How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
I came to poetry early—I have a vivid memory of reading “Prufrock” at fifteen and feeling as if the top of my head suddenly came off—but I didn’t start writing it seriously until the age of twenty-five, and didn’t start writing at a high level until thirty-five, when I decided to go to grad school. I’d been a journalist and freelance writer for a decade at that point; after pumping out an 800 word movie review on deadline, I found I didn’t have the energy to write even more prose—many fragments of fiction live somewhere in some long lost files—but I did, weirdly, have the energy to write poems, which over time came easier and easier to me. When I realized I had completed very few short stories but a seeming metric ton of poems, I finally succumbed and decided to focus on poetry.
How did publishing your first book change your writing? What have the differences been since?
When I finished my MFA, I thought it would take three to five years to get a book into the world. Ha. In the end it took eleven years (with a small press chapbook along the way), and by the time it happened I was very far from the poems of my thesis manuscript, and my work wasn’t changed by publication so much as it confirmed I had found the right row to till.
How does a poem begin?
With a line in my head, often while I’m doing something completely unrelated to thinking about poetry. I often start with a pentameter line, just as a starting point; my default when I sit down to write a poem is usually to write the sonnet, until a poem tells me it doesn’t want to be that.
Do you see your work as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
While I have manuscripts that are indeed extended projects, most poems that I write are simply threads; what they might weave is for someone else to decide.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
A benefit of not having become a novelist is that I don’t need to stick to a daily schedule. I’m embarrassed to say that I write whenever the poems arrive, but that’s very often of late, and I tend to write three or four poems a month.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I’ve fallen out of the habit of reading journals—I tend to read collections—but recently I picked up a copy of Granta for the first time in years and really enjoyed it. I think this is a function of the Internet: I often read poems shared from journals, but rarely a whole issue in of itself. Many of my favorite journals, both print and online, sadly no longer exist, but I do like The Heavy Feather Review and Cobra Milk.
Who are some of the artists you have engaged with lately that most excite you?
The
best exhibit I saw this past year was the Jack Whitten retrospective at MoMA—an
absolute revelation. Cinema is very important to me as well; just last night I
saw, for only the second time, Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes
(1992) at the Museum of the Moving Image, an overwhelming experience; if I
could write a poem that does even a tenth of what that film does, I could die
content. The book that is currently rocking my world at the moment is Anne
Boyer’s book of essays, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, and I highly
recommend The Weather Station’s latest album, Humanhood.
Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021, Brooklyn Arts Press) and Walking Away from Explosions in Slow Motion (2018, The Operating System). He is currently the poetry editor for the online journal Bowery Gothic.