The Birds’ Ulterior Motives Get Them Killed: An Interview with Craig Morgan Teicher
Congratulations on Cradle Book, published by BOA in 2010. It is a lovely book of what I thought were fable-like prose poems. But BOA has listed the book as fiction. Do you see it as a work of fiction?
Sort of. It’s certainly not poetry. I wrote it in part because I had always wanted to write fiction but don’t have anything resembling the patience for it, so I thought I could write little stories about archetypal characters and animals that die when things that fall on their heads. But, no, it’s not fiction, in the sense that Hemingway wrote fiction or Anne Patchett writes fiction with characters we’re supposed to fall in love with and hate. It is prose—and something separate from poetry, a different material from poetry. READ MORE >
From the Margins: An Interview with Peter Davis
With just two books of poetry, and a third on the way, Peter Davis has already established himself as an innovator with a great deal of intelligence and skill. Modest but assured, he explores ideas most poets would not think to broach and pushes the accepted limits of form in ways that expand what a poem can be. Whether pondering the heinous mustache of the previous century’s most infamous tyrant, or inventing satirical monologues for real and imagined audiences, Davis knows that in order to break ground a writer must be bold and open to uncertainties: “An artist has to pursue something he or she is unsure of, but then pursue it recklessly.” While these pursuits make great comic shtick, they are only half the story, for Davis’s sense of play services a unique moral vision. The text below is a collation of one face-to-face interview in April 2011 and several email exchanges from April to June 2011. – Tony Leuzzi
What was the genesis for the idea of writing an entire book of poems about Hitler’s mustache?