September 13, 2019
Traci Brimhall, “Love Is in the Repetition”
“I love the love poem because love is one of the most horrible and terrifying things we do with our lives. It’s an experience that demands so much honesty and vulnerability and hope…and inevitable disappointment and failure and teaches us so much about our own weaknesses.”
Jenny Johnson, “Troubling Forms”
“Struggling with a form that troubles you can be one way of troubling back, as you make space for your voice and bring your own intimate contemporary sensibilities to a given shape.”
Phillis Levin, “Recording Mortal Sight: The Drama of Prosody”
“When blank verse works, it’s often creating the illusion of the speaking voice, of authentic, vernacular speech. One of the things I’ve noticed reading this poem is that Hecht interweaves a lot of monosyllabic words with polysyllabic words, and that’s one of the ways I think he is able to modulate the voice, creating different textures of transparency and opacity.”
“Conversation with Nathan McClain”
“How does the poet maintain the proper balance between clarity and mystery that propels the reader through the poem? How can the poem’s details raise questions in the reader that keep them engaged throughout the poem? So, part of what we’re discussing is how the poem creates and manages tension (a key element, to my mind, in any successful poem).”