ONE QUESTION

A wide-ranging series of interviews on the art and craft of poetry.

To prepare for these interviews, Nathan writes by way of introduction, he “would read everything by the poet I could get my hands on, and then talk with them on the phone, off the record, sometimes for many hours.” Only then would he send a single question to the interlocutor, sometimes just “a bouquet of question marks” to prime the pump. This comprehensive approach gives him plenty of material to forge thoughtful introductions to poets whom casual readers may not know, and there are many. While well-known writers such as Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, Robert Pinsky, and Forrest Gander figure in Nathan’s pages, so do less-established writers such as Ishion Hutchinson and Megan Fernandes. All have something to say, and while there are rather vaporous moments (“writing poems for me has always been about my ability to be open to serendipity and haunting,” says Diane Seuss), there are plenty of solidly grounded observations, especially on a poem’s architecture or form. Getting to that form is a matter to which many of Nathan’s interviewees speak, as when Gander asks, “Don’t you think details help you focus?” And Graham, who wrote her way through terrible illness, speaks of the independence of the poem as something that best reveals its form to the poet as its own creation: “A poem is alive; it uses you to get itself written, spoken, to get its wisdom to cross from the unknown into the known.” A little mystical that, too, but if poetry is not incantation and sorcery, then—well, read on.

A valuable set of inspirations and instigations for budding poets.