With Luck, We All Become Persons of a Certain Age: an interview with Leatha Kendrick

Leatha Kendrick lives and works in Kentucky. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, the most recent one, And Luckier (Accents Publishing, 2020). She co-edited Crossing Troublesome, Twenty-Five Years of the Appalachian Writers Workshop and wrote the script for A Lasting Thing for the World—The Photography of Doris Ulmann, a documentary film. Her poems, essays and fiction appear widely in journals and anthologies including What Comes Down to Us – Twenty-Five Contemporary Kentucky Poets; The Kentucky Anthology—Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State; Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, I to I: Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists, and others.

She leads workshops in poetry, life writing, and writing to heal at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, KY, as well as at workshops and conferences in Kentucky and elsewhere. She is at work on a novel that centers on sisters, small town life, relinquishment and adoption.

Review and Interview by Melva Sue Priddy

Leatha Kendrick guest taught in a few of my creative writing and English class rooms some 15 years or more ago. Engaging and organized, my students and I learned from having her in my high school classes. I also rubbed elbows with Leatha at The Hindman Appalachian Writers Workshop, KY, and The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, Lexington, KY. We have a mutual friend, Ann Olson (https://annwolson.blogspot.com), who sent me a copy of Leatha’s new book upon its release during these months of the coronavirus pandemic. It has been an uplifting, inspiring and engaging read for this isolating time. I was reading Elizabeth Berg’s novel The Pull of the Moon as I read Leatha’s And Luckier. Somehow they worked with and informed each other—but that could just be me and my luck.

Leatha’s readers, mature and young, will enjoy reading these 45 poems, divided evenly between “I. Home Fires,” “II. Broken, Various, Inscrutable,” and “III. Unasked-for Singing.” Her writing has honed deeper into the human condition with each new book, and, ever personal and real, she holds your hand as a friend who walks with you as you read. You might think I am exaggerating; well, not by much. Leatha caught my hand with her second poem, “Next World” and we walked from there.

            Tell an unborn child
            there is dancing here,
            a blaze of scarlet leaves
            at autumn, seas that whisper
            to the sand, vermillion rose-
            gold skies at evening,
            I dance, he’ll say. His legs,
            flexed, test a wall.
            I hear the ocean pulse,
            drift in warm waters,
            gaze on ruby skies
            bright and filtered.
            Sleep, dream. I know
            that other world—
            how it must be.

            Tell him galaxies, wind,
            houses, lightning,
            lover’s fingers, dinner’s
            warm steams rising,
            a flower. Yes, yes,
            he’ll say. I know.

Reading on, Leatha doesn’t gloss over the difficulties in life. In another poem, “How to Go On,” one line reads: “So much suffering. We cannot uncause it.” In her briefest poem, “Eviction,” she writes: “Most of what / I lost I took / from myself.” If that isn’t everyone’s truth! Her range of themes move through birth and death, order and chaos, finding and making home, joy and difficulties, and aging. General and very specific. And she conveys so much wisdom. Her skill with words is modest and fluent. And her poems are informed by what is going on in this world and what she has experienced in her lifetime. “Out the Door,” a sonnet, “stands / between us and the world”:

            It’s getting out the door that stands
            between us and the world. I know. Open
            the damn thing and step through. Broken
            promises are all that hold us. Plans
            we made and then ignored. The mess in the house
            we’re afraid will survive us. The quiet hours
            we thought to have. Access to the powers
            we felt as children, near in us, now lost
            to lack of faith. The only thing that changes
            is the heart. There’s the door. The dream
            kept the faith you dropped. Time arranges
            more second chances than they tell us. Clean
            breaks, old reservations waiting to be
            taken up.

The following interview was conducted via email.

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MSP – The first poem in your collection that I fell in love with is your second poem, “Next World”. Tell me about that poem.

LK – The poem began with my trying to imagine the world from an embryo’s point of view. Imagining the sky, the “weather,” the sounds, the day/night cycles of it. An embryo late in its gestation might feel pretty certain about what life and the cosmos were all about. And then comes birth! So the poem is a playful, speculative look at the limits of knowledge. The poem is one of the oldest ones in the book, drafted in 2013 and published in 2014. And Luckier came together as a collection over the past decade, and “Next World” survived multiple drafts as the poems began to teach me what this book was going to be about. One of its biggest themes is limits: physical limitations, the limits of what we know and can know, and the limits of our courage and compassion. This poem could have been a first inkling of the book’s themes, if I had known enough to realize it!


MSP – “Reinvention” reads like a very coronavirus poem. When did you write this? Do you agree? What is it about?

LK – I first drafted “Reinvention” in July, 2013. For years I had juggled teaching and writing while commuting between Lexington and eastern Kentucky. As I worked on this poem I was clearing out the house we’d lived in for thirty years and our small place in Lexington as we downsized to the townhouse where we live now. It was another one of those times when I felt that I was never doing enough or being enough, and I wondered what it might feel like to simply stop. The poem is a playful response to my weariness with multitasking and trying to be all things to everyone.

I suppose that in the back of my mind were visions of a post-apocalyptic world in which we’d be forced to start over, though I certainly did not anticipate that we’d be living through a pandemic that would bring so much of daily life to a halt. I remember wondering what it might look like if we chose stillness. Many of us discovered in the silence of the lock-down a chance to reflect on what matters.

As in all utopias, however, human nature itself is the ultimate shaper of outcomes. To the extent that they can, old patterns of thought and being will reassert themselves, and the poem imagines some aspects of this as well.

If many poems in this collection seem fitted to our moment in history, maybe that is because the pandemic forced a recognition of pressures that have been building in our culture. For example, the opening poem of the collection, “Your Fear,” was written in December of 2018—not in response to pandemic fears, but out of my realization that our personal and societal fears are partly created and certainly manipulated by the headlines someone in some media outlet has chosen to present to us on a given day. I am conscious of writing to engage with moments of time in a broader context (on the planet, in our global society) as I age. I have my small sliver of vision about how things are – what do I have to say? what do I have to say?


MSP – Your poems include many questions, more than I’ve ever seen in any one collection. Can you tell me about that?

LK – I had not considered that the book is filled with questions until you pointed it out. Maybe part of that is a function, again, of age! I am acutely aware of all that I do not know and will never know.

Here are some questions from the poems: “What is the new?” “What did I want?” “What do I have to say today?” “What do I know?”

A question opens a door – it makes space for what I might not have considered before. Questions are about wonder – about taking a fresh look, taking a step back and saying, “Hmmm.”

At this point in my life I feel an urgency to look at everything differently, to consider possibilities. And part of recognizing what might be possible is learning to ask the right question—the best question to enlarge understanding. Ultimately, the poems are concerned with discovering what questions are important to ask and accepting never having a single right answer for any of them. And it is about having faith in the midst of the unknowable. As a writer, I want to come at the world with what Keats called “negative capability,” which he characterized as “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

The questions in my poems point to moments of understanding, but they also admit the limits of what we can know. It’s about trusting not knowing. Facts and reason have a important place in discursive writing, but art helps us inhabit other points of view. I want my poems to be about learning empathy, honoring the mysteries of other ways of being.


MSP – “Poem for a Daughter” appears, scattered in the collection, in three versions, I, II, and III. You chose different forms for each. Tell me about these poems.

LK – The three “Poem(s) for a Daughter” were written separately and over a long period of time. Each had its own title, and I did not think of grouping them until I was well into making this book. As I chose which poems to include I knew that this collection circled issues of identity: who am I? how do I know who I am?

For many years, mothering was central to who I was. I wrote my first poems and essays about mothering. “Mother,” of course, is not a static identity. Each of these poems was born of a moment of transition as I moved from parenting children at home to becoming the mother of young adult and adult daughters.

The poems appear in the order in which they were written – the first one dating from when our daughters were coming home from college, suddenly independent and distanced from me. I had wanted that poem to be a sonnet, but could not get it into fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. I settled for sixteen lines which range from ten to seventeen syllables each. The uneven rhythm mimics my struggle to reach through the changing roles that separated us, though the poem settles toward iambic pentameter in the last five lines.

“Poem for a Daughter, II” is a villanelle occasioned by our oldest daughter’s pregnancy with her first child. The poem began as a villanelle, though it went through ten years of revisions (our oldest grandson turned 11 in June) to find the truest and most accurate words to express the layers of feeling I was trying to convey. The repetition and variation of the form – and the liberties I took with the refrain – reflect the fact that every pregnancy is both common and one of a kind, endlessly repeated and unique. From the very first draft, the villanelle had be the form for this poem.

“Poem for a Daughter, III” is a fairly new poem, drafted late last summer on a day that brought back the intensity of mothering our first child in a little house on a hillside in eastern Kentucky above the Big Sandy River during the worst winter in decades (1976-77). Again, the poem leans toward a sonnet’s shape and musicality, though it is not quite a double sonnet. Written on an August day that recalled the heat of our first August in that little house next to the church on Cow Creek, the poem speaks to an “all-at-onceness” contained in some moments when time feels as if it’s collapsed. My daughter and her daughter on the phone talking about a smelly mess made by a broken washer brought back those diaper pails of forty years ago, as if they were not gone at all. Were they truly gone? How can everything be both here and not here at the same time?


MSP – You include about ten sonnets in the book, five of what I call “”very free verse poems” (pages 7, 27, 35,39, & 50—you may have a different name?), and two prose poems, and at least one villanelle, one ode and one triolet. Can you say something about how you know when a poem should be a particular form.

LK – As I was saying about the “Poem for a Daughter” villanelle earlier, sometimes a form suggests itself and sustains layers of meaning in a poem. Form, allows me to play with words and step outside my normal phrasing and thought patterns. Far from constricting expression, form is a vehicle for discoveries as I write a poem.

Fixed forms – like the villanelle or triolet, for example – offer a doorway into difficult material sometimes and other times allow a playful stance. “Dream Shop,” the triolet in AL, gave me a way to render a vividly recalled dream – the form’s repeating lines mimicked the stuckness of the dreamer, her self-questioning: How did I end up here?

Content pushing against form creates a fruitful tension that makes a poem more interesting – both to write and to read. Meeting the demands of form forces me to consider more deeply exactly what I mean to say. As Richard Wilbur put it, “The strength of the genie comes of his being confined in a bottle.” Pursuing a form as I write makes each decision conscious: every word and line break, the sound and rhythm of each line, the visual impact of the poem.

The sonnet is my favorite fixed form, a challenging and useful container. Though it seems counterintuitive, the sonnet’s rigid structure has been part of why it has endured: poets through the centuries have wrestled with, adapted, rebelled against, and ultimately made use of the form. It’s just the right length to contain a small argument with the self. Its fourteen iambic lines put a limit on how far you can go. Rhyme complicates and diversifies the conversation with the self, forcing me to find language I would not have used otherwise.

Most of the sonnets I write begin as sonnets, with me letting the form itself guide me into the content of the poem. Reaching for a line-ending takes the poem in unexpected directions and is very satisfying. It’s rare (and difficult) for me to revise a free-verse poem into a form.

Very free verse poems – which may be characterized as “astrophic,” or not written in regular stanzas – make use of white space as well as line breaks and stanza breaks. I love this form for its sense of energy and whimsy, as in e.e. cummings’ poems. I can deploy lines across the field of the page to set up another layer of tensions and juxtapositions. Lines can mimic the way thought moves – white space can say, “On the one hand . . . but also. . .” simply by where words are placed in relationship to each other. May Swenson is an influence on my use of this kind of form, and, more recently, the poems of Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

Prose poems offer a chance to blur genres – to tell a little story yet keep poetry’s strangeness and lyricism. They are (for me) the hardest form to trust. The two prose poems in And Luckier spent years in other forms before I thought to try them as prose poems. Now I try to make it a practice to put poems into un-lineated form to see what happens. Every change of form as I am revising shows me what isn’t in the poem yet – or what needs to come out.

I usually begin drafting free verse poems in a long unbroken stanza, with the lines finding whatever length seems to suit the rhythm of what I’m hearing in my head. Deciding where to break stanzas and whether open up the lines and use the whole page is part of what is, for me, usually a long process of revision that includes refining the language of the poem and paying attention to sound. Finding the form for a poem is the same thing as finding the poem for me—the form is part of the poem’s content.


MSP – What did you learn about aging in writing And Luckier?

LK – It’s not so much a matter of what I learned as what writing these poems allowed me to articulate that I had not found a way to say before. My poet self loves words for themselves, she plays with language and speculates and riffs on lists and sounds and associations, and in the process, she names what she feels, as in the poem, “Naming It.” Here, the aging woman claims her right to sing, “unasked.”

Writing poems –especially in forms like the sonnet (in “The Warp,” for instance) – leads me to voices I didn’t know I had. In “The Warp” I found images of rust and heat and slivers of light that voiced a wiser and more joyful understanding than I had articulated before. Through those images, I let go of the person I used to be and put away the dream of the person I thought I might become. These surrenders made space for the person who is and allowed me to embrace her in the poem’s last two lines.

Aging is a lesson in confronting limits. Writing these poems I learned that limits are best confronted with humor (if possible) and a big dose of self-compassion. The latter is not always easy to practice. Courage and optimism are also essential. Singing helps – and dancing, too, whenever and however you can. One thing that did surprise me was that many of the poems of aging took me to light-hearted places.

Part of the joy of putting And Luckier together as a collection was the chance it gave me, at 70, to speak back to the circumstances of my life and of the world. The part of me speaking in these poems has made a space for herself and claimed and filled it. When I teach a workshop or write with friends, we are creating and owning space for the kinds of understandings and delights and self-acceptance that making poems can bring us. We are doing it together, and there is joy in that.


MSP – Do you want to say anything about how difficult it is to have a poetry collection come out during the coronavirus pandemic?

LK – What I am most aware of is how many writers I know who had books coming out this spring and summer. Artists of all kinds – particularly ones whose art is performance – have faced challenges getting their work to its audience. Most musicians and writers responded by generously sharing work they would have otherwise been performing live over virtual platforms. We’ve had extraordinary online access to all kinds of art these past months!

Platforms like FaceBook and YouTube and Zoom have allowed us to get our work heard. In one way, it’s been an amazing thing to reach people around the world this way. Despite the potential reach of a virtual event, however, the trade-off is a loss of the energy and spontaneity of an in-person reading, not to mention the serendipitous conversations and connections that happen at live events. Like my other writing friends with new books, I had scheduled readings and local and regional events beginning in April and throughout most of the year. All but a couple of these have been cancelled – and those will be virtual.

It is more important than ever to talk to each other about books that came out during these months of social isolation. Sharing poems on social media and in email and Zoom conversations, writing reviews (even brief ones in social media posts), attending virtual readings, and buying books (from local booksellers if possible) are vital to sustain and support each other. Podcasts, blog posts, and interviews (like this one you are doing – thank you!) keep us aware of new books we can come to love. These days I am more aware of and grateful for the many ways we stay connected as artists.

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Leatha Kendrick’s title poem comes in response to a quote from Walt Whitman: All goes onward and outward nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one is supposed, and luckier.” This blog is always a a virtual event, and I thank Leatha for working this interview in, around all the everyday events that yank us up and sooth us down, especially during the coronavirus epidemic. I’ll give Leatha the last word, from “There Was a Door”:

     What do I have to say today?
             Only Oh and Oh and Oh
     let me cross my own boundary
              open the door—

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Melva Sue Priddy, a native Kentuckian, earned degrees in English/Education from Berea College and The University of Kentucky, before earning an MFA. Her poems witness survivance and growth, bringing to light truths that arise out of felt experience. In addition to poems, she creates gardens, quilts, and some rustic woodwork. Her poetry can be found in ABZ, Accents Publishing’s LexPoMo, Blood Lotus, The Louisville Review, Poet Lore, Motif Anthologies, The Single Hound, and Still.

Interview with Katerina Stoykova About Her Book Second Skin

"praise the wound / opening and closing / like a womb"
- from "Praise Song for the Wound" by Katerina Stoykova

Katerina Stoykova and I have been acquainted for almost ten years. We both attended Spalding University, and I have long admired her work and her dedication to the literary community. I heard her read from her book Second Skin last year and knew that I wanted to interview her about it. Before you get to the interview, below is a bit about her, as well some information about the book.

—Nancy Chen Long

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"Katerina Stoykova's poetry collection How God Punishes came out in English in 2017 from Broadstone Books. The Bulgarian version of this book was published in 2014 by ICU press and won the Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Prize. Katerina is the editor and translator of The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry (Accents Publishing, 2014). For six years Katerina hosted the literary radio show Accents on WRFL 88.1FM, Lexington and recorded hundreds of hours of conversations with poets and writers from the USA and around the world. Katerina acted the lead roles in the independent feature films Proud Citizen and Fort Maria, both directed by Thom Southerland. Additionally, Katerina was the co-writer for Proud Citizen. The film received a number of festival awards, including Best Narrative Feature, Best of the Fest, Audience Favorite, Best Cinematography, as well as two special acting awards for Katerina's performance."

Overview of Second Skin
"Second Skin by Katerina Stoykova discusses the horrors of growing up in domestic violence, and focuses on some of the long-term effects of such upbringings. This poetry collection features three main characters—a mother, a father and a child. The story of the family is told from the child's perspective. Initially published in Bulgarian by ICU Publishing, Second Skin received wide acclaim and attention, including a 2018 Creative Europe grant by the European Commission for the book to be translated and published in English. Upon publication in Europe and launch in London, ICU Publishing and Accents Publishing partnered for the distribution of the book in the USA."

Praise for Second Skin: 

Second Skin by Katerina Stoykova is a brief, but more than sufficient book. It is more than sufficient to expose the issue of domestic violence, and along with one child's fear—the fear of every child forced to love an abusive parent. The second skin you wear to hide what happens at home; second skin that cannot contain you. A book about the guilt due to the inability to forgive, about hatred towards the one who has moved on and forgotten. A book about the children cowering in the corners of their own powerlessness, who thirty years later continue hearing the screams from the other room. Difficult, true, and exceptionally important. ~Natalia Deleva

Review of Second Skin
https://www.theusreview.com/reviews/Second-Skin-by-Katerina-Stoykova.html#.XhkPiuhKhPZ

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How Are You, Child? by Katerina Stoykova
(a poem from Second Skin)

Wherever I go,  I bring my own prison.  My restrictions are

animate. And hazardous. And all-encompassing. Reflective

of  my  past  like a rearview mirror.  I can  talk  to someone

and, without asking, surmise what kind of parents she’s had. 

And  those  mastering  spiritual practices I can spot with the 

naked  eye.  And those  in need  of therapy.  And  those who 

can’t manage their own lives,  and those who shun the truth,

because it’s too much.

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Please tell us how Second Skin came about. Also, how did you decide on the title?

KS: Second Skin has a long and complicated history. I worked on it for close to ten years in various forms. At first I wrote the idea of the book into a play dealing with family relationships and domestic violence, titled Black Coat. Then the play became a portion of the screenplay for the narrative feature film Proud Citizen, directed by Thomas Southerland. The movie depicted a Bulgarian playwright coming to Kentucky to see the premiere of her play, Black Coat. In the film actual actors act out scenes from Black Coat. They act out a few of my poems. After the film I rewrote the material into a 300 page memoir, which I’ve since abandoned. I felt I needed to put the manuscript aside for some time and published the surprisingly funny poetry book How God Punishes and then returned my attention to Black Coat. By that point I had written a stack of new poems and felt ready to tackle the material as a poetry book – or a mixed genre book – in Bulgarian. I completed it, though I needed further time to be able to get used to the thought of publishing this book. The title Second Skin came from a line of a short poem discussing growing up in fear in a domestic violence situation.


The book has a dedication page (or is it an epigraph?) that says “How are you feeling, Child?”, a phrase that is repeated in the book. Can you speak a bit about that?

KS: Yes. The book is dedicated to all of us unimportant children, having grown up distant second to parents’ alcoholism and dysfunction. All of us who haven’t been asked this kind and simple question. All of us who’ve cowered alone in rooms, waiting to be the next recipient of an angry parent’s violent outburst. Having grown up in such environment, I had to learn to reconnect to myself and my own feelings. I had to develop the habit of asking myself how I am feeling, in order to learn to get in touch with my self and my own needs. The book in a way mimics my own process.


As can be seen in a number of your poems, for example, “You Have the Right to Mourn, Dear One,”, domestic-violence victims frequently feel trapped in their abusive relationships and often feel a loss of identity—a loss of a sense of self—in the midst of those relationships. They also often grieve the loss of the abusive relationship, a mourning that is necessary in order to move on. I imagine some of these poems were difficult to write. How did you work through the emotional aspects of these poems? Did you encounter any other difficulties or challenges in writing some of the poems?

KS: The difficulties were not so much in the writing of the poems, as in living in the energy of the book. As most poets I know, I take my craft seriously and edit extensively, and take my time in completing the project. So, activities such as reading the entire book out loud multiple times was difficult, reading separately for grammar, ordering and re-ordering the material – that was much more difficult, because it kept me immersed in the book for hours at the time. I learned quickly that I shouldn’t work on the book in the morning, because after that I wouldn’t be able to do much else for the rest of the day. But also I shouldn’t read the book too late in the evening, either, because wouldn’t be able to sleep. I found out it was best to do my editing at about 5 or 6 pm, right before dinner, when I still had energy to do the work, but no big plans afterwards.

 I consider personal breakthroughs the act of writing of the individual poems. I believe not that the breakthrough is difficult, but what leads to it. The process could be lengthy, involved and unclear. To quote a line from my bilingual "Bird on a Window Sill”: “Finding your way out of the same labyrinth 1000 times is not the same as exiting once from each of 1000 labyrinths.” I feel that every one of these poems has been the exit of some complicated labyrinth I’ve wandered through for years.

 At some point I knew that I needed to stop working on this book. And the only way to stop working on it was to publish it.

Have you given a public reading of the work? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?

KS: I’ve given public readings, yes. At the beginning I was very nervous and apologetic. I didn’t want to depress anyone. But then again, normally there are no random people at poetry readings. You go to a poetry reading because you want to be there, and you want to listen. So, people knew in advance what the book was about, and still came to the reading.

I set aside time for Q&A after reading from this book. That’s something I’ve never felt necessary to do before. But with this book people want to know things, to ask questions, and I make it clear that I don’t mind being asked personal questions. Most attendees ask questions publicly, but also there are always a few who approach me after the reading to let me know that my book describes their story, as well. Usually I can recognize these people while I’m reading. I can see it on their faces.


In Second Skin, what is one of the more crucial poems in the book for you?

KS: At different times nearly every one of the poems in the book has been critically important to me. Why? Because each poem has been the next step forward, and I believe that each step is critical, even the seemingly small ones. I choose to share the second poem in the book, because it quickly walks the reader through much of the story. (Here is an audio of Katerina reading the Bulgarian version of this poem: https://soundcloud.com/toestbg/katerina-stoikova-chete-terasata-na-osmiya-etazh.)


8th Floor Balcony Ghazal

If I catch you smoking
I'll throw you off the balcony.

If something happens to you
I'll jump off the balcony.

Dad stopped hitting me: Go ahead, he laughed, scream for help.
Then opened the door to the balcony.

To free space in the kitchen,
we moved the stove to the balcony.

Dad got mad and started
dragging Mom towards the balcony.

You could see the sun rise
out of the Black Sea from the balcony.

When the guests for Mom's funeral arrived,
Dad hid, smoking on the balcony.

I hated him in the house,
as well as on the balcony.

I've been faking all my orgasms,
I confessed to my first ex-husband on the balcony.

I stared out for a month, waiting for my pen pal to arrive,
as I was scrubbing the windows on the balcony.

Your marriage will last at most three years,
Dad told me on the balcony.

When I was leaving for America, I looked up from the cab and saw
my best friend waving from the balcony.

I'm ready to let go of everything that happened
except the balcony.

Katerina, there is no heaven or hell,
there is just this balcony.



You are a master of aphorisms, epigrams, and the short poem. The first issue of your journal Literary Accents featured poems that were less than 50 words long. Blaise Pascal once wrote that he would have made document shorter, but he didn’t have the time. What is it about the short poem that calls to you? Do you find that with your own short poems, that they take more time to finish? Or do you naturally tend toward shorter poems?

KS: I naturally tend to write shorter poems, or if it’s longer piece, it’s normally written in smaller parts. I am not sure why. Perhaps I find writing so intensely emotional, I can take it only in brief bursts. Also, I believe that there are many ways of saying something. As a reader of poetry, I’ve taught myself to appreciate all of these ways. Probably the biggest influence, however, is cultural. I’ve grown up reading poetry from the Balkans, the language of which tends to be more direct. Well, if you say something more directly, chances are you’ll need fewer words. That’s what I think.


You started Accents Publishing 10 years ago. I remember attending your first release of, I think it was something like 7 chapbooks at one time. It was such a wonderful celebration. What is happening at the press at the 10-year mark?

KS: The press is more alive than ever. We have expanded beyond chapbooks into full-length poetry books, added a printed literary journal. We provide workshops and craft teachings. We’re about to announce results for our novella contest. In near future we plan to add memoirs and short story collections to our catalog. We would like to do more with our blog, as well. At the tenth year mark, we feel inspired to be an active and recognizable voice in contemporary literature in the USA and beyond.

What are you working on now?

KS: Right now, with the generous support of a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, I’m working on a poetry book about the relationships between the self and others. Waking up to love. Understanding it. Living it.

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Purchase Second Skin: http://accents-publishing.com/secondskin.html


Find Katerina online:

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katerina.stoykovaklemer

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katerinastoykova/


All poems printed or quoted in this post © Katerina Stoykova Second Skin (Accents Publishing, 2019) (Initially published in Bulgarian by ICU Publishing)

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Nancy Chen Long is the author of two books of poetry: Wider than the Sky (Diode Editions, 2020), winner of the Diode Editions Book Award,  and Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the Tampa Review Poetry Prize. Her work has been supported by a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing fellowship and the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award. You’ll find her recent work in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She  works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division.

An Arched and Lighted Entrance: An Interview with Greg Pape

Friends of poetry, for this month's post, you're in for a real treat as guest-blogger Drew Pomeroy interviews poet Greg Pape about his most recent collection, Four Swans.  ~Nancy Chen Long

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Greg Pape is the author of nine books, including Border Crossings, Black Branches, Storm Pattern (all originally published by University of Pittsburgh Press), Sunflower Facing the Sun (winner of the Edwin Ford Piper Prize – now called the Iowa Prize – and published by University of Iowa Press), American Flamingo (winner of a Crab Orchard Open Competition Award, and published by Southern Illinois University Press), and Four Swans (published by Lynx House Press). 

His poems have been published widely in such magazines and literary reviews as The Atlantic, Iowa Review, The New Yorker, Northwest Review, and Poetry. He has received the Discovery / The Nation Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award, and his poems have been featured on NPR and read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. He teaches at the University of Montana, and in the Brief-Residency MFA program at Spalding University. He served as Poet Laureate of Montana from 2007 to 2009.
 

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DP: Readers of Four Swans (Spokane: Lynx House Press 2013) may know that some of the poems included were originally published in your chapbook Animal Time (Lexington: Accents Publishing 2011). To better understand the process of composing a chapbook before a complete collection, could you speak to which of these works was first in your mind: the chapbook or the book?

GP: Four Swans was a work-in-progress long before the idea for Animal Time came to me. I have always been interested in animals and the ways we human animals interact with other species, how we are connected, or disconnected, with each other, how we share or infringe on each other's habitats, what we give and take from each other. But the idea for the chapbook Animal Time grew out of a lecture I gave at Spalding in which I considered the ways poets have engaged imaginatively with animals. After looking at the work of Whitman and Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Gerald Stern, Philip Levine, various Chinese and Japanese poets, and others, I looked at my own work and made a gathering of poems in which animals figure prominently. Those poems developed into the chapbook Animal Time.

DP: That deep interest in human and animal coexistence seems to be the heartbeat of Four Swans. I find myself often wondering what animals might think of us or say to us if they could speak. For you, as a poet, how does this very human concern become a poetry of coexistence?

GP:  I like your idea of a poetry of coexistence.  Four Swans, the book, began with the experiences presented in the title poem.  I had just spoken with my mother on the phone.  She was in the hospital in California.  I was worried about her, thinking I needed to get down there and see her.  I drove to the National Wildlife Refuge near my home in the Bitterroot, a place I often go to walk, think, write, a place set aside for people and other creatures to coexist.  There were four swans on Whistler pond close enough to observe without binoculars.  Beautiful creatures, calm, dignified—I describe them and name them in the poem.  They seemed to give me access to something I needed.  I don’t know what they thought of me, but they were aware of my presence and seemed to be untroubled by it.  They were in complete possession of themselves, at home on the ice and the water, feeding, preening, stretching their big wings.  I wondered what it would be like to be one of them.  Then I thought in some way I am one of them.  I guess that’s a poetry of coexistence.

DP: Your poem “Tracks & Traces” (Four Swans 17-18) begins with the speaker expressing a nearly child-like curiosity when he says, “It must be fun to be an otter” (line 6). However, at the end of the poem there is a profound moment of coexistence revealed beneath an uprooted Ponderosa pine, which you describe as “a time of violence / become a place of shelter, part of the story / that houses us all” (50-52). Can you tell us more about the curious and wise speaker of this poem?       

GP:  The speaker of “Tracks & Traces” is a guy like me walking through the woods in winter reading the signs, the tracks left in the snow by animals, trying to discern the stories those tracks tell.  It is something I do often in the winter, a form of walking meditation, a state of concentration and observation much like a hunter’s, except I am after something else besides deer or ducks and geese, some other kind of sustenance.  These winter walks can start off serene and peaceful then turn, as the weather turns, fierce, or you come upon the carcass of an elk with ravens feeding on it, or you step down into a hole at the base of a lovely old Ponderosa pine that’s blown down in the last storm.  It’s hard not to think of the violence as well as the beauty that’s written on the land, and in us.

DP: The presence of Nature in these poems, captured in both the vivid imagery and a beautifully-wrought diction of the land, is a powerful one. What is the importance of the human element that is thinking and living within the powerful Nature of these poems?

GP: I think it’s important to describe and try to articulate all sorts of experiences.  If our poems and other works of art help us live our lives, and that seems to be one of the primary purposes of art, it is by articulating, questioning, and shaping experience, sometimes making sense, providing insights or feelings that can be shared, sometimes just putting something out there we don’t completely understand, adding to the conversation.  If we have learned anything it’s that the human element is not something apart from Nature but something within Nature.

DP: There are four separate but very carefully connected parts to the book Four Swans. How did each of these parts become its own?

GP: When I began organizing the poems, written over several years, into a book, I found there was a kind of narrative arc that traced the infirmity and death of my mother from the first poem, written in winter, to the last poem, written in fall, and the seasons, more or less evident in all the poems, shaped and commented in a strong way on the arc of the book.

DP: The poem “Elegy for Big Red” (Four Swans 38-40) is perhaps the most humorous yet equally heart-breaking poem of the collection. In it the speaker tells the tale of a rooster named Big Red, whom he describes as a “bastard hatched / in Nebraska, shipped to Montana / in a box with dozens of others” (lines 1-3). Why was it important to have this poem in Four Swans?

GP: Swans, roosters, people, the beautiful as well as the good the bad and the ugly are all part of the tapestry.  “Elegy for Big Red” is both a lament and a celebration, and maybe a warning.  My relationship with Big Red was complex.  We seemed to bring out the worst in each other.  But when I found him headless in the chicken coop one morning I realized what a beautiful creature he was, and how petty and self-indulgent I had been toward him at times, and how much I respected him and would miss him.

DP: In the poem “Big Lost River Breakdown” (Four Swans 57-60) you write “under the cottonwoods, the smoke / sweetening the summer air dawn to dusk / makes us recall Dreamland” (lines 35-37). Some readers may initially see this Dreamland as an imaginary place of the poet to be further explored in the next stanza, but as a former native of Alabama, my mind (and taste buds) went straight to the plate of Dreamland barbecue you later describe. Do you find yourself thinking and writing about a place, like Montana or Alabama, when you are surrounded by it, or do you tend to write about a place when you are away from it, wondering about it, longing for it?

GP: I think I was writing in my journal in Arco, Nevada sitting at a picnic table when I smelled that barbeque smoke, so I was there, fully present, and certainly hungry.  But that smell took me immediately to Dreamland, which as you know is the name of a great barbeque place outside Tuscaloosa.  So the answer to your question is both.  By writing about one place you make associations with other places, and depending on your aims or needs, you follow your pencil.  In this case to Dreamland.

DP: While nearly all of these poems occur in a natural world, Parts III and IV contain many poems about people, specifically family and friends. Can you describe the necessity of these more human poems in Four Swans? 

GP: I think all the poems occur in the natural world.  There are poems in Parts III and IV that are elegies, poems that remember the lives and mourn the deaths of friends and family, but they are mixed in with sketches of particular places and people—life and death side by side of necessity.

DP: Several poems in Four Swans present a speaker looking through a window, either out onto the natural world or into some other world. What do these windows reveal, or hide, from the human element of the poem?

GP: I like to write outdoors, and I do as much as I can, even sometimes in winter.  But when I’m writing indoors I often keep in touch with the outdoors by gazing out the window.  Emerson said, “the health of the eyes demands a horizon,” and I believe that is true literally, as well as metaphorically.  A window lets light in, and lets one see out.  It is both an entrance and an exit.  I’m never completely comfortable in those rooms without windows.

DP: There is this consistent presence of faith, hope, and patience in Four Swans. This is especially true of those poems at the end of the book. Do you see these elements as an extension of yourself in the poetry, or is it a result of the Nature, the possibility of regrowth, in which many of these poems exist?

GP: Where does one find faith, hope, and patience?  More good names for swans.  Certainly we need those to get through tough times.  I think we discover and develop those things in all sorts of ways.  We learn from each other, from literature, from religion, from rivers and swans and ponderosa pines.

DP: The final poem of the book, “White Church in Wiborg” (Four Swans 82-83), presents a speaker looking into the window of a church and imagining a scene taking place inside. In that scene is a captured moment of human, perhaps family, history. The speaker leaves this imagined moment and follows another down the wagon-rutted mule path all the way to Cumberland Falls, where one can “watch the Moonbow / rise above the river, like an arched and lighted entrance / through earthly air that made those who saw it lean closer” (33-35). Why did you choose to end the book with a sense of entry into another world? Should we be anticipating anything? Another book perhaps?  

GP: My mother’s stories of her childhood in Kentucky had always fascinated me.  She was born in Wiborg in McCreary County, one of eleven children.  Her father and mother were both born in the southern mountains, descendants of the first European settlers.  They made their living from the land as hunters, gatherers, subsistence farmers, and later as coal miners.  She had a hard life.  Her stories of childhood were vivid and memorable, and sometimes scary, but not without love for her early home place.  After she died I took her ashes to Kentucky and searched for, and found, the small family graveyard near where she was born, and placed her ashes and monument there.  The white church in Wiborg was established by her grandfather.  I was lucky to be able to visit it and make it part of the setting of the last poem (it has since burned down).  The other setting of that poem, Cumberland Falls, where one can see the Moonbow, is a place of great beauty and natural wonder, and for me a place of intimate connection to my family’s past, to my life before I was born.  And to witness the Moonbow with others, I’ve felt a sense of awe and kinship, an entrance, not necessarily to another world, but a deeper sense of this one. If all goes well, there will definitely be another book.

Greg Pape on-line:

"American Flamingo," The Atlantic

"Cemetery in Kentucky," Poetry Daily

"Fog," The Atlantic

interview: Alabama Writers' Forum Executive Director Jeanie Thompson interviews poets Greg Pape and Frank X. Walker about their literary work (audio)

poems featured on The Writer's Almanac

on the Montana Poet Laureate Program website: Nine poems from two of his books

reading selections of his poetry at Montana State University (MSU) Library (video)

review of American Flamingo at Valparaiso Poetry Review

review of Four Swans at Two Poets blog

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Drew Pomeroy grew up on the banks of the Alabama River in the small historic town of Selma, Alabama. He is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Spalding University where he has had the pleasure of working with Greg Pape. He currently lives in Louisville with a shaggy shelter dog named Molly. Drew is also a proud and active member of the Brewhouse Poets – a group of thirsty writers living and working in Kentuckiana.

A Review of Burden of Solace and Interview with Poet, Teneice Durrant Delgado

Burden of Solace
Cervena Barva Press
www.cervenabarvapress.com
by Teneice Durrant Delgado
Copyright 2012

Burden of Solace, a review by Barbara Sabol

Teneice Durrant Delgado’s chapbook, Burden of Solace, offers us the double pleasure of a satisfying read and an important education:  the reader is treated to poems not only compelling in content, deft in craft, but also bristling with history.  Little known history:  the Irish slave trade in 17^th century West Indies is the vivid and tragic backdrop for this collection of narrative poems. 

The ten poems that comprise Burden of Solace form a narrative of a young Irish girl abducted into slavery by the British, transported as human cargo and branded (“. . .We were led to the branding/stand, Master’s iron rolling in a fire”) on a slave ship, laboring in the cane fields, routinely raped by slave drivers (“. . .It became a ritual/picking and being plucked”), floating her new-born, slave-bred baby “home on the sea” rather than surrendering him to Master in “Kosoko.” The story unfolds in clear linear progression with the poet, in persona as a young girl, recounting her journey from her mother’s arms in Galway to a slave hut in Barbados.  Little solace afforded the Irish girl/mother enslaved.

The narrative arc of the collection occurs with the poem “Solace,” in which she is mated like a “breeding mare” with the slaves, hiding her reviled white face against the cot when  “. . .twice a/day a black man was unchained outside the hut, forced through the/door. . .and it went like this/for months. . .”  Finally, when Not-John, a prominent figure in the collection, is whipped into the room, she asserts her personhood through their anything-but-tender connection, making him truly see her as they join; thus, for a brief time, she reclaims her identity:

          . . .when he pushed into me, I looked at his face.  And his

          shimmering molasses-hate eyes didn’t see me, just white          

          . . .and I wanted him to see I was

          Irish, forbidden.  I wrapped my limbs around his cross-scarred

          trunk, held hard as I could.  I whispered some scraps of an old

          Irish, forbidden, lullaby, the only offering I had to make.  He wept

          inside me. . .

Delgado’s sure use of prosodic features throughout the poems animates characters and action.  In particular, the speech line, set in italics, naturally flows through the poems, breathing  life into the narrative.  She captures the diction of the time in credible and rhythmic lines such as the voice of Maris, “the seen-too-much-old,/half-Irish/mulatto” who warns the younger female slaves:

          . . .And if you stop

          bleeding, she said, in Irish, forbidden,

          Don’t ever let yourself love that child.

                                                              Don’t

          you ever think that child yours. . .

The most poignant example of speech seaming the narrative occurs in the poem “Mary-Margaret,” as the title character, the girl’s mother, chides her, knowing she will never see her daughter again on earth, “. . .You must be very/good, inion.  If you are bad, I will/be lonely in Heaven.”  The poem closes with the most moving lines, I believe, of the entire book: the speaker, gone just “a fortnight” but already initiated into the wretchedness of slavery, laments:

          Mary-Margaret O’Conry, don’t think

          on me, don’t whisper my name

          over so many polished beads, a litany

          . . .

          Mama, forgive your

          child the sin of survival.

Among the prosodic elements employed is the rhetorical device of repetition: the pairing of the words, “Irish, forbidden,” recurs like a tethering refrain, within and between poems. The utterance serves as a resonant reminder of what has been lost―language, culture, Irish identity― all now illicit.  Forbidden or not, the women use their native tongue to curse, to pray, to lament.  They risk the comfort of prayer in Irish, “Áiméan, forbidden” in the poems “Ann Glover” and “Kosoko.”  In the poem, “Adam,” in response to brutal rape in the sugar cane fields “. . .the women cursed [the drivers] in Irish, forbidden.”  The utterance punctuates “Solace,” alternating with “Ireland, forbidden” five times throughout the poem, the words a lodestone pointing home. And in the final poem of the book, “Jamaica,” the speaker proclaims, “. . .never again will/I cry out for Ireland, forbidden” as she walks to the hanging tree.  That language resides at the core of self comprises a secondary yet equally powerful theme that further unifies the poems in this collection:  Irish dovetails seamlessly with English, lending authenticity to the narrative and intensifying the speaker’s isolation in a foreign and harsh environment.

Solace possesses both a cinematic sweep and sharp focus on tangible detail. The poems become a lens that pans a dominated and impoverished Galway, the high sea voyage to Barbados, sugar cane fields running to a distant horizon, squalor quarters.  The “Look-out Tree” high on the hill.  The speaker renders an island landscape and its savage conditions in both panoramic and close-up, intimate frames.  The view is stark, horrific and heartbreaking; descriptions of violence graphic, no holds barred.  The reader visualizes the Irish women’s “rows of burnt skin” in the fields (“Adam”); the camera zooming in as “her work-bent fingers worry over imaginary/rosaries for three long days” before she is “lassoed. . .dragged up the hill to the Look-out Tree,/hung. . .” (“Anne Glover”); a just-born babe whose first breath never arrived “wrapped in a sugar sack,” the new mother’s blood “making a trail/of rose petals in the dirt” (“Kosoko”). 

In the space of ten poems, Delgado takes the reader on a sad, shocking journey, back to a century when Irish families were torn apart by the West Indies slave trade.  Through the experience of an unnamed Irish girl, the reader can fully imagine a cruel chapter in history.  Dramatic though the story may be, the speaker’s voice is matter-of-fact, perhaps numbed to atrocity, as she reveals a shadow-side of British history: “a story: water, hell, the/consequence of empire.” I admire the poet’s commitment, in terms of rigorous research, passion for her subject and an authentic voice, and I am thankful for the brave and accomplished poems in Burden of Solace.

Interview with Poet, Teneice Durrant Delgado, by Barbara Sabol

Burden of Solace is a powerful and important book, for the strength of the individual poems and the story they tell collectively about the Irish slave trade―a little-known and shameful piece of history.  The speaker’s voice in Solace is compelling―authentic and unadorned; a dry-eyed description of the conditions of an Irish girl’s slavery in Barbados.  Her voice resonated long after I read the book and I remain haunted by the story and its telling.  Of course, I had the pleasure of hearing you read from this book at the Third Thursday Poetry reading last October, and so the poems became that much more audible and animated.  With each re-read, I am even more riveted by the strong sense of place and person in these poems; there is a cinematic quality to the poems and the narrative progression through the book, which leads me to the first question:

B:  The speaker’s voice in these persona poems is consistently credible and genuine. The poems read like memoir in verse.  I wonder how you found your “protagonist’s” voice, and whether she may be a composite character from your research.

T: First thank you so much, Barbara, for inviting me out to read at Third Thursday and for reading Burden of Solace. The voice of the narrator in these poems came to me after much reading and research. I took an interest in the Irish slave trade when I happened upon a book called Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl by Kate McCafferty. It is a fictional account of the trafficking, but it was very rich in detail. From there I found To Hell or Barbados by Sean O’Callaghan, which is part history, part non-fiction account of his own research in present day Montserrat and Barbados. When I began researching this topic, there were very few resources, and most were citing the same three or four authors or state papers. On a shoe-string, I managed a visit to Manchester, England and spoke with a trans-Atlantic scholar, tried to see some plantation records (I was denied access, of course. You can’t just walk into the Rylands Library in Manchester and ask to see 400 year old papers.) I kept reading and re-reading, knowing I wasn’t going to use all of the material I had found, but hoping that it would filter into my subconscious. Then I started imagining myself in these situations: being branded, being isolated, giving birth. That’s when the narrator’s voice started coming out.

B:  The scenes and experiences described in the poems are disturbing, often horrific.  How much

did you identify with the “I” in the poems, and how did putting your poet-self in her shoes impact you while you were writing the book.

T:  Many of the events I describe were written about in detail in stewards’ and missionaries’ reports. For example, pregnant women were, in fact, expected to dig out a little trench in the ground so they could lay face down to receive the whippings. Women were hung for singing or praying in Irish. The women and children were raped daily, and expected to continue working. Several nights I had to stop writing, or cried my way through a draft.

B: There is quite a cast of recurring characters in the book: Not-John, Master D, Maris, and others. Are they based on anecdotal research or completely of your making?

T: The characters that the narrator meets are composites of people that I would expect to be the most influential in a young slave girl’s life. I was wary of making stereotypes, so I tried to give each of them a distinct personality.

B: Even though the same character speaks each poem, the poems form a kind of theater of voices created by poignant lines of monologue and dialogue. Often an utterance takes a dialectal turn of phrase or a Irish word appears. The speech lines are so natural– how did you come upon the speech patterns and language?

T: I think by not thinking too hard about it. I listened to old Irish hymns and read poems. I looked up Old Irish words. I didn’t want to force it. So, along with the research on dates and places, I researched songs and poems and let it all filter through my subconscious.

B: Many characters reappear throughout the book, and they all are all named (even the refuse-to-take-a-western-name, “Not-John”). However, our main subject, who speaks every poem, goes unnamed. I wonder if that was because self-reference didn’t suit the poems, or perhaps because she lost her Irish identity so utterly, that she no longer possessed even her own name.

T: The choice not to name her was deliberate, as was the choice not to give the master’s full name. In regard to the narrator, I often called her “Solace” in my head, since the impetus for this collection was the quote that described the plantation owners need for Irish girls “to solace them.” But, yes, she goes unnamed throughout the sequence; though references are made to what she was called by her mother and what the other Irish girls call her, once she becomes pregnant. Names are so vitally important to our sense of identity, so it seemed fitting leave her unnamed as she struggles with this new, forced and wholly unwelcome life as a slave in Barbados. I didn’t name the master simply because so many masters are already named, their names inked into history books and state papers, ledgers and on the sides of important buildings. No more ink needs to be spent on them.

B: Solace intersects poetry and history is a truly engaging way. I can think of a few other books which brave a poetic re-imagining of history. One such example is Linda Bierds’ The Profile Makers, in which a Civil War survivor examines the plate-glass negatives depicting her family and battle scenes; another is our fellow Spalding University's Low-Residence MFA alum, Frank X Walker’s When Winter Come: The Ascension of York, a book of persona poems in the voice of the explorer, York, who accompanied Lewis and Clarke. Yours is also an ambitious and successful first person journey in a specific historical time frame. Did you model Solace on any particular work of poetry profiling a chapter in history?

T: I was greatly influenced by the first book of York’s travels, Buffalo Dance, the journey of York by Frank X Walker. Hearing Frank read from that collection and Ascension, you get a sense of how much research went into those poems. There is integrity in the research that comes through in the books.

B: On that same note, what role do you think that poetry plays in chronicling history, especially the suppressed underbelly of history, such as the Irish slave trade in the 17th century? I came away from Solace believing that poetry can be revelatory not just about human experiences but also as a powerful truth-telling medium regarding human history.

T: I think persona poems in particular can create a very powerful bridge between history and human experience. The poems create a space for intense emotional experiences in a way that reading a history report or an article may not, and may get at some truths about human experience that facts may not.

B:  Do you think that the revelations in Burden of Solace are relevant to current times?

T: I really hope that this series of poems creates a conversation about present day trafficking, especially in the United States. Many people think that human trafficking is an Asian or an Eastern European problem, but the United States has an alarmingly profitable human trafficking industry.

B:  I’m really interested in how the book came into being. In the author’s note, you mention a
“random” visit to the UK and a fortuitous meeting with Dr. Natalie Zacek. Depending on how
one feels about randomness, do you feel you were destined, in a sense, to write this book?

T: Yes, I think there was some kind of destiny at hand. Coming across the copy of Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl, seeing these little stories about her materialize over the course of six years, crying with her at night, and finding someone willing to publish them. It’s been a long, but rewarding experience.

B: At the risk of needing a spoiler alert, I must ask about the closing of the final poem, “Jamaica.” It ends on an ominous note, opening up several possible resolutions for the poems’ speaker, rather than signaling “The End.” Did you intend that the reader create her own ending to the speaker’s story, or does the poem signal that the main character chooses the one means at her disposal to regain control of her life?

T: I have a very definite ending in my mind, but yes, I was uncomfortable with spelling it out for the reader. There’s enough ambiguity that, if the reader was particularly hopefully, they could craft a different ending than the one I have in mind.

B: What project(s) are you currently working on? Do you feel inclined to take on another historical or even mythological tale in persona mode?

T: I am very interested in the nurses of the world wars and Vietnam. Often we hear of the men in the battle field, but not the women who saw the carnage of war every day. I’m hoping to do some research and perhaps even document some stories before beginning a series of persona poems about their service.

B: A question about balance and the writing life: I know that you’re very involved with other literary projects, such as Winged City Press Chapbooks and New Sins Press, while earning a Master’s Degree in Community Counseling AND being a mom. That’s one full plate. How do you manage to carve poetry writing time into that kind of a schedule?

T: It happens in fits and starts. I’ll turn ideas over for a long time in my head, then when I get a quiet afternoon, I spit it all out. Then I can pick it apart and revise when I get moments. I have a very supportive family and a couple of amazing writer-friends, particularly Stacia Fleegal, who has read every word and scrutinized every comma I’ve ever written.

Thank you, Teneice, for shedding light on the subject of the Irish slave trade in such a tightly and masterfully woven series of poems. I await your next book!

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About the Poet

Teneice Durrant Delgado is a co-founder and poetry editor for Blood Lotus: an online literary journal, and a proud graduate of Spalding Unviersity's Low-Residency MFA. She is the publisher and managing editor for Winged City Press Chapbooks and also serves on the editorial board for New Sins Press. Her Poems have appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Heartland Review, The Furnace Review, Pirene's Fountain, Glass, Pisgah Review and Soundings East. She is the author of two chapbooks, Flame Above Flame and The Goldilocks Complex. Teneice lives in Dayton, Ohio, where she is currently pursuing a degree in CommunityCounseling at the University of Dayton.

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Guest blogger Barbara Sabol lives in the Great Lakes area and has an M. A. in Communication Disorders, an MFA, and a BA in French. She is the author of two chapbooks: Original Ruse (Accents Publishing, 2011) and The Distance Between Blues (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, most recently The Examined Life, San Pedro River Review, The Louisville Review, on the Tupelo Press Poetry Project web site, and in the collection, Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems (Accents Publishing). An essay and book review/interview have also been published in Public-Republic.