During the annual AWP conference in Denver in April, Fringe contributor Rachel Dacus asked a few poets a few questions. Over the next few days, Fringe will be posting their responses–enjoy!

Our first interview comes from Barbara Crooker. Barbara’s books include MORE, Radiance, and Line Dance.

Fringe: When did you first become interested in poetry and writing poems?

I got interested in poetry as a child; my mother bought a set of The Book House Books, which are full of poetry and classical literature rendered “child-sized.”  Then, as an undergraduate, I took a class in creative writing, which I never actually attended (hey, it was the sixties), but I did do all the assignments, and wrote a bit on my own, getting into the college lit mag and yearbook.  I didn’t really set foot on the writing path, though, until I found myself as a single mother in my late twenties, having to revise my entire life.  I came across some poems of Diane Wakoski, and thought, “Hmm, I can do that.” (Of course, I couldn’t).  But I started writing, and have never looked back.

Fringe: Which poets or poems have influenced you?

Like Walt Whitman, I embrace multitudes.  I think I’m influenced by poems I dislike as well as the poems I love intensely.

Fringe: How does poetry enrich life?

For me, that’s a question similar to “How does oxygen enrich life?”

Fringe: If you could change one thing in your work, what would it be?

In the last poem (”Holsteins”) of my new book, MORE, I have this line, “But I don’t want to change a thing.  I want / to keep walking this stony path, listening // to dried leaves in the beech tree, / insects playing their strings in the grass. // I want the sun to run down my face like honey. / I want the wind to kiss me.  I want all this to last.” Some of my poems are DOA, miserable failures.  But without them, poems that I’m proud of wouldn’t have happened.  So there’s nothing I’d want to change; it’s all woven from the same cloth.

Fringe: What’s your favorite moment or milestone in your poetry career?

The easy answer is being invited to read at the Library of Congress in the Poetry at Noon series this past fall. The harder answer is this story:  a woman who was briefly part of our Women-in-Poetry (Wom-Po) listserv posted that she had to go for an emergency MRI, and she wrote that she recited one line from one of my poems over and over, while she was in the machine.  All I want to do in this “one small life” (Mary Oliver) is write poems that matter (or else, like Flannery O’Connor, I’ll say “the hell with it”), both to me, and to my readers.