Did Rachel Dacus’ interview with Palestinian poet Deema Shehabi this week pique your interest?

Check out some of her poetry in Drunken Boat and Perihelion. And feel free to discuss below.

The Publisher/Editor of Cooper Dillon Books talks about poetical collaborations, the underrated virtue of humility, and the need for community. more »

In Fringe 23, our own Rachel Dacus interviews Eliot Khalil Wilson about his influences, his poetic aims, and the following poem from his forthcoming collection This Island of Dogs (Margie/Intuit House Press).

White Slip on the Paris Metro
by Eliot Khalil Wilson

From the fouled nests of Villejuif
to the street below,
then the walk, the steps down
to the catacomb metro—
I have waited with Moroccans squatting like tajines
and Senegalese women asleep against their bundles,
waited in this crowd like a soul for a ferry
and how many skies exiled?

How many skies?
To ride this silent film
under cobbled Paris, her exposed-bone sycamores,
to pitch and tilt and judder,
in scumbled light,
there among the speeding cataleptic,
rocking like the drowned,
being how many kinds of foreign
and living like Saint Jerome.

And I speak stone but no one speaks.
I have slept against my reflection.
I have pretended a bored sleep.

But once I raised my head
and saw, I swear, a woman wearing falling snow.

She glowed supernova in a slip.
Not a knot or a kiln or a boat ramp
but a dress from the silver water of the moon
and a liquid shape, each way free.

Not... more »

Eliot Khalil Wilson talks about poetry as a moral act, shopping for images while traveling, and why he’d be happy to be sung to by a frog. more »

Addonizio talks about how a poet is like a musician, being inspired by “Little Orphan Annie,” overcoming fear of failure, and what it takes to be a working poet. more »

Poet Cheryl Dumesnil talks about why her children are her gurus, San Francisco as a font of poetry, and how she knows when a poem is ready to publish. 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 »

"No Translation," "Poem to Save Your Life," "Poem to Write on Your Birthday," "Elegy for an Amputation," "At the Easel with Alzheimer's," and "For a Day of Silence." more »

Rachel Dacus’ poetry books are Another Circle of Delight, Femme au chapeau and Earth Lessons. Her work appears in the anthologies Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English, Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po LISTSERV, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose… more »