Madam Mayo: Q & A

Very late in the game, albeit well more than a decade ago, I learned of Bruce Berger’s work when I happened upon Almost an Island: Travels in Baja California in a California bookshop.. >> READ THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Monday, October 28, 2019

Q & A: Sergio Troncoso, Author of “A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son” on Reading as If Your Life Depended on It, Emily Dickenson, the Digital Revolution, and the Texas Institute of Letters

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is devoted to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

>> CONTINUE READING THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Monday, September 23, 2019

Q & A: Clifford Garstang Author of “The Shaman of Turtle Valley”

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is devoted to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

>> READ THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Monday, August 26, 2019

August From the Archives: Q & A with Shelley Armitage on “Walking the Llano”

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

August 2019 finds me on vacation. Nonetheless, each Monday this month I will be offering posts from the archive (as usual, look for a workshop post on the second Monday, Q & A with a fellow writer on the fourth Monday).

Q & A WITH SHELLEY ARMITAGE
ON WALKING THE LLANO

Originally posted on Madam Mayo blog August 21, 2016

The week before last, I posted a brief but glowing note about Shelley Armitage’s Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place. This week I am delighted to share with you the author’s answers to my questions about her lyrical and illuminating memoir of growing up in and later returning to explore the area around Vega, Texas.

>> CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Monday, July 22, 2019

Q & A: Eric Barnes on "Above the Ether" and Turning It All Off

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com
This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is devoted to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

It was about a decade ago that I first came across Eric Barnes‘ work, when we both had novels with Unbridled Books– his was a dark comedy about high tech, Shimmer. Now I am delighted to learn about his latest, just out from Arcade Publishing: Above the Ether. It promises to be an exceptionally good read. Booklist says: “Barnes’ spare and chilling prose flows from one horrific scene to another without, surprisingly, alienating his readers, perhaps because the heart of his narrative ultimately reveals an abiding faith in the power of human compassion. A first-rate apocalyptic page-turner.”
>> CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Monday, June 24, 2019

Q & A: Diana Anhalt on her Poetry Collection "Walking Backward"

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is devoted to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

We have never met, but I feel as if we have. I think this is always true when one has read another’s such wonderful writing. But I did “meet” Diana Anhalt, in a matter of speaking, when years ago, she sent me a selection from her powerful and fascinating history / memoir of growing up in Mexico City, A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965. When, sometime later, I read the entirety of that beautifully written book itself–which I admiringly recommend to anyone with an interest in Mexico–I wrote to her, and we have kept in touch ever since. Apart from writing poetry and essay, we have this common: a lifetime, it seems, of living in Mexico City, and married to a Mexican. By the time we found each other’s work, however, Diana and her husband Mauricio had left “the endless city” for Atlanta, Georgia. (But ojalá, we will meet one day outside of cyberspace soon!)

Her latest, just out from Kelsay Books, is Walking Backward. From her publisher’s website, her author bio:

>> CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Monday, May 27, 2019

Q & A: Donna Baier Stein on "Scenes from the Heartland" and "Tiferet"

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is devoted to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

It has been more than a couple of years now since I participated as faculty at the San Miguel Writers Conference, but shining bright in my memory is a chat in the emerald cool shade of some palm trees there with Donna Baier Stein. And then we crossed paths again at the Women Writing the West Conference. Pequeño mundo! And at some point in between, to my great honor, she published an excerpt from my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, in her journal, Tiferet. Donna Baier Stein’s latest book is a collection of short stories inspired by artworks by Thomas Hart Benton– one of the greatest of the greats among American artists, and a personal favorite of mine. >>CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Monday, April 22, 2019

Q & A: Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado, on "The World As Is"

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is devoted to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

JOSEPH HUTCHISON, POET LAUREATE OF COLORADO

The World As Is: New and Selected Poems 1972-2015 by Joseph Hutchison.

Photo by C.M. Mayo.

(My own fave is “Poem to Be Kept Like a Candle, In Case of Emergencies.”)

One of the blogs I’ve been following for a good long time is poet Joseph Hutchison’s The Perpetual Bird. We have never met in person but I feel as if we have; moreover, we have friends in common, among them, poet, essayist and translator Patricia Dubrava– and if my memory serves, it was her blog, Holding the Light, that first sent me to The Perpetual Bird. Here on my desk I have Hutchison’s collection of his works of several decades, The World As Is. From publisher NYQ Books’ catalog copy: >> CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Monday, March 25, 2019

Q & A: W. Nick Hill on "Sleight Work" and Mucho Más

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is devoted to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

I was delighted to get the announcement for Sleight Work from W. Nick Hill, a poet and translator I have long admired. Sleight Work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License. The author invites you to download the free PDF from his website and have a read right now!

Here is one of the poems from W. Nick Hill’s Sleight Work which seems to me the very spirit of the book:

NOTICE

by W. Nick Hill

I live in a desert at the mouth of a mine.

The rocks and geodes I leave out on the sand.

If something fits your hand

Go ahead with it.

[>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM]

Monday, December 31, 2018

Sunday, November 18, 2018

Q & A with Mary Mackey on THE JAGUARS THAT PROWL OUR DREAMS, Bearing Witness, and Women Writers' Archives

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

This year, 2018, I have been aiming to post a Q & A with a fellow writer, poet and/or translator on the fourth Monday of the month. This usually happens! This month however I am posting two Q & As-- this third Monday, and another for the fourth.

[>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT THE NEW SITE, WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM]

Mary Mackey's
The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams
Marsh Hawk Press, 2018
amazon
indiebound
Small Press Distribution

The Internet invites us be everywhere allwhen, so it seems, but in ye olde 3D meatspace, I have a habit of attempting to be in three places at the same time. (I leave all other impossible things for before breakfast!) One of those places is California, because that's where my mother was living, and in recent years I flew out there from Mexico City to see her more times than I can count. Initially, when I realized I needed to go more often, I imagined that I could attend literary gatherings while in California, so I joined the San Francisco chapter of the Women's National Book Association, an organization I warmly supported in the years I was living in Washington DC. Alas --(those with elderly parents will smile sadly with understanding)-- I never could make it to a meeting. But I did read the SF WNBA newsletters and announcements, including news of Mary Mackey's books. Her latest, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, a collection of her poetry from 1974 - 2018, promises to be an especially rich read.

Mary Mackey is the author of a multitude of award-winning poetry collections, novels and more. Read about her distinguished career, and the unusual and highly original nature of her works, here. Though we have yet to meet in California, here we are, at least, on the same page in cyberspace: via email, Mary Mackey graciously answered several of my questions about her work. May you, dear extra curious and adventurous writerly reader, find her answers as fascinating and inspiring as I did.

Here's the catalogue copy for her latest, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams:

Mary Mackey writes of life, death, love, and passion with intensity and grace. Her poems are hugely imaginative and multi-layered. Part One contains forty-eight new poems including twenty-one set in Western Kentucky from 1742 to 1975; and twenty-six unified by an exploration of the tropical jungle outside and within us, plus a surreal and sometimes hallucinatory appreciation of the visionary power of fever. Part Two offers the reader seventy-eight poems drawn from Mackey's seven previous collections including Sugar Zone, winner of the 2012 Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence.

"Mary Mackey's poems are powerful, beautiful, and have extraordinary range. This is the poetry of a woman who has lived richly, and felt deeply. May her concern for the planet help save it."—Maxine Hong Kingston

"Always Mackey's eye is drawn to the marginalized, the poor, the outcast, the trivialized. [In] THE JAGUARS THAT PROWL OUR DREAMS, she has created an oeuvre, wilder, more open to change with each passing year. Hers is a monumental achievement."—D. Nurkse

Read a selection of her poems, including "The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams," on her website.

C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams?

MARY MACKEY: As Maxine Hong Kingston observed, my poetry has “extraordinary range.” I write for readers who love the mystical, visionary poetry of Mirabai, Blake, Pablo Neruda, and Saint John of the the Cross; for readers who want to step into the heart of our disappearing tropical jungles; for women struggling against sexual harassment. My ideal reader hates to be preached to and doesn’t like poems that are obscure—academic poems that read like puzzles. Instead, my ideal reader loves beautiful, well-crafted, complex, profound poetry that can be understood on many levels. My ideal reader also likes to laugh because some of my poems are very funny.

C.M.MAYO: What was the most important challenge for you in selecting poems from your now very substantial ouevre?

MARY MACKEY: When I started selecting, I came up with 280 poems which, when combined with the 48 new poems in Jaguars, would have resulted in a book the size of a cinder block. No poet writes 280 great poems, so I started culling. I ended up with 78 of my very best poems. Not one has a line I don’t like; not one is a second choice. Another challenge was to make sure the poems I picked had stood the test of time, since some were written as early as 1974. Some didn’t, but to my amazement several I wrote in the early seventies as part of the Second Wave women’s movement read as if they had been written today.

C.M. MAYO: In the process of selecting the poems, did you see your development as a poet in a new light? Are your poems very different now, and if so, how?

MARY MACKEY: I didn’t see my poetry in a new light as I went over my previous collections, and although my poems are different in content, they are not different in essence. My poetry has always had an inward and an outward stroke. That is to say, it has always been both highly personal and highly engaged with what is happening in the world. I don’t preach. I don’t tell people what to do. I think it’s the duty of a poet to bear witness to her times, and that’s what I have done for over 40 years: bear witness. Right now I am not writing for those of us who are alive in 2018. I am writing for future generations who will never see a live elephant, a tropical jungle, or a healthy coral reef. I am writing poems to tell them how beautiful our Earth was and what parts of it we are losing due to climate change.

That said, I did discover some changes in my poetry over the years. My lines grew longer, as if I were not as rushed. I married happily and so wrote fewer sad love poems. I fell in love with Portuguese and incorporated some Portuguese words in my last four collections. In 2011, I began to speak openly about the fact that I have run a number of life-threatening fevers (often near 107 degrees) and began to write poems about the visions and fever-induced hallucinations I had during these near-death experiences.

C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive poet and writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?

MARY MACKEY: I’ve been using computers since the early 80’s, so the Digital Revolution did not come as a surprise. It hasn’t affected my writing, but, like all writers these days, I have to spend time on social media that I would have otherwise spent writing, so I ration my online time carefully. To write poetry, to create anything, you need long periods of silence and intense concentration. You need to be able to hear your inner voice. You can’t do this if you are always checking your phone. My solution is rigorous compartmentalization. I set aside times to write and times to do social media.

When I am writing, my phone is off, my browser is closed, and I am completely and absolutely focused on my writing or on the essential daydreaming that precedes writing. When I am doing social media, I am absolutely focused on social media. The two don’t bleed over into one another. I also add a third element: time in the real world with physically present people. I write or do social media for about 5 hours a day beginning in the morning. Then I stop, turn off my computer, and see friends and family, take long walks, talk to strangers, look at the stars or watch an ant or a sparrow. In the evenings, I usually read instead of watching Netflix or something on cable, because I’ve had enough screen time for the day.

C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?

MARY MACKEY: When I started writing, paper was the only option. I still write out the first drafts of my poems in cursive in a special journal because I don’t like to have any technical interface between me and my imagination, nor any temptation to look something up in the initial moments of inspiration. I write freely without thinking about quality or organization. I let my hand and my mind wander. Then I transfer the result to my laptop and begin a rigorous process of cutting, improving, altering, editing, and crafting the final poem. I have taken a 4 page poem, written out in almost unreadable script, and transformed it into a polished, poem of three lines.

I should mention here that I am also the author of fourteen novels. Paper figures big in this part of my writing life. I wrote my first novel out in cursive in a notebook in the Scandinavian statistics section of the University of Chicago Library (a place where you could be sure no one would appear to interrupt you). I wrote the second on a manual typewriter; the third on an IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter, and the fourth on a computer so primitive it didn’t have a hard drive. I’ve used computers ever since for my subsequent ten novels, but at the end of each day, I print out all additions and changes, because I like to have hard copies of my work. I find it easier to edit hard copy, because you can see an entire page and move back and forth more easily. Also you can actually see what you’ve crossed out in case you want to change your mind. You can’t do this with deleted text. Then too, if the Internet goes down, my backups get stolen, my hard drive goes up in smoke, my passwords are compromised, the cloud is hacked, or my computer gets invaded with ransom ware, I have hard copy.

C.M. MAYO: Your papers are archived in the Sophia Smith Special Collections Library, Smith College, Northampton, MA and your website offers a "Guide to Women Writers Archives." https://marymackey.com/educators/guide-to-women-writers-archives/ . As a writer with an archive myself and as one who has made grateful use of many archives over the years --and one also keenly aware of how many valuable collections of papers, alas, end up lost— I am especially interested to know: How did this come about?

MARY MACKEY: It took me fifteen years to get up the courage to try to place my literary papers, because like so many women, I thought no one would want them. Imagine my surprise when I finally sent out emails and got almost immediate replies from nine universities who not only wanted my work, but offered to pay me substantial sums for my archives. I ended turning down monetary offers and donating my archives to Smith College, because they are dedicated to preserving the archives of women writers and the history of women. I’m not an alumna of Smith. I went to Harvard, but I didn’t donate my papers to Harvard because the university wouldn’t let me use Lamont, the Harvard undergraduate library, when I was a student there. In fact, until 1967, no women could enter Lamont. The guards at the door even turned away Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

After my experience with archiving, I decided to help women writers and artists archive their work. I have also helped men, but my focus has been on women, because if you tell a women about archiving, she will invariably say: “No one will want my papers. There’s no use trying.” In contrast, a man will say: “No one will want my papers, but I might as well give it a try.” I tell women that I want our history to be written on stone, not on water. I don’t archive their work for them, but I give them a packet of instructions on how to do it, encourage them to give it a try, tell them my own story of being timid and uncertain, and remind them that they can only control what goes into their archives while they are still alive. When they have successfully placed their papers, I list them on my website in my Guide To Women Writers’ Archives, congratulate them on my Facebook Page, and congratulate them again in my quarterly newsletter.

C.M. MAYO: What's next for you as a poet and as a writer?

MARY MACKEY: Right now I’m working on a plot outline for the final book in a series of novels about the Goddess-worshiping peoples of Neolithic Europe and their struggle to fight off Sky-worshiping, patriarchal invaders from the steppes. These novels are based on the research of archaeologist and UCLA Professor Marija Gimbutas who helped me with the first two novels in the series.

I’m also working on a series of visionary poems with the working title “Cassandra.” I think Cassandra is the perfect spokeswoman for our era. She saw the future, but when she tried to warn people that disaster was coming, no one believed her.

>> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Q & A with Historian Lynn Downey:

"Research Must Serve the Writer, Not the Other Way Around"

Q & A with Sara Mansfield Taber on

Chance Particulars: A Writer's Field Notebook

Q & A with Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyaho Ahron Taub on Translating

Blume Lempel's Oedipus in Brooklyn from the Yiddish

Monday, October 29, 2018

Q & A with Roger Greenwald on Translating Tarjei Vesaas's THROUGH NAKED BRANCHES-- and On Writing and Publishing in the Digital Revolution

Through Naked Branches:

Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas,

Revised Bilingual Edition, Translated,

Edited and Introduced by Roger Greenwald

(Boston: Black Widow Press, 2018)
Get this book from
The Seminary Coop

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

Reading poetry in translation can be like wafting through a door into an eerily beautiful palace. The tiles glow in new colors, shapes are peaked or oval when you expect square, juxtapositions startle, and the cats don't meow but miau or nya or, as in Norwegian, mjau...

Apropos of the just-published translation from the Norwegian, Through Naked Branches: Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas, it is a delight and an honor to post this interview with one of the most accomplished poets and translators working in English today: Roger Greenwald.

Through Naked Branches:
Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas,
Revised Bilingual Edition, Translated,
Edited and Introduced by Roger Greenwald

(Boston: Black Widow Press, 2018)

[>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST ON THE NEW SITE, WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM]

C.M. MAYO: How might you describe, in just a sentence or two, the ideal reader for this book?

ROGER GREENWALD: These poems are accessible but deep, and they reflect an unusual sensibility, so anyone who is open to a new experience in poetry is an ideal reader. My introduction explores why this poetry that is easy to “get” is so hard to discuss critically; the essay will be of special interest to people concerned with our relation to the natural world and with ecocriticism.

CMM: What inspired you to translate this work?

RG: Tarjei Vesaas was and is a famous novelist, but his poetry was like a secret shared among other writers and a small number of readers. When I first read his poems, I realized that the best of them were unlike any I had ever read. In addition to his special sensibility, he has a distinctive voice, pace, and turn of phrase, as well as a very fine ear for the music of language. And by the time of his death in 1970, almost none of his poetry was available in English, never mind in versions that did it justice. In some ways it is very difficult to translate. Twenty years passed before I had translated a selection to my satisfaction, and then it took me another eight years (eight drafts) to write my introduction.

CMM: How did you learn the language?

RG: This apparently simple question poses a problem at once: Which language is “the language”?! I first learned Norwegian on my own from a textbook. But Norwegian has two official written norms, and the textbook was about Bokmål, which ultimately derives from Danish and reflects Norway’s urban dialects. Tarjei Vesaas wrote in Nynorsk, which ultimately derives from Old Norse via Norway’s rural dialects. I advanced my knowledge of Bokmål by living in Norway at various times, by doing more reading, and by bothering my friends with a million questions. Dealing with Nynorsk required further study, and I cannot claim to have mastered it even as a reader, so I need more advice and feedback when translating from it than when translating from Bokmål.

CMM: What was the most important challenge for you in this translation?

Vesaas has certain characteristically odd turns of phrase that are difficult or impossible to render in English. They stretch Norwegian but are not un-Norwegian, so they require creative equivalents that stretch English but are not un-English. And of course English cannot be stretched in exactly the same was as Norwegian can be. But the greatest challenge lay in the responsibility I felt to introduce English-speaking readers to this poetry in a way that would help them to see that it was modern even though it was not urban, and that its relation to the natural world was profound and not a throwback to the English Romantic poets.

CMM: Has his work been an influence for your work as a poet?

RG: I think Vesaas’s poetry hasn’t exerted as great an influence on my own poetry as has the work of some other Scandinavian poets, but in one of my poems (“The Milky Way. Big and Beautiful”) I refer to him and quote three lines; and I’d say that in another (“The Voice”), the deliberate pace and the way silence creeps into the stanza breaks probably owe something to Vesaas.

CMM: You have been a consistently productive poet and writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?

WRIT Magazine

RG: I started using computers in the early 1970s to produce files for the literary annual I edited, WRIT Magazine. Coach House Press, where the journal was printed, was a test bed for cutting-edge digital typesetting and layout. I learned enough about computerized editing and typesetting on a UNIX system so that I could take advantage of it for my own work for about twenty years before I acquired my first Windows machine. This was an enormous benefit when it came to revision, especially for translations, and it enabled me to get book manuscripts several stages closer to publication than had been possible earlier. I felt that computers trebled my productivity, not in the sense that I wrote more or translated more, but insofar as they saved large amounts of time and encouraged me to produce finished manuscripts and files that I knew could be used for printing.

That was, you might say, the first digital revolution, the second being that of the Internet and later the World Wide Web. Online resources have made it much easier and faster to answer certain questions that arise in writing and translating, whether these be about language as such, about allusions in texts, or about what a certain landscape, building, or object looks like. Email has greatly facilitated getting advice and feedback from friends and colleagues in distant locations, consulting with authors I’ve translated, and getting proofs from publishers. And the web has made it possible for me to post descriptions of my books, sample poems, and ordering links.

Read more about Roger Greenwald's poetry
at www.rogergreenwald.org

Resisting distraction is really a question of psychology, work habits, and time management. We tend to forget that it was almost as easy to be distracted and to waste time before the Internet existed as it is now. One could read magazines and watch TV for hours a day. Those were, though, less fragmented activities than online distractions can be now, and were less likely to interrupt constantly. I made an early decision to stay off all social media, mainly because of concerns about privacy and distrust of the motives and methods of people like Mr. Green T-shirt. That decision has meant being uninformed about a few events now and then, and it has perhaps reduced my ability to promote my work (how many people would really have followed a Facebook page that posted new material only a few times a year?). But it has prevented most of the woes we all associate with social media, including invasion of privacy, online harassment, and the expense of countless hours on reading and posting.

CMM: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?

RG: In my formative years, my choice was between handwriting on paper and writing on an electric typewriter. I always used paper then for any work that required real thought and much revision during the writing process. Later I got to the point where I could write letters and reports on the typewriter, and sometimes even fiction when it was driven by a type of nervous energy that was in tune with the hum of the typewriter. Even after decades of using computers, I still write poetry by hand, and I tend to translate poetry by hand also. I can write a first draft of fiction or translated fiction on a computer. Handwritten drafts make it easier to see all the choices one has tried and then crossed out.

CMM: What's next for you as a poet and as a translator?

RG: I have more or less withdrawn from translation to focus on my own work (there is one more large translation project that I may or may not get to someday). But I do what I can for my previously published translations, like the Tarjei Vesaas book, which was first published in 2000 and was out of print for many years. Finding a publisher for a new edition enabled me to make revisions – the second time I have been able to revise and/or expand a major selection (on the other occasion the gap was from 1985 to 2002, when the University of Chicago Press issued North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen). Don’t ask me whether such opportunities are translators’ dreams or nightmares!

My first book of poems was published in 1993, my second (Slow Mountain Train) in 2015. Now I am hoping to get out my third and fourth books in the next two years. I have manuscripts beyond those and will be working on getting them into near-final form. So get off Facebook and watch my website: www.rogergreenwald.org !

+ + + + + + + +

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

P.S. Click here to read Greenwald's Q & A for Madam Mayo about his translation of Swedish poet Gunnar Harding's Guarding the Air, from July 2015. See also Greenwald's lecture for the University of Chicago in its series History and Forms of Lyric.

Usually I post a Q & A with another writer on the fourth Monday of the month, not the fifith, but as you see, the Muse had a notion. Look for a post here every Monday, and another Q & A with another writer next month.