Interviews
When I was young, poetry seemed like a dusty exercise. Then I discovered the wit and heart of Shel Silverstein, closer to Dr. Seuss than to S.T. Coleridge. Emily Dickinson’s poems followed and loomed large, then and now, in their brevity and depth. In college, revisiting the works of Coleridge's cohort of the English Romantic Poets—Keats, Shelley, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and the mystical William Blake who, like Silverstein, could weave magic with his drawings as well as his words. Some say he was the original hippie who gave voice and hope to a renegade band of followers. Like Shakespeare, Blake’s staying power prevails today, both bards still bearing witness to the frailties, joys, sorrows, and foibles of human beings in our increasingly fragile world.
From the mid-nineties on, I was fortunate to work with a gifted NPR producer, the late Phyllis Joffe, and the audio-wizard David Budries, Chair of Sound Design at the Yale School of Drama — our work recorded live with a background of birdsong and airplanes in the Sunken Garden at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut. I interviewed the visiting poets from mid-June through mid-August as the peonies and roses bloomed and then faded and the pink and blue hydrangeas heralded the end of another magical poetry festival summer. It is and was the very best gig I’ve ever had, and probably ever will.
Because I'm extroverted, the interviews were really conversations that took on a therapeutic life of their own, for poet and questioner. Donald Hall spoke movingly of the loss of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. Galway Kinnell talked about necessary aloneness as the natural idyll of a poet. Christian Wiman opened up about surviving a troubled childhood and late stage cancer. Lucille Clifton signed a book of her poetry for my then adolescent daughter, and asked her questions about her school and life and dreams. Mark Doty wrote about the loss of his lover in his prose memoir, Heaven’s Coast. The following summer Mark introduced 93 year old Stanley Kunitz — at the time a friend, fellow neighbor and gardener in Provincetown—as the hardiest perennial in the garden. Marie Howe was fearless in exposing her childhood trauma with grace and courage. Caroline Forche--essayist, lyricist, poet and human rights advocate — wrote about witnessing the horrors of war in El Salvador. The list of poets goes on, and to my good fortune the memories do too — every poet, a teacher, and every interview, an extraordinary blessing in my life.
As a result, I often turn to poetry for solace, inspiration, perspective…and, yes, hope.
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 2012 and in 2013. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard and she is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi. Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough. Her parents had traveled to Ohio to marry because their marriage was illegal in Mississippi at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her recent memoir, Memorial Drive, chronicles her mother’s murder by her second husband—an event Trethewey said turned her towards poetry to make sense of what happened. She is the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University and previously served as the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.
Donald Hall
Donald Hall (Donald Andrew Hall Jr.(September 20, 1928 – June 23, 2018) was an American poet, writer, editor and literary critic. He was the author of over 50 books across several genres from children's literature, biography, memoir, essays, and including 22 volumes of verse. Hall was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, and Oxford. Early in his career, he became the first poetry editor of The Paris Review, the quarterly literary journal, and was noted for interviewing poets and other authors on their craft. On June 14, 2006, Hall was appointed as the Library of Congress's 14th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (commonly known as "Poet Laureate of the United States"). He is regarded as a "plainspoken, rural poet," and his work, he "explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects [an] abiding reverence for nature.” Hall was respected for his work as an academic, having taught at Stanford University, Bennington College and the University of Michigan, and having made significant contributions to the study and craft of writing.
Tony Hoagland
Tony Hoagland (Anthony Dey Hoagland, born November 19, 1953) was an American poet. His poetry collection, What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors included two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems and criticism have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, Agni, Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review, American Poetry Review and Harvard Review. Hoagland died of pancreatic cancer on October 23, 2018.
Suji Kwock Kim
Suji Kwock Kim was educated at Yale College, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Seoul National University and Yonsei University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow. Her work has been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, New Statesman, Irish Examiner, Slate, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, Poetry London, Poetry Review and Poetry, recorded for BBC Radio, National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Genoa, and Radio Free Amsterdam, and translated into Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, Croatian, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, and Bengali. Choral settings of her poems, composed by Mayako Kubo for the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus, Chorusorganisation, Koreanische Frauengruppe Berlin, and Japanische Fraueninitiative Berlin, premiered at Pablo Casals Hall, Tokyo in December 2007.
Richard Blanco
Richard Blanco (born February 15, 1968) is an American poet, public speaker, author and civil engineer. He is the fifth poet to read at a United States presidential inauguration, having read the poem "One Today" for Barack Obama's second inauguration. He is the first immigrant, the first Latino, the first openly gay person and the youngest person to be the U.S. inaugural poet. Blanco's books include How to Love a Country; City of a Hundred Fires, which received the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press; Directions to The Beach of the Dead, recipient of the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center; and Looking for The Gulf Motel, recipient of the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award. He has also authored the memoirs For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood, winner of the Lambda Literary Prize.
Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur (Richard Purdy Wilbur, March 1, 1921 – October 14, 2017) was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989. Wilbur was also a translator, specializing in the 17th century French comedies of Molière and dramas of Jean Racine. His translation of Tartuffe has become the play's standard English version and has been presented on television twice. Wilbur also published several children's books, including Opposites, More Opposites, and The Disappearing Alphabet. His honors included the 1983 Drama Desk Special Award and the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of The Misanthrope, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award for Things of This World (1956), the Edna St Vincent Millay award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Chevalier, Ordre des Palmes Académiques. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959. In 1987 Wilbur became the second poet, after Robert Penn Warren, to be named U.S. Poet Laureate after the position's title was changed from Poetry Consultant. In 1988 he won the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry and in 1989 he won a second Pulitzer, for his New and Collected Poems. On October 14, 1994, he received the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton. He also received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation in 1994. In 2003 Wilbur was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. In 2006 he won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 2010 he won the National Translation Award for the translation of The Theatre of Illusion by Pierre Corneille. In 2012 Yale University conferred an honorary Doctor of Letters on Wilbur.
Lives, Last Communion
My mother knew she had alzheimer's disease long before it was diagnosed, her symptoms an eerie reprise of my father's dementia a scant decade earlier … Her words bring back my father's last moments.
My Julia Child
Julia Child was my Betty Freidan, the wisecracking, groundbreaking grande dame responsible for my culinary awakening.