Interviewer’s Note: Born in New York City, Rachel Hadas was educated at Radcliffe College (Classics), The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins (poetry), and Princeton (Comparative Literature), as well as by living on a Greek island for several years in the early 1970’s.  Since 1981 she has taught in the English Department of the Newark campus of Rutgers University, where she is currently Board of Governors Professor.  She has also taught writing courses at Columbia, Princeton, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the West Chester Poetry Conference, and the 92nd Street Y.  Most of her numerous books are collections of poetry, most recently Laws (2004) and The River of Forgetfulness (2006).  She is also a translator of poetry by Euripides, Racine, Baudelaire, Karyotakis, and many others; an essayist; [...]

More than half a century has elapsed since Richard Wilbur, still prolific at 87, won his first Pulitzer Prize. The extraordinary qualities of that statement should be highlighted for readers who claim there are no incontrovertible giants on the American poetry scene. Wilbur’s most recent book, Collected Poems: 1943-2004, has prompted a widespread critical reassessment of his career, at a time when the writing of poetry in traditional verse forms has attained its greatest level of popularity since the years after World War II. Throughout that career, Wilbur’s poems and translations have appeared steadily in anthologies, major magazines, and literary journals alike, beginning with his first published volume, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947). Ceremony and Other Poems (1950) followed, and in 1956 his [...]

“John Berryman took his place, but Berryman soon got into trouble—he got drunk and wrecked his room, and the police threw him out of town.”

William Jay Smith is the author of more than sixty books of poetry, children’s verse, literary criticism, memoirs, translations, and editor of several influential anthologies. From 1968 to 1970 he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a post now called the Poet Laureate) and two of his twelve collections of poetry were finalists for the National Book Award. Smith was born in Louisiana in 1918 and brought up at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, just south of St. Louis. His memoir, Army Brat (1980), which recounts his unusual boyhood as the son of a professional soldier and clarinettist in the Sixth Infantry Band, was praised by Eudora Welty and Ralph Ellison. His prize-winning children’s verse, collected in Laughing Time: Collected Nonsense (1990) has been [...]

XJK: I like the sound of words and the fun of putting them together. When I first made fumbling attempts to write, I tried writing fiction too. I wrote extensive imitations of Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys, but those projects didn’t get anyplace. Actually, later on I wrote some science fiction for pulp magazines, two fantasy novels for children, and some stories in little magazines.

An Interview with Jon StallworthyInterview By: Sunil IyengarJon Stallworthy’s blood quickened after a poetry reading he gave earlier this year, not because he admired his own recitative powers, but because of something an audience member told him. This man, who turned out to be Stephen Spender’s nephew, had found a sheaf of letters in his late mother’s attic. His mother was Nancy Spender, Stephen’s sister-in-law, and it seems that she had maintained correspondence with her former lover, Louis MacNeice, long after their relationship had cooled. As MacNeice’s literary executor and official biographer, Stallworthy had known of the possible existence of some letters, but after the breakup of Nancy Spender’s first marriage, those had gone missing.[private]The letters her son found were different. They had been written [...]

EH: The architect Frank Lloyd Wright once wrote that “the truth is more important than the facts.” What does this statement mean to you?

ED: Because I readily admit that much of my book is autobiographical, my family likes to quibble about the details of some of the poems. Every time my parents are present for a reading of “Bees in the Attic,” for example, a discussion of the way “it really happened” always follows. Was the hive really right above my bed? Who discovered the noise first? I remind them of the idea of poetic license and we move on. Similarly, when my mom read “DrugFace” the first time, she was concerned, asking about what (again) “really happened.” I gave a similarly evasive answer, something like, “Yes, I used to drive with my eyes closed, but nobody’s ever asked me what’s my sign.” For me, much of the energy of a poem is in the details, but those details aren’t necessarily facts, though they are true to the situation of the poem and true to the feelings it invokes. In that way, all of “DrugFace” is as true, or as factual, to me as the actual night when I drove around Columbus, Ohio inebriated.

Interviewer’s Note: Born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1948, Timothy Steele is the author of several collections of poems: Uncertainties and Rest (Louisiana State University Press, 1979), Sapphics against Anger and Other Poems (Random House, 1986), and The Color Wheel (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). The first two of these books have been re-issued in a joint volume, Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986 (The University of Arkansas Press, 1995). Steele has published as well a book of literary criticism, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (University of Arkansas Press, 1990) and is the editor of The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (Ohio University/Swallow Press, 1997). His study of meter and versification, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, was published [...]

EH: If someone were blindfolded and reached out at random on your bookshelves, what might he come away with?

FW: The New Testament, Neue Gedichte, and the pornographic stories of Apollinaire.

An Interview with the Editors of FoetryConducted by: Garrick DavisInterviewer’s Note: This year, a new website was launched in the National Poetry Month of April-not to publish poetry or fiction, but to examine the ethics of the poetry world. With its mission of exposing fraudulent book contests, and corrupt judging practices, the editors of Foetry aim to be a watchdog agency in the so-called Po-Biz. The editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review conducted the following email interview with Foetry’s editors, who shall remain (by their own request) anonymous.How did Foetry come into existence? What served as the catalyst for this project?Ethics and economics. It’s an excellent idea to charge an entry fee for a competition. Funds collected support the actual cost of running thecontest, which [...]