When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems?
My earliest encounters with poetry were poems by A.A.Milne and Robert Louis Stevenson. As a teenager and young adult I spent time in the New Hampshire and the Maine woods and I wanted to write like Robert Frost.
Do you have a writing routine? A favorite time or place to write?
I like to write first thing in the morning. I sit on my couch. But I can pursue a poem at any time of day.
Where do your poems most often “come from”—an image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?
My poems come from all those places, but most likely from a phrase.
Which writers (living or dead) have influenced you the most?
Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda., Jane Kenyon, Shara McCallum
What excites you most about your new collection?
I learned a lot as I was assembling my new book. Though I was processing personal loss, my husband died in 2019, I was only too aware of the universal grieving going on (it was put together during Covid). It was helpful to me to select poems I’d written that looked outward as well as inward.
Click the poem to read more.
Amy Gordon spent her childhood years in New England, France, England, and Brazil. Following a
career of teaching theater skills to middle school students, she went back to school for an MFA
in Poetry at Drew University. Her poems have appeared in Blue Nib, The Massachusetts Review,
and other journals. Her first chapbook, Deep Fahrenheit, was brought out by Prolific Press in 2019. She is also the author of numerous books for young readers. Painting the Rainbow (Holiday House) won the 2015 Paterson Prize for Young People. She lives in Western Massachusetts.
