Do you write poetry in other languages?

Although I’ve been able to study and stumble through several European languages, I have never mastered one to the point of choosing it for a poem’s voice. English is challenge enough and vibrantly rich in choices.

Did you write poetry before you moved to Texas?

You bet. I think my first poem was written when I was in high school. It was more of a prayer really as I stared out our living room window and composed a reasonable longing addressed to my struggling parents asking them to buy me a sports car. That poem did not have a receptive audience.

My first book was my bound MFA thesis, From the Journal of Crooked Trees. I was starting to believe that my deep pleasure in language and the quirky world could be shared with a larger audience.

Do you write poems about food?

Food? Not much.  Looking over my poems I find that many of them are concerned with human spirituality, our species’ capacity to find the sacred in our lives, with nature, especially the healing offered by trees, and every now and then a feisty political statement announces itself.  Oh, and I did write an entire collection reviewing the emotional arc of a marriage.  That was therapeutic!

Do poets make a lot of money?

That’s funny.  In an alternate reality, yes.

Do poems have paragraphs?

The visual structure of a modern poem is highly varied.  Yes, a prose poem can be written as a paragraph.

More often though,
we see a sequence of lines arranged in a pattern.

I try to create patterns—that is, space between groups of lines, based on the poem’s evolving intention.

Line breaks are important to me.

How can I get to be a poet?

Live a deeply observant life.  Read lots of poetry.  Take a class or 20 from poets you admire.

Or just do it!  Fly high and take chances with words and speaking your mind.

Do your poems rhyme?

I write in free verse but do enjoy sneaking a slant rhyme or an internal rhyme into a poem.  Usually such musical tidbits happen unbidden.  I have to admit that I am partial to alliteration, if used carefully… the repetition of initial consonants is my music—Listen to the b’s here.

 …the dactyls of yaupon fingering the joyous quiet
each branch a whispered beat in this gentle music.

Bathed in this sanctuary of good dirt
and bursting seeds,
I hear rhyme and reason.  

(From Shinrinyoku: Forest Bathing)

Can anything be a poem?

No. But, I think anything can prompt a poem—a memory of a perfect bagel, the undeserved smack your sister gave you on the backside, the thrill of the first roller coaster ride, and on.  Now, what happens to that prompt is when the prompt becomes a poem.  Will the famous bagel tell its story in rhymed couplets? Will the poet defend herself in the voice of a trained litigator? Will we hold our breath on that Double Danger Loop the Loop ride with the poet?  I don’t know. How the poet shapes the prompt is where the magic begins.

Do you write every day?

Gosh, no. But, I do edit every day. I get a comfortable draft of a potential poem written down and then let it simmer. I go back to that draft repeatedly until I’m satisfied and finally turn it loose. As they say, a poem is never finished; it is merely abandoned.