Q & A with Matthew Gavin Frank

Dear Black Lawrence Friends,

Happy September! We are kicking off the month with an open-ended question and answer session with Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Sagittarius Agitprop, which we proudly published this summer. Matt will be guest blogging all day to answer any questions that you might have about his work and his creative process. He might even dole out some advice on writing and getting published.

We are going to open the discussion by asking Matt a few questions, posted below. We look forward to your questions and hope for an interesting and lively discussion. Please post your questions in the comments section of this post. Matt will review them and respond to as many as possible.

All the best,

Your Black Lawrence Press Pals

1) What are your top five favorite poetry titles? Why do you love them?

2) You write in a few different genres. How do you decide between genres once you have decided to write about something?

3) Are you tackling any craft issues at the moment? If so, what are they and how are you dealing with them?

4)Who are you reading right now?

[Via http://blacklawrence.wordpress.com]

Interview with Rachel Hadas in The Contemporary Poetry Review‏

I took Poets & Poetry last semester with Professor Rachel Hadas, and I just can’t remember (other than Professor Jeanne Beaumont) any other professor teach poetry with such depth and respect for the art in my entire academic career.  They said she was nice, and she was for the most part, but the thing about a Hadas class is that you can’t just read poetry—you have to think about it, reread it, learn more about the poet, take into account the moment in history in which the poem was written, read what the critics have to say, read the poem once more, and then tell her what you think about the poem, how it makes you feel.

Just take a look at what Professor Hadas has to say about the present state of the art of poetry in her latest interview featured in The CPR Interview,

And yet was there ever a golden age of poetry, of literary culture? Randall Jarrell says somewhere that the thing about a golden age is that everyone goes around complaining how yellow everything looks.

Rachel Hadas

Luna

[Via http://rnmfa.wordpress.com]