Cammy Thomas (poetry ’99) Interviewed about TREMORS, Her New Collection of Poetry

When did you first encounter poetry?  How did you discover that you wanted to write poems?

The first time I remember poetry making a deep impression on me was when I had the measles at age eight. My mother had them along with me, and we lay in her bed with the lights low for several days. She read to me out of her school poetry anthology.  She’d once dropped the book in the bath, so the pages were very crinkly. She read parts of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge, and I was gripped not just by the exciting story of the mariner who had done wrong by shooting the albatross and was condemned to tell his tale over and over, but also by the ballad rhythm and rhyme: “Water, water, every where, / And all the boards did shrink; / Water, water every where, / Nor any drop to drink.”  Then in ninth grade, I had a teacher, Irma Kempel, who encouraged us to keep a journal, in which we could write poems or prose as we chose. I started writing poems, trying to write words that would make readers feel things.

Read the rest of the interview and a poem from TREMORS on the Mass Poetry Society website: https://masspoetry.org/new-book-thomas/