Book :: Rattle Conversations

New from Rattle magazine:

RATTLE
Conversations
Edited by Alan Fox
Published by Red Hen Press, 2008

“Fourteen selected RATTLE Conversations offer rare insight into the lives and thoughts of some of the most notable American poets of our time. Informative and intimate, the conversations look beyond the academic minutia and into the heart of what we love – the passion that compels poetry, and the process that completes it. These poets explore not what they wrote, but why they had to write it, and how it came to be. As such, the RATTLE Conversations serve as an indispensable guide and companion to anyone who appreciates the art and experience of writing.”

Includes conversations with Daniel Berrigan, Hayden Carruth, Lucille Clifton, Sam Hamill, Jane Hirshfield, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jack Kornfield, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Gregory Orr, Luis J. Rodriguez, Alan Shapiro, and Diane Wakoski.

An excerpt from the interview with Gregory Orr:

Fox: You talk about the impulse to write and the importance of that. What happens to you after the poem is out there in the world? Is the response meaningful?

Orr: It certainly is now. I love reading my poems to audiences now. I love the idea of communicating with people in the sense that what I really enjoy is that if I read my poems to people, we somehow start talking after the reading. Those things where they say, will you take any questions after the reading? They’re terrified to even ask you that. And I’m thinking, the hell with the reading, let’s just have the questions, let’s just have a conversation. So, I’ve gone from this person who was in terror of other people and, again, I’m describing the first several books and stuff. I had no pride, no pleasure in sharing, in confiding. I was still so far inside myself, working out my own self-absorbed, anguished story.