When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems?
In second grade I was thrilled to have my first poem displayed on the bulletin board. The following year I authored a much longer rhyming piece, which I can still recite! The passionate teacher of my eighth-grade Creative Writing class provided my most powerful early motivation.
Do you have a writing routine? A favorite time or place to write?
My calendar has defied a routine schedule, even in retirement. I do my best creative work in solitude during morning hours, but, if allowed, I can spend an entire day reading and revising. I prefer to spread out pages on a desk or table in ample natural light, wielding a mechanical pencil to compose on paper or to revise a printed copy.
Where do your poems most often “come from”—an image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?
Often what prompts a poem for me is a piece of conversation, a point of curiosity or annoyance, an incongruity or juxtaposition, or a peculiar observation in nature.
Which writers (living or dead) have influenced you the most?
When young, I savored the works of E.E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost. In recent years, I have grown through reading William Matthews, Theodore Roethke, Tony Hoagland, George Bilgere, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Hayden Saunier.
What excites you most about your new collection?
My new book, But I Still Have My Fingerprints, developed as I wrote through my months of having acute myeloid leukemia, chemotherapy, and a stem cell transplant, which forced me to leave my profession of practicing and teaching medicine. My journey to survive stretched through the harrowing, the frustrating, and the victorious. Complications ambushed progress, and reprieve ushered in more minefields. As I learned survivorship, jotting notes helped me understand and speak my feelings—transforming and redeeming the experience to redefine my life. One of the greatest gifts from this writing process has been hearing the appreciation of readers into whose lives my poems have spoken. In recent months, I have also had opportunities to advance medical humanities education through speaking and teaching.
Dianne Silvestri is the author of But I Still Have My Fingerprints (CavanKerry Press 2022). Her chapbook Necessary Sentiments came out in 2015. She has studied poetry in Tupelo, Colrain, PoemWorks, and Tom Daley workshops. A past Pushcart Prize nominee, she has written poems published in JAMA, Barrow Street, The Main Street Rag, Naugatuck River Review, The Healing Muse, Evening Street Review, The Worcester Review, Poetry South, The Comstock Review, and elsewhere. She led her town’s Mass Poetry Common Threads, which spawned the Morse Poetry Group in Natick, where she resides with her husband. Find her at www.diannesilvestri.com.
