James Longenbach is the author most recently of Draft of a Letter.
1. What poet should be in Obama’s cabinet, and in what role?
None. No poet knows enough about something other than poetry.
2. If you could send Obama one poem or book of poems (not your own), what would it be and why?
None. He couldn’t learn what he needs to learn from poetry.
3. What other poetry-related blog or website should I check out?
I’ve never read a blog.
4. Who is the most exciting young/new poet I’ve never heard of, but whose work I ought to find and read?
Chaucer.
5. What’s the funniest poem you’ve read lately? What was the last poem that made you cry?
Lately, funny poems seem like a socially acceptable form of narcissism.
6. William or Dorothy? Robert or Elizabeth Barrett? Moore or Bishop? Dunbar or Cullen? “Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully” or “No ideas but in things”? Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or Tender Buttons?
Moore. She altered the discourse of poetry permanently, subtly, and with no self-congratulation.
7. Robert Lowell wrote a poem called “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid.” What supposedly immortal poem puts you to sleep?
That would be my fault.
8. Even for poetry books, the contract has a provision for movie rights. What poetry book should they make into a movie? Who should direct it, and why? Who should star in it?
This is a funny question.
9. What lines from a poem you first read years ago still haunt you now?
“Some say the world will end in fire”
10. What poem do you love, love, love, but don’t understand?
All of them.
11. If the official organ of the AWP were not the Chronicle but were the Enquirer, what would some of the headlines be?
I’ve never read the AWP Chronicle.
12. If you were making a scandal rag for poetry in the grocery store checkout stands, what fictitious poetry love triangle would you make up to outsell that tired Hollywood story of Angelina and Brad and Jen?
Shakespeare—Milton—Keats. It happened.
13. This is the Best American Poetry blog. What’s the best non-American poetry you’ve read lately?
Galassi’s translations of Leopardi.
14. We read poems in journals and books, we hear them in readings and on audio files. Sometimes we get them in unusual ways: on buses or in subway cars. How would you like to encounter your next poem?
In my mouth.