You feel watched, you pull over to avert and the eyes pull over with you.
You know that this happens. You know how this happens and why.

Scholar and author Bettina Judd, Ph.D., shared these lines from her video poem, “On or About July 10, 2015 for Sandra Bland,” during the second event of the Fordham series Black Feminist Worldmaking.

The black and white video, also shot by Judd, shows the view from the back of a car driving through a neighborhood. Over a woman’s vocalizing, Judd recites the poem about the day Sandra Bland was arrested and her death a few days later in a Texas jail cell. The poem accompanies her essay Sapphire as Praxis: Toward a Methodology of Anger.

“I share that poem to start our discussion today [to show how]  interdisciplinary creative production is an important Black feminist practice for me,” said Judd, assistant professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Washington, and interdisciplinary writer, artist, and performer. 

Throughout her presentation, Judd shared works by influential Black women activists and artists with accompanying images of notes from her archives.

“I was ushered into being by a Black woman writer, by other Black women writers, including Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison in my teenage years—and I have been changed ever since,” she said.

She also shared another poem of hers written in an experimental format called a Sapphire Paradox, which she attributes to the poet Tyehimba Jess from his book Olio. 

“You can read it from any point in the poem that has punctuation and move on to the next line,” she said, and proceeded to recite the poem four different ways. 

Among the poem’s lines are “When I said that I was angry, I meant I was angry” and “I name the peace in my heart girl, she that is lost.”

“That Lorde essay, Eye to Eye: Black Women Hatred and Anger, that helped me think through the ideas of hatred and anger in that poem,” said Judd.

Understanding the World Through Black Feminism

Scholars like Judd, who “think about Black feminism in relation to artistic practices and creative practices like poetry,” are the type of speakers Sasha Panaram, Ph.D., said she sought out when she created the Black Feminist Worldmaking series, which began last fall.

An assistant professor of English, Panaram wanted to introduce her students to Black women authors for her course Texts & Contexts: Treasure(d) Maps, Black Women, and Southern Literature.

“I don’t want students to think of the theory that we read as divorced from the world we live in,” she said. “How can I bring people that we’re reading together in class so that they can meet with the students, so that the students can actually ask them questions directly?”

The series, sponsored by the Arts and Sciences Deans’ Faculty Challenge Grant, the English Department, and the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program, was designed to bring scholars and activists who work on Black feminism to Fordham.

Panaram’s hope for the series is for students to be inspired to seek out new and unexpected job prospects for the future. 

“I think so much of what we do as professors and people who work with young people in the university is training them not only for the jobs that exist, but the jobs that they’re going to create for themselves,” she said. 

She also hopes that students use the framework of Black feminism and the works of Black feminists to make sense of our world.

“Black feminism is a mode of thought, but also a way of living that can help us understand the world we live in today, and in fact, make it better,” said Panaram.

Managing Anger

During the Q&A after Judd’s presentation, Michele Prettyman, Ph.D., assistant professor in the department of communication and media studies at Fordham, asked Judd whether she found it necessary to manage anger.

“Anger has the possibility to burn things down—that’s what makes it useful as well as very dangerous,” said Judd, who is also the author of Patient, which addresses the history of medical experimentation on Black women. “I think for me that is, of course, an ongoing process.” 

She relayed a story about how her mother would purposely read a book about religious and scientific racism because it made her angry, and how she herself was no longer angry at the same book because her mother had digested the anger for her. 

Judd noted that her mother read the book at the library and never brought it home, which meant that she could process her anger in a controlled, safe space. 

“I can’t say that I have the answers for all the ways that one must engage with anger for one’s own self-care,” she said. “But I think I like this idea of using it as a practice and practice space … If you can practice it in a safe space, it can perhaps be less harmful.”

The next and final event of the Black Feminist Worldmaking Series will take place on March 8, with Salamishah Tillet, Ph.D., of Rutgers University.

Never have we worshipped
so many suns:

the morning sun
with its golden tassels,

the evening sun
with its mask of moon,

the sun on the sea
of undulating eyes

that refract the giant eye
watching from space.

Remember when the ocean
was forest.

We used the big razor
to reveal a clearing

of water that could worship
for us.

—Christopher Kondrich, FCRH ’04

About This Poem

I’m fascinated by the ways in which our conceptions of religion and the natural world converge and intersect. When I wrote “Clearing,” I was thinking about the common trope of the forest being a dark and ominous place, about the origins of this trope. Did it come about, as Robert Pogue Harrison discusses in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, because the treetops obscured our view of the sky and, by association, God? And how does this relate to the modern practices of clearcutting and deforestation? These questions haunt me every day.

About the Author

Christopher Kondrich is the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series and by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019. After graduating from Fordham, he earned an MFA from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in English and literary arts from the University of Denver. He is an associate editor of 32 Poems magazine.

plucked from the folds of my skirt
and perfumed with citrus and sweat.

Behind me, las cabras and my cousins
calling baaaa-baaaa-baaaa.

In front, foggy glass pitcher
of sugar water in her hands.

I want to steal a lemon, feel the sting
of spring on my pursed lips.

Want to see her, squeezing
fruit again. Her, filling

the pitcher. Her, filling
each of our glasses to the brim.

—Li Yun Alvarado, Ph.D., GSAS ’09, ’15

About this Poem

My brother and I spent our summers with our extended family in Puerto Rico when we were kids. My grandparents had a limón tree in their backyard, and beyond the yard’s chain link fence there was a huge field full of goats that my cousins, brother, and I would spend hours imitating. I wrote this poem to honor Mama Merida, who passed away in 2007, and the many happy memories we had in that backyard. This poem has even more significance for me now that my papi, Jun Alvarado, has joined Mama Merida after he passed away in December.

About the Author

Li Yun Alvarado is the author of Words or Water (Finishing Line Press, 2016). She earned a Ph.D. in English at Fordham, where she also served as the graduate assistant for the Poets Out Loud reading series. A native New Yorker, she lives in California and takes frequent trips to Salinas, Puerto Rico, to visit la familia.

Christopher Kondrich, FCRH ’04, writes poetry that deals largely with human connection—our connections to each other and to the world around us.

In his newest collection of poems, Valuing—a 2018 winner of the National Poetry Series prize—he explores the personal value systems we form through these connections, and through the meanings we place on intangible concepts like faith, love, ethics, and mortality.

In “Asylum,” Kondrich writes, “I choose to love our auspices / because they brought us here, to love / disobedience because it shows the freedom / to love or not love. Or value.”

As one of five poets to win the National Poetry Series competition last year, Kondrich received a $10,000 cash prize and a contract with the University of Georgia Press, which published Valuing last month. The poet Jericho Brown selected Kondrich’s manuscript from more than 1,500 submissions, describing it as “a philosophical work of art,” with “potential for influence on poetry and on any mind made vulnerable to poetry.”

New Yorkers will have a chance to hear Kondrich read from his award-winning work at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 16, as part of the University’s 2019–2020 Poets Out Loud reading series. The event, which will also feature poet and memoirist Kenny Fries, is free and open to the public.

Attendees will find that Kondrich is unafraid to tackle big societal issues in his work, as he did with gun violence last April as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. In “Common Things,” he wrote:

“Even if you do not own a weapon, you could. / And because of this you are complicit. / But you cannot do anything about most things. / You cannot put the arms back onto a statue / is another way of saying you can’t put a bullet back into a gun.”

Since 1992, Poets Out Loud (POL) has presented free public readings featuring dozens of emerging and renowned poets, including Pulitzer Prize winners Kay Ryan, Yusuf Komunyakaa, and Tyehimba Jess. The POL Book Series, run in coordination with Fordham University Press, issues two new full-length volumes of poetry each year.

Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., director of Fordham’s Poets Out Loud reading series, opened the Feb. 26 event with a few meaningful words about how the organization goes about selecting its readers:

“The quality of the poetry is always the main criterion,” she told the audience, “But tonight’s reading also fulfills one of POL’s real aims: a commitment to representing a range of styles, ethnicities, and sexualities.”

Meg Day and Sharon Wang, the evening’s featured poets, embody both of those ideals—excellence of craft and a commitment to representation—in personal and unique ways.

Meg Day, whose 2014 book Last Psalm at Sea Level won the prestigious Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, is a poet whose work is difficult to pin down in terms of style or subject. In fact, that might be the point: a self-identified member of the LGBTQ community, Day often focuses on the interstitial nature of bodies and identity. And as a deaf poet—there were two American Sign Language interpreters on hand Tuesday night—Day also tackles issues of access and interpretation.

Take, for instance, “Portrait of My Gender as Inaudible,” a new poem that Day introduced by noting: “[It] came out of my frustration with closed captioning, and the way that closed captioning is evidence of sound—but oftentimes it’s evidence of sound that people can’t hear, the irony of which is hilarious to me,” she said, referring to captions that deem something “inaudible.” The poem concludes with this almost ineffable image:

I made a photograph of my name
It was a shadow in a field and I put my shadow in it
You can’t hear me, but I’m there

Day prefaced their next poem with a brief history of the Americans with Disabilities Act, explaining that it “states that reasonable accommodation is all that the government has to provide for you if you’re disabled.” Day continued: “Reasonable accommodation is really just trying, like, ‘Well if you’re trying to provide access that’s enough, that’s reasonable.” The poem, aptly titled, “Reasonable Accommodation,” begins:

You’ve met me halfway between the door to our bedroom
And the other we know is real only because you are always gesturing, “There it is.”

The evening continued with Sharon Wang, who earned her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and won the Kundiman Poetry Prize in 2016. Tuesday night’s reading was co-sponsored by Kundiman, an organization dedicated to cultivating Asian-American creative writing that holds its annual retreat at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

Wang’s work is often concerned with the natural world, the sense of touch, and loss. As Dubrow described it, “Her emphasis on what is unattainable is reflected in how often many of her titles refer to elegy, those poems of loss and death.”

Wang read both from a new collection of epistolary poems and from the book that earned her the Kundiman Prize, Republic of Mercy. The first poem she read, titled “Dear Sentient Being,” set the thematic tone for all that was to follow, with its descriptions of nature that conflate the natural world and the human body:

I want a world that clicks into place like my molars
When I wake up my teeth are worn down from the night

Wang wound down the evening with an elegy called “Mea Culpa,” a selection of which reads:

I thought I could hone my mind until intellect and emotion were a single organ
The way a snake’s motion comes from the musculature of its entire body, and when it moves
There is no part of it that has not moved.

The event was also sponsored by the FCLC Dean’s Office, the Fordham English Department, and the Axe-Houghton Foundation, with additional support from the Gerald M. Quinn Library. It was funded in part by Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

The next Poets Out Loud event is on Monday, April 8.

–Dane Gebauer

These words, taken from the poem “Thunderdome” in Sarah Gambito’s new book Loves You, evoke the kind of nourishment the poet hopes readers will find in her work.

In 96 pages of poems, Gambito, an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Fordham, presents a gamut of personal life experiences: how Filipino Americans—and people of color—are assailed and fetishized; the struggle to hold on to cultural identity as an American-born child of immigrants; the nuances of everyday life; and what it’s like to be the mother of a biracial child. But her book has a tasty twist.

Loves You is part poetry, part cookbook. Her poems are divided among five flavors: umami, sour, salty, bitter, and sweet. Most of them reference food in some shape or form. (Example: “When God was Filipino, / he put a pig and fire together and called it porkissimo.”) And her poems give readers a taste of not only her life but also her actual cooking. There are recipes for family favorites—salmon sinigang, barbecue scepters, watermelon agua fresca—scattered throughout the book.

Her ultimate goal? To nurture strangers with her words—to make people feel, she says, even if they are occasionally puzzled by her poems, published by Persea Books on Jan. 22.

“I want people to feel nourished. I want people to feel provoked. I want people to feel … a little freaked out,” she said, laughing a little. “I don’t see it as sort of just a sweet book. There’s anger here, as well. But I think anger can hold equal footing with joy and creation, and with thinking about community and family.”

In her poem “Don’t Eat Filipinos!” Gambito speaks about the subtle symbolism of a biscuit called Filipinos. The controversial cookie is sold in Spain—a country that controlled the Philippines for years.

“To name it after a people, a country that was colonized for 400 years … I really thought it was a joke,” she said. “Literally, it’s like you have Spanish people eating Filipinos.”

As an antidote, the page after that poem lists her husband’s recipe for lychee macarons.

“The epigraph is instead of eating Filipinos, eat these,” Gambito said. “The idea is to be thoughtful about what we’re doing, what we’re putting into our bodies—what it means.”

Gambito’s new poetry book also melds meals with motherhood. Her poem “Hapa,” defined as a person who is partially Asian or Pacific Islander, is about her 8-year-old son. He was born with blonde hair and blue eyes—a stark difference from his Filipina mother. Strangers would mistake Gambito for his nanny. She felt like they were “othering” her from her own child, she said. “Orangutan nanny in the garage / my pleasure—a disappointment,” she wrote in “Hapa.”

Gambito mentions a more universal aspect of motherhood—the joys and fears of being a mother. In the poem “First Born,” she writes, “Basically: my wish is that you are never, never pierced through the heart. / My aim is ordinary. / My anthem open. My berries gasping together in pie.”

Those last six words describe the feeling of being breathless, she said. “You want to provide. You want to give your son beautiful, sweet things, and you feel like always short to the task.”

Loves You is Gambito’s third published collection of poetry. This book was 10 years in the making, she said. But back in the book’s infancy, she recalls sitting at a ramen shop with a friend, pondering over the purpose of her new poetry collection.

“What do you think poetry should do?” her friend asked.

“It should do this,” Gambito said, cradling her warm bowl of broth with her hands. “It should nourish you from the inside out.”

Text of Gambito’s poem “Holiday” in Loves You:

Crashing across cousin stars with deep listening holes. Because we’re

related and every wren that has nested abroad would like to become

my mother. I’d like to lie flayed open upon her twelve breaking torsos.

This blood would weld us to the chair and I’d let a crowd in. I’d always

thought that crowds were created in a panic. A great anti-system of

people fleeing fire. Rather crowd dynamic is cultivated because you

run towards. You want concert tickets or something to do the day after

thanksgiving. They’re almost giving it away. This is what she says as

the gold metal hits the outline of her. She says I want you to find me. I

want that you never give up and you find me.

The group’s last reading of the season featured poet Tyehimba Jess, who read from his second book Olio, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Also reading were three teen students who took part in Poets Out Loud’s high school outreach program.

Jess—known for his poetry slam skills—read from his series of sonnets on conjoined twins who were born into slavery, made to perform in freak shows, and eventually earned enough money to buy the land where they had been slaves. (See him read from these sonnets at a Tedx talk.)

Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., Fordham’s John D. Boyd, S.J., Chair in the Poetic Imagination and director of the Poets Out Loud reading series, said having an accomplished poet like Jess was a great way to end the season.

“We were delighted to have Pulitzer Prize winners at both the beginning and the end of this year’s series,” she said, referring to poet Kay Ryan, who read in October.

“We like to represent poets at all stages of their careers, from emerging writers to very distinguished ones. It was wonderful to include Tyehimba Jess, not only because he is distinguished but because of what he offers in other ways. The poetry is splendid; it draws attention to many contemporary experiments with poetry and it engages with historical issues and some of the most shameful issues in our country’s history.”

Jess had a tough act to follow. Before he took the mic, the high school students got up to read their work, which dealt with issues both personal and global. Laurynn Laurore, an 11th-grade student from East Side Community High School, read her poem “Music”:

Music

Music wrapped around the peaks of my ears
And placed a kiss on my ear drums
The sounds bounced up and off the shaking of my hips
To cascade down my body
You watched in amazement
You had never seen me like this
So completely lost in something
You might have been a bit jealous

This is what I wanted for you
To get lost in the magic of music
So I pulled you close and sung the tune in your ear
Hoping it would kiss you too
Hoping it would flow through you
And teach you how to move with me

Laurore was joined by Alesha Alli, from Bronx Early College Academy, and Deliana Rosario, from the School for Excellence.

In a loud, strong voice, Alli read from her poem called “Perspective”: “We complain about the rain/and when our food is too plain/While there’s children in Africa/ suffering endless pain.”

Rosario read softly from her poem, which focused on a relationship: “You’ll never know my story/because it’s never been told/Maybe it’s just toxic/the little hope that we hold.”

Poets Out Loud’s high school outreach program, started by Dubrow in 2009, aims to fosters an interest in reading, writing, and listening to poetry among high school students in underserved communities in the city.

Just before each event in the reading series, these students gather for a workshop—run by a Fordham graduate student—on the poets who are going to read. The poets themselves join for the final 10 minutes. Then the students join the audience for the reading.

Dubrow said that many audience members express how they never thought they were interested in poetry, but that their teachers encouraged them come to the event and that got them excited about future readings.

“The series is challenging and exciting because we bring poetry to so many people, both those who have long been seriously involved with it and those who, through the readings, realize how much it has to offer,” said Dubrow.

“Hers is a confident, yet compassionate voice that speaks from an unabashedly feminine perspective,” she said.

An accomplished teacher and scholar, Ponsot has translated 40 books from French into English, written radio and TV scripts, and taught students at Queens College, The New School, Columbia University, the 92^nd Street Y, Poets House, and other venues.

As a young woman, O’Donnell said, the native New Yorker moved to Paris after earning a master’s degree from Columbia. On the boat voyage over, she met poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti—a meeting which led to the publication of her first book, True Minds, as part of his City Lights series, in the 1950s.

Ponsot did not seek to publish her second book, Admit Impediment, for some 24 years as she raised seven children, said O’Donnell. Remarking on this unpublished period of her life, Ponsot wrote: “You don’t wait for someone to approve. If you go on doing it and enjoying it, well what have you done? You’ve spent time enjoying what your language makes of you. Very often this makes for a more comfortable self than any other you’ll ever meet.”

Speaking softly to a large audience gathered in the Corrigan Conference center, Ponsot exclaimed “it’s exciting” to receive the award and to be given an opportunity to read portions of her poetry. She was subsequently presented with a plaque and a collage of her published book covers, to which she threw up her arms delightedly.

The recipient of several poetry awards, Ponsot has also published two books on the pedagogy of writing, and, in 2010, was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

The event was co-sponsored by the Mezzo Cammin Women poets Timeline.

U.S Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Kay Ryan, who grew up in the San Joaquin and the Mojave Desert, told PBS’ Jim Lehrer that she became interested in poetry, or “compressed language,” because it can be “highly selected” without making one feel as if they’ve “just had a vitamin pill.”

For Rajiv Mohabir, an acclaimed Indo-Caribbean-American poet who has lived in New York, Florida, Alabama, London, and Hawaii, poetry serves as a conduit to his cultural oral traditions and the different places he has called home.

“I can’t help but pick up pieces and leave pieces everywhere I go,” he said.

As part of the 2017-18 Poets Out Loud reading series, Ryan and Mohabir will deliver readings of their award-winning work on Wednesday, Oct. 25 at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. The event, which is co-sponsored by the college and Kundiman, will be held in the Lowenstein building from 7 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

“Poets Out Loud has a longstanding commitment to represent a range of ethnicities and poetic styles, and audience members may well be intrigued and excited by this particular pairing,” said Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., holder of the John D. Boyd S.J., Chair in the Poetic Imagination and director of the Poets Out Loud reading series. “Mohabir’s language is luxuriant and multilingual and Ryan’s language is spare, with apparently straightforward words often juxtaposed with startling ones.”

Kay’s collections of poems include Erratic Facts (2015), The Best of It, New and Selected Poems (2010), Flamingo Watching (2006) and The Niagara River (2005). Besides her Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she has received a MacArthur “Genius” Award and a National Humanities Medal.

Despite these accolades, Kay, who has taught remedial English at the College of Marin for more than three decades, has created equilibrium between her own independence and the literary spotlight she is often thrust into. In the cleverly titled, “Lime Light,” from Say Uncle (2000), she affirms: “One can’t work by/lime light.” Meanwhile “Blandeur,” another poem from the same collection, finds Kay endorsing a similar refrain: “If it please God, let less happen.”

In contrast, the poems of Mohabir, a professor of English at Auburn University in Alabama, Georgia, may seem expansive. “Ode to Richmond Hill,” recalls the vitality of the Little Guyana community in Queens, New York, the words pulsating like the soca, calypso, and Bhojpuri folk music of his ethnic customs: “eyes in disbelief, Pick up yuh/paisa, na man! no worry/on this slate day youths dem/speak no Hindi to know paisa/means money, a taxi speeds/by blaring chutney remix.”

Mohabir will be reading poems from his debut poetry collection, The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016), and The Cowherd’s Son (2017), for which he received the 2015 Kundiman Prize.

“As a student, I remember going to these types of readings and saying, ‘Oh my god! Is it possible that I can write like this?’” he said. “I feel like it’s cool to be in such dialogue and inhabit that space where people are actually listening to what I say, but then also thinking about how to include the things they never thought they could do in their own writing.”

Ryan, who will be reading poems from The Best of It and Erratic Facts, enjoys the unique perspectives that  poetry readings can bring.

“What I most enjoy about reading my poems to an audience is the sense I get of a big collective mind receiving them, a mind bigger and more convincing than any individual mind,” she said. “It’s nice to read to a really big mind.”

Lewis’s talk took the form of a lyric essay and covered the research methodology and process that she undertook to write the poetry collection’s titular piece. “Voyage of the Sable Venus” is a narrative poem made up entirely of titles of artworks from across centuries of Western art that feature or refer to the black female figure.

She said the idea for the project first came to her in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit on American colonial furniture. It was there that she saw a chair whose legs consisted of carved figures of four miniature black women and whose seat was being supported by their eight arms. Soon after, she noticed that the figures of black females existed everywhere as artistic ornaments. She saw that “our whole artistic history [is] crawling with the decorative bodies of black women.”

It was not until she happened across the painting after which her poem is named that the idea for the project fully emerged, she said. She recalled how she fell in love with the both the title and the painting itself—the image of a black woman drawn by dolphins across the sea and attended to by gods, in the tradition of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

Lewis talked about her research project and its methodology, which included visiting museums, churches, and courthouses in search of the black female form. Delivering her talk in a  lyric style which gave insight into the poet’s intimate relationship to her project, she described her work as “taking 38,000 years of art history and condensing it down to 79 pages.”

Following her talk, Lewis read “Plantation,” another poem from her collection, after learning that several English classes had analyzed it in their study of her work, and that it had created some debate among Fordham’s English faculty.

Lewis took a question from a Fordham student in the audience: “Why do you think this book is important? Why should I buy it?”

Calling the question “one of the best questions I’ve been asked in a long time,” she answered that she hopes the book condenses important scholarship on art, race, and beauty into a form that is accessible to readers.

— Rebecca Sinski

Your new book is a collection of poems. What made you choose Arsonville as the title? 

I live in Somerville, Massachusetts, about a mile and a half from the Boston city line. When I moved to the area 20 years ago, Somerville had a horrible nickname: Slummerville. In the years that I’ve lived here, the town has gotten more and more gentrified, and I think my title captures something of the juxtaposition between the old city and the newer city.

Arsonville also speaks to me about global warming and environmentally destructive and other self-vexing aspects of the country as a whole. About a year after I decided the book was going to be called Arsonville, there was a big outbreak of arsons in Somerville.

You studied philosophy at Fordham. How does philosophy contribute to your poems?

I learned to be a close and careful reader in both my philosophy classes and my literature classes. The first great philosophy class I took was on Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel with Dr. Kenneth Gallagher, when I was a freshman.

All of my poetry friends at Fordham took Father John Dzieglewicz’s classes on the Symbolist Movement. He would actually play bits of Debussy on the piano when he taught Verlaine. His sense of poetry as being un-siloed and related to all of the other arts, music in particular but also painting, made a huge impression on me.

The philosophy core was heavy on Aristotelian naturalism. The importance of the physical world and sensation that I found in my partial reading of Aristotle and Aquinas pre-disposed me to favor image-driven and concrete modernist poetry by William Carlos Williams and a similar tendency in Walt Whitman. New York City is the ideal place to read and discover poetry.

Comparisons are sometimes made between you and dead poets, like Frank O’Hara. Who’s still alive that you admire? 

There are an enormous number of amazing poets right now. Living in the Boston area, I’ve gotten to hear poets who live around here­­. If I had to choose one poet and one poem, I would say to read Derek Walcott’s sequence The Schooner Flight. That is a sort of an ultimate poem. As I worked on Arsonville and then Friends with Dogs, which came out this spring, I found a lot of new inspiration in the poet Donald Revell. Like my mother, he’s from the Bronx. I look for poets who combine a strong sense of imagery rooted in the physical and social world with inventive and energetic language.

As a teacher at the University of New Hampshire, did you become a better poet?

I’ve been teaching poetry and creative writing classes, mainly on the undergraduate level and recently on the graduate level as well, and I think it did make me a better poet. I get to spend a lot of time reading and re-reading great poetry aloud, which certainly keeps poetry in my nervous system.

Teaching puts you in touch with other people, and the teaching of poetry is a particularly joyous experience to share.

–Kiran Singh