Copper Canyon Fall 2011

Copper Canyon Press, in their catalogues, adds poems and statements from their authors. I like that they do that. (I want to cheer for some and argue or quibble with others, but I don’t want to right now. Right now is just to point and say “here.”)



“A poem doesn’t seem to be alive unless it has moved somewhere.”
                                                                            —Dean Young


“Poetry just like painting is something that you have to give your entire life to—and that includes all your life.”
                                                                            —Jim Harrison


“The more I write the more interested I am in fragments.”
                                                                            —Deborah Landau


“Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.”
                                                                            —Marvin Bell


“I discovered something that I should have known: when you’re writing poems, you’re not aware, quite, of the kind of poet you’re becoming until after you’ve become it.”
                                                                           —W.S. Di Piero


“I’d like to say I’m of the begging bowl theory of poetry. You put out your begging bowl and see what drops into it. I really don’t want to know where the poem is going.”
                                                                           —Marianne Boruch


“It has always been helpful for me to keep in mind the following from the dazzling Larry Levis: ‘Out here I can say anything.’ And we can. And we should.”
                                                                          —Michael Dickman


Interviewer: Is there anything you would say to young aspiring poets?
Valzhyna Mort: Read, read, and read.


“Don’t make it up. Write it down.”
                                                                         —David Budbill


“In the land and in language is a freedom from our worst selves, and I’m always scrambling like crazy to find my way toward it.”
                                                                        —Nathaniel Perry


“Before we can fathom out whatever sense there might be behind the world, we have to be true to the world itself.”
                                                                       —David Bottoms


“There’s a mysterious tension between reality and imagination that drives the manifest world, I think. Together, they power the engine.”
                                                                       —Dana Levin


“The endless engagement one can have with the world, an engagement that comes from trying to put words to it, pluck images from it, discover new meanings, unearth its secrets—there is no better way, in my opinion, to use the little bit of time we have here.”
                                                                      —Laura Kasischke


“You see a recoiling from the adventure of new writing happening to people, and it’s not a place where I want to settle.”
                                                                      —C.D. Wright


“For me, poems are at their basic level one person speaking to another.”
                                                                     —Matthew Zapruder


“Poetry . . . enables the reader to experience what you have experienced with a kind of specificity and depth that is not possible in casual language, partly because the form also communicates the information.”
                                                                     —Stephen Dobyns


“I think all poets need living poets.”
                                                                     —Jean Valentine


“The way the poems work, there’ll be a line or a phrase that will come to me one way or another. The poem has to figure out a way to encapsulate and house that phrase, that line.”
                                                                    —Travis Nichols


“I’m just interested in what science is interested in—where matter came from, what life is, how the brain works.”
                                                                    —James Richardson


“The vastness of place is certainly interrupted by the collisions of paradoxes.”
                                                                   —Sherwin Bitsui


“Poetry’s not window cleaning. It breaks the glass.”
                                                                   —Chase Twichell


“As a teacher of creative writing, I am always seeking the balance between rigor—regarding craft, knowledge of the traditions, and self-criticism—and the pleasures of the unexpected.”
                                                                  —Jon Davis


“If you’re going to spend any time—much less sympathy—with my poems, you’re going to have to resort to your mouth.”
                                                                  —John Taggart


“I write as though I’m writing for myself. I’m not smarter than the average person. So most people that read my work kind of get it or don’t get it.”
                                                                 —Chris Abani


“Poetry’s not a way of thinking, except insofar as ‘I think’ means ‘I’m not sure.’”
                                                                 —Heather McHugh


“I read my favorite books of poetry many times (something I don’t tend to do with prose).”
                                                                —Ben Lerner


“I am a lucky man—I love what I do.”
                                                               —Benjamin Alire Sáenz


“Is there anything sillier in life than to be called Pablo Neruda?”
                                                              —Pablo Neruda


“Poetry is living prose just as gardening is living architecture.”
                                                             —W.S. Merwin