Interviews

I interviewed the poet David St. John, my friend of several years, shortly after the death of writer Sam Shepard. The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins).

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.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of the triptych, especially in those Renaissance altarpieces I've been able to see traveling throughout Italy, and also while I lived there.

Cole and I wanted to offer evidence of a more complicated understanding of American poetry than the one we saw being promulgated all around us in classes and reviews.

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.

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).

Poetry is the art form that's always seemed to me, in the end, the most engaging. By the time I was eighteen, I met the poet Larry Levis and Larry introduced me to Philip Levine, and so I started writing poems with Levine.