Richard Siken has received high praise from fellow poets such as Louise Glück, as well as critics at the New York Times, and has won numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize and the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. It has been 10 years since the publication of his first collection, and his sophomore collection, War of the Foxes, is beautifully wrought and well worth the wait. We asked Siken a few questions about his writing process, the focus of his new collection, the role of poetry and more. 

This is your first collection since 2005’s Crush. How has your writing process changed since then?
My process hasn’t changed, but my concerns are different. Crush was focused on romantic love. After Crush was published, it occurred to me that I might never love again—an awful thought, but it was possible—and if I didn’t love again, would I have anything left to say about myself or the world? It turns out, I did. Instead of asking, “Why won’t he love me back?” I started saying, “Don’t kill my friends.”

This collection includes many poems that center on painting or utilize painterly language. How has your painting influenced your writing?
It hasn’t. In War of the Foxes, I wanted to show the difficulties of representation. A bird and a painting of a bird are different, just as an event and the story of an event are different. It’s not that painting influenced my writing, it’s that it became the subject matter of my writing.

Crush has come to be revered as a kind of cult classic among readers. How has its success shaped the way you approach your work?
I’m reminded that I’ve made something and I’m “responsible” for it in some way. I was surprised that so many people wanted to know if it was “true”—whatever that means—instead of letting it evoke emotion. If anything, this insistence on wanting to know the truth compelled me to start writing about the lie of representation and how singing shouldn’t be held accountable to the rules of journalism.

In past interviews, you’ve expressed concern and frustration over “the frequency in which explanation is demanded from art.” In our modern, information-fueled world, why is it important for art and poetry to remain nebulous in meaning?
Oh no! I never meant that at all. Nebulous is an awful word. Poetry and visual art are full of meaning, often very clear, focused and deliberate meaning. What frustrates me is that people want to know—and bluntly ask—what my childhood was like, what medications I might be taking, and if maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with me that makes me unlovable. They think they need this backstory, this explanation, if they are going to approach my poems or consider them valid.

You can stop a song every few beats to analyze its structure—which can be useful for understanding it in one way—but you can also listen to the song all the way through and have the experience. It sounds obvious when I apply this idea to a song, but it seems that dissection the default approach for poetry and visual art. It’s an autopsy, which is fine, except it offers very little, and it does so at the expense of all the living parts.

Are there certain poets or collections that you find yourself continually coming back to, for solace or inspiration?
Gertrude Stein and Lyn Hejinian. Deep lyric and pure play. Astounding.

Where do you do most of your writing?
I have a nice desk. It used to be someone’s dining room table.

What is the best piece of writing advice you have received?
Read what you hate. It’s easy to read what you love, it’s easy to get discouraged when you compare yourself to your all-time favorites, but when you read what you hate, you can feel your aesthetic starting to bristle, you can see, again, the necessity of your work.

Aside from poetry, filmmaking, painting and photography, are there any other artistic mediums you would like to explore in the future?
I am building chairs. And I am trying to figure out how to design a bigger desk.

What do you believe is the role of poetry today?
The role has never changed. Poetry is an example of how to be human. And I believe poetry is the language of the imagination. And we need larger imaginations. Figurative language reframes problems and offers previously unseen solutions. It challenges as well as delights. Poetry should be everyone’s second language.

What advice would you offer to those who may feel intimidated by poetry, but would like to start reading it?
Poets use the materials of conversation for not-conversation—for singing and playing around, and storytelling—and this makes people angry and confused. I think poetry has too often been presented as a puzzle that needs to be solved to get to a deeper meaning. There can be deep meaning and surface meaning and sideways meaning, beautiful lying and sudden honesty, risk and tension and complicating frictions, and, quite frankly, joy inside a poem. It isn’t supposed to be intimidating, it’s supposed to be electrifying. If a poem makes you feel stupid, it’s probably a bad poem.

Author photo courtesy of Copper Canyon Press.

MacArthur fellow Campbell McGrath channels the voices of well-known luminaries, artists and political figures of the 20th century in his new collection, XX. Written over the course of 10 years, this ambitious collection asks questions about the impact of art while rejoicing in the century's discoveries and the velocity of worldwide change.

We asked McGrath a few questions about taking on Pablo Picasso's voice, the many ways of chronicling history, how he's celebrating National Poetry Month and more.

What was your initial inspiration for creating this unique series of poems?
About a decade ago I wrote a book-length historical poem, Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which was published in 2009. That book tells the story of George Shannon, one of the men on that epic journey, who got lost and wandered alone in Nebraska for sixteen days. That project was so interesting and enjoyable that it set me thinking about historical narratives, and I wondered if I could tell a story not just in one character’s voice, but in a host of voices—“a chorus of ghosts,” to quote XX. For some reason the entirety of the 20th century is the “story” that came to mind, and so I decided to give it a try.

How long did it take you to complete this project, and what surprised you the most over the course of your writing?
The very first poems in the book were written nearly 10 years ago—the first two were published in 2009, one in the Yale Review, the other in the Harvard Review. I’m not sure if I really believed that I would cover the whole century back then. The last three or four years I’ve been writing XX intensively, filling in holes, polishing up poems, and making sure the various threads came together as a fabric, a tapestry. Many things surprised me during this process. Particularly that some people I had wanted and expected to write about just refused to cooperate, while others—like Picasso—showed up in my head and demanded to speak.

Did you feel any trepidation in taking on the voices of such iconic personas as Picasso or Elvis? If so, how did you navigate that?
Picasso, as I’ve said, insisted on playing an important role in the century, and likewise in my book. So I felt no concern there. His ego would be satisfied. I had always intended to write an Elvis poem, since I’ve been fascinated by Elvis for years, have visited Graceland, and have in fact mentioned him in at least half a dozen other poems I’ve written. But I actually finished XX without writing about him at all. But then, reading through the book, I felt his absence—and ended up writing the longest poem in the book about him. And it’s one of my favorites. 

Was there any historical or cultural figure of the 20th century that you wanted to dedicate a poem to or embody, but couldn’t quite work in?
A lot of figures I had wanted to write about, but could not quite capture, are included in the catalogue-like “Clock” poems that show up periodically, and act almost as news-reels. Einstein, James Joyce, Walter Benjamin, Miles Davis. Some subjects or people I just didn’t feel entitled to speak for—like Martin Luther King, Jr. Others, like Richard Nixon, never came into focus.

Some may argue that poetry was much more culturally pervasive in the 20th century then it is today—how do you see the role of poets and poetry evolving in the 21st century?
Poetry is a subterranean current running below the surface throughout XX—many famous poets make an appearance, of course, but nearly everyone in the book has some relationship to poetry. Picasso and Mao both wrote and published poetry, Jane Goodall’s childhood ambition was to be Poet Laureate of England. Advertisers and propagandists stole their techniques from poetry’s old toolbox—rock and roll stole a different set of our tools. Poetry, which is a marginalized art in this country, is central to many cultures around the world. If you go to Ireland or Nicaragua, Egypt or Vietnam, you will find that poetry is valued and poets are honored for their work. Poetry is ancient—it predates written language. I have no doubt it will still be around long after many of our contemporary artforms have been entirely forgotten.

Obviously, time and the role of history is an overarching theme in XX. How do you view the relationship between history and poetry?
Poetry was the original form in which people recounted their most important histories—their epics and legends, from Gilgamesh to The Iliad to Beowulf. XX is not exactly that kind of project, but I drew inspiration from that deep connection. History can be told any number of ways—from a Ken Burns TV documentary to a hip hop opera, as Lin-Manuel Miranda has proven with Hamilton. If I weren’t a poet I would want to be a historian. In XX I get to be both.

In our hyper-connected and instantly gratified world today, has our cultural perception of time and history become hindered in any way?
Americans have always been forward-looking, which can be a great strength—but it is also an excuse for our lack of historical self-awareness. It is quite a paradox that the Internet is the greatest historical tool ever invented—all the information at your fingertips—and yet the methodology of our modern technologies is all about speed and motion and the fragmentation of our multi-tasking minds. Nobody wants to read carefully, think deeply, reflect thoughtfully. Why should they, if it is not rewarded in the culture?

How do you celebrate National Poetry Month?
With XX just coming out, I’ll be giving readings for the book, not only in Miami but in Los Angeles, Berkeley and Chicago. But it’s always a very busy month for me, especially nowadays, as we have a wonderful local poetry festival during the month of April. The festival is known as O, Miami, and there are events pretty much every day, and its goal is to get poetry out of the attic and into the actual lives of people in South Florida. As I’ve said, poetry is rarely seen or heard in American culture, so April is our month to gain a bit of attention and build the audience.

Do you have any new projects on the horizon?
Yes, always, several! I’m always working on various kinds of poems, and imagining my way toward new books. In terms of historical poetry projects, my next one will focus on the North Atlantic as a natural and a human environment. My grandparents emigrated from Ireland, so the story of transit across the Atlantic is not only our national foundation myth, but a personal one as well. If it follows the pattern of XX it will probably take me a decade to write it, but what’s the rush? History has all the time in the world.

Is there anything Billy Collins misses about being the U.S. poet laureate, a post he held from 2001 to 2003?

“Not really,” Collins says genially during a call to his home in Winter Park, Florida, where he lives with his fiancée, the poet Suzannah Gilman. Collins, 75, retired recently from a long teaching career at the City University of New York. “You’re never completely disconnected from it,” Collins says of being poet laureate. “I compare it to being Miss America. Even though you might have been Miss America in 1973, it’s always part of your identity.”

Collins, who was an unusually popular American poet even before he became poet laureate, calls himself one of the “gateway poets.” These, he explains, are poets who write very readable, nonacademic poetry that can connect with people who leave the form behind after miserable experiences in the meaning-hunt of high school and college. “The key reason for the smallness of the audience for poetry is that people associate poetry with school. . . . I wrote an essay some time ago where I mention six or seven pleasures of poetry—things like the pleasure of rhythm, the pleasure of sound, the pleasure of metaphor. The last pleasure was the pleasure of meaning. The search for meaning has dominated the classroom experience of poetry to the exclusion of all these other pleasures.”

As his many fans know, Collins is a poet of what we’ll call deep playfulness. “I like to play with the reader,” he concedes. “I tell my poetry students that earnestness and sincerity are not the only tones you can take with a reader. In fact, wanting always to be emotionally sincere eliminates a lot of the possibilities for play.”

And so we get the slyly funny “On Rhyme,” whose 13th line provides the title for Collins’ delightful 11th collection of poems, The Rain in Portugal. “It’s supposed to be a kind of blunder,” he explains, laughing. “Because no word comes easily to mind that rhymes with Portugal. Portugal is contiguous to Spain, but it just doesn’t present the same rhyming opportunities as in ‘the rain in Spain.’ Some readers might think the poem is about a rainy day in Portugal, but it’s really an ironic admission to the reader—a kind of trigger warning—that if you’re looking for rhymed poetry you won’t find it here. The real admission is, I’m just not very good at rhyming.”

This sort of self-deprecation in conversation, as well as in his poems, is one of Collins’ most appealing characteristics. But that’s not the only tone he takes in his wide-ranging new collection.

In a poem called “The Present,” for example, he good-humoredly challenges the popular idea of how great it is to live in the present. “It’s questioning how you can live in the millisecond that is always vanishing before your very eyes,” he says. “And it talks about the pleasure of regretting and the pleasure of the mind’s ability to envision a future. I guess that’s what distinguishes us from cows, for example. Probably cows tend to be in the moment. They’re not thinking about what happened yesterday or when they’re going to be milked tomorrow. One of our human abilities is to imagine a future and recreate the past or fall into nostalgia.”

And then there is the darkly beautiful line in the poem “Greece”: “Is not poetry a megaphone held up to the whispering lips of death?” A number of poems in this collection seem to be meditations, often wry meditations, on death. Is mortality a particular concern these days?

“Well, no one’s getting any younger,” Collins responds. “But mortality is so engrained in lyric poetry that the inclusion of death in my poems doesn’t so much reflect my own trepidation or concerns about my own personal mortality as it is a recognition of a convention. I don’t mean to be too professorial about this, but I’ve said this before: If you major in English, you’re majoring in death. The shadow of mortality commonly falls across the page. Thumb through The Norton Anthology of Poetry and you’ll find a lot of death in there. That’s the lens through which we see things.”

I think good poetry gives you the impression that it’s being written just for you.

Collins remains an energetic and engaging presenter of his poetry, which he reads aloud at public appearances across the country. But performing a poem and writing or reading a poem, Collins says, are very different things. “Poetry intensifies one’s aloneness. . . . I don’t show my poems around to other poets [before publication]. Ever since I was an adolescent, the appeal of poetry for me is that you did it by yourself.”

Expanding on the subject of aloneness, Collins says, “If you’ve read my poems, you’ve probably noticed that there are very few other people in them. No aunts or uncles or family members; no Uncle Charlie, no ex-girlfriend. I want to be alone with the reader. I don’t want the reader to be distracted by others. That intimacy clearly gives poetry, well, if not superiority then a least a large difference from public or political language. I think good poetry gives you the impression that it’s being written just for you.”

Add a profound sense of intimacy to the lengthening list of pleasures in reading Collins’ new collection of poems.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In Oceanic, Aimee Nezhukumatathil plumbs the imagery of nature to break down barriers between humans and the world around us. We asked Nezhukumatathil a few questions about her interest and research into the natural world.

Oceanic conceptually is a book about nature, marine life and its place in our own lives. Was this your plan from the outset, or did you discover this conceptual framework along the way to its completion?
My parents made sure that I knew the names of most plants/animals/trees/constellations wherever we lived (we moved around a lot when I was young), so I grew up with that vocabulary and always have been fascinated by the small and large dramas in, say, a garden or an edge of shoreline. So many of these poems are love poems in various forms, I think—and using the diction and specifics of the outdoors just made sense to me. I don’t know how to make sense of a world without using its inhabitants to draw metaphors and find a sonic joy when I draft a poem. 

These poems feel like they’re powered by a backdrop of research, like they’re drawing their weight from the actual facts of the natural world. Can you talk a bit about your research process behind this book?
So much of my earlier poetry is explaining my entrance into subject matter that is “worthy” of being in a poem. It’s not that long ago when I was so very starved to find any experience or any writers that looked remotely like me in the “best of” anthologies or journals. It was as if we didn’t exist, which is of course not true, but now (thankfully) I feel like there is an exciting embrace of poems from all backgrounds and cultures, so my focus on “explaining” doesn’t feel as urgent to me as it once did, when I was struggling to just say, “Hello! I exist!” But yes, to get back to that sense of urgency, I feel like what is urgent for me now is to write and record a slowing down or a tenderness towards the outdoors—in all its complications. Kind of like my own way of following environmentalist Rachel Carson’s belief that the more attention we pay to the natural world around us, the less appetite we have for destruction. And honestly, I’m so exhausted from the voracious appetites of destroying the gorgeous natural resources around us all.

What role do objective facts play in your poetry in general? Is it an essential grounding element, or do you feel safe in blurring the lines?
Oh, it would definitely be a mistake to read any of my poetry books as autobiography. But all the science and nature elements I include in my poems have been triple checked and/or extensively researched to be as accurate as possible. I’m not at all interested in fudging something just for the sake of music or sound, for example. I want very much for people to learn about plants and animals they might normally not have expected to learn about from a book of poems. 

I was surprised by the specific subjects you chose to contemplate. The opening poem, for example, finds you identifying with the scallop. Another pair of poems draw language from one-star reviews of famous landmarks. How do you know when you’ve stumbled across a subject worth writing about?
I hardly ever (as in less than 3 percent of the time) draft with a specific subject in mind—rather, I start with an image and write around/through/about it and see what happens from there. No surprise for the writer/No surprise for the reader is a mantra from Frost, but I absolutely find that so applicable to my drafting. I need the image to be surprising and a little heartbreaking and delightful all at once, and when I can’t stop thinking about it, that’s how I know I need to get to my drafting journals—I still draft almost everything by hand first. 

Finally, what’s your favorite animal? 
That seriously changes on the hour for me, for real. Right now, I’d have to say the ribbon eel for its moxie and audaciousness, but at any given time it could be a royal fly catcher, a narwhal or a mantis shrimp.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Oceanic.

Poet Edgar Kunz discusses the central themes and narratives of his debut collection, Tap Out.

In your collection, the storytelling feels organic. These traits remind me of Robert Creeley’s “I Know A Man,” which operates at breakneck speed—until it doesn’t. In your poems “Again,” “Franklin Free Clinic,” “Blue,” and “Graduation,” the reader and the poet seem to move in unison, as if witnessing something fixed from the backseat of a moving vehicle. What do you hope is accomplished in rendering these events as poetry?
I love that Creeley poem! Incredible to hear him read it. (There’s a good recording on the Poetry Foundation website.) He leaves a real pause at the end of each of those hard-enjambed lines. It’s jerky, breathless—exactly how you might feel in that erratic car.

When you’re a kid, you have almost no control over your days. You go along because you don’t have a choice, and eventually, you come to this burgeoning sense that grownups might not always know what they’re doing or why. And then you get a little older and realize, yeah, they definitely don’t know. Then you become an adult yourself and you think god I have no idea what I’m doing. These poems are, among other things, trying to be true to that progression. They move from childhood to adulthood without losing, I hope, that sense of bewilderment. Who the hell is driving this thing?

A teacher told me once that to be alive is to be at sea, to be grasping around for mooring and not finding it. Poetry can open up that space in people—a good poem sends us reeling. I love prose, too, but I’ve found poetry to be best for the kind of efficient, unsettling work I want to make. I have something to tell you and I’m not going to waste your time.

I’m hoping you can speak to some of the concerns that your poem “Graduation” seems to raise: How is it possible to go through life unscathed, and how do we find healthy ways to express our “desperate, / public struggle for happiness?” 
I don’t think it’s possible to remain unscathed. If you’re living a full life, you’re getting burned over and over. If you’re lucky, those burns are soothed by friends, lovers, books, long walks, good drugs. And you draw on your courage, your stubbornness, to keep going. The problem with the father in “Graduation” is that he’s convinced of the specialness of his own pain. He’s consumed by his addictions, sure, and also by his narratives. You can see it in the poem “My Father at 23, On the Highway Side of an Overpass Fence” most clearly: There’s a story [the narrator] tells himself—a story of victimhood and helplessness paired with a poisonous masculine ideal—that derails and ultimately destroys him. Of course, he’s also a product of an economic system predicated on the oppression of an entire class of people. The longer I live in the world, the more I feel like I can understand how he came to be the way he is in the book. For everything else he is, he’s also a man at the mercy of this churning machinery—chemical, narrative, economic—utterly beyond his control.

The use of the central image of hands seems to function as a physical indication of experience and worth in these working-class environments. As a poet, working largely from memory and feeling, what is the definition, or the sign of experience? Is this book offering an alternative image or marker for masculinity or adulthood?
You can tell a lot about what kind of life a person’s living by looking at their hands. My grandfather and grandmother on my dad’s side ran a woodworking business together in Upton, Massachusetts. Their hands were callused, scarred, thick with muscle. In his working years, my father’s were, too. These days I’m a teacher, so my hands reflect that. There’s a poem in the book, “Natick,” that addresses this directly—the father and son are riding together in the father’s work van and the father holds up his hand and tells the son to press his palm to it. It’s a scene of first recognition. The father tells the son he has “piano hands” and the son is ashamed—by his own gracefulness, his difference. I’ve always hated that writing poems isn’t more physical. My sweetheart and I bought a tiny 100+-year-old rowhome in Baltimore this summer, and she jokes that we got it so I could have a never-ending source of projects. She’s not wrong. I’ve internalized something about work—that it has to be physical, it has to leave you sore and out of breath. I’m starting to understand that writing poems can be like that, too.

It seemed to me that the book was wrestling with how much we discard of what our parents show and teach us, and how much we then work to define these things for ourselves, even at the cost of failing in our ways.
I think that’s the central question of the book: Is it possible to entirely leave behind where you come from? And if it is, what will it cost? As a kid in a chaotic house, I became obsessed with escape. First, it was into a girlfriend’s house at 17, [then] taking classes at community college, then enrolling at a far-off college I applied to because it had a pair of beat-up Chucks on the brochure. These decisions weren’t fully-formed, but they kept me moving, and they kept me studying literature. It’s taken a long time to build a life that makes any kind of sense to me, and these poems chart that trajectory. They move from a troubled childhood to a troubled—and lucky—adulthood.

A big difference between the rich and the poor is that the poor are one failure away from ruin. One possession charge, one missed loan payment, one blown head gasket—stuff that folks with wealth or access to wealth can shrug off will leave a poor person stranded. I’ve never had much of a safety net, so I’ve been very lucky to dodge any major setbacks. If I weren’t white and a man, I don’t know where I’d be. I’ve fought for my chances, but I’ve also been told time and again—in language, and also through opportunities offered, breaks cut—that I’m worthy, that I deserve success. A lot of folks are told the opposite.

In your collection, instability is caused by a variety of things, chief among them—alcoholism, drug use, depression or some amalgam of these. Could you tell us more about the estrangement, loss of clarity or the deterioration of mental health that the narrators of these poems experience?
I think most artists feel estranged from the world: it’s this distance that allows the world to come into focus. For me, writing poems is an attempt to see clearly, to make connections in a reality that often seems totally incoherent. The poems reach toward meaning, and they mostly don’t find it. They settle for articulation. When I sit down to write a poem, I have some level of control over what enters and how the elements are arranged—which is to say nothing of the will the poem exerts on me, or how disparate elements snap together like powerful magnets, or how a memory or idea will enter suddenly and disrupt everything. That’s part of the pleasure, too. As the poem begins to reveal itself, the seemingly random fragments of experience start to cohere. When it’s going well, it’s totally unlike everyday life. It’s exhilarating.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Tap Out.