KC TROMMER is a poet and collage artist based out of New York City. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI Online, Poetry East, MARGIE and The Antioch Review, among other journals, and more recently in Sycamore Review. KC was kind enough to answer a few questions about her poetry and work with other visual arts. — Mario Chard, Poetry Editor

SR: “The Mechanism of Pleasure” recently appeared in our Winter/Spring 2009 issue. Would you mind telling us a little more “about” the poem, something of its genesis perhaps?

I was visiting with my friend in her summer camp at the tip-top of New York State, near Plattsburgh, when she gave me the idea for the poem. I hadn’t seen her for a number of years and, in the intervening time, she had had to undergo brain surgery to remove a tumor. We were having an epic …MORE

CARL PHILLIPS is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Speak Low, a new collection of work, and Quiver of Arrows, selected poems from 1986 to 2006. His many awards and honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, to which he was elected a chancellor in 2006. Phillips currently teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Below are a few exchanges from the much longer interview, which you can find in Issue 22.1–Winter/Spring 2010, due out next month. –Mario Chard, Poetry Editor

SR: You only write a few times a month—keeping away from distractions— and you write almost the entire day. My question is, then, do you …MORE

RITA DOVE served as the Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and has served as Poet Laureate to the Commonwealth of Virginia. From her first collection of poetry The Yellow House on the Corner in 1980, Dove has gone on to publish short stories, a novel, essays, and a number of poetry collections, the most recent of which is Sonata Mulattica, released only the week before this interview. She sat down to talk with David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review’s poetry editor at the time, in front of an audience at Purdue University. Below are a few exchanges from the much longer interview, which you can find in Issue 22.1–Winter/Spring 2010, due out next month.

DB: You return so often to musical themes in your work. Music seems to be a real constant, …MORE

Lauren Alwan’s short story, “Report from an Independent Chapter of the Embroiderers’ Guild of America,” appears in the current issue (Summer/Fall 2009) of Sycamore Review. In the story,  which is told from the perspective of a sharp 14-year-old narrator named Gillian, she and her grandmother attend the meetings of a local embroiderers’ guild. We’re big fans of the story, as evidenced by our nominating it for a Pushcart Prize last month. Sycamore’s Fiction Editor James Xiao recently interviewed Alwan, who lives in San Leandro, California, and teaches craft and fiction workshops in San Francisco. It was Sycamore’s first instant message interview.

SR: Let’s start with your story. I must say that as a guy in his twenties I did not expect to be as captivated as I was by a story featuring embroidery and physics.  But I once …MORE