An Interview with Poet & Artist Bianca Stone
It’s just what Stein was talking about: letting images (just as words) go where they want. It’s about allowing imagination into your process. Bianca Stone is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including I Want To Open The Mouth God Gave You Beautiful Mutant (Factory Hollow Press) and I Saw The Devil With HIs Needlework (Argos Books). She is also illustrator of Antigonick,...
Scientific Materialism and Poetics: An Interview with Eleni Sikelianos
I think maybe I’m an animist at heart. I know I’m an animal, and am part of a lineage of animals. I tend to see commonality and exchange between species and beyond (say, rocks and bones) rather than demarcations. “Language is simply alive, like an organism… Words are the cells of language, moving the...
An Interview with Sarah Maclay
We’re living in a moment that is not so much definitively regional or strictly hierarchic as it is kaleidoscopic. Sarah Maclay is a poet, critic, and teacher. She lives in Los Angeles, but draws experience from a life spanning the United States and Europe. She has written three books of poetry, is working on...
An Interview with Moya Cannon
I found Hands is also available at Carcanet Press or on Amazon, as is Carrying the Songs. More Moya Cannon: http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=860
Two Voices of Poetry Parnassus and the 2012 Cultural Olympiad
As part of the 2012 Poetry Parnassus—an international poetry event in the spirit of the ancient Olympic Games. Poets and spoken word artists nominated to represent each of the 204 countries participating in the Valzhyna Mort will be representing Belarus. Read her February 2012 interview and our review of her latest book Collected Body. To honor and highlight these two...
An Interview with Valzhyna Mort
My personal history of violence is quite visible, yes, and it challenges first of all myself. Valzhyna Mort’s previous two poetry collections, I’m as Thin as Your Eyelashes and Factory of Tears, garnered international acclaim, and she quickly developed a reputation as an electrifying reader. Mort has received numerous awards and fellowships throughout Europe...
An Interview with Jeannine Hall Gailey
I think I must have a long-standing obsession with women who transform into monsters or animal spirits. The idea that women necessarily must live in two worlds—the animal and the human—kind of crosses over multiple cultures… Jeannine Hall Gailey is the Seattle-area author of two books of poetry, Crab Creek Review, writes book reviews,...
Robert Pinsky at Slate: An Interview
With all due respect to excellent organizations like the Academy and the Poetry Society of America, as a matter of my own eccentricities I much prefer the informal, personal, improvised forum of Slate. Robert Pinsky began his relationship with Slate.com in 1996. At the time, publicly available Internet was still a new phenomenon (Hotmail, the...
An Interview with Gioia Timpanelli
While the bones of the story stay the same, the art is in the telling, in the uncovering, in creating the form. Gioia Timpanelli is one of the world’s foremost storytellers. Timpanelli doesn’t give readings; rather, she performs her work, quickly and deftly weaving between personal anecdotes and folktales from a variety of cultures...
An Interview with Benjamin Paloff
It is a kind of politics that allows us to live with this reality—the fact that everything, including our bodies, eventually fails, though we know not when. Welcome to CalJoPo! Your first book of poetry, The Politics, was published early in 2011. It is a surprising collection of intellectual but playful poems that mix earnest...
Author Audio & Profile: Nikola Madzirov
From my father I learned to believe in doubt, and from communism I learned to doubt in believing. Recently, we interviewed Nikola Madzirov about his latest collection of poems translated from Macedonian into English, Remnants of Another Age. Read the interview here. We also had the chance to hear Madzirov read from Remnants. Click on...
