Post Questions for Charles Harper Webb Interview!!!!

The Charles Harper Webb interview will be coming soon! Now is the time to ask questions! Comment to this post with your questions and look for the answers in his forthcoming interview!!!

Charles Harper Webb is the author of numerous collections including Reading the Water, Liver, Tulip Farms and Leaper Colonies, Hot Popsicles, Amplified Dog, and his latest, Shadow Ball, New and Selected Poems. He is also the editor for Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, a truly wonderful collection of voices from across the poetic world. His work has appeared in anthologies and journals, too many to name, but to name a few: Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, and Poets of the New Century. He has received the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, Kate Tufts Discovery Prize Award, Felix Pollack Prize just to name a few. He grew up in Houston, received a BA in Honors English from Rice University, has an MA in English from Washington University, and his MFA in Professional Writing and his PhD in Psychology from USC. He is a former rock musician and now teaches at California State University, Long Beach where he directs the MFA Creative Writing Program.

Links to his poetry:

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Charles-Webb/19742

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Charles-Webb/19743

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Charles-Webb/19744

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Charles-Webb/19745

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Charles-Webb/19747

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Charles-Webb/19748

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Charles-Webb/4355

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Charles-Webb/4356

http://jacketmagazine.com/10/webb-c-h.html

http://judithpordon.tripod.com/poetry/charles_harper_webb_feeling_sorry_for_myself.html

Statement of Poetics

As a poet, I try to follow the Golden Rule—writing for others as I would have them write for me. With that in mind:

I like poems that generate momentum, and hit hard.

I like poems that crackle with energy, even if it’s the energy of despair. I don’t like poems that droop with world-weariness.

I like to hear voices I’ve never heard before.

I like to see from fresh perspectives.

I like to encounter fascinating minds.

I like poems that renew not just the language but the world, and therefore, my life.

Imagination is an end in itself.

I like strangeness, unless it’s gratuitous, or not gratuitous enough. (Monty Python’s "Fish Dance" is gratuitous enough.)

I don’t like poems that won’t risk meaning.

I don’t like monotonous poems, even when the single note is a good one.

I don’t like poems that use their lines like well-made bricks tossed at random on a lawn; these poems never get off the ground.

I like to be swept up, carried away.

I like to laugh.

I don’t exactly like to cry, but I like poems that make me want to (unless it’s from frustration).

I like to be entertained.

I read for fun; struggling isn’t fun for me.

I’m willing to work hard reading a poem, but what I get out of it must be worth more than the effort I put in. I want a fair return on my investment.

I don’t like obscurity for its own sake—or, to tell the truth, for any other’s.

I like language masterfully used: "the best words in the best order." Great language is necessary but not sufficient for great poetry.

I like words that are fun to say.

I love good metaphors.

I don’t really believe that "progress" in poetry is possible, but I try to write as if it were. I care more about progress in understanding the human psyche than in the development of technique.

I shy away from writing called "experimental"; the term usually sticks to failed experiments.

I think all good writing is experimental.

A poem is like a shark (or like sharks are supposed to be): if it stops moving forward, it dies. Also, a strong one can eat you alive.

The cardinal sin of poetry, as of all art, is to bore.

*taken from poetrynet.org