The Accidental Poet

[Gerald So]

Anyone on Crimespace read and/or write poetry? All my years in school and two years into my teaching career, prose writing seemed more solid footing than poetry. I wrote two very prosy poems in college, which became the first official submissions to Font, a literary magazine I helped found at Hofstra. The two poems seemed to say all I needed until, two years into teaching at Hofstra, I became the Assistant Editor of the faculty poetry site (which meant I occasionally offered my opinion on poems read by the editor while I was HTML-coding).

Working on both zines, I felt if I was going to nudge others' creativity, I'd better nudge my own. That's how things started, and to date I've had more poetry published than crime fiction. Why ever stop?

As a student, I liked the work of T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Yeats, and Keats. Today I draw the most from Philip Levine, Carolyn Forche, Sharon Olds, Edward Hirsch, and Tony Hoagland. I just got into Donald Justice and am always looking for more to try.

[Scott Hess]

I read and write poetry. Sometimes I also eat it. (Hat tip to Mark Strand, of course. and one wonders what one shits after eating poetry? Greeting cards, perhaps?)

I like shrunken poetry, stuff that's as suited to being projected on a wall as reproduced in a chapbook. Creeley. Strand. Some Thomas Lux. Cummings, of course, and typically. Williams. John Wieners. (If you haven't read "The Acts of Youth," you should. Maybe my favorite poem of all time, and with a sense of doom, gloom, and foreboding worthy of a crime writer/reader.))

Lately I tend to write small, circular stuff...zen poems, maybe.

Here's one, almost rambling for me, from a coupla years ago, from a cycle of "airplane poems"...:

Going Nowhere

Why is it
only when I am
speeding above the earth
my life
the land,

passing

between places
I can
slow down
well enough
to hear my heart

beating, to feel my
being moving

to no
destination no
place no
where?

Is there more wisdom
in the answer or
in the question?

[Joy Calderwood]

I've had a few poems published, too, but my great love is editing. Bringing out that statue inside the marble. I'm currently editing Pier Giorgio Pacifici (fantasy), whose prose often has the feel of poetry. He writes in Italian, then translates it to English. He reminds me of Somtow Sucharitkul (aka S.P. Somtow), who won the John Campbell with his mind-bendingly beautiful science fiction novel LIGHT ON THE SOUND.

[norby]

My teachers in school always managed to make poetry seem as interesting as watching glue dry. They always wanted to disect everything-take the words apart until they didn't seem to mean anything any more. I was always more interested in how the words sounded together, how they flowed. (um, did I mention the communications degree-I have this thing about the way words sound)

So, now I'm getting a little more into poetry, slowly. Right now I like Yeats. I've written a few myself when the mood strikes, but I have an odd relationship with poetry. I hate stuff that rhymes too much (back to the public speaking days-don't get into a singsong!), so I read poetry books here and there and just look for what seems to fit me.