“To me, place is about the relationship of distance-to-closeness. How connected someone feels to their national identity can be just as important as how direct or indirect a speaker is in a poem, or how straightforward or mysterious an image is.”
Category: Poems
Katy Giebenhain: How I Wrote ‘Iowa River, October Wind’
“The Iowa River was right there before me. Like all rivers it has a history. It was no leap to think about the way we treat performers and natural resources.”
Julia Forster: How I Wrote ‘Drawing, 1988’
“Perhaps that’s what this poem is about: the many-dimensional reality in which we live as adults as opposed to the constraints of a childhood in which we are operating on different brain wave lengths.”
A.M. Juster: How I Translate a Poem
“I am a traditionalist and work hard to keep the meaning very close to the original while also echoing the sounds and rhythms of the original.”
Adele Evershed: How I Wrote ‘Dirty Laundry’
“‘Dirty Laundry’ deals with nostalgia, memory, and the passage of time, but if I were to sum it up in one word, I’d say – hiraeth, a word any Welsh expat knows well.”
Sean Swallow: How I Wrote ‘Rereading Blackberrying in Uwchmynydd’
“Even out there at the tip of the Llyn peninsula, with Bardsey Sound beneath me, the bleakness of our environmental predicament felt inescapable. I envied [Plath] not writing under that weight.”
Content warning: mention of suicide
Jane Campbell: How I Wrote ‘Campfire’
“My hope for this poem is that it reminds dykes of our unity when so much of the world tries to undermine us. Campfires give us a way of celebrating the rare joy of being in a majority.”
Forester McClatchey: How I Wrote ‘Elephant in Hannibal’s Army’
“Perhaps the best one can hope to do when writing in the voice of an animal is urgently point to one’s own ignorance.”
Content warning: animal cruelty, war
Betty Doyle: How I Wrote ‘Announcements’
“It raced through my mind, unlocking all the bars, yelling ‘no compromise – you must and can and will write’”
Content warning: pregnancy loss, childlessness