How does Lost & Found build upon or depart from your last collection, Evidence that We are Descended from Chairs?

Although there are autobiographical poems scattered throughout Evidence, Lost and Found is more consciously autobiographical throughout. This is not to say that every poem in it is literally true, but, taken together, they amount to a Rorschach ink blot representing my intellectual/emotional/spiritual evolution over (so far) 71 years. The reader is free to interpret the blot as he or she wishes, relying, I hope, on intuition at least as much as logic.

I admire how delight and playfulness are a staple of your poetry, you seem to insist upon it, even in the midst of the reflective and somber. What attracts you to it when writing poetry?

I don’t insist on it. It’s just there, part of my DNA, I think. My father and his family were German Jews who fled to the U.S. in the late ‘30’s. My mother was an atheist/Jewish/Socialist intellectual from New York. Humor was a  key to their sanity. The darker the situation, the more important it was to find something to laugh about. A classic Jewish telegram sums up this perspective: WORRY NOW. DETAILS TO FOLLOW.

Many of these poems take place or look back on the past, given the title, what is the speaker trying to reclaim? And is there a loss in that reclamation?

I’d turn the question around. It’s impossible to reclaim what one has never owned or controlled. But in each loss there is something to be found. The title poem, about the Challenger explosion in 1986, is mostly about loss, but there is a nugget of discovery in it as well. A number of the poems are directly about  losses in my life—of my father (“Timing,” “In the Woods,” “Downpour”), my sister (“Perspective”, “A Fleeting Dream of My Sister”), my mother (“Shorts”); also the loss of my own innocence (“Shorts” again, “The Day I Crossed Over to the Dark Side,” “Across the Street from Graceland: a Professor’s Epiphany”). I found something while writing each of these. I also discovered a great deal while writing “Autopsy,” about the imagined aftermath of my own demise.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Of Moose and Seuss”. Will you talk about the process of writing that one?

In 1991, when Theodor Seuss Geisel—Dr. Seuss—died, I was writing a weekly column for the Boston Sunday Globe. The good doctor was a lifelong hero of mine. I wondered if I could write a tribute to him in Seussian style. I immersed myself in the old books. Once I had settled on Thidwick, The Big-Hearted Moose, the poem came easily. I should add that the adrenaline rush of a tight newspaper deadline helped a lot.

Do you have a favorite poem or section of the book?

That’s kind of like asking which of my children is my favorite. But I do tend to favor poems(as well as children) that bring me joy: “Yukon Go Home Again,” for example, and “The Interrogation” “Chemo,” and “This Music.”  I’m not saying these are among what critics might consider the most accomplished poems in the book; they’re favorites because they make me smile, even if, in at least two cases, I’m smiling through tears.

Andrew Merton is a journalist, essayist, and poet. Publications in which his nonfiction has appeared includeEsquire, Ms. Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, and The Boston Globe.His bookEnemies of Choice: The Right-To-Life Movement and Its Threat to Abortion, was published by Beacon Press in 1980. His poetry has appeared inBellevue Literary Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Rialto (U.K.), Comstock Review, Louisville Review, Vine Leaves, the American Journal of Nursing,and elsewhere. His book of poetry, Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs?, with a foreword by Charles Simic (Accents Publishing, 2012) was named Outstanding Book of Poetry for 2013–2014 by the New Hampshire Writers’ Project. He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of New Hampshire. His website is available here.