2017 poetry alum Amanda Newell recently interviewed Reginald Dwayne Betts (Poetry ’10) for Plume Poetry. An excerpt of the interivew with Betts, who just wrote for the New York Times, can be found below:

AN: Since you mention the “tension between what we intend work to do and what it actually does,” I wonder if you might comment on the idea that writers shouldn’t veer from the lane or lanes of their own experience. I’m talking specifically about persona poems which attempt to embody the voice of the/an other, but in so doing, draw widespread criticism for appropriating that voice rather than speaking from it.

Does it ultimately depend on the dynamics of who is writing from what voice—and whether the assumed persona is working to destabilize traditional power structures as opposed to reinforcing them? Is the answer not to try because failing means further marginalizing that voice? And where does that, then, leave the imagination? How can we have meaningful conversation around this issue, especially when it involves matters of race?

RDB: A few minutes ago I finished reading Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country. A novel, the book does a lot of important historical and emotional work around how Black folks in America have historically confronted racism. It’s a good book. Kind of science fiction, but running right alongside this country’s history, using art to dramatize the lasting effects — and getting a good number of things in there, from lynching to redlining to the economic legacy of slavery. And it’s all done quite seamlessly. Oh yeah, Ruff is white.

When people do it right, we have no need to answer questions about what lanes folks should be in. The question, the way we deal with it, is always about how we castigate people for getting it wrong. Maybe that’s legit. But that doesn’t change the reality: get it right and you got it right.

The novelist has more practice with this. More experience believing the job is about seeing others. Maybe the poet, the contemporary poet, in a world of narrative first-person poems and lyric “I”s, believes that the voice always has to be them. But if that’s the case, the poet is robbed over their superpower: their ability to notice and distill a world — not their ability to notice and distill their world. Such a selfish move, I think, it would be if poets believed that every “I” needed to be them. And frankly, I don’t even think of it as persona. For me, persona is when you are naming and acknowledging and making it clear that the voice is specific, locatable, as opposed to just a speaker that isn’t named, one that becomes, if the writer does it right, the reader, every reader, each time they utter the word, “I.” while they read your work.

So I guess I’m saying write what you want, all of it, and be whoever you want to be on the page, because otherwise what art might do is constrained. And that would be sad.

You can read the interview in its entirety here: https://plumepoetry.com/reginald-dwayne-betts-on-art-poetry-the-particular-fucked-up-parts-of-incarceration-and-the-multitudes-of-i/

Lee Sharkey (poetry ’91) passed away earlier this month at the age of 75.  She was the author of Calendars of Fire (Tupelo Press, 2013) and three other full-length collections. Her poems appeared in Crazyhorse, Field, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, and Seattle Review, and she served as coeditor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. 

Across a long career as a writer and publisher, her recognitions included the Abraham Sutzkever Centennial Translation Prize, the Maine Arts Commission’s Fellowship in Literary Arts, the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance’s Distinguished Achievement Award, the RHINO Editor’s Prize, the Shadowgraph Poetry Prize, and Zone 3’s Rainmaker Award in Poetry. 

Lee Sharkey recently completed a final volume of poems, “I Will Not Name It Except to Say.” Tupelo Press will publish the book in 2021.

2006 poetry graduate Beverley Bie Brahic was recently featured on the Scottish Poetry Library Podcast and had a poem featured in The New Criterion. Read an excerpt of “Next to nothing” below:

Next to nothing

Ambling back from the bottle dump
I glimpse my neighbor, busy
Under a honeysuckle’s winter thatch.
Summer in February, we agree—
But should we rejoice or be scared?
She’s picking the grey-green leaves
From a sheaf of dried verbena,
Replenishing her tin of bedtime teas:
Verbena leaves that weigh next to nothing.

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/10/next-to-nothing

2018 graduate Megan Pinto recently had two poems featured in AAWW. Read an excerpt of “Original Sin” below:

Original Sin

One night after rehearsal, I searched
my mother’s closet. The assignment was to dress
in your character’s best. I knew better

than to take my mother’s things, but I stole
a nude lipstick and her silk blue blouse.
It had ruffles down the center, like a kind of spine

but softer. Like something trying to bloom.

Read the poem (and “Spring,” an additional poem by Pinto) here: https://aaww.org/original-sin-two-poems-by-megan-pinto/

Mel and Sol must have recognized one another from the start. 

Chemicals—bio-signals?—telegraphed; moved them toward one another in ancient, primal ways. Scarlet wished to God she could cheer for the sermon on the mount. Easy to say I am glad you are happy. Harder by far, it seemed, to cheer the apparatus of happiness. She drew up bluejeaned legs, hugged her knees. 

Mel insisted she was happy. Scarlet didn’t buy it. Some fat lie lay coiled like a python in the engine room of that story. From the beginning Mel endured Sol’s vanities, his dogma, his pronouncements, though much of it whipped her bloody. His laying down of absolutes. I don’t have affairs, I have relationships. On and on he talked about how he loved his wife, the golden angel Winnie. Never dreaming it might pain the mistress at his knee every Saturday, who smiled whilst his words stabbed her in the head, over and over. Smiled as she bade him goodbye, softly shutting the door. Then the smile fell off. Scarlet knew this from years of e-mail, before Mel stopped reporting. Once Mel had actually slipped into a clarinet concert of Winnie’s, come home, and wept. She would never, never allow him to know. 

What was Scarlet to do? 

Witness. 

Cheer. 

Cheer when she could.

…

Sol had everything. Authority, wisdom, money. Devoted slave-wife. Adoring female 

students. Perfect control. Except, Mel said, his grown children were having trouble. Stumbling in the world. Surprise surprise, thought Scarlet bitterly. Sol’s response to his children’s trouble, according to Mel, was characteristic. He would swoop in on them—drove up to their homes announced, wifey Winnie alongside him in the car like Robin to his Batman. Squared off theatrically with his kids and their spouses, confronting them with some sort of moral reprimand or ultimatum—until someone fled the room in anger or tears. Then he took his wife by the arm and drove off, head erect. Or he withheld his visits, a royal withdrawal. Wrote long letters instead, detailing his philosophy of life in many single-spaced pages. His wife’s responses to the children’s distress? Sol doesn’t say. Winifred Armantino, from what Mel had gathered, was reared in North Dakota. Lines of demarcation were clear: Husband king. Head never higher than his, Mel had once murmured, a line from The King and I, making Scarlet laugh at the time. 

Winnie claimed an art of her own. This, it was gathered, somehow saved and excused her.

Clarinet with the city symphony, later a wind ensemble called Scarborough Faire. 

Sol had confided to Mel that his wife did not understand the music she played as well as he did, though course he’d never suggested that to her, and though he himself did not read musical notation. It was the music’s spiritual core he understood, saw into, far more deeply. 

As she aged, Winnie stopped her public performances, giving private lessons. Then those, too, fell away. She puttered now, saw to the household—a villa on a hill, overlooking a pear orchard. Perhaps she even cleaned the villa herself, though Mel doubted that. They had money. 

Winnie’s great task was to minister to Sol. She would burst into his home office when she wished to show him something that delighted her—an ad for a yogurt maker, or a new diet. He always let Winnie interrupt him, he repeatedly told Mel, because her heart was so innocent. Once he’d upbraided his wife, he admitted, about an improperly baked potato from the microwave. This was an image Mel never, ever forgot—nor, on hearing it, did Scarlet, silently thanking God Mel had been spared marriage to this man. Always, Sol praised Winnie to Mel. Hours of praise, months, years of it. Elaborate descriptions, soaked in amused affection. Diets, gardening, a program she’d seen on television. More diets. Cabbage soup, grapefruit, lemon and honey. He told Mel many times how much weight Winnie had lost. Mel listened, smiling. She herself had always gained weight effortlessly, fought food cravings all her life, and now, exacerbated by chemo and countless medications, had grown wide, doughy, puffy. 

Scarlet though it stunning that a gifted man could behave this way. Sol appeared to have no glimmer he was cutting his lover to internal ribbons with adoring reports of his wife’s weight losses. Year after year Sol marveled over his beloved Winnie, chuckled aloud at her endearing foibles. Mel listened with luminous eyes; asked fond questions. Chuckled with him at his wife’s childlike qualities, at the purity of her heart. 

When Sol went home Mel fell into bed. 

Scarlet rubbed her hands against the tops of her thighs. 

Mel wants it this way. 

Wants? 

Accepts. And why, cannot matter. Not to you, not anymore. And not out loud.