"And would’ve you passed the
Would your past
would you your past?
Would the
(your or ...
"What little that's rooted must arise.
Like, who plants in cups except kids?
Enter the forest. The forest will eat you,
men in balaclavas who haven't read Marx.
And so on, including the starry skies.
You've seen a sieve? Explosions unto mesh..."
--from "Vegetables" which appears in the Fall 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 3).
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I feel in dialogue with quite a number of contemporaries – Maureen Seaton, Stephanie Strickland, Brenda Hillman, Mac Wellman, Thylias...
The earth too is a magic coach, my dear,
look at the flocks of elves that pull it
down dark virgin forests of the universe,
and a witch or two, it's known, would like to diverge it
into a coy ditch, in a passionate embrace.
--from "Mozart's Magic Coach" which appears in the Winter 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 4).
Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated
The first pieces of poetry that I translated were poems by a Croatian poet Vesna Parun. I had been teaching Croatian at the University of Southern California and was looking...
"The flute, the sackbut, the dulcimer
in the rooms of the dying. The harp,
the cornet, the psaltery. The look..."
—from "Music from a Farther Room" which appears in the Winter 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 4).
Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written
I remember being twenty-one or twenty-two and writing a poem on Christmas Eve in my basement bedroom in my...
"these hands, their roughness
if you tell me what to swallow, I'll do it
sheathed in ice, brittle as glass
another kind of groping in the dark
a blue note fills the room
climb on top, again and again......
