Rob Dinsmoor

RS:

You've said that a few of the stories in your new collection Toxic Cookout were based on events that happened to you. Are you more comfortable writing from real life or creating fiction? Is it a very different process?

 

RD:

Until about five years ago, I felt more comfortable writing stories based on real events that happened to me.  Before Toxic Cookout, I wrote two memoirs, Tales of the Troupe, about writing for a popular and edgy New York comedy troupe in the 1980s, and You Can Leave Anytime, about my longer-than-expected stay at a drug and alcohol rehab facility in Florida—and how I got there.  The beauty of this type of writing is that the story's already there and I just have to get it down on paper.  People told me they liked the books for their humor and emotional honesty.  With Tales, part of the fun for me was writing in the voice of me in my 20s—shy, naive, arrogant, repressed, angry, and often drunk.  Likewise, in the rehab book, I enjoyed recreating the twisted mental processes of someone with an addiction, in terms of rationalizing my own crazy and self-destructive behavior.  I found that people actually liked the narrator because he wasn't afraid to show his flaws.  The downside is often having to disguise characters based who are based on other people.

 

When I was in my teens and publishing short stories in the school newspaper, I enjoyed writing satire, horror, and science fiction.  (I was in high school and needed the escape!). I dabbled in fiction in college but among my creative writing professors, story-telling was less interesting than novel literary approaches, so I turned to screenwriting and playwriting.  I returned to outright fiction only in the last five years or so.   A lot of the skills I honed in my memoirs in terms of establishing character, setting up a scene, and building suspense served me well in my fiction.  

 

RS:
I’m a novelist who has trouble NOT writing in the first person, but you excel at both first person and third person. Tell me a little bit about how you make the decision about which way to go with a story. Have you ever written something one way, then went back and changed it? 

 

RD:

First of all, thank you!  I’m rarely aware of why I choose one or the other, but I tend to gravitate toward first-person narrative, especially when I want to explore the point of view of a narrator who is different from me, such as the snarky teenage girls in “Selfies” and “Surf’s Up” and the world-weary gun-toting truck driver in “Truck Stop.”  Like acting, it gives me a chance to step outside myself and experience being someone else.  

 

On the other hand, sometimes I use first person when I’m plunging someone like me into a weird situation.  I based “The GENEration Pyramid” on an actual pyramid scheme I fell for involving dietary supplements.  I started with a straight reality-based account, but didn’t really like it--and then took it into the realm science fiction.  (Some of the aggressive marketers  approached my friend Helen, who told them selling vitamins was not in her “DNA.”   Soon afterwards, I had a nightmare that the vitamins were hatching in my stomach, altering my DNA, and turning me into a monster—and there was my story!)  In “Kundalini Yoga at the Arkham YMCA,” I identified with the yoga teacher but I wanted to have fun with the fact that he has no idea he’s in the Neo-Gothic world of H.P. Lovecraft.   (The creepy old Arkham YMCA is actually based on a nearby YMCA where I’ve taught.)

 

RS:

Do you have any ideas you’re sitting on that for some reason you can’t get right, no matter how many times you write it? What’s the longest amount of time you’ve spent tweaking a story?

 

RD:

I’m still tweaking some of my stories that I can’t seem to get right, and I’ve been working on some of them for over 6 months.  There are several stories I’ll never probably never finish because there’s something fundamentally flawed about them. I’m still working on an overly ambitious novel that I started back in 2015, and I’m just now smoothing out a chapter I’ve been obsessing over for a couple of years.  But the fact I’m still working on this thing after 5 years tells me it’s more than a passing fancy.

 

RS:

Favorite tip for writing short stories?  

 

RD:

I’ll give you several that are interrelated.  First, keep rewriting and don’t get too attached to your first draft.  (Or as Faulkner and others have said, “Kill your darlings.”)  I took a wonderful screenwriting class from Professor Maury Rapf at Dartmouth in which he really delved into the mechanics of storytelling.  As we had a sit-down about my short screenplay, which he really liked, he puffed away on his pipe and suggested all kinds of changes to add conflict and suspense.  My first reaction was “don't mess with my creation!” (not out loud, of course!), but looking back, those changes really drove the story forward.  So, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.  The second suggestion is to show your story to people you trust.  It really helps to have others tell you their reactions--what works, what doesn’t. what’s confusing, and how they feel about the story and the characters--and that is why I’ve been in a writers group for nearly 20 years.  Having said that, feel free to ignore their comments!  You’ll find that everyone has a different opinion and, rather than changing the story back and forth to please everyone, you have to decide which criticisms make sense to you.  Never forget it’s your story!

Craig Fishbane

RS:

We did your first collection of shorts, and I kept wondering why you don't write a novel. I think I even asked you about it. So ... why not?

 

CF:

I could actually write a novel answering the question about why I stopped writing novels. I used to only write long pieces. In my 20s, I wrote three complete novels and drafted large sections of two others. I’ve got literally thousands of pages on my computer that never went anywhere past the slush pile of a literary agent. I eventually got burnt out. It was incredibly frustrating and isolating to lock myself away and write these drafts that came to nothing. I worked with an editor to help me revise one of the manuscripts and his insistence at working at a breakneck pace completed the process. I got so sick of the endless, fruitless revisions that I stopped writing for a year or more.

 

The thing that pulled me back into writing was an acceptance of a poem that I hadn’t even remembered I sent out. I finally had a piece of my work in a literary journal and that one tiny bit of encouragement was all I need to throw myself back into the game. I spent the next few years participating in the spoken word scene and writing short narrative poetry.

 

My bad experiences with novel writing made me almost neurotic about writing prose. When I tried to draft an idea for a short story, I could feel the needles of anxiety coursing down my arm. It was like I was about to have a heart attack. I finally overcame my self-induced abstinence from fiction when I came to realize that the poems I was writing weren’t really poems at all. They were very short stories—the form we now call flash fiction. Slowly and nervously, I underwent the process of unbreaking the lines and turning the verse back into sentences.

 

The unpublished poems became published stories and eventually they became the collection you published, On the Proper Role of Desire.

 

See what I meant about writing a novel about this?

 

My first taste of success encouraged me to write more and more stories and I became comfortable writing short fiction. In fact, it was a positive relief that I could focus my creative energies for, say, an hour each day, and then I could go about the rest of my life without becoming obsessed with the rest of a potential chapter. It was like what Hemingway described in A Moveable Feast, when he could satisfy himself with writing one true sentence.

 

That being said, I clearly am at a turning point. The ideas I have right now are clearly too big and complicated to be contained in a very short piece. I am indeed feeling the urge to let it all go and write longer pieces, perhaps something book-length. The key is to preserve my mental health in the process. When I was younger and didn’t have much going on in my life, I could easily spend my days obsessing about how character A was going to meet character B and whether character C should wear a raincoat or a poncho. My life is too emotionally rich for me to want to go into full OCD-shutdown mode for months on end.

 

So I’m trying to find the balance between the call of living and the call of writing, while also trying to heal the scars of a decade of failure at long-form writing. I’ll let you know how it all turned out in the sequel.

 

RS:

What are some themes that keep cropping up in your writing?

 

CF:

For the last few years, ever since a certain reality-show celebrity got elected, I’ve found myself writing about issues that we find ourselves surrounded by. The plight of immigrants has been a focus of many of my recent stories. I make my living as an ESL teacher and, for better or worse, I’ve had a front row seat at the Theater of Anxiety that Trump has created for immigrant children. 

 

I’ve written a half dozen pieces from the point of view of a kind but ineffectual teacher who is witnessing an entire world of ideals and assumptions slip away. I can’t say I’ve expected these stories to magically change anyone’s mind, but I did need to document the very real horror that this president has created. As William Burroughs once put it, I wanted to show what we were actually being fed with the newspaper spoon.

 

My more traditional or personal themes have always been about the issue of self-actualization or, at least, grasping something about the world beyond your limited sense of self. Many of the stories in On the Proper Role of Desire feature a character having some sort of ironic epiphany, interacting with a person in such a way that they learned about something that was beyond their original frame of reference. A lot of the best characters in that collection are know-it-alls who discover, usually at the last sentence, that in fact they don’t know it all. Many of my stories deal with travelers. Thailand features prominently in many pieces in On the Proper Role of Desire. It was the first country I visited in Asia, and the indelible blend of spirituality and corruption damaged my mind in ways I’m still recovering from. In a broader sense, a lot of pieces I’ve written capture a sense of the world in flux—snapshots of globalism, if you will. 

 

I guess you could say that my more recent stories touch on the moment when globalism came to a crashing halt, when walls both physical and metaphorical started being erected. The characters are forced to come to terms with more limited horizons, the epiphanies less hopeful. I suppose the theme I’m grasping towards in both real-life as well as fiction is how we can continue to aspire towards growth and becoming richer, fuller human beings while living in dark times.

 

RS:

Best tip for someone who wants to write short stories?

 

CF:

Read a lot. Learn about all the possibilities of the form: both classic and contemporary. Be humble and let the brilliance of other writers be an invitation to your own excellence. And after you’ve crowded your mind with a staggering array of voices and visions, push them all to the side and let yourself discover what you—and you alone—really want to say.

Zvi A. Sesling

RS:

I've seen you take on a huge variety of topics in your poetry. What are some of your favorites, and why?

 

ZS:

I have four favorite topics so far: Jewish themes, sports, Eastern European dark ideas, and war. Because I am Jewish, I have found a variety of experiences which worked well in the poetic form, such as holidays, anti-Semitism, Holocaust. My book The Lynching of Leo Frank represents thirty years of my writing on those themes.  It was nominated for the National Jewish Poetry Book Award and is a book of which I am very proud.  Sports has been part of my life since I was very young, particularly baseball. I have written many baseball poems including a chapbook, Simple Game, Baseball Poems. The Eastern European dark poems were inspired by a number of poets. Many of those poems are encompassed in Fire Tongue. They reflect the dark side of humans and the world in general. My poems in War Zones are based on personal experience, articles that I have read and my intense feelings about war which have grown since my own time in the U.S. Navy. This book was also an award nominee.

 

RS:

What made you decide to start writing, was it something you've been doing since you were a kid?

 

ZS:

I decided in the second grade that I wanted to be a newspaper reporter; it’s a long story. I wrote science fiction and hardboiled detective stories in the early 1980s and by the mid-1980s switched to poetry because I found both free verse and the need to be concise and exciting. I have written more than 2,100 poems and still going! Among the poets who have inspired me are Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Wislawa Symborska, Bertolt Brecht, Charles Simic, James Tate. I also have a fondness for Hay (na) ku, a poetry form invented by Eileen R. Tabios.

 

RS:

Tell us a little bit about your magazine and why you started it.

 

ZS:

Muddy River Poetry Review began as a hardcopy publication in the late 1990s before I changed over to an online publication because of the huge number of submissions. It is published twice annually and has featured some wonderful poets such as Alicia Ostriker, A.D. Winans, Afaa Michael Weaver, the late Sam Cornish, Rick Lupert and others. I receive two to three hundred submissions for each issue and select 60-70. Some of those poets are published for the first time. Countries represented in the magazine are the U.S., UK, France, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Egypt, Italy, Spain, Canada, Romania, Argentina and others. Muddy River Poetry Review is my contribution to the greater world of poetry.

 

RS:

Best tip for writing poetry?

 

Observe, observe, observe. What we observe every day, walking, working, reading, watching TV, shopping, traveling, can directly inspire a poem. It might bubble up in the future to help create that poem itching in the back of the brain.  Poets must read a lot of poetry and other books.  You never can tell…

Brady Peterson

RS:

Wow, you and I have known each other for a long, long time, and we’ve seen each other through some major life changes. I never told you this, but once I tried to write a poem for you titled, "One Daughter Died and One Daughter Had a Baby," but for the life of me, I couldn't do it. But I was just so struck with that set of circumstances. How did writing poetry help you with your grief?

BP:

Actually, when Melinda died, my daughters Lou and Emily both had babies. One was born a month before Melinda died. The second was born two weeks after, in the same hospital. It seems to be a family theme: my father's death was sandwiched between two granddaughters being born. My wife and I drove from my father's funeral to the hospital. I learned something in the process, I think: we die to make room.

I have more than one friend who believes we just come back into another life. I have other friends who believe in the more traditional heaven and hell narrative. I'm only a poet. I miss my daughter terribly, but it's been over six years. I still ride my bike, do kettleball workouts, garden, and dance to the music of Clifton Chenier. I wrote in one of my poems how the ordinary clings even in the midst of disaster.

How did poetry help me deal with my grief? I don't know that it did. Marie Howe wrote a whole book, What the Living Do, about her brother dying and her dealing with it. Maybe it helped her in her grief. I think it more just bore witness. 

Grief has its own agenda. Poets bear witness.

RS: 

You seem to be a political person. Do you think it's possible to implement change with poetry? I think I'm to jaded to believe it, but I'd love to know if you do.

BP:

Am I a political person? Yes and no. I don't and won't run for office, something about truth telling being incompatible with getting elected. Pavel Tsatsouline describes vegetables as a necessary evil. It seems that vegetables come with these little toxins that help our immune systems get stronger. Thus, a necessary evil. Analogies are fraught with problems, but in a similar way, I would suggest politicians are a necessary evil. Pick the ones who will help make you stronger. Avoid the ones who will kill you.

Whether poets can implement change or not is up for grabs. Historically, poets are among the first to be dragged out of their houses and shot when the tyrant assumes power. Poets, the good ones, are always rattling cages. Still, poets should be relatively safe in America, because Americans don't read poetry. Our current president doesn't seem to read anything at all. I have a good friend who suggests that anyone who hasn't read a book of poetry shouldn't be allowed to vote. He also believes the same for anyone who has submitted a poem to The New Yorker. That is not likely to happen. there is the concerted effort, though, by some to keep anyone not white from voting. Alas, what does the poet do. He or she bears witness.

Then there's crazy Ezra Pound who reminds us even a poet can be a fascist.

RS:

How have you watched yourself grow as a poet?

BP:

I spend more time watching myself in the mirror doing kettleball swings. I'm 73, and I'm tuned into this struggle we have with growing old and dying maybe more than I should be. That we will grow old and die is a given. How we do it is another matter altogether. I have this desire to go out as a badass. Of course, badass may mean I can squat down and pick up my grandson. As for the poet, he is really a visitor who taps me on the shoulder when I need to see something. The poet is not me, he is someone else. What changes, if anything, is my ability and willingness to listen to the guy.

RS:

Favorite tip for writing poetry? 

BP:

Read everything. See everything. Hear everything. Howl at the moon when necessary, but try to avoid using the moon in your poetry as it has become cliche. Love with all your heart, knowing full well it will be broken.  

  

 

Maureen Kadish Sherbondy

RS:

Hey, Maureen, we've known each other for a long time! Since Big Table published your chap Weary Blues in 2010 (Wow, how have ten years gone by already?) what have you been up to since then?

MS:

These are the books I have published since then:

The Year of Dead Fathers (2012)—winner of the Robert Watson Poetry Award 

Scar Girl (2012)

Eulogy for an Imperfect Man (2013)

Beyond Fairy Tales (2014)

The Art of Departure (2015)

Belongings (2017)

Dancing with Dali (2020)

 

I have also been writing and publishing short stories and flash fiction.

 

I began teaching full-time at a community college in North Carolina in 2017. There seems to be a bit of a gap with my book publications during that time.

RS:

A few years back, you met the man of your dreams (so did I!) and got married. How did falling in love at that stage of your life show up in your writing?

MS:

After six years of dating, I finally met my perfect mate through a dating site. We had a whirlwind romance. Met in January 2017, got engaged in March, got married in May. As if that wasn’t enough, we built a house that same year, traveled to Paris, and had two wedding receptions. Barry is perfect for me. He is a Northerner (like myself), an English teacher (life myself), and also a writer! What else could one ask for? He’s also tall, blue-eyed, handsome, and very funny. 

Falling in love in my fifties was unexpected. I had just about given up on men to take up knitting and crafts. Seriously, I was very discouraged. Barry changed me in so many positive and thrilling ways. As far as my writing goes, I now have a built-in writing group, an editor, a partner to bounce ideas off when I am plotting a story or novel. Falling in love with Barry gave me the confidence to take additional risks with my writing. For example, I had written a YA novel and shoved it in a drawer. When I met Barry, I dusted it off and shared a chapter with him. He actually liked the novel and encouraged me to totally rewrite it. Thanks to his support, my first YA novel is coming out on September 10th of this year with Black Rose Writing. I’ve had this dream of writing books since I was eight years old. Barry gave me the encouragement to fulfill my dream of getting a novel published. 

 

With that novel under my belt, I am hoping to get an agent for a women’s fiction novel I have just finished. Cross your fingers for me. 

RS:

Has your writing ever taught you something surprising about yourself?

 

MS:

My writing has taught me several things about myself: 1. I like to explore different topics and genres   2. I work my tail off  (Try teaching a 6/5 load and continue to publish stories, poems, and books in your spare time) 3. I am great at taking rejection (I learned this both from dating and from sending work out to publishers)  4. Writing what has to be written sometimes has consequences (I have lost a family member as a result of writing what I needed to write) 5. My writing friends are extremely important to me on this writing journey

 

RS:

Favorite tips for writing poetry?

MS: 

1. Make sure you are having fun writing.  2. Take the last line of your last poem and begin a new poem with that line 3. Try reading poetry from writers you have never read. Keep on reading good poetry. 

  

Thank you for interviewing me, Robin! 

Giving Zoloft To My Son

 

I give my son

a small blue oval of hope,

disc tinged with shades of doubt,

antidote to the daily discontent.

My adolescent Sisyphus,

you’ve given up the climb.

 

I know this pain too,

the same bleak little men

swim through my veins,

chain down my thoughts and dreams.

 

I know the downside of medication,

that falling sensation, the dizziness

of withdrawal. Constant rock

middle ground mood,

no playground highs

no graveyard lows.

 

Pill held in that same palm

I first saw seventeen years before,

he grabbed my finger and squeezed

as if, even then, the world was too much.

 

Once he colored in the universe

on construction paper,

eight planets, and at the center

a bright yellow orb

Mom written in crayon inside the sun.

  

Today, I place the pill inside his hand,

and the yellow sun falls out of this universe,

slips so far away it topples off the page.

 

Still, for now

I press the answer

into his palm; he swills

it down with juice,

I shoo away the swell of little men

and say a prayer inside my head.

Brad Rose

RS:

Your stories often dabble in the macabre and the ironic, and are usually funny or bizarre. What makes you most comfortable with that theme?

BR:

Over the years, my writing has become more "surreal" (for lack of a better term.) One's writing continues to evolve and mutate - both in spite of, and because of, what one intends - and mind has increasingly gone in a surreal direction - although I still occasionally write something in a realistic/naturalistic style. Examples of these appear here. At first, this surrealist turn surprised me, so much so, that I think I resisted it a bit, but then, gradually, I began to realize that I was solving some problems by using this form. As you know, I write both poetry and micro/flash fiction. Over the last 6 or 7 years, I've concentrated on writing prose poems. I find this form is perfectly suited for a kind of "country and western" surrealism I tend to write. The embrace of the surreal and the prose poem form has enabled me (through my speakers/narrators) to be funny, ironic, dark, pessimistic, and bizarre - all the while having a lot of fun. It may be possible to incorporate these qualities into lineation poetry, but in my view, the prose poem - and even the micro story - is much more amenable and open to these qualities. Over the last few years, I have tended to follow a dictum espoused by Paul Valery, "Every view of things that is not strange is false."

RS:

The first time we met, we talked a lot about our writing histories. Like me, you've been writing basically all your life. Tell us about some of the things you've written that haven't been published. You were working on a novel for years, weren't you?

BR:

Sadly, I have hundreds of unpublished poems. I sometimes wonder if maybe it's better that they aren't published. You know, like many they're not really that good? So, there might be an "upside" to not having them parading around "out in public" so to speak. I console myself with the thought that you can't hit a home run every time you're at bat. At least I can't.

I've been writing since I was 11 or 12. I began writing in response to the death of a family friend - as a way for me to process that event - through poetry. I wrote a fair bit of poetry throughout high school and into college, after which my output began to decline. I wrote poetry periodically until my early 30s, then took about a 25-year hiatus - mainly because I had other things I needed to do. During my hiatus, I worked a number of jobs, ranging from railway worker to management consultant, to non=profit administrator. In retrospect, these experiences became source material for my later writing. I returned to writing when I was in my early 50s. My first published piece after my return was a poem called "Clown Car" about a kid's birthday party clown. Shortly after that, Robin, you were so kind as to publish a number of my short fiction pieces and poems in Boston Literary Magazine.   

Some time in the middle of the first decade of this century, I began to write a novel called Lola Loves Richard. It's a tragicomedy that takes place in Hollywood, composed of six-sentence chapters. I wrote about 130 "chapters" then kind of ran out of gas. I had a blast writing it, but fear I stopped because I didn't know how to finish it.

RS:

Do you have any bad literary habits that crop up from time to time?

BR:

I like to think that all of my literary habits are good, although I should read more novels than I do.

RS:

Favorite tip for short fiction writers?

BR:

It's important to read widely, including non-fiction. I try to read as much science and philosophy as I can. I also recommend trying to write as often as you can, each week. Practice - a lot of it - is what helps a writer perfect his or her craft. I think the nostrum about the necessity of 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert, or a master craftsman, is true. Only, I fear, the actual figure is 20,000 hours. That's two 500 8-hour workdays. Yikes! Always keep a notebook by your bed. You think you'll remember that great idea when you wake in the morning, but as I've found, you don't if you don't write it down.

The Truth About Love

Long ago, when music was rectangular, I was voted by my senior class "most likely to survive capital punishment." Of course, there are many different kinds of love. Some are angry, fun; others, a one-car funeral. Like that time we were driving across the Golden Gate Bridge and you told me that I have two different colored eyes. I realized, right then and there, we are spied upon by our own Wi-Fi. As long as I am barreling through this amnesia, I might as well mention that incident with the lesbian robots. At first, I thought it was a party trick, until you told me it was just me. How was I to know it wasn't necessary to communicate exclusively via homophones? What did you expect? I don't read music, although I do own all the Led Zeppelin Christmas albums. By the way, I don't care what color they are, Fruit Loops are all an identical flavor, and I'm willing to bed some real Hollywood money to prove it, too. Yes, I was in church when that terrible weight-lifting accident happened. The barbells were so heavy, not even Jesus could lift them. But as you know, we're always willing to forgive beauty, even if we're never prepared to forgive love. Just as time leaks from a clock, little by little, love leaks from our lives. There is nothing we can do about it. It's the just law of averages. Because everyone knows love is nothing like that. 

 

Renuka Raghavan

Rodger LeGrand

Christopher Reilley

RS: 

You write mostly free form. Do you have any other favorite formats? Are there any you avoid?

CR:

I love rhyme. There, I said it.

As someone with a deep and abiding love for language, I get a charge out of the interplay of sounds and meanings that comes with playing in rhyme. Humans have been rhyming for well over 6,000 years, and we will continue to do so. Every children's song ends up deeply ingrained because of the way rhyme carves patterns into our memory banks. Rhyme is important. It is also the basis of every other structured poetry format in existence. For example, the abbaabba rhyme scheme of the first octave in a sonnet.

But two important things about rhyme: 1.) It is not the most popular poetic style currently. That trend will likely change, in time, as trends do, but for now, rhyme is relegated to Hallmark cards and song lyrics. 2.) Rhyme is difficult to do well, which is why in our modern world it is rare; so much of it is crap. This is why I publish primarily free verse.

Every poet's evolution is different, but I started writing poems for the structure, the convoluted schema, the word-puzzle quality of matching meter and tone to result in a coherent message across time. As an engineer, troubleshooter, and professional problem solver, I was attracted by the puzzle structure of poetry forms.

Which is my convoluted way of answering your question; I enjoy writing all poetry forms, it is my favorite mental gymnastic pastime. I've been playing a lot with ghazals lately. Good times.

I don't avoid writing any challenge, I tend to jump on them feet first, and wrestle them into submission.

RS:

What do you think is the biggest mistake some poets make?

CR:

Being afraid to murder their darlings: "In other words, sometimes, when editing, you have to get rid of your most precious and especially self-indulgent passages for the greater good of your overall work." (Slate.com) Many folks have attributed that bit of literary advice to everyone from Ginsberg to Faulkner, but it was actually first said by Arthur Quiller-Couch, who spread it in his widely-reprinted 1913-1914 Cambridge lectures On the Art of Writing. In his 1914 lecture "On Style" he said, while railing against "extraneous Ornament": 

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

As you mentioned, I often get involved in workshops and critiquing groups. Countless times I have seen poets receive a critique that suggests they cut out a morsel that they would rather leave in. Whether the critique is valid or not, the writers' anguish at this experience has cost the world more great writers than poverty. I've seen countless good writers stay good, instead of reaching for great, because they cannot bring themselves to delete a line, phrase, stanza or section.

Do not be afraid to hack your work to shreds. Hell, you can always rebuild it again, or revert to the original if what you did isn't working. Bravery made more poetry than caution.

RS:

Favorite tip for poets?

CR:

The only one that really matter: READ. Read a LOT. Read everyone. Read stuff you hate and figure out exactly what you hate about it. Read someone you never heard of (then share it if you liked it.) Read newspapers, trade magazine, bargain bin books, pulps, romance novels, and biographies. Read for pleasure, read to dissect, read to learn, read to be informed, read for leisure, read for work. Every page you consume WILL inform and fertilize every poem you write.

I've written an essay about writing tips (wow, nine years ago!) and anyone interested can find it here: 

I Am a Poem

I am a poem.

I am more than a collection of random words.

I am much more than meter and rhyme.

I was wrestled from magic, fixed into place,

and spun like candy floss into being.

If I can live one day,

one single day

before moving down the list of poems

like me

that wish to exist

I will have meant something.

If I can relay to you, and you, and you,

something different,

something other,

in a way you not only understand

but feel -

I will have succeeded.

If I can become;

deep meaning in every line,

taught to future poets,

loved by one and all

I will have triumphed.

And win or lose, pass or fail,

I will happily

break down into words

to be wrestled into shape

for the next poem

at the top of tomorrow's list.

Doug Holder

RS: 

Your new "Essential" collection features not just free-style poetry, but that sort of stream of consciousness structure featured in the first book Big Table did with you, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Poseur. Can you tell us a little about the difference in writing the two forms?

DH:

Portrait of an Artist was written in a sort of fever dream: several years ago we had this huge snow event in Boston and I was stuck in the house. I was reading my journals that span over 40 years, and I just went into a stream of consciousness mode and had sort of writing prompts from snippets from the journal. The Essential Doug Holder is a collection that spans 30 years of my work, but oddly enough, I was encouraged by you to compile the poems in a time of isolation too. Most of the poems here were more deliberate; there wasn't that automatic writing going on for the most part. 

RS:

What do you feel is your greatest strength as a poet? Your biggest challenge?

DH:

I think I'm good with the short form. My wife and others sometimes tell me, "I want more," when they read my poems. I'd like to expand my poems in some cases, but then, would that be the essential Doug Holder? 

RS:

Have you ever simply abandoned a poem because you felt you just couldn't get it right?

DH: 

Yes. Usually when I am committed to the idea of a poem, I try my best to bring it to life, but sometimes it's just dead on arrival. But usually when something strikes me hard it seems to work out. 

RS:

Growing up, what did you want to be, how did you envision your career, did you always hope to be a poet?

DH: 

I had this idea that I would be this urban character in Greenwich Village, working as a social worker and writing on the side. In essence, I became that: I worked at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA for 36 years as a mental health counselor, and I ran poetry groups for patients (as well as other duties.) For over 10 years, I have been teaching writing at Endicott College and Bunker Hill Community College, which is great, and something I never envisioned doing when I was very young.

RS:

Most of your writing is based on things you've experienced, observed, or read about. Some themes, like your father's death, show up again and again. Is it hard to write about that, or is it cathartic?

DH:

It's like communing with your father and your past. Father and son relationships are very intricate: love/hate and all that sort of stuff. By writing about my father, I gained an understanding of him, me, and the relationship itself. I know this is corny, but at times I felt his presence when I was writing.

RS:

This collection really allows us to watch you grow up. How has your poetry evolved since you began writing, and did anynew insights hit you as you chose which poems to include?

DH:

I think at first, I often wrote for shock value. I tried to focus on bizarre subjects, like a woman who sat on her toilet for a couple of years. But now I think my work is more probing; I feel there is more steak than sizzle.

RS:

Favorite tip for writing poetry?

DH:

Write every day. Revise. Revise. Revise. Engage the senses. Use original language. 

At the Reading: Young Poet

She illuminated the dark bar 

like the distant

pristine light from the maw of a cave.

Her expression

practiced, dramatic

but every so often

betraying herself

with a nervous tic

a flutter of her eyes

an awkward positioning of her legs.

She talked of making love

as if a new discovery

of how he fills her crevices

she is he

or he is she

couplings in small rooms

of old Cambridge victorians

cigarette smoke

lipstick traces

romantic places

half-empty glasses

the lingering scent

remembered words...

phrases.

Looking at the audience

her body willowy

graceful

her face impervious to the revealing glare of the spotlight

her hair dropping down her shoulders

looking like it was glazed with honey.

From the corner

an old woman

lifted her head

from the rim of her shot glass

and cackled

breaking the spell:

"What's the big deal, kid, any two dogs could do that."