Michael Juliani interviews David St. John for the LA Review of Books I INTERVIEWED the poet David St. John, my friend of several years, shortly after the death of writer Sam Shepard. Shepard’s death influenced my reading of St. John’s latest book, The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins), not only for the similarities between the two writers’ origins as Californians, but …

What do you find exciting about American poetry at the moment? The explosive diversity, both culturally and stylistically, has helped to make American poetry both lasting and breath-taking. I’ve always felt American poetry is strongest when it acknowledges and champions a plurality of voices. At this moment in our poetry we are—I hope—moving toward a critical mass of diverse poetic …

Interview with L. I. Henley for Aperçus Quarterly 2.4 Henley: I am particularly interested in The Auroras as a triptych and what that structure (or form) connotes. Are you interested in visual triptychs—paintings, photographs, altars, things that must unfold in order to show the entire landscape? And speaking of altars, would it be unfitting to think of the The Auroras …

A Brief Interview for American Literary Review Kyle McCord: David, there is such a lovely range to the work in The Auroras. I’m eager to get to that, but I did want to ask a little bit about your collaboration with Cole Swenson on American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. The anthology takes on the difficult task of …

An Interview with David St. John from How A Poem Can Happen, by Andrew Kuhn When was this poem composed? How did it start? The poem “The Shore” was begun in draft in the late fall of 1975 or in the early spring of 1976, while I was living in both Cleveland, Ohio and Oberlin, where I was teaching. My …

Densities of Light An Interview with David St. John by Christopher Burawa for Hayden’s Ferry Review I encountered David St. John for the first time in the used book section of a local Tempe bookstore. It just so happened to be on the cover of his first book, Hush (1976). I had never seen, outside of posthumous collected works, the …

Conversation Between David St. John and Alan Fox, on October 20, 2004 First Published in Rattle Alan Fox: David, why do you write poetry? David St. John: Well, it’s the art form that’s always seemed to me, in the end, the most engaging. The one I most enjoy. I’ve tried lots of different things. When I was a teenager I …