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 second AWP interview is with Carol Willette Bachofner. Carol is poetry editor of Pulse Literary Journal. She received her MFA in Poetry from Vermont College, has taught college English, and resides in Rockland, Maine. Her books are Daughter of the Ardennes Forest (2007) and Breakfast at the Brass Compass (2009).

Fringe: When did you first become interested in poetry?

I wrote my first poem when I was six, in the sand, with a stick. I was heartbroken that the ocean came and ate it. My father said, “Do you still have it in your head?” I said I did, and he said it wasn’t gone. And I still remember it.

Fringe: Which poets or poems have influenced your work?

First and foremost Richard Wilbur. His poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World” is, I think, a perfect poem. I read it about once a week. B.H. Fairchild, amazing poet, amazing mentor. Ednay St. Vincent Millay keeps me centered on form. Dana Gioia. Those are my staples.

Fringe: What is your favorite milestone in your... more »

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... more »

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,... more »

This week in Vintage Fringe, we’re featuring “No Translation” and five more poems by Rachel Dacus that originally appeared in Fringe Issue 4. Poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips caught up with Dacus by email over the Thanksgiving holiday to discuss ecopoetry, the practice of keeping one’s mouth shut, and Dacus’s “square poems.”

It’s been over three years since your work appeared in Fringe. Looking back on the poems, do any new ideas about them occur to you?

I still like the box format of the poems—I use it to compose in and then sometimes break up a poem into lines. More often, I leave the dense square of text as is. I think it encourages focus and enables ambiguity and resonance in the writing. While I don’t like to leave out punctuation in order to do this, I find the square shape—neither a lineated poem nor a paragraph—makes the reading slower, which is nice for poetry.

When I first read these  “square poems,” I loved the way the syntax and imagery, within the defined shape of the poem, and seemed to open up experiences of landscape. For instance, the beginning of “Poem to Save Your Life”:

                                                         Sung by a gnat
          who lands  on  the  under-carriage... more »

Please use this as a forum for discussion about Fringe Issue 20’s three poems from Catherine Daly’s forthcoming collection, a florilegium.

There’s a lot of good things down here in North Carolina, and one of them is happening right now: SPARKcon, “a showcase of creativity, talent and ideas of ‘the creative hub of the South,’ the Triangle NC.”

The event is a “creative potluck” made by teams of volunteers. The poetrySPARK team has put together a great bunch of readings.  There will be a big NC Writers’ Network reading Friday night, and on Saturday, a series of four themed readings. These each have two headliners, including Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Joanna Catherine Scott, and Alex Grant, and then some rabble-rousers to round things out. Count me as one of the latter—I’ll be reading during the experimental reading at 10 p.m. Fringe Poetry editorial assistant Nellie Bellows will read during the narrative/lyrical reading at 7:30.

Dara received her MFA in 2006 from Emerson College in Boston, and has continued to live and work there. Outside of writing poetry, she’s a full-time massage therapist, an avid bicycle commuter, and a lover of animals of every shape… more »

Nellie Bellows holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA in English from Guilford College. When she’s not writing poems or thinking about them, she’s probably drinking coffee, reading YA novels, and pretending to… more »