“I first fell in love with poetry as a child. Poetry was everywhere, as it is for all kids: in nursery rhymes and playground jump rope songs. When I learned that people wrote books—poetry and otherwise—I knew that I wanted to write.” — DeMisty D. Bellinger
“It’s been astonishing to have entered each poem individually, and then to discover that they were interacting with each other. I love the dynamic process of discovering connections I didn’t realize were there. It’s as if the poems have a life of their own, and reach across the book to reflect on one another.” — Rebecca Kaiser Gibson
“It took me a while to understand that a poet isn’t defined by complex metaphors or the way they present their work…a poet is only defined as and by the person whose name and essence stamp those stanzas and similes. So in short, don’t let what you think hold you back. Let what you know push you forward.” — Anjalequa Birkett
“People say (poets say) they write poems because they have to. It’s not a choice. Poetry is how they are able to move through the world. Poetry helps me get out from under the farce of the world. It helps me get out from under the weight of my existence, and my complicity in the cycle.” — AR Dugan
“My hope is that this project inspires other writers and artists, especially BIPOC folks, queer people, disabled people, and others who have been marginalized in the literary and art communities, to develop new ways of releasing work into the world. There is a myriad of ways we can dream up to engage with capitalism differently and to create and deepen community. That’s what I’m most excited about.”
“You hold type in your hands, and that type is energy, captured. Energy that was input to make type can sit waiting in cases for decades, and be used over and over with no additional energy input needed.”
What is your writing process like?
Mariya Deykute: Sporadic and flexible. I have two young children, and a full-time job, so writing happens around that. Sometimes it’s a half hour in the morning, sometimes fifteen minutes on the playground, sometimes in whatsapp messages with myself on my phone. There are times when I think it makes for the best kind of writing — free from the doubt and hesitation that a freer schedule used to bring, and sometimes I fall into a pit of despair that leaves me wondering if I am losing the chance to write the great American novel because I’m not on a desert island with a typewriter. Normal stuff. Mostly, though, when the going is good, I find that my writing process is often something like a secret affair or obsession, something I waltz with on time stolen from my regular work; something I pursue with feverish impatience when the rest of the house is asleep.
“I prefer clumsy preservation of everything to no preservation at all, and once I’m distant enough to gain perspective, I can see what I was trying to do in that clumsy mess.” — Jae Kim
“This book began with an intense desire to counter the witch kitsch narratives of Salem, MA, but as I wrote those poems my vision for the book evolved and became more complicated. I discovered that the book wanted/needed to connect that history with contemporary events that were both personal and political.”
“I think prose poems are more approachable, more “democratic,” than much of lineated contemporary poetry because of their ease of reading. Even people who don’t like poetry can approach a prose poem, or micro fiction, because these look like almost everything else they read. I think the unassuming appearance of prose poems adds to their disruptive and startling moments.”
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? My stepmother is the Massachusetts poet Christopher Jane Corkery, so being a poet was something I knew was a real thing from childhood, when she came into my life. I...
Quintin Collins What is most important to your writing process? The most important part of my writing process is letting the poems do their thing. From the title to the final word, I have to let the groove guide the intellect. Otherwise, I fail the poem. The pandemic...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? My mother read to me from a book of children’s poetry when I was very little. I soon after became obsessed with song lyrics on the radio and on the vinyl records we...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? The first time I remember poetry making a deep impression on me was when I had the measles at age eight. My mother had them along with me, and we lay in her bed with...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I’ve been a reader of poetry for my entire life. My parents read to me, but I was an early reader too, so I was able to take in A. A. Milne and Robert Louis Stevenson, for...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? My first real encounter with poetry was in the 8th grade when, one day, I was called upon to stand next to my desk and read out loud to the rest of the class Part Two of The...
Elisa Rowe What is most important to your writing process? Doubt and wonder, equally. What about you comes across most in your writing? Maybe my sensitivity? To emotions, experiences, objects, how my senses process the world and the way it shapes me in big and...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? For the longest time, truth be told, I had no idea that I ever wanted to write poems: I had joined the MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts as a fiction writer, and my...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I think my first encounter with poetry was in nursery rhymes and jump-rope chants. Through them I learned about rhythm and rhyme. Then in high school, I fell in love with the...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I started studying poetry because I felt I knew nothing about it. I have an extensive background in American literature, and I made sure that when I began teaching at the college...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I only remember loving the idea of poetry as a kid, the little daydreamer I was. I wrote a bunch of poems before the age of ten, a couple of which were published...