Over at Heavy Feather Review you can read an interview of Luke Stromberg by fellow poet and E-Verse accomplice John Wall Barger (Luke is the poetry editor for E-Verse and John co-hosts the E-Verse Equinox Reading Series). They cover a range of topics, from technique to what it’s like living across from a cemetery. Here’s a sample of this fantastic interview.

JWB: There are doubles, or ghostly presences, throughout your book. Sometimes it’s people imagining other lives. Sometimes, as in “Chimes at Midnight,” it’s remembering dead people. In “Talking to God,” the speaker says, “I feel like the understudy for myself.” Throughout The Elephant’s Mouth there’s longing and self-doubt, both of which involve a kind of doubleness: being in the present, yet imagining other possibilities.

LS: That’s true of “The Elephant’s Mouth,” which involves the idea of the “exciting” circus life, which my father did not live. Did he come back to his normal life and wonder, Could I have been something different? We long for excitement. And I often ask myself, Did I make the right decisions? When you live your life, you always doubt yourself. Is this as good as it gets? Is this where I’m supposed to be? I think the ending of that poem, where the father doesn’t join the circus, is ambiguous. Is it sad? Are we supposed to feel heartbroken that the father hardly thinks of the elephant at all? Did he give up on his life? Or is the braver thing to do to accept the life you have? Acceptance is a type of bravery, I think. To be okay with being a normal person and not be some special circus performer, or famous. The bravery to accept normal life.

Read on over at Heavy Feather Review!