Category Archives: Interview

Interview with an Accents-published author, or someone else we want you to hear from.

Mortals Don’t Stand a Chance: Frank X Walker on About Flight

Accents Publishing has just released your chapbook About Flight (2015). Is there anything you want your readers to know about this collection before they read it?

That I’m thrilled to see these poems in print though they are difficult to read and were very difficult to write.

The title and first poem evoke superheroes—Superman by name and Wonder Woman by her magic lasso—how does your interest in superheroes intersect with the sense of love, loss, guilt, and perseverance throughout the book?

If there is an intersection it would be start with how much of a super villain addiction is and how only superhero sized efforts could ever defeat it. In my reality, mere mortals don’t stand a chance.

The speaker does not merely observe the pain of Brother and other family members but participates in the grief and trauma of the book. In Domesticated, “I am simply the academy’s pet dog,” rings as one of the harshest condemnations of the collection.

Yeah, it’s not really a question…this is the poem that always gets stuck in my throat when I read it. The speaker in these poems is a participant in this drama, not just a witness or observer.

There’s a current of sardonic humor throughout the poems. What was your process in approaching humor in the face of tragedy?

I think its just part of my personality and personal philosophy to use humor to soften the blow. Somewhere in the healing process there is a step that suggests that if you can laugh about it, you’re at least in recovery.

Would you talk more about Etheridge Knight’s influence on this book and your writing?

Although I’m a fan of his poetry, it’s Knight’s life more than his work that is the touchstone for me and this book. His tour in the armed forces and his struggle with drug addiction always made me think about my brother.

The final poem resists a happy and tidy ending and instead challenges the reader to consider the violent role love has when helping those struggling with addiction. Do I interpret this correctly: the choice to give unconditionally can destroy the addict and the giver?

Yes, unconditionally loving an addict is destructive. The role of enabler comes from a place of love, but it does more harm than good to addicts and amending the situation.

What’s next for you and your writing?

I’m always working on multiple projects. I’ve another collection of poems coming out later this fall called, The Affrilachian Sonnets, and I hope to finally finish my novel. I made a lot of progress on it this summer and if I can get it done I get to begin my spring sabbatical working on two new projects. One is a collection of poems that respond to or are inspired by the writing and life of Thomas Jefferson. The other is an examination of apartheid that will require me to spend time on the ground in South Africa conducting research.

Multidisciplinary artist and Danville, Kentucky native, Frank X Walker, is the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky, and Professor in the department of English and the African American and AfricanaStudies Program at the University of Kentucky. The founding editor of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture is a Cave Canem Fellow, co-founder of the Affrilachian Poets, and the author of seven collections of poetry including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, winner of the 2014 NAACP Image Award for best poetry collection. The Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry recipient is the originator of the word, Affrilachia, and wholly committed to deconstructing and forging a new definition of a pluralistic Appalachia.

“And it was like I had never seen color before”: Bianca Bargo Speaks with Christopher McCurry

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Tell us a bit about yourself and your debut chapbook How I Became an Angry Woman (Accents Publishing 2015).

I grew up in Southeastern Kentucky, in this little area of creeks and hills off Highway 229, right at the Knox and Laurel county line. Very happy childhood, loving family, lots of laughter—my memories from that time are all gold and blue and green. I was an early and ravenous reader, and the urge to write for my own pleasure hit me when I was about 7 or 8. That’s when I wrote my first poem, and I have been hooked ever since.

How I Became an Angry Woman is comprised mostly of pieces I began working on during my early 20s while studying English at the University of Kentucky. Just as my first real romantic relationship was ending, my first real education in poetry was beginning. Dan Howell, my first poetry teacher at UK, and the students in that class, began chipping away all my bad poetry habits—crimes of ignorance, to be fair—and opening my eyes to the real work poetry could do. One day, at the beginning of class, Dan wrote Margaret Atwood’s poem “You Fit Into Me” on the board:

You fit into me

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye

And it was like I had never seen color before. I took that new perception into the several consecutive poetry workshops I had with Jane Vance, whose significance to me can’t be fully described here. The book is dedicated to her to speak to that. She was an exceedingly generous teacher, mentor, and friend to me. She not only believed I had a voice worth hearing, but she helped me hone it in such a way that I began believing it too. Almost every poem in this book was read and workshopped by Jane, either in the classes I had with her or in our informal workshop of friends that continued after my graduation. Her encouragement helped me do things like intern for UK’s literary journal, Limestone, and submit my poem “Mood” to be considered for the Farquhar Award. And it won! It was through Jane, also, that I met so many other dear friends, with whom I am still engaged creatively today.

So How I Became an Angry Woman is a declaration of awakening. That’s why I chose the title from that poem, because it was most explicitly about waking up with a new vision, a new understanding, a new way of being. That’s what I experienced in more ways than one while writing and sharpening these pieces. I’m always becoming slightly new, I think; like every time I learn something, I relearn everything before or understand it a bit differently. So it’s incredibly difficult for me to declare anything the way the speaker of my poems can, and does. That is why I love poetry so much, because it gives you the chance to take feelings and moments that last barely a second in places inside you you’re usually too busy or too afraid to acknowledge, or an experience you’ve been wrestling with in secret forever, and proclaim it. I’m thrilled that Accents believed in these proclamations and gave me the chance to share them. This book was a dream I didn’t even admit I had until it became reality.

What struck me most about your book is the voice. The speaker seems to explore the range and strength of anger, like it is a tool to be used in, and maybe with, love. How do the two, anger and love, work together for the speaker of these poems?

The speaker of these poems would never have fully understood, or owned her anger had she not experienced the different shades of love. Though anger and love can both seem pure or basic, for her it’s not that simple. Her anger is at least half sadness, her love is almost entirely lust. As a woman she knows very well how often beauty is painful, how often love reveals ugliness. And though she desperately wants both, she is at times so frustrated by the difficulties and indignities of seeking, maintaining, and losing love, she wishes she didn’t. When she says “love is a grey madness/I was never good at/suffering,” she is speaking to that ambiguity, “the bliss and the sting/inseparable.” She becomes angry at her lovers, herself, the patriarchy, religion, literature, other women. Where she felt components of love to be deceitful, anger was wholly honest. And through the lens of that anger, she sees more clearly. Anger is her first real path to power, and begins to love herself for following it.

The speaker calls upon Plath and Whitman, as well as biblical and Shakespearian archetypes and allusions throughout the poems. Are these your own literary influences?

For a writer, I’m incredibly ill-read compared to my peers. But the Appalachian culture is one that involves a particular rhythm and pace of speech, rules of communication that definitely shape my writing. That accounts for the biblical language. That and a series of issues I have regarding images of women in something as culturally significant and pervasive as ancient religious texts. As if somehow, by taking words written by men for the purposes of men and putting them in a female speaker’s mouth, I am giving a voice to a voiceless collective.

When I was young, I was particularly captivated by Maya Angelou, I remember. But it wasn’t until college that I became truly familiar with other writers people my age had known for years. I would still be unlikely to catch witty references to a host of poets, I’m sure. However, the things I did read I learned to analyze and connect them to history, the world, and myself… The sense of connection is highly spiritual I think. References to other works act like a shorthand not only for the reader, but for me as well. Sometimes I could only mean what I mean because it was informed by that poet (Plath) or that line (Whitman’s “I sing the body electric”)! I love how art influences art. For example, “Ophelia” came from an exercise in one English class, I don’t know which. But we were looking at the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and the assignment was to write something in response to a painting of our choice. I was struck by the Sir John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia.” And by this point, I had read Hamlet a couple of times and was understanding it in new ways—it appeared to me that Ophelia suffered so much more deeply than Hamlet; it’s just that the play wasn’t about her. So I did the poem in three parts to get at the effect the character’s story and her image had on me. I later learned in Jane’s class that this was an exercise called “ekphrasis.”

My poetic style now comes firstly from my own instincts, but it is most definitely shaped by the tone and style of Margaret Atwood (I am always reading Morning in the Burned House), Sylvia Plath, and Jane Vance, if I were to pick just a few out of many.

I’ve heard it said that writing about sex can be difficult because the words we have are either too medical or too gratuitous. How did you go about tackling the language in “I don’t know why I sucked your dick” and “In My Fuck Me Shoes.”

I actually didn’t even think about it until after it was already on the page. Both of the poems came to me almost fully formed. I generally struggle with titles but these two poems titled themselves first thing. I used language I felt to be accurate and delightful, both for the image and the cadence. It was only after writing the pieces that I started to feel a bit shy about reading them, or having anyone else read them. But ultimately, I’m not ashamed to say I loved them and believed in them so much—especially “In My Fuck Me Shoes”—that I wanted to share. I think I’m also really pleased that, without intending to, I crafted some pieces that present a truth for my speaker about two things that can seem to disempower women in heterosexual politics—high heels and giving oral sex—and I show how she felt very powerful, almost hedonist in one and indifferent in another. There are so many facets to all parts of the human experience, and sex is no different. The more depictions of the various truths about sex that are out there, in the cloud and the consciousness, the better. Especially for women.

What or who inspires you to write?

There’s this thing that happens, an impulse, before I write most of my poems, when a word, a line, or the form of a poem just come to me in an instant and I feel compelled to jot it down. It comes from dreams, memories, specific experiences, moods (usually bad ones), conversations, movies, music, relationships, workshops, other things I’m reading…One of the best things for my writing is when I’m given a prompt with limits to work within. I haven’t attempted that in a long time. I don’t think it would surprise you to know I write especially well when I’m either angry or blue…and of course, any time I put wine to my lips I get the urge to put pen to paper. Also, I have many creative acquaintances and friends, like the very dear and talented Sue Churchill, who is continually inspiring me to keep writing.

Are you currently working on any projects we can look forward to?

I am attempting some prose for the first time in many, many years. And I’m thinking of a collection of body poems. It seems to be a theme that keeps presenting itself…

Bianca Bargo was born to a loving family in Knox County, Kentucky. She earned her B.A. in English from the University of Kentucky, where she discovered and honed her poetic voice, winning UK’s Farquhar Poetry Award and serving as Managing Editor of Limestone: A Journal of Art and Literature in 2009. From 2010-2014 as she spent her time working in retail and public education and obtaining her MA.Ed. from Eastern Kentucky University, Bianca continued to write and enjoy poetry with the inspiration and support of Lexington’s poetry scene. Her work has been published in Accents Publishing’s Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems. She currently resides in Lexington, Kentucky with her husband Micah and their pets. She has yet to Figure everything out, but continues to work on it while trusting kindness and curiosity to lead the way.

“They Are Not Alone”: An Interview with Roberta Beary by Christopher McCurry

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Tell us a bit about yourself and your chapbook Deflection (Accents Publishing 2015).

I created Deflection in the wake of my mother’s death in 2013 after caring for her for five years. Shortly after my mother died, my nephew died. It was a hard year. Working on Deflection was a way of dealing with my grief. I also hoped the collection would resonate with readers, especially those who find it hard to voice their own sense of loss. I believe in the power of haiku and enjoy doing haiku and haibun workshops and readings both in the States and abroad. My haiku collection, The Unworn Necklace, has just gone into its 4th printing and was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams’ award. I’ve also edited several haiku anthologies.

Deflection relies heavily on the Japanese forms haiku, senryu, and haibun. How did you come to writing in these forms?

Haibun is the form that speaks to me. I love the way it combines the freedom of flash fiction with the discipline of haiku. Some poets distinguish between haiku (poems with a season word) and senryu (poems about human nature). I like both forms and combine them whenever possible. I think of myself as a hybrid poet. In the 1990s I lived in Tokyo for five years and discovered the beauty of small things, including haiku. When I returned to the States, I joined Towpath, haiku poets of the Chesapeake Bay. We’ve been meeting for 20 years.

In the title poem the speaker discusses the death of her mother. The opening lines

mother gone
my urgent need
for a new coat

use senryu to capture the way we avoid thinking about the loss of a parent. What did this form offer that other forms and styles did not or could not?

Senryu are not easy to write well. The form’s discipline forces me to be very careful in choosing both words and images. This was certainly true when I was writing the title poem, which is a haiku sequence. I wanted to convey the feeling of loss in a way that expresses deep sentiment not shallow sentimentality. In the title poem, grieving takes on different guises, all of which show that it is a natural process.

Do you feel any anxiety to look for fresh interpretations of such venerated forms, and if so, do you ever feel as if you would/should jeopardize the form for the content, or vice versa?

I would describe myself as a haibun rebel. Traditional haibun don’t interest me very much─I see a lot of them as haibun editor for Modern Haiku. Haibun are much more than prose poems with a haiku tacked on at the end. I don’t feel any anxiety about looking for fresh interpretations. They come naturally to me. I’m a risk-taker in my writing.

Do you have any advice for those seeking to write in these forms?

Reading the print journal Modern Haiku is a good way to see the best of today’s writing. The Norton Anthology, Haiku in English, is a good guide for those who want to jump into the haiku world or just get their feet wet. I also want to give a tip of the hat to Rattle, Issue #47, which features Japanese forms.

What inspires you to write?

In large part, I want to connect with others, particularly the disenfranchised, to let them know they are not alone.

Are you currently working on any new projects we can look forward to reading?

As a self-described hybrid poet, I do like to mix things up. I am working on a collection of my photo-ku, short poems with photographic images. You can see examples of my photo-ku on twitter @shortpoemz. I’m also working on a chapbook which pairs my haiku and haibun with my brother Kevin Beary’s artwork. He’s an amazing artist as you can see by the cover of Deflection!

Roberta Beary is the haibun editor of Modern Haiku; she tweets her photoku @shortpoemz. Her book The Unworn Necklace was named a William Carlos Williams finalist by the Poetry Society of Americain 2008, the first such honor for a book of haiku. A frequent judge of haiku and haibun contests, she travels worldwide to give workshops on the art of the short poem. Her poetry is featured in the reference work A Companion to Poetic Genre (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and in the anthologyHaiku In English The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013). www.robertabeary.com.

Kingdom of Speculation: Interview with Barbara Goldberg

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James Pfeiffer: This collection presents a new world to its reader—one that may be inhabited by some seemingly familiar characters, but which is governed by its own unique set of rules. (Where else are eggs kept under lock, key, and the protection of armed guards?) And the characters themselves are involved in a bit of world-building, and seem to take delight in it—I’m thinking of the Princess classifying plants throughout the kingdom, finding herself caught up in the “elation of naming.” I wonder if you found yourself in a similar state of elation as you defined your world. Are there pleasures in world-building as a writer? And how would you describe the pleasures of encountering world as a reader?

Barbara Goldberg: I love traveling to new worlds—especially from the safety of my own chair. That’s also reflected in my reading preferences: from A Child’s Garden of Verse (I especially liked the wrought iron gates and the woodsy green landscape beyond); to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (the more fabulous his cities, the more stringent the rules); to Julio Cortazar, who makes the ordinary magical—forks, spoons, watches, all with lives of their own. I am very attracted to magic realism and world literature that open possibilities not bound by laws of nature. Continue reading →

Accents on The Best American Poetry Blog

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a copy of The Best American Poetry’s newest anthology

Award-winning poet Karen Schubert recently interviewed Katerina for the Best American Poetry Blog.

In the interview, Karen asks, “Does poetry and publishing poetry serve to deepen your connection to your chosen community?” to which Katerina responds:

I think the most productive way to feel connected to a community is to work to serve it, to give of yourself.

The interview reads more like an informal conversation between Karen and Katerina, and primarily discusses Accents’ mission of promoting brilliant voices and fostering an exchange in literature among different cultures.

Katerina also shares a poem from Brandel France de Bravo’s Mother, Loose, and discusses the importance of translating and sharing Bulgarian poetry, such as in The Season of Delicate Hunger.

Check out the interview here, and be sure to check out Lit Youngstown, the blog that Karen Schubert runs with Kris Harrington and Liz Hill, as well as Karen Schubert’s personal blog.

I don’t make a distinction among memory, understanding, dream and prophecy.

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Katerina Stoykova-Klemer interviews Filitsa Sofianou-Mullen about Prophetikon

If you had to describe this book in 30 to 50 words, what would you say?

This book is a book of seeing, of seeing anew events, people, myself. In this way, it is a way of understanding life and the importance of the other and of duality but also of oneness. It is a book of giving a modern twist to old, inescapable myths.

These poems place the reader in particular geographical places – both real and imagined. To what extent are these poems “poems of place” or informed by the place where they were written?

Let me begin by telling you that I have lived for long periods of time in three different countries: Greece, the US and Bulgaria. And I have travelled a lot mostly around Europe. Each place leaves a mark on me, one that has to be recorded somehow. Many times the places blend together in my memory or in my dreams. For example, in the poem “(Kolchis)”, I did have a dream of myself looking at a tree from a window in my university in the US, but it was the same tree that in reality I had seen in a field in a village in Greece. And thus the association with the Jason-like wonderment at where one’s shoes are, where things are, where one belongs. I suppose this blending is natural, at least I accept it as such. Continue reading →

Poet Barry George on Tanka, Haiku, and The One That Files Back

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Katerina Stoykova-Klemer interviews poet Barry George

Congratulations on the publication of The One That Flies Back! What can you tell us about this book?

Thank you, and thanks for the opportunity to talk about the book. It’s a chapbook of tanka, which are five-line poems in the tradition of a 1200-year old Japanese short-form. My hope is that they are fresh, original poems that honor the tradition.

How long has it been in the making?

About seven years. All of the poems except one are from that time. The exception is a revision of a poem that I wrote quite a bit earlier, which I have since realized was my first attempt at a tanka-like poem. Continue reading →

An Interview with Brandel France de Bravo

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Accents Publishing: Throughout Mother, Loose, you are working with characters borrowed from nursery rhyme and fairy tale, as well as inventing characters within those worlds. And in doing so, you give what are often considered old children’s stories a more mature, modern context. Readers will encounter Mary and her lamb skipping school to go to the mall, and find that the dish and the spoon are only a small part of a larger utensil community full of fulfilled and spurned loves. What makes these “children’s” rhymes so compelling to you as an adult? In thinking about bringing children’s rhymes to an adult audience, how do you hope your poems will alter a reader’s view of these stories and characters? Is it elaboration? Subversion? Something else entirely?

Brandel France de Bravo: I am fascinated by Mother Goose rhymes—they way they stay with you, like a baby tooth that lingers into middle age (I have one of those that’s finally giving up the ghost). The simple rhymes bring bodily joy—to repeat them is to remember pumping your legs on a swing. While their forms are tight and unwavering—closed even—there is something Steinian and open-ended about their nonsense-wisdom. After all these years, I still find many of them mysterious, as though they were excerpts or fragments from a larger narrative. All those Jacks, each with his own story: the one who went up the hill, the one who sits in a corner, the thin one with the rotund wife. They beg for, if not completion, amplification. Continue reading →

An Interview with A. Molotkov

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Accents intern James Pfeiffer interviewed Accents’ latest author, A. Molotkov, about his book Your Life as It Is.

Your Life as It Is is currently available from the Accents Store.

James Pfeiffer: Setting seems to be at the forefront of these poems, the opening sentences always grounding us in time and space. How is place important to your poetry or to your view of poetry in general?

Anatoly Molotkov: As both a poet and a fiction writer, I have a special relationship with places, settings: I mistrust them. Since I was a kid, extensive descriptions and unnecessary specifics in literature have bothered me. My goal is to give the reader enough information to understand the text’s objectives without painting a complete (and therefore exhausting) picture. I’m more interested in a generic river than one with specific water and specific banks. I prefer a bridge to a brown steel bridge unless the two adjectives affect some essential result in the poem. Of course, the right detail is often key to unlocking the reader’s reaction. Under these circumstances, my use of detail is conservative and reluctant. In Your Life as It Is, the second person character seeks to inhabit a place between the page and the reader—I would hesitate to break the applicability of the narrative by providing details that are excessively specific. On the other hand, I often utilize recurring motifs—and in a work of this length they can be especially important. My generic places are among the recurring motifs.

Each of the pieces in this collection is what one might call a prose poem, but they aren’t the block texts which that moniker might imply—instead, there is a repeated four-stanza structure. Can you speak a bit about how that form developed as you were writing the collection?

The four sections on each page provide a frame for seeing the text and the world in general—four unchanging windows available to examine the ever-shifting set of four views. The issues and the terminology found in each section are skewed towards a particular set of concerns, creating a feel of four separate sub-narratives. This form emerged from the start, rather than through a retrospective reshaping. This approach seemed necessary to provide continuity, and consistent with the notion of life as a series of changing, but similar, days.

The pervading tone of the collection seems to me to be a tone of skepticism. There is a skepticism within the speakers about the ways in which they sense, experience, and think about the world. There is even a feeling of the poet being skeptical of his own conceits and movements within the poems. I found it quite energizing. For example, I’m thinking of all the questioning and challenging of vision and perception that takes place in just a few sentences like: “The little girl rides her bicycle by your front porch. The wheels are frozen, as if she is in a film. You realize you too may be in a film. You look around for a camera, but your own eyes are the camera and the source of light.”

Am I right to call this skepticism, or would you define it as something else? To what extent can that intense questioning be productive and to what extent can it be burdensome? What makes its presence so necessary in this collection?

AM: Skepticism is an applicable term, but uncertainty is a better fit for how I feel about it. Sure enough, thesaurus lists it as one of the synonyms for skepticism—but to me, the latter implies a colder, more secure position—a stance of viewing from aside. My second person character is much more embedded in a lack of understanding and the resultant insecurity. The character operates in a world whose rules are inscrutable, liable to change at any moment—indeed, even the core aspects of the character’s identity, such as gender, undergo a metamorphosis. And I would argue that it is the uncertainty lying in wait just steps away from the polished surfaces of our lives that causes our existential insecurities. We rub against this uncertainty in our self-definition. Whether intense questioning is productive for literature is a separate topic, very much dependent on the reader’s expectations and experience with text. Much of my writing contains overt rhetorical questions (those with a question mark at the end) —something I consciously avoided in “Your Life as It Is”. I often get criticized for the preponderance of questions in my work—just as often, I get complimented for the same trait. It’s up to each reader to decide which modes of literary evocation affect them correctly.

What do you hope readers will encounter in Your Life as It Is?

AM: It is difficult to formulate a recipe for my readers, with Your Life as It Is or any other work. The reader brings emotional and intellectual history to a literary text, and the final version of any text is the reaction created in the reader’s mind and heart. Thus, written text lives many lives. I rely on the readers to discover their own ways to interact with my texts. Just as writing is ultimately an intuitive process, so is reading. I’m reluctant to preempt that intuitive experience. In any case, I prefer to be the last person to understand my own work. I leave interpretive joys and responsibilities to the reader.

a_molotkov Born in Russia, A. Molotkov moved to the US in 1990 and switched to writing in English in 1993. Published or accepted by The Kenyon Review, Mad Hatters Review, 2River, Perihelion, Word Riot, Identity Theory, Pif, and many more, Molotkov is winner of New Millennium Writings and Koeppel fiction contests, and a poetry chapbook contest for his True Stories from the Future. He co-edits The Inflectionist Review and serves on the Board of Directors of Oregon Poetry Association. Molotkov’s new translation of a Chekhov story was included by Knopf in their Everyman Series.

An Interview with Emily R. Grosholz

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Katerina interviewed poet and philosopher Emily R. Grosholz on her newest book, Childhood (Accents Publishing). For more information about Emily, you can click here.
For more information about Childhood, click here.

Childhood has been described as a collection of poems about children and parents, including childbirth and adoption. What draws you to these themes?

In an earlier book, Eden, I wrote some poems about the birth and infancy of my first child, who was born 25 years ago, and that led me to revisit my own childhood. This was uncharted territory for me: I didn’t know any poems in the English canon that dealt with pregnancy and nursing a baby, or with fathers and babysitters. The physical aspects of nurturing a baby, and the social aspects of sharing the tasks of parenthood, seemed fascinating to me, and worthy of a poet’s reflections. Later, we adopted our second son, and as a kind of late surprise, I gave birth to our third son and we adopted our daughter a few weeks later. At that point, I became even more interested in the texture and quality of the life of small children: how they begin to talk, how they discover friends, how they learn to make music and play sports, how they get ready to fly away. In this endeavor, I found more precedents and inspiration: Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, Galway Kinnell, Yves Bonnefoy, Anne Stevenson, Richard Wilbur. My children were the main inspiration, but in writing about what they helped me see, I was also trying to discern the universal aspects of childhood, the experience of all children as they grow into language and the world.

A percentage of the sale of each book goes to an organization that supports children worldwide. Tell us more.

I’d been thinking about collecting some of my poems about childhood. During the first few months when I held my oldest child in my arms, I often thought of other children with no parents, or with parents who loved them but couldn’t protect them from poverty or illness. So I started supporting organizations like UNICEF. About twelve years ago, an undergraduate student of mine at Penn State, Ashley Waddell, persuaded me to teach a course on “Children and Social Justice,” where we read not only philosophy texts but also sociological accounts of the global status of children, focusing on the tension between their right to go to school and their obligation to work so their families can survive. We also read about street children; Ashley worked with an organization in the Dominican Republic that tried valiantly to care for street children. (She went on to law school and has worked tirelessly for human rights ever since graduating; this year she and her husband welcomed their first daughter!) But from our reading and from first-hand testimony, we came to the conclusion that children who don’t have at least one adult parent or care-giver usually die before they reach adulthood: the younger generation needs the love and wisdom of the older generation to survive. So my commitment to supporting a children’s humanitarian organization intensified. I am happy to see that our pre-launch sales have already gone to support the welfare of children worldwide with a donation to UNICEF.

Tell us about the lovely artwork accompanying the poems. How did you match the poetry with the drawings?

This past year, there was a happy coincidence. I had admired the drawings of mothers and children by my friend in Paris, Lucy Vines, for many years; one of them in particular struck me as the image I’d like to see on the cover of this imagined book. I saw Lucy last March, we talked again about the project, and she at last agreed that we could create the book together. The alternation of poems and images expresses some of the correspondences we found. Just afterwards, thanks to Philip White and Lisa Williams at Centre College, I discovered the books of Accents Publishing, and thought this press would be just right for the project. And it was! Lucy thought so too: she found the production of the book quite beautiful.

Who should read this book?

People who have just become parents, or who have just become grandparents, or who have just become empty-nesters. People who lovingly raised other people’s children and grandchildren. People who prefer poetry in meter and rhyme (slant rhyme), no matter what it’s about, or who like the interplay of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French and Latin words in a poem, or who enjoy contemplating the exchange between images and poems that speak to each other. People who worry about the 140 million orphaned or abandoned children in the world, and hope to help a little (like me). People who like to travel with their children. People who like to stay home with their children. And storks, since they carry so many babies! Oh, wait, storks can’t read. Well, maybe Sandra Boynton’s storks and hippotenuses and udderly cows and good gnus, who entertain so many children (and me) and are clearly literate since they make puns. My poems are also not without puns. In fact, thanks to my father, I can hardly talk for five minutes without making a pun. Thanks to my mother, I love babies and have enough patience to construct a metrical line.

What do you wish for all the children of the world?

What we all wish for: happiness. Here are some requirements for happiness. Grown-ups who love and take care of you so that you can think and play, and who also teach you about conflict and spark your anger in ways that make sense, so that you can grow up. Food and shelter and protection against violence. A good education that results in a love of books. Compassion. Friends. (You can’t make friends without compassion.) Chocolate. Garlic. Good medical care. Bright red mittens. A sense of humor, because no matter what we do, the world will always be intermittently terrible. And hope, because most of the time, after things are awful, they improve and sometimes even turn out to be wonderful. You can never tell.

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