This is what I think: that one feels nothing while writing a poem and only sort of thinks. It’s a high-wire act. Maybe. And the feelings associated with a poem, long or short, are entities from before and after the writing of the poem—which may well contain them—but one doesn’t, even cannot, experience them while writing.

ALICE NOTLEY's latest book is Certain Magical Acts.

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, including (most recently) Benediction, Negativity’s Kiss, and Certain Magical Acts. She has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She lives and writes in Paris, France.

I don’t feel like playing all these games any more, I say. That there is a literary world with rules, judgment, just observation. People have jobs about what I write; other poets have doubts about it, or what.

Anselm Hollo (1934-2013) was/is author of nearly forty books and chapbooks of poems, translator from five different languages of works ranging from poems by the great Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski to books by the Turkish-German detective novelist Jakob Arjouni to Brecht, Genet, Blaise Cendrars, and many more.