My poem “Great Bay Estuary,” from the collection Last One Out, is featured in the “How a Poem Happens” interview series, hosted by Brian Brodeur. The series has included interviews about poems by a frankly astounding array of poets, including (only to name a few) Rick Barot, Ross Gay, Donald Hall, Elizabeth Spires, Richard Wilbur, Camille Dungy, Tony Hoagland, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Marilyn Hacker, Matthew Dickman, Carl Dennis, Maxine Kumin, Stephen Dunn, Terrance Hayes, Robert Pinsky, Claudia Emerson, Linda Gregerson, Jennifer Chang, Dorianne Laux, Philip Levine, Galway Kinnell, Cate Marvin, Charles Harper Webb, Robert Hass, Marilyn Nelson, oh, and on and on. It really is a fantastic resource, a lot of fun to read through.

“I’ve always hoped a poem could work as a spell. Poetry works as we expect magic to. A good poem transforms the reader, inspires fear or hope, brings sadness or instills courage. It transports the reader to other places, other times, into another person’s life and experience. It lodges in the mind and survives on the tongue, changing the way the reader speaks. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is. . . . A poem must consist of memorable language, as Auden put it, and there are many ways to achieve that. Another characteristic of my ideal reader would be an ability to recognize ambiguity, to understand how a word or phrase could be read in more than one way—not in mutually exclusive ways—also the manner in which rhymes by themselves might undermine the apparent intention of a poem, little puzzles and clues like that, which are integral to my way of making poems.” – Ernest Hilbert, “How a Poem Happens”

You can read the poem and the entire interview by visiting “How a Poem Happens.” Check it out!