Q&A …

… Dancing in the endzone: a rare interview with Clive James. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… The real mystery is not in the timing but in the disproportion between the subject you read about and the subject you write about. For example, I might be halfway through Anne Applebaum’s terrifying book Gulag and I suddenly find myself sketching out the opening stanza of a poem about dancing the tango in Buenos Aires. Later on, sometimes months later on, that opening stanza might become the closing stanza, but the process of getting the poem in the right order is nothing like as complex as the question of how you were reading about despair and were suddenly visited by the music of elation.