I just read Sparks from the Anvil, a wonderful book of interviews conducted and assembled by Christian McEwen, all from visits to Smith College. The book covers interviews with sixteen different poets, from those earlier in their career to some of those we consider canon (like W.S. Merwin, Rita Dove, Maxine Kumin, Yusef Komunyakaa, and others). I want to pull out a few quotes from the book to give you a flavor of what you can expect.

McEwen asks terrific questions and some of those questions are in search of advice from these poets whether for students or other writers. The poet Matthew Dickman has a great suggestion for those of us who know and love the art form to “…go out and get a book of poems or print up a couple of poems that you really like, and send them to someone who doesn’t read poems. Because they need them, more than you know, and more than they know.” I’m definitely inspired to do just that.

Many of the poets in this book speak to the increasing noise that our culture generates, and their concern that people, poets and otherwise, are able to find space for quiet reflection, the importance of that. Edward Hirsch tells us, “I feel that a certain kind of sustained reading puts us in touch with our interior lives. And that’s endangered in our culture because you need to be alone with yourself, you need some presence, and you need to be able to give yourself up to the experience of absorption.”

In the interview with Jane Hirshfield, Hirshfield discusses much of how her Buddhist practice often informs her writing. I love this passage from her as it applies to how we can create poems that breathe and allow the reader time for discovery. “This is how we change, by letting go of the past, by letting go of the status quo, the reified thought. I think this is why we require sabbath in our lives, and silence in our words: because nothing new can come unless there’s a space for it to enter.”

Lastly, I love how Chase Twichell speaks to the ability of poetry to capture, or at least direct us to, some of the more ethereal of human experiences. “It has been my experience that there are states of mind and kinds of human perception and consciousness that are simply not translatable into language. But language can point at them.”