Okay, so I think it was 2023, that I saw the Grub Street writing fellowship, and it came up on like an Instagram ad or something like that. To be honest, I saw the stipend, and I was very enticed, but I had been writing all my life, so it just seemed like a no brainer, and I never really took it seriously before that point. Honestly, I was a little bit resistant. My parents were very excited about it, so I submitted a lot of stuff that I didn’t really care a lot about that I had written for school, and by some miracle, I got in. That turned things around for me. The artists that I was working with were Otto Vock and Anthony Febo. Febo went on to take, like, a large role at Mass poetry. He said, I think you should come to SW@MP. I think that SW@MP would be a really good opportunity for you after the fellowship ended. I jumped on it. I was like, yes, of course. So that’s really how I started with Mass Poetry, and also started taking writing seriously. I saw Febo and I saw Otto, and I was like, that’s what I want to do. And before that, I don’t think, like any type of career path really spoke to me and I was sort of told that if I wanted to be a writer, there’s very specific avenues that you have to go down. So, you could be a journalist, like write for a paper and I didn’t want to do any of that. So they really, like changed my perspective on that. 

Is there anything in particular that inspires you to write?

As a society, we’ve lost visceral emotion really heavily. I think that short form content makes it so we experience all of these very intense emotions in very fast periods. We’ve learned how to desensitize ourselves to each of those emotions, like while scrolling you see like the greatest tragedies in the world, and also something that reminds you of this, like deep seated trauma. We have to get used to only letting that emotion live within us for those 15 seconds, and then scrolling past it and pretending that didn’t happen or not holding that impact with us. I think that makes it really difficult to expect humanity out of people. What is it to let yourself be consumed on that level? Be consumed by an emotion or a feeling or a moment? And have that not be wrong. There doesn’t have to be a distraction. There doesn’t have to be a cure or something to fix. So I think that’s what it is. I think my main goal with writing is to bring back that held visceral emotion for people, and because that’s what writing did for me. I think being in a room when you’re hearing a poem and just not wanting it to stop, and then when it you just can’t let go of that feeling right? And there is a resolution, but there’s not a resolution right? Internally, I think that’s the most special feeling in the world. That’s what made me want to write. So if I could give that to someone else, that’s just, that’s amazing.

What has your experience with Mass Poetry been like?

I think that Mass Poetry genuinely became my family. When I started SW@MP, it was Crystal Valentine and Anthony Febo and I call them my surrogate parents, as a joke, but that’s genuinely how it is. I don’t think that I have seen a single person pass through SW@MP without being deeply affected. I know that regardless if they stay or not, whether they’re there for like, three months, six months a year, you know. Like me and some of the closest artists that I worked with there, Maria, Zaki, and Parker, and Salva, we just wanted to do everything that Mass Poetry had to offer and just soak up every single thing they had to say. I think that’s what makes it different. I think the people at Mass Poetry are a game changer. I’ve never met teaching artists like that. I’ve never met teaching artists that care so vastly about the individual well-being of students and their personal well-being beyond writing. I came to mass poetry when I was feeling like the best ever, and then I also would show up during some of the worst, most tumultuous periods of my life. And it was always the answer. There were times that I was out of work, I wasn’t in school, and I would still make the point of showing up every week, because I knew that it was something I wanted, it was something I always wanted, and it was always going to be helpful to my current situation.

How do you think creativity is fostered at Mass Poetry?

It’s just this feeling of, I can say anything in this space, I can throw around any idea and see what sticks. It really just allowed me to be. I knew that there was no judgment in the space, and therefore I could be, fully the artist, come into the artist that I wanted to be, have as big of aspirations as I ever wanted to, and they weren’t crazy. I think that’s what it is. I think that you were never made to feel crazy about your ideas. You were never made to feel like you had said the wrong thing. There was no wrong answer. That specifically, and also just the abundance of support, if it were not for the abundant support in SW@MP, I would never have tried out for the BB team. My first year at Brave New Voices was life changing drastically, and that was because of Mass Poetry. When they brought me there, I was like, I want to be a poet, there’s no other choice. At the first BB, that’s where First Wave met me. So Mass poetry is single handedly responsible for all of that, and for making me realize I want to be a poet, and the endless support. There was constructive criticism, I wanted to hear the honesty and the truth about my writing, and that was always given in a way that allowed me to expand, instead of regress or have to refine.

What was your reaction when you first heard that you were going to become a First Wave Scholar?

Oh, my goodness, I actually freaked out. I got a phone call that I missed because I have a 608 number, I lived in Madison when I was little, and so I get spam calls from 608. So, I immediately hung up, and then I got a voicemail, and it said, we have a very special announcement for you. So I called them back so quickly, and they told me, and I literally remember just sitting on the stairs, just crumbling. I was like, oh my goodness, I cannot. Like, this means it’s actually possible, and I actually did it. So, yeah, I was freaking out. I think I didn’t even call my mom or dad. My first call was Febo. I was freaking out. I was sobbing, I was screaming. I was like, Thank you. You did this for me.

What has your experience been like as being a First Wave Scholar?

I think First Wave is incredibly unique, but I think actually the experience of being here is incredibly unique as well. I think it fosters this environment where I think a lot of times people, like artists, are made to feel like they cannot experiment because doing so would make their craft cringy or something. They formulated this space where you can just do anything and try anything, and with a bunch of people that don’t even necessarily know your craft, and that’s okay. So, I mean, it’s amazing, like, we have my cohort, we’re 12 people, we’re a little bit smaller than previous years, but we have hip-hop dancers, we have rappers, we have poets, we have drummers, we have classical violinists. It’s so sick to be around so many different media. I think it’s so special to spend your whole life perfecting one medium, or so many years perfecting one medium, and then be so willing to throw that to the wind and say, I will try anything or I want to engage with whatever art is put in front of me, right? I think that’s just amazing. Being able to experience all of these different art forms that I wouldn’t otherwise experience or get to engage with has been so impactful, especially for my writing. It’s like I am so much more able, now more than ever, to see what I want from my writing, and what my writing will never be able to accomplish. With emotion like how dance does, but how we can incorporate that together to give the audience that feeling. It widened my perspective on what my art is trying to do, as well what I’m trying to do with my art, and how I can get there. It just reinforced the idea of, this is your family, this is your artistic community and you can try anything here, we will celebrate your wins.

It was actually when I was 18 years old, as a freshman at Florida State University, and I took a really amazing freshman composition class. It was required, but my professor introduced us to just really interesting writing, kind of experimental, radical writing. She herself was a poet, her name is Helen Wallace, and she just encouraged me to start writing poetry. Prior to that I really hadn’t and I just saw something in poetry that sort of let me say something that I felt like I hadn’t been able to say prior in different genres. So, I really am grateful for my freshman composition class.

Is there a specific poet you read that you take inspiration from?

In that class, I was introduced to some of the older poets, or more traditional, like Sharon Olds, a confessionalist poet, that addresses some hard human experiences like incest, and I felt like I hadn’t really seen women poets writing about those topics and in this kind of raw, confessional way. For me, at that stage in my life, I was just really moved by the emotionality of that writing, but then also other more experimental writers. I was introduced to a concept called grammar B, where the focus is less on being linear and more on thinking about narrative from a galaxy or a constellation of ideas that somehow fit together, but don’t move in one direction. I think it was like I was exposed to some more traditional, big hitters, like Sylvia Plath, but then also exposed to writers, not even poets, but just fiction writers who are doing radically different things. Very surreal things like Amy Bender, her short story collection, just blew my mind, because she had characters turning into fire or de-evolving to a single-celled amoeba going back to the sea. It just really showed me that words can do just really incredible things.

What’s your favorite thing about poetry?

I like that you can pretty much do anything you want with it, that there are really no rules. I can write a poem that, like Victoria Chang, looks like an obituary for a dead parent. I’m reading poems right now through the voice of cyborg girls, which I think is amazing and I love that anyone can write poetry. You don’t need a lot of money to write it too, it’s accessible, and there are really no rules. I think, if anything, the rule is that poets are supposed to be innovative and to think in new ways, and that’s part of the task of poetry: how can I say this in a way that, maybe has been said before, maybe with a new angle, or a new formal technique or strategy. From the beginning, that has been the thing that has always spoken to me the most about poetry.

Is there anything you take inspiration from when you’re writing?

I’m definitely idea driven and so while I’m not a confessionalist poet, I usually start with some experience that I’ve had, or some idea I’m mulling over, and try to figure out how to say that in a poem through images and concrete language, the musicality of words. My books usually are kind of project based. The one that I worked on over the summer, which is right now called “The First Mother’s Fable,” it started with writing poems about my experience going through IVF to conceive my daughter, which kind of took a strange dystopian angle, where the first mothers became the petri dishes, and the drugs, and the medicinal or scientific component of conception for me. A lot of times it is personal experience, but then I kind of radically translate it into a larger metaphor.

In your latest collection, “The Mouth is Also a Compass,” what inspired you to create that work?

I had just finished a project and was a little bored with my own writing. So, I gave myself an experiment to create erasures of Richard Byrd’s memoir, “Alone.” I am not sure why I chose that book, except for it’s just an old book that I read many years ago, and it was on my bookshelf. I just was really like, let’s just see how someone else writes, and how that can kind of infiltrate my own writing and my own creative consciousness. That was just meant to be an experiment to just jar my typical writing process, and it really hooked onto me. It was the summer, I was doing all my little summer expeditions of taking long bike rides, like 50 mile bike rides, or taking long hikes or walks. I just thought, well, I’m doing all these things, let’s create a persona or character that’s doing her own expedition. But it all kind of intuitively evolved to starting to think about a feminist perspective on expeditions. Traditionally, expeditions are about conquering, about abusing and using the land and the resources for one’s own purpose or goal. I thought, what about making an explorer who’s a woman and in this dystopian reality where there’s been an ecological collapse. How would she navigate that? So it really evolved from my own personal experience to something totally different, like a mushroom, or a cell that keeps dividing itself.

Do you have anything else to say about poetry?

I think it’s amazing how it asks us to see the world differently, and it can be really challenging and messy. Its goal is not to be easy or digestible. Some poets are more in that vein, which is also fine, but the poets I’m drawn to, like Franny Choi’s “Soft Science,” which I’m reading right now with my classes, it asks us to think about technology, physical autonomy, gender and sexuality in these radically new and different ways. I feel like poetry is this radical space where we confront our humanity through the lens of the poet. In doing that, we are seeing the world in a new way, but also learning something about ourselves in the process. I just find that really amazing. 

Is there anything poetry has taught you about yourself?

I’m an obsessive thinker, I think that definitely has taught me that. Part of why my books are projects is because I get an idea, and it just drills down into my creativity, and I have to keep working on it until it feels like it’s kind of coming to completion. I think because of that tendency to overthink or be obsessive, poetry has been this very welcoming space for me to put my way of using my brain. I think it also just showed me that if we trust our subconscious and our creativity, there’s just so many new ways we can think about the world. I just really love that about writing. It calms me down, it centers me, it focuses me. It’s a little bit like a meditative practice at this point.

“Carrie Bennett has been teaching in the Writing Program at Boston University since 2004 and currently teaches seminars on multimedia poetry and cross-genre writing. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow and author of multiple books of poetry, as well as several chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, and jubilat.”

Check out her most recent collection “The Mouth is Also a Compass.”

Mass Poetry envisions a world where poetry catalyzes understanding and connection. We harness the power of words to engage diverse communities across our commonwealth. We envision a vibrant, inclusive community that lifts all voice

Now celebrating its 15th anniversary, Mass Poetry serves as an arts-partner-in-residence at GrubStreet’s new Center for Creative Writing in Boston’s Seaport District. This pioneering initiative features a bookstore, literary stage, workshop space, podcasting studio, cafe, and is now set to become a literary hub for all voices. Our signature programs include the biennial Massachusetts Poetry Festival and our teen spoken word program and festival. Mass Poetry is also a founding member organization of the Poetry Coalition-–a national network of more than three dozen poetry organizations, spearheaded by the American Academy of Poets.

About the Development Director Position:

Mass Poetry’s first full-time Development Director will spearhead the final, public phase of our fundraising campaign as we seek to meet or surpass our $1.25M goal. To date, we have raised nearly $850,000 in gifts and pledges to support the next phase of our growth. The Development Director’s primary responsibilities will include:

• Partnering with the Executive Director (ED) to establish appropriate goals, timetables, benchmarks, plans and budgets for all fundraising activities;
• Along with the ED, engage and support the Mass Poetry Board of Directors in fundraising endeavors;
• Develop an annual fundraising plan and progress monitoring tool to drive decisions and actions by staff and the Board;
• Host fundraising events such as Evening of Inspired Leaders and donor house parties; 
• Manage a development intern, a marketing and communications co-op, and a contract grant writer;
• Support marketing and publicity via social media, local and national media outlets, co-sponsored events, and Mass Poetry’s website; 
• Cultivate new individual, corporate and foundation prospects and seek new funding opportunities;
• Coordinate and participate in meetings with high level prospects and donors in conjunction with the Executive Director;
• Plan and implement grant applications and reports as well as sponsorship requests;
• Lead fundraising content creation including writing proposals,  supporting documents, and other correspondence;
• Oversee solicitation and acknowledgement processes, including managing our Little Green Light donor database
• Serve as a liaison to Mass Poetry’s board advancement committee, planning all related meeting agendas and generating materials as needed;
• Lead the creation of future-oriented multi-year fundraising planning including outlining key milestones such as funds raised, donor diversification, etc.
• Provides other services as reasonably requested by the ED.

Qualified candidates should be able to demonstrate experience with:

• 5+ years of experience raising funds for arts or education-related non-profits;
• Increasing responsibilities over a minimum of five years of full time work;
• Directing large-scale projects while managing the work of others;
• Collaborating and communicating well with others;
• Solving problems quickly and creatively;
• Engaging and motivating key stakeholders;
• Multitasking with ease and precision;
• Working independently and efficiently to meet deadlines;
• Developing easy-to-use methods for tracking key financial data; and
• Presenting user-friendly financial information to both internal and external stakeholders.

SALARY & BENEFITS:

The salary range for this position is $80,000 – $90,000. Benefits include 15 days vacation, 5 days of paid sick leave, health insurance, and the option of contributing to a matching retirement plan.

TO APPLY: The deadline for applications is October 1, 2025. Please submit a cover letter, resume, professional writing sample, and 2-3 references to the Development Director Application Form. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so please plan to apply early.

I guess I first encountered poetry in high school, and I mostly did not like it. Maybe that was because we read the driest corners of the canon, or maybe it was that poems had emotions in them and that made my teenage self uncomfortable. Either way, I had tons of resistance to poetry. 

But then in college, I started writing fiction, which made me more attentive to language in literature in general. And then I came across an incredible Joe Brainard poem; here is the whole thing: “Sometimes/ everything/ seems/ so/ oh I don’t know,” and that taught me that poems can express aspects of human life that would otherwise be impossible to convey. Somewhere in there, writing fiction turned into writing poetry.

Do you have a writing routine? A favorite time or place to write?

Oh man, I’m really disorganized about my writing and, like, sporadic about it overall. Not all of us can manage a respectable routine, okay? But often when I get excited about an idea for a poem, it takes up my life, like a ton of my headspace, until I can write it out and feel relatively satisfied with my treatment of it. And yeah, I am not precious about my writing: it’s usually on my laptop, but I use the notes app on my phone, and I scribble things down on scrap paper next to my bed. Whatever, wherever. And of course, then lots of revision.

Where do your poems most often “come from”—an image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?

You know, often it is a memory—many of my poems draw on recent and distant memories, usually rooted in image. Often, those come to me in quieter moments in my life, like in meditation or just when eating a meal by myself on my porch. Like one day out of nowhere, I was struck by a recollection of a moment with a religious high school teacher lecturing us on his skepticism re: the theory of evolution. That became “one day we will laugh at every last human certainty” (which I include below).

Which writers (living or dead) have influenced you the most?

I recently read an interview with the writer and activist Stephen Jenkinson, who said something like, “Anyone who claims to know their influences probably doesn’t,” and I think there is a lot of truth in that. These things can be quite subtle and unconscious. But yeah, I love many poets: Ocean Vuong, Ross Gay, Ada Limon, Victoria Chang, Kaveh Akbar, Hanif Abduraqib.

What excites you most about your first chapbook?

My uncle studied acting, and he told me that he heard from a teacher that “no one is boring when they’re talking honestly about themselves.” My chapbook is very raw and personal, and I’m excited by the risk of that. Nervous too! (So connected are those two feelings—nervous and excited, right?) But yeah, I am hoping that the reader, in hearing the sound of my voice in their head in all my particularity, may feel some connection to the truth of their own life. It’s that idea that a vivid portrait of someone else’s life helps us better understand our own.

Select the cover to read more.

Alex Baskin is a hospital chaplain and a poet, rooted in over a decade of Buddhist practice and his upbringing in an orthodox Jewish family and community. He holds a bachelors degree in philosophy from Tufts University and a masters of divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School. His poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Redivider, The Christian Century, poetry.onl, and elsewhere. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Massachusetts.

It all began with The Real Mother Goose beautifully illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright. Word and image spun a powerful connection and to this day I sing its melodic poetry, ”Doctor Foster went to Glo’ster all in a shower of rain….”  Some years later however, I was stricken with depression and found myself laying on the ground looking for words to pin feelings to sky or paper. Two lines, four and later a larger volume that would corral words and begin dealing with nightmares. Not long after, I published a few poems in a newsletter for adults and children that had suffered domestic and sexual abuse. In the next issue someone remarked that she had thought no one could understand these experiences and how much the poems had meant to her. After a good cry, I was encouraged to strengthen, recognize and honor the power of words, including my own.

Do you have a writing routine? A favorite time or place to write?

Unfortunately I do not. I am undisciplined and write by the seat of my pants.

When a thought, phrase or internal rhyme comes, which may be in the middle of the night, I get up. I used to use pen to paper and still begin that way on scraps that have a bad habit of hiding afterward.  A nearly finished poem then jumps to the computer.

I am not a tech person by any stretch of the imagination and I do most things living in my head which becomes a problem in keeping up with the norm. Fortunately my partner is sympathetic and works for free.

Where do your poems most often “come from”—an image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?

Words or a phrase will arrive while driving, other times they take over dreamtime and require wrestling and coercing. Being a constant tinkerer, I can’t leave them alone, even with poems that have been published so I am not as prolific as I would like.  Empathy is my friend but also has its curse. I receive transmissions from the natural world, lollygagging, witnessing, reading and watching performance poetry.

Which writers (living or dead) have influenced you the most?

Martin Espada, seeing this large man turn himself into a beautiful bird while reading from City of coughing and dead radiators.

The late Art Stein with,  Blonde  Red Mustang…  Art engaged and encouraged me to write and join him in the love of linked haiku.  I also enjoy the works of  David Lynch, Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson, Kae Tempest and Charles Bukowski.

What excites you most about your new collection?

I am in love with The Sound of Her Good Name.  It has power, beauty and resources.   It feels good in your hands.  Inside you discover a Go Bag bookmark, instruction for the universal signal for help and the gorgeous photography of Natasha Hanna. Slate Roof is an art press with heart you should keep your eyes on. I am excited by the following blurbs from Gail Thomas who writes “Even amid the lurking violence, Curran creates music” and Jody Stewart, “an odd colloquial elegance, its disturbances nourish, its darkness sparkles” and Richard Hoffman , the poems, “their badass musicality…”

Select the cover to read more.

Candace R. Curran was raised alongside Wachusett Mountain in rural Princeton by a Coyote and Ford mechanic doing the best they could. Curran is the founder and organizer of INTERFACE, exhibitions that included the work of twenty or more artists and poets over ten years of presentations throughout Western Massachusetts. Candace was also a co-founder of Exploded View, a five woman traveling collaborative art and poetry performance group. Her publications include the anthology, Bone Cages, with Doug Anderson and John Hodgen and others, Haley’s Press, 1996, and her book Playing in Wrecks, Haley’s Press, 2011.  Candace’s poetry has also appeared in journals, Meat For Tea, Silkworm, RAW NerVZ Haiku, and others.

When I was ten years old in Chennai (then known as Madras), India, I found a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in my local lending library, and later bought it. I fell in love with all the poems, especially those that had lyrical lines, or nature-related themes. That was my first step into English literature – and it was all by chance – I happened to come across it, and was immediately enraptured. I had never read anything of the kind before, and had no one to teach me, or explain anything literary to me, so in a sense, I’m a literary auto-didact.

Another resource: I had a lovely elderly neighbor whose name was “Sunda,” (which was probably a shortened version of my name – Sundaram is a somewhat familiar last name in South India). He was a retired journalist, and owned hundreds of beautiful, leather-bound volumes with gold-edged pages, all neatly arranged behind spotless glass in his
bookcases. I was a pre-teen who read anything in sight, and was deeply attracted to his anthologies of poetry, as well as his volumes of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Rabindranath Tagore, and other writers. He lent me book after book, including The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, which I read, and finished during my summer holidays. Keep in mind I was ten years old. I fell madly in love with Wilde, and somehow got him, understood him, humor, pathos, “purple prose,” and all. My neighbor saw how much I loved Oscar Wilde, and lent me Hesketh Pearson’s wonderful biography The Life of Oscar Wilde. I learned about the rise and fall of my beloved writer, came across the word “homosexual” for the first time, and knew, even then, without talking to a single soul about it, that it was absolutely wrong, terribly wrong to imprison a man who loved another man for “the love that dare not speak its name.” I was heartbroken at what Wilde experienced in prison, and enraged that he died penniless and broken in France. Even then, he maintained his sense of irony, saying about the wallpaper, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”

To shorten this rather long digression, I borrowed these summer after summer, re-reading them feverishly, and dreaming complex dreams. My neighbor, Sunda Mama (another word for uncle) seeing how much I adored The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde and Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali and The Gardener (to go into how much I love Tagore would take another long digression, but I loved his poetry) finally gave them to me when I was about thirteen. My joy was beyond words.

When I came to the US in December 1988, these books came with me in my one check-in suitcase.

How did I discover that I wanted to write poetry? Well, I wanted to write poems after I read William Wordsworth’s sonnets (which I read around the same time as the other books I mentioned above). I was also moved by Shakespeare’s sonnets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s haunting poems, as well as John Keats’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s beautiful Odes. I loved Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, but those came a little later, when I was in my teens. Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge did it for me.

Do you have a writing routine? A favorite time or place to write?

Alas, I wish I did!  When I was young, I would always write at night.  I used to write a poem a day for a few years as a teenager.  Sometimes, even in the past few years, I’ve tried to write a poem a day in April, but other than that, I have let my Muse down a few times – I try to keep my appointment with my Muse, though.

I would love to have a routine, but I’m a full-time faculty member at Bunker Hill Community College, and before that, I taught Middle School English at a suburban school, so when I write these days, it’s always with the sense that I’m stealing time from myself.
That said, my favorite time to write is in the depths of night.

My favorite place?  Usually my study, or the kitchen table.

Where do your poems most often “come from”—an image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?

That is almost impossible to answer.  I would say that images play a big role in my poems – but so do ideas, sounds, and emotions.  As to phrases?  I’m not so sure – I delight in words, but I like to produce them!  For me, sights, sounds, smells, feelings, and ideas are my inspirations.  Oh, and my dog, Holly!  She inspires me.

Which writers (living or dead) have influenced you the most?

Another very hard one to answer:  Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Walter de la Mare, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, May Sarton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Milton, W. B. Yeats, John Masefield, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Naomi Shihab Nye, Maya Angelou, Omar Khayyam, Philip Larkin, some Kahlil Gibran, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, some Wallace Stevens, some Lucille Clifton, some Nikki Giovanni, Lewis Carroll, and of course, William Shakespeare. 

What excites you most about your new collection?

Another very hard one to answer:  Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Walter de la Mare, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, May Sarton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Milton, W. B. Yeats, John Masefield, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Naomi Shihab Nye, Maya Angelou, Omar Khayyam, Philip Larkin, some Kahlil Gibran, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, some Wallace Stevens, some Lucille Clifton, some Nikki Giovanni, Lewis Carroll, and of course, William Shakespeare. 

What excites you most about your new collection? (Significance of the title? Overarching themes? Process/experience of assembling it?) 

I was thrilled that Červená Barva Press published my first book, titled Fractured Lens. 

The title came to me, because of two things:
1. Of course, this crazy, broken world of ours, with our varied voices and different perspectives jostling and elbowing each other in the digital and physical world, all asking to be heard, to  be seen.  When I look around, I cannot help but see everyone’s perspective, and it can be confusing at times, and unifying at other times.  So, my vision is both whole and fractured.

2. The second reason is simple: A door between our home library (which is a converted porch, really) and the mud room had glass panels, and one day, we heard a loud, cracking sound, as of glass almost shattering.  My husband and I were in different rooms, and thought that the other had dropped a large glass jar, or something, but this was, clearly, a larger, diffuse, different sound.  When we converged in the space where we had heard it, we saw that the glass panels in the door had shivered into fractured lines, all radiating away from each other, but without breaking fully.  We liked the look of it so much, we kept it as it was.
Hence, my title Fractured Lens.

Here’s a picture I took of my face behind it:

I had hoped they could use it for the cover, but it didn’t have the kind of resolution they wanted, or something.  I’m rather fond of this picture, though!
As for overarching themes, I’m afraid I didn’t consciously think of any, but many of my poems seem to straddle a liminal place – both in this world, and the world of dreaming, of the spirit.

The process of compiling these was interesting, because I tried not to have too many poems talking about loss, or death, or sorrow, nor too many about nostalgia, or longing.  I also had some personal poems that were lyrical or descriptive, so I tried to assemble them with my own sense of what I’d like to see in a book – a blend of different elements, delicately balanced, to satisfy my poetic palate.

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​​Vijaya Sundaram is the current Poet Laureate of Medford, MA (2023-2025).  Her first collection of poems, titled Fractured Lens, was published in August 2023 by Červená Barva Press.  She is also a singer-songwriter, guitarist and sitarist.  In her capacity as full-time English faculty, she teaches college writing, poetry, literature, and American Culture in the English Dept. at Bunker Hill Community College.  In her capacity as Poet Laureate, she runs an Open Mic and a Poetry Club in Medford, to which all are welcome.  She hopes that poetry will help make this broken world whole, give people beauty, light, and truth, and lead us back to each other in appreciation, admiration, and affection.

I fell in love with poetry through an elective workshop in college. That’s where I first read a full collection by a contemporary American poet (Jerome Rothenberg), and understood how much of life could be explored and expressed in verse. It was so much fun for me to learn this new way of using language. At that time, I was an East Asian Studies major. I was planning to spend a few years after graduation in Japan, then work in the international corporate world, but, when I was abroad in Kyoto my last semester in Fall 2008, I ended up becoming very ill. I realized that my life was not going to follow the path I expected. This was also in 2008 when America was headed into a major recession, and so I came home sick with a pile of debt, no career, and no jobs to be found. I had to re-envision what I might do with my life, and I figured if I can’t make money I might as well be happy. Hence, poetry.

Do you have a writing routine? A favorite time or place to write?

Yes! It’s varied over the years, but I write a lot, since last year especially. I joined the Stafford Challenge and started doing a poem a day (I fell about 50 short last year, but I’m slightly ahead for this year!). I tend to sit down and write in spurts though, so I might write many poems on Thursday for example and take other days off. A friend and I also try and get together once a week to write. We just go back and forth for a while, exchanging prompts and seeing what we come up with. Of course, most of those poems don’t end up working out, but it’s good for me to get a lot of material out onto the page. I don’t need to be in any particular place or location, but if I have an idea for a poem I try to get straight to a notebook/laptop/notes app before it can get away from me.

Where do your poems most often “come from”—an image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?

Poems rarely come from images for me, I’m not at heart a very visual person. I tend to think of a good turn of phrase (or mishear someone else) or be struck by an idea and jump into the poem from there. Lately, I’ve been using a lot of prompts as well. I find, as I get older, I can’t wait around for inspiration if I want to get somewhere in my writing. I also love reading and responding to another poet’s work.

Which writers (living or dead) have influenced you the most?

Oh! So many, I read poetry almost exclusively. Though I’m somewhat particular in how I want my poems to move and what I want to say as a poet, I rarely meet a poem I don’t like. I try to be very open, it’s easy to get too attached to a style or idea about what poetry “is.” Nothing is better for me than coming across a new mode or style of expression in another poet’s work. Even if it doesn’t end up being something that touches my own work, I feel like I understand how language can move us a little bit better afterward. And, since I still haven’t named anybody, I’ll say Ginsberg. I feel like I don’t hear people citing him as an influence as much nowadays, but I’ve always loved the grandness of the voice in his poems and the way he never made a complete divide between the personal and the political in his work. I try to keep that duality in mind. Also, though much of his work is just so-so to me, his moments of genius are transcendent. I think this is true of a lot of the great poets we collectively remember. I can only hope that, after a lifetime of work, I have a few worth holding onto as well.

What excites you most about your new collection?

My new chapbook, Hard Up from Lily Poetry Review Books, is all on the theme of money, work, retail, and capitalism. For years I resisted putting these pieces together, thinking it would be a bit “too much.” I have to thank my friend January Gill O’Neil, she kept encouraging me to go for it anyway, and now I love it. The book was treated with such care by the press and is so beautifully designed, that I’m so grateful every time I pick it up. In terms of why I write about these themes, I grew up on welfare with a single mom in a middle-class town and then went to an Ivy League university, so money and class were always central to my idea of my identity in the world. I was often in places where I was (or thought I was) the only person who came from a low-class background. Plus the Great Recession came at the start of my working and writing life, so these are just issues I had to think about a lot. Even now after all these years, I’m still hustling—both in life and poetry! Money and class shape the way we see the world, just like language does. They influence how we interact, how we judge ourselves and others, and how society organizes itself. And no one is outside of this system—rich or poor, banker or monk, financially literate or spendthrift. We’re all caught up in this together, just (hopefully) doing our best.

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M.P. Carver is a poet and visual artist from Salem, MA.  She is Director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, miCrO-Founder of Molecule: a tiny lit mag, and teaches creative and digital writing at Salem State University. Her work has been published in Rattle, Mantis, Jubilat, and Love’s Executive Order, among others. She has received funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Essex Community Foundation. In 2023 her poem “In Vitro” was named a finalist in the Connecticut River Review’s Experimental Poetry Contest, and in 2022 her poem “You & God & I” was awarded the New England Poetry Club’s E.E. Cummings Prize.  Her chapbook, Selachipmorpha, was published by Incessant Pipe in 2015. Her second chapbook, Hard Up, is out from Lily Poetry Review Books in early 2025.

My earliest encounters with poetry were poems by A.A.Milne and Robert Louis Stevenson. As a teenager and young adult I spent time in the New Hampshire and the Maine woods and I wanted to write like Robert Frost.

Do you have a writing routine? A favorite time or place to write?

I like to write first thing in the morning. I sit on my couch. But I can pursue a poem at any time of day.

Where do your poems most often “come from”—an image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?

My poems come from all those places, but most likely from a phrase.

Which writers (living or dead) have influenced you the most?

Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda., Jane Kenyon, Shara McCallum

What excites you most about your new collection?

I learned a lot as I was assembling my new book. Though I was processing personal loss, my husband died in 2019, I was only too aware of the universal grieving going on (it was put together during Covid). It was helpful to me to select poems I’d written that looked outward as well as inward.

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Amy Gordon spent her childhood years in New England, France, England, and Brazil. Following a
career of teaching theater skills to middle school students, she went back to school for an MFA
in Poetry at Drew University. Her poems have appeared in Blue Nib, The Massachusetts Review,
and other journals. Her first chapbook, Deep Fahrenheit, was brought out by Prolific Press in 2019. She is also the author of numerous books for young readers. Painting the Rainbow (Holiday House) won the 2015 Paterson Prize for Young People. She lives in Western Massachusetts.

Poetry was the first form of creative expression that I can remember being truly irresistible. The idea of writing being something that could move down the page without being restricted to a paragraph, a page of text, but rather play with the line itself, has always felt the most natural to me. I’ve been writing poems since elementary school, which took the form of poems about the outdoors and nature; poems, and the images and lines in them, just felt like the way I parsed information and my experiences in the most authentic way.

Do you have a writing routine? A favorite time or place to write?

My routine fluctuates a lot; I don’t have a set time every day to sit down and write. Rather, I keep my notes ready on me to be able to pull out and jot something down, and give myself equal grace for a short phrase versus a full rough draft. Sometimes inspiration hits at 4:00 am and I’ll type something out quick on my phone, and sometimes it hits on my commute to or from work; either way, I embrace my process as fluid and try to hold myself to consistency to show up for myself and my poems.

Where do your poems most often “come from”—an image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?

My poems will root themselves in an idea at the start; I am drawn to the way words fit together in a short phrase to encapsulate so much. Sometimes it will be a scientific fact that I want to play with; other times it will be a concept grown out of connecting memories or experiences.

Which writers (living or dead) have influenced you the most?

Whenever I get asked this question it feels simultaneously so easy and so hard to respond. I am drawn to poets that are able to write through a balance of lyric and narrative as well as a balance of personal experience and connection to the outside world, whether that is with an interdisciplinary lens, incorporating found knowledge, or evoking the relationship between our environments and ourselves. Some major influencers and poets I admire, which by no means is an exhaustive list, include Vivee Francis, Kimiko Hahn, Ross Gay, Rajiv Mohabir, Leila Chatti, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Kaveh Akbar, Layli Long Soldier, Alan Shapiro, and Brenda Shaughnessy.

What excites you most about your new collection?

Aurora Uteralis blurs the lines between the plant and the body as poems deliberate on sexuality, autonomy, and the different facets of emotional intimacy we carry. The poems simultaneously live within the world of the body, not shying away from imagery of stretch marks and vaginal fluid, while bridging this inner world to one of shriveled sage plants, clamshells, and cockroaches. I am excited about the possibility of unexpected pairings of body and nature that ask us to look more closely at ourselves through the growth, decay, and dirt of life around us. I explore how the body is viewed, loved, and grieved through environment, and work towards blurring the line between a scientific and artistic perspective through a poetic lens.

Katie Mihalek is a poet, editor, and educator living in Somerville, MA. She is the author of Aurora Uteralis, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press. She holds an M.S. in Medical Sciences from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College, where she served as the Editor-in-Chief for Redivider. She has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Southampton Writers Conference, and is the Poetry Editor of Fork Apple Press. Her poems can be found in Frontier, TIMBER, Sheila-Na-Gig, and others.