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…