Kelli Russell Agodon interview

Martha Silano interviews poet Kelli Russell Agodon on her blog, Blue Positive.  Kelli's newest book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room was this year's winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Book Award.  If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it.

Here's a little teaser:

Interstellar (& Very, Very Exclusive) Interview with Kelli Russell Agodon

Kelli Russell Agodon (www.agodon.com) stopped by the other day at Blue Positive to talk about her brand spanking new poetry collection, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Kelli's previous books are Small Knots (2004), and the chapbook, Geography, winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award. She lives in the Northwest, where she is an avid mountain biker and the editor of Seattle’s literary journal, Crab Creek Review. Here she reveals process and product secrets, including how a black bra and a black hole collided, resulting in a poem titled "What the Universe Thinks of Lingerie."

For more, please visit:

http://bluepositive.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/marthasilano

Whoo hoo! Great job!

A Poem for Wednesday

Neruda's Hat by Kelli Russell Agodon

Neruda's Hat

On a day when weather stole every breeze,
Pablo told her he kept bits of his poems
tucked behind the band in his hat.

He opened the windows to nothing
but more heat, asked her to wander with him
down to the beach, see if their bodies
could become waves.

When they returned he placed his hat,
open to sky, in the center of the table.
She filled it with papaya, figs, searched
for scraps of poems beneath the lining.

By evening, the hat was empty
and his typewriter, full
with pages that began something about ocean,
something about fruit.

And they didn't notice the sky, full of tomorrow's
stars or the blue and white swallow
carrying paper in its beak.

They sat outside until the edge of daylight
stretched itself across a new band of morning,
the shadow of a hat washing onto the shore.