• INTERVIEWS •

“I don’t think making political work is more noble or ethical than making work that decidedly isn’t. There’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, and there’s no such thing as ethical literature under capitalism. Look at the tags on your clothes or the food you eat or the social media you populate. Everything is snared in this trap and the publishing industry is not exempt.”  —Brooklyn Review
“The act of gathering is important to me, though it’s just as important to differentiate that from collecting. It’s been said more than a few times that my poems gather their materials at the beginning of the poem and like to dispense and return to those materials throughout the poem. I think that’s true, and I also think collecting—both the word and the act—strikes me as much more pernicious. I think it’s undeniably true that we’re a culture that thinks in singles in music and individual poems in poetry, but I also feel hostile toward curator culture and listicles and this idea that art can pruned and catered to bolster our genius individual tastes.” —The Rumpus

“People don’t want anything to do with narrative, which I think is weird. That revulsion isn’t the reading tradition I come from, even if it’s the writing tradition I come from. It’s hard not to resent the term “narrative poetry”—but I’m also a little obsessed with the ways in which words situate themselves inside their own stories. It’s different than connotation. It’s more like the skeletons in the closets of words. Sometimes I wonder if naming isn’t a religious hangover, a Christian or a Puritan hangover, like we’re still bitter about the Garden.” —The Believer
I ask questions:

Translating Tranströmer: An Interview with Patty Crane
—The Paris Review

Three Questions with C.D. Wright
—PEN America

Ten Questions with Geoffrey G. O’Brien
—The American Reader

Three Questions with Maggie Nelson
—PEN America

Three Questions with Cathy Park Hong
—PEN America


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