2013 poetry graduate Tommye Blount was recently interviewed for Adroit Journal. Read an excerpt below:

NIN: I’m stunned by how close these speakers feel as I read your work. What would you say is the role of vulnerability in your poetry, and how did you come to define what vulnerability looks like in your work?

TB: In order for there to be vulnerability, there has to be some inherent sense of consequence. In other words, there must be knowledge that something valuable is at stake. This is the task I always charge my poems with: there must be something (a way of life for instance) the speakers within the poems are not afraid to lose in the name of feeling whole and human. It’s also why I am drawn to the lyric mode. Within the lyric mode, a problem or question becomes the engine behind the poem; the motor that keeps the machine of the poem chugging along. Ellen Bryant Voigt, in The Flexible Lyric, considers the lyric as being that mode in which much of the narrative happens beyond the poem. The lyric poem is simply an event along that narrative line—I am paraphrasing of course. Anyway, this is why I am drawn to desire and its penchant for an elliptical and obsessive logic. The act of desire is an act of grief. In desire, one feels something was lost when in fact they never possessed the object in the first place. Perhaps that closeness you hear, Noor, emanates from the open and shameless embrace of obsession that exists in the poems, but I want to say more.

One of the ways that I envision this book operating is as theater. In Detroit, one of my favorite theaters is the Slipstream Theater Initiative. The building is nothing fancy: a storefront that’s been refashioned into a black box theater. What gets me each time I see one of its productions is that they use the space differently each time. In a standard proscenium theater, one has a ticket that corresponds to a seat number located along the house’s floor. With Slipstream, I never know how I am to move through the space and what will be asked of me. In Fantasia, I mean the poems to make such demands on the reader by using myself, or the lyricized self in the book, as a conduit. Looking at the book’s approach to point of view, the membrane between “you” and “I” is very delicate. What I mean is the roles of subject and observer get fuzzy. The reader, I hope, experiences that sense of closeness to the speakers and the events happening. When the poems call out my name, it is also a placeholder for “your” name. With all of that said, I (as the poet) have as much at stake as the reader has invested in the poems. Although the book employs various personae and voices, it really is a kind of self-portrait that relies on the reader to complete. I think all of this too aids that sensation of vulnerability.

Read the interview in its entirety here: https://theadroitjournal.org/2020/08/25/give-me-your-madness-an-interview-with-tommye-blount/

Chloe Martinez, a 2009 poetry graduate, recently had several poems featured by Negative Capability Press. Read an excerpt of “Manuscript of a Long-Forgotten Poet” below:

Manuscript of a Long-Forgotten Poet
For Jamel

For days we may not speak more than
a few words to anyone but each other.
We leave the hotel in the cool morning and
come back sweaty, drained of energy, to stand

before a huge cage of parakeets, watching them
quickstep sideways along their long stick-perches.
Courting? Fighting? When we wash our hands
we turn the water brown as a flooded field.

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.negativecapabilitypress.org/blog/2020/6/25/featured-poet-chloe-martinez

Noah Stetzer (Poetry ’14) was recently featured in Hobart. Read an excerpt of “How It Was When We Were” below:

How It Was When We Were

Jeff O told us that he and Brian H split after watching Chasing Amy 
and getting into a fight—by then I was pretty much over my crush 
on Jeff O and I was kind of off and on living with Steve K who I was sort of 
ready to break up with so I deliberately rented Chasing Amy for us to watch 
and then broke up with him (but it had nothing to do with the movie).

I remember I drove to the corner gas station and called Ricky 
(never Rick) my best friend to tell him and he said to meet 
him and Matt M (my other best friend) for a drink so we could recap 
(I had had a crush on Matt M I think before and after this). 

Read the entire poem here: https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/how-it-was-when-we-were

2014 poetry graduate Daye Phillippo was recently interviewed for Slant Books. Read an excerpt below:

Poets have reported various triggers for poems—sounds, scents, etc. What triggers a poem for you?

For me, a poem almost always begins with an image, something that catches my eye—a weird tree, a hawk swooping low across the hood of my car, something out of the ordinary. I jot it in an image journal, or just bring the image straight to a notebook or to the computer, and begin describing. It’s by getting as deeply and accurately as possible into an image through description that other things begin to open up for me, discoveries are made, and things I had no idea I’d be writing about begin to show up.  That doesn’t always happen, of course, but it’s like a thunderhead rolling in when it does. It’s what keeps me coming back.

For instance, with my poem “Fledgling,” I was weeding in the garden one day when I noticed a robin fledging on the ground by a tomato cage and I realized that that little bird was out of its nest, maybe for the first time, learning to fly. What an exciting time, the beginning of everything new for this little bird.

I left my weeding and came in the house to begin describing what I’d just seen. Suddenly I found myself writing about something that had happened to me way back when I was at what could be called the “fledgling stage” of my own life. I’d had no idea the poem would turn that way when I first started writing. I was just trying to document the cool experience of seeing that little speckled fledgling up close.

Personal discovery is part of it for you, then. Anything else?

Oh, yes! Let me quote Thomas Merton here since I believe he explained this part of the writing process for a person of faith in such a beautiful way:

“The earliest [church] fathers knew that all things, as such, are symbolic by their very being and nature, and all talk of something beyond themselves. Their meaning is not something we impose upon them, but a mystery which we can discover in them, if we have the eyes to look with.” (Selected Poems of Thomas Merton)

Isn’t that lovely? That’s my prayer now—Lord, give me the eyes to look with!

During undergrad at Purdue, I took dendrology (the study of trees), tree physiology, and several urban forestry classes. When people asked why, as a creative writer, I wanted to study trees, I told them that I studied trees not only in the hope of writing better poems, but also in hope of better understanding the mind of their Creator. As a person of faith, spiritual insight is something I’m hoping for every time I write.

Read the interview in its entirety here: https://slantbooks.com/2020/08/03/the-sky-as-a-body-of-water-qa-with-daye-phillippo/

2019 fiction graduate Candace Walsh recently had a story featured in Complete Sentence. Read an excerpt below:

Thoughts Leading Up to My Successful Au Pair Application

The son I carried for <famous actress> (I know who she is but can’t say: hint hint, she’s winkingly Sapphic enough to quicken our pulses) is five, quarantining with Mum and her husband (harrumph) on their English estate, the article said she humbly admits to success with homemade crumpets and wryly bemoans daily squabbles over home learning; a child often sulks and balks when his mother picks up schoolmarmish chalk…they’d never need to know he once swelled my belly and plucked my sciatic nerve like a fresco’s cherub plays a tiny lute, as I, back then, nineteen, disowned for my exposed desires and all alone, soothed myself to sleep with think of the money, the money, the money…

Read the piece in its entirety here: https://www.completesentencelit.com/post/thoughts-leading-up-to-my-successful-au-pair-application