At qarrtsiluni, Beth and I are really excited by this year’s winner of our poetry chapbook contest: Watermark by Clayton T. Michaels, which we just launched on Monday in dual print and online versions. As part of the latter, we put together a audiobook podcast of the author reading his poems, for which he also composed and performed an original guitar theme, but I thought it would be fun in addition to record a conversation with Clayton and find out where all this great poetry is coming from. So I called him up last Saturday, and peppered him with questions about writing poetry and music, teaching, heavy metal, comic books, and more.
Links
- Clayton’s blog
- Watermark online
- Two essays by Richard Hugo from The Triggering Town: Essays and Lectures on Poetry and Writing
- “A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass (in Robert Pinsky’s “Poet’s choice” column)
- Stan Brakhage (Wikipedia)
- Brakhage’s Mothlight on YouTube
- Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey
- David Dodd Lee’s blog
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)