Poor Yorick: What got you and your group interested in the topic of the Indian Army in WWI? Sharon: I worked with Stephen Barker, Heritage Advisor and Consultant on the Alchester Project some years ago. I made a film about the project, which explored the Roman tombstone that was excavated in 2003, the memorial stone of the second Augustan Legion, Lucius Valerius Geminus. So I was fortunate that he approached […]
PY: Space is clearly an overarching theme in “A Lunar June.” Is it a frequently occurring theme in your other works? BH: This story, I suppose, marks the first time that I have written about space. I guess I always had the sense that a space story was going to sort of roil itself up in me – I especially think this when I consider the long nights watching the Northern […]
PY: How did you first hear about the Skull Tower of Niš, and what about it inspired you to write this poem? JS: In all honesty, I went looking for it, but I didn’t know what it was. I wanted to find something worth knowing about with a lot of poetic potential. I began searching for landmarks in Serbia—I’m an avid National Geographic reader, so foreign places and customs are […]
A Q&A by Carolyn Bernier PY: Did you see the works of art The Battle Between Carnival and Lent and Angelus Novus in person before you wrote your poems? If not, how did you come across and familiarize yourself with images of the paintings? No, I did not see either of them face to face, but I spent a lot of time looking at each in beautifully produced books that did justice to […]
by Carolyn Bernier – PY: What is your connection to the city of Worcester, Massachusetts? I moved to Worcester from Chicago in 2000, following a former spouse who had just gotten a job there. I lived there for seven years, teaching in various colleges and universities, most notably Clark University. I didn’t really like Worcester for most of the time I lived there. I found it gritty and hard to […]
by Melissa Gordon – PY: What drew you to Poor Yorick? Why did you think your piece “Ekphrastic Evolutions: New Paths in Poetry” would be a good response to PY’s mission? SF: I first found out about the aims of Poor Yorick when running a creative writing workshop with the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, England. The curator told me that editor Melissa Gordon [Poor Yorick’s then editor-in-chief] was […]
– A Q&A by Melissa Gordon PY: What inspired you to submit to Poor Yorick? CL: The swastika is such a potent symbol that I wanted as many people as possible to understand its history and why some cultures continue to use the symbol. By sharing knowledge, we widen our outlook and progress our creativity. Spreading positive information serves to educate, and I believe Poor Yorick is a great […]
– A Q&A by Jeannette Ronson According to William Zeitler’s book The Glass Armonica – the Music and the Madness, rumors of the instrument’s music leading to madness snuffed out the glass harmonica fad during the early nineteenth century. Mozart and Beethoven composed music for this instrument that emits eerie and unearthly sounds through the principle of rubbing wet glass. Ben Franklin played his own self-designed glass harmonica of thirty-seven […]
A Q&A by Leslie Lindenauer – PY: Your pieces published in Poor Yorick come from a series of digital photo-collage pieces taken from a current project entitled The Book of No Ledge. Can you talk about your artistic statement in this series? NVW: In my dialogue with this encyclopedia (circa 1947), I attempt to marry a bit of poetry with the know-it-all simplifier of the universe voice. Besides altering the […]
A Q&A by Leslie Lindenauer – For a little over two years now, Catherine Sasanov has been searching through archives in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, trying to find traces of an unnamed woman, enslaved and branded Y. In 1719, the woman had been sent by ship from Barbados to Kittery, Maine, where she was to be sold on consignment by merchant, William Pepperrell. She died approximately three weeks after […]