Blog / 10 Questions

10 Questions for Peggy O'Brien

September 12, 2018 - By Abby MacGregor

"The shortcut proved the long way round. Mid-summer,
Insomniac sun. She ambled through the market.
Throngs pressed the flesh. Is this salmon firm and fresh?
These strawberries plump and sweet, as ripe as June?
Crubeens and chickens, carrageen moss and peas.
The price went up according to the depth
Of hunger in a voice. "Cheap flowers,""cheap flowers,"
—from “Barter,” Summer 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
For many years in my twenties and thirties I listened to another’s poetry rather than wrote my own. I was not just married to a well-known Irish poet, I was also his first reader. I would criticize draft after draft,...

10 Questions for Stacy Gnall

September 10, 2018 - By Abby MacGregor

"Up out of the trailer, the apartment in Harlem, the estate of the estranged

             circus stars—    All lit true

                                                              by the glint of a tooth, you are ending.

With the black bear doped and posed at the country fair. To prove

           There's a god, a snake

                                     ...

10 Questions for h.R. Webster

September 5, 2018 - By Sarah Lofstrom

Road-kill season
and the borrowed breath
of woodland on the verge
is the easiest exit for whatever
afterlife was promised.
Velvet & quiver.
—from “Jersey Bruiser,” Summer 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
...

10 Questions for James Haug

August 27, 2018 - By Sarah Lofstrom

"The river was collecting snow on itself. Almost nobody  was coming to see it. Its banks were either slick and muddy, or frozen and rutted. The river was letting itself go. Here and there it was jammed with branches that trapped chunks of ice from the current, and plastic jugs and scraps of chicken wire, and here it was that snow collected...." —from “Dismal Levels,” Summer 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Early on I tried little stories in a Jack London vein: dog stories, man and dog stories, man and wolf stories, man alone in the wilds playing harmonica near a campfire stories, man hallucinating in the driving snow stories. It seemed pretty heady and elsewhere. It was all...

10 Questions for Jonathan Weinert

August 20, 2018 - By Sarah Lofstrom

But she was never coming through the snow.
The cottontail’s earth door gapes
And in its cold
Throat
Her kitten waits. 

            -From "Origins of Poetry " Summer 2018 (Volume 59, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I’ve been writing poems, on and off and falteringly, ever since I was about seven years old, so there are countless unremembered poems that I can’t account for, and many of the first poems I wrote when I became serious about it were either never finished or abandoned.

I began writing poems in earnest just after the attacks of September 11, 2001. I heard Stanley Kunitz and W. S. Merwin on NPR...