Q&A …

… SHORT CONVERSATIONS WITH POETS: ANGE MLINKO. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

There’s a lot of truth to Keats’s remark that “if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.” I won’t sit down to a blank page—well, screen—unless I feel the narrative coalescing in my head. (“My head,” I say, though poems begin in the ear; “narrative,” I say, though I think poems are powered by rhyme and metonym, not story.) Perhaps what I mean is: when I have a direction from A to B, and a musical phrase to start with, then I’m on my way. And it goes fast.