Christina Cook is our featured poet this week. Poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips asked for her thoughts about remnants, the poems, and (a perennial favorite question) how she makes time to write. At the end you’ll find a writing prompt courtesy of Christina. Happy NaPoWriMo!

When you think of remnants, what’s the first poem or poet that comes to mind?

Definitely Sappho. All we have of her poems are remnants of the full poems she wrote. She is a poet whose work we will never fully know.

How did “21st Century Sappho” begin?

The poem began when I was reading a new translation of Sappho’s poetry, Sweetbitter Love, by the extraordinary translator Willis Barnstone. As I was reading, it occurred to me that there are two ways to read these poems, one being to read them as the remnants they are, in which case we are conscious of reading incomplete, excerpted poems. The other way was much more interesting to me: to read the fragments as complete poems, which is not really a stretch since this approach simply transformed them into elliptical poems. Most all poems are elliptical to some degree: Part of the essence of poetry is to engage the reader in completing the... more »