Interviewed by Taylor N. Schaefer
FROM: The Shore

TNS: In your poem “S.O.S With Warble and Cell Tower,” you utilize large shifts in tone and rhetorical position— from call for help to call to action— from dream imagery to concrete reality. How did you come to these craft choices in the poem?

NLW: Honestly, I don’t really know! That’s just how my brain works. Sometimes, writing a poem feels more like a dam bursting than a careful stitching. This was one of those times.

As Diane Seuss recently said in an interview with Southeast Review, “I’m a poet where my primary strength is imagination.” I’ve learned how to make a home in the liminal space between what’s present and what could be. As a poet, I’m constantly wavering in between dreams and reality, calls for help and calls to action, the mundane and ecstatic, the best and worst imagined futures—a “semiprofessional dreamer” as Matthew Zapruder put it in Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017).

I also want to credit Eduardo C. Corral and his poem “Self-Portrait with Tumbling and Lasso” from Slow Lightning (Yale University Press, 2012). That poem is an outrageously delightful rollercoaster of language. It does surprising turns so well, and it’s sunk into my bones. I’ve written half a dozen or so “self-portraits” inspired by Corral. This one, however, ended up being more of an “S.O.S.” because it reaches beyond observation of the self to touch upon the edges of collective angst.

Motion over stagnation is the necessary work of hope, even if we have to zig-zag to get there. I try to have as much fun as possible in the leaps, even when the ground is miles below. Read Rest of Interview Here