Two Interviews from Gulf Coast's
Emerging Authors Series
(an annual feature of the fall issue of GC)
Tracy K. Smith:
"Many of us as writers begin from someplace close to home, but to label as confessional a poem that stems from the poet's life or experiences is often to ignore the transformation that any successful poem enacts upon its subject matter. For this reason, I view the term as pejorative only in-as-much-as it seems to sell the reader out by saying: 'You should be willing to go only so far in your experience of this poem.'" |
C. Dale Young:
"In my second book, the poems arose out of a need I had to create not just landscapes that hint at emotional states but actual emotional landscapes. I wrote many of those poems out of a belief that one could render an emotional landscape in much the same way one can a natural landscape. I wanted desperately to write a different kind of poem, one that was more compelling and more personal, just not necessarily confessional."
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Gulf Coast
Volume 17, Number 1
University of Houston
Executive Editor: Mark Doty
Managing Editors: Sasha West
Associate Editors: Jennifer Grotz, David Ray Vance
Copyright © 2004 by Gulf Coast
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Poetry Daily / Amazon.com
Selected books available by Tracy K. Smith:The Body's Question — Paperback
Selected books available by C. Dale Young:
The Second Person — Paperback
The Day Underneath the Day — Paperback