Editor, poet, and graphic designer Bryan Roth lives in northern Colorado, where he teaches poetry workshops and classes, helms his own design company, and is in the process of launching a new poetry press. Fringe’s Rachel Dacus emailed to interview Bryan to pick his brain about the purposes and occasions for poetry and about poetry editing. He writes, mainly in free verse, about relationships, pivotal moments in time when everything can change, and regret about the choices we make in those pivotal moments. He’s well-known in Colorado for reading his own and others’ poems from memory.

In the second installment in this interview, which will go live next Wednesday, Roth and Dacus will talk about some of his poems.

How did you become interested in writing poetry?

In high school, my freshman English teacher in gave everyone an assignment to write a poem. I had no idea what to write about. The girl next to me in English class was constantly complaining about math class, so I wrote a poem complaining about how hard algebra is, which was ironic because math was my best subject, and English—not so much, up to that point. Long story short, the teacher liked the poem so much, she put it in the school literary magazine. I thought that was pretty cool, and more importantly, so did quite a few freshman girls. Naturally, I immediately resolved to write more poems. I’m quick like that.

What sustained your interest in poetry?

What kept me writing poems is that I discovered that I could write about things in poems that you weren’t “supposed” to write about (or talk about, or think about) in any other form of writing—or talk openly about, for that matter. After a while, though, I wondered why I was bothering, since I didn’t seem to be improving (I wasn’t, because I wasn’t reading good contemporary poetry!), and was trying to decide if I should quit “wasting my time” on poetry, when I took a creative writing class in college from the late Linda Hull, who introduced me to the poetry of Stephen Dobyns. I was blown away, and re-excited about poetry; I still don’t know if I’ll ever write good poetry, but I’m resigned to writing it now, Don Quixote-like, as if on some impossible quest for perfection that I know I’ll never attain. Kind of like playing golf, I like to say, although I’m not a golfer.

What is poetry? What is its purpose?

Poetry is that form of literature that—what else?—poems belong to. Or maybe it’s this: Poems are moments of truth, filtered through the sensibilities of the poet, and transcribed in such a way that a reader may experience them as such. That’s my “official definition”—every poet seems to have his own, and that’s mine (so far, anyway; I reserve the right to edit that into perpetuity!). I suppose it’s more of an editor’s definition, though, since it’s not, itself, very “poetic.”

People can debate—and do, endlessly—what the difference is between “good” and “bad” poetry. I do think that difference exists—I don’t belong to the “It’s All Good” School of Poetics—because every language has rules and structure; therefore, writing is and must be a craft, and there are better and worse “crafters” in every art form, be it music, singing, sculpture, or whatever you care to name. A piece of pottery has its own inherent needs, distinct from the wishes of the potter, in order to actually hold together in the kiln (and not fall apart after it’s “fired”); in the same way, a poem has its own exigencies, regardless of the intent of the poet, in order to “hold together” as a poem. A poet who ignores, or is ignorant of those needs, is not likely to write a poem that fulfills its own potential, which is a nice way of saying it won’t be very good poetry.

As for the purpose of poetry, who knows? It can be anything, to either the poet or the reader: literature, philosophy, catharsis, entertainment. It depends on why an individual poet writes poetry, or what purpose the poet had for writing a particular poem, why an individual reader reads it, or the nature of a particular poem. Some poems are infused with “deep meaning,” others are meant to be merely entertaining in some way—but whatever their purpose, they must have an element of truth at their center, or they will not be very good poems.

What is the best way to structure a book of poems?

The best way to structure a volume of poetry by a single poet is to structure it in whatever way brings out the best in the poems: in short, to organize the poems in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In editing, we talk of this as ordering the poems in such a way that they “speak to each other.” It’s about juxtaposing themes or forms, and even the length of individual poems. You try, as an editor, not to have several long poems in a row, in a book, for example, in order to break things up a bit for the reader. You can put a couple of poems in a row where the second one takes the subject of the first a bit farther, or in a different direction, or takes the first as a point of departure, or you may want to place a poem after another in order to contrast the theme, style, etc.

I’m not a big fan of books composed of poems all in the same structure, say, a book of sonnets, or free verse poems that are all poems with long lines of similar lengths. I think that’s arbitrary and a bit less interesting for a reader; but there are always exceptions, and there may be a reason to do exactly that. You can always break the “rules” if there is a good reason for doing so whether writing a poem or putting together a book; there are the needs of a poem (when writing it), and the needs of the book (when putting together a collection). One poem is a work of art; thirty poems are thirty-one works of art: the thirty individual poems, plus the book as a whole, which is a work of art unto itself.

What is the best way of structuring a poetry anthology?

Organizing an anthology is very different from organizing a collection by a single poet, of course, and dependent on what kind of anthology it is. If it’s thematic in nature (say, a collection of love poems, or a collection of poems about cats), you have some latitude when organizing it, in that you can organize the poems so they can “speak to each other,” much more like a single-author book than a typical anthology.

If you’re putting together a more typical anthology, which is meant to be a “sampler” of poets, say, of a particular school, or generation (such as New American Poets of the 90s), or period of time (like The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry), you pretty much want to put all the poems by each poet together, rather than force the reader to search through the volume to hunt down poems.