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

Donald Ray Pollock, author of the linked short story collection, Knockemstiff, sat down to talk with Sycamore Review’s Christopher Feliciano Arnold during a visit to Purdue University in September. You can click on the following links to listen to audio clips from the conversation. A transcript of the interview follows.

Clip 1: On writing and working at a paper mill

Clip 2: On first lines

Clip 3: On the reputation of his hometown of Knockemstiff

Clip 4: On learning to sit

Clip 5: On hearing voices

DONALD RAY POLLOCK was born in 1954 and grew up in southern Ohio in a holler named Knockemstiff. He dropped out of high school at seventeen to work in a meatpacking plant, and then spent thirty-two years employed in a paper mill in Chillicothe, Ohio before leaving to enroll in the MFA program at Ohio …MORE

Seth Abramson is the author of The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009) and co-author of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2008). He was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize by Poetry in 2008, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, AGNI, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. His poem “Angolans Approach United Nations Camp at Dukwi” recently appeared in Issue 21.1 of Sycamore Review. A graduate of Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently a doctoral student in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. — Mario Chard, Poetry Editor

SR: “Angolans Approach United Nations Camp at Dukwi” recently appeared in our Winter/Spring issue of 2009. What strikes me as peculiar about this poem, as opposed to much of your other work, …MORE

Dean Young is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Primitive Mentor and Embryoyo. His 2005 collection Elegy on Toy Piano was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Young has received numerous awards, including the Colorado Prize for Poetry, a Stegner Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.  His work has been anthologized numerous times in The Best American Poetry.  Currently, he teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. –Josh Wild, Poetry Editor

SR: First of all, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview.  You recently became the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas after spending several years teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  What has been the most surprising adjustment you’ve had to make between Iowa …MORE

Jessica Garratt’s first book, Fire Pond, won the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, selected by poet Medbh McGuckian, and was published by the University of Utah Press in April 2009. Individual poems from the collection have appeared in the North American Review, Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Missouri Review, and in the forthcoming Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets’ University and College Prizes, 1999-2008, edited by Mark Doty.  Currently, Garratt is a doctoral candidate at The University of Missouri, where she teaches literature and creative writing, and holds a Creative Writing Fellowship.  She has also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, and from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of  Texas at Austin, where she earned her MFA.  — Ruth Joynton, Nonfiction Editor

SR: Order is an essential process in building any poetry collection, and you’ve done a fantastic job of arranging the poems in Fire Pond. How …MORE

Denise Duhamel is the author of seven books of poetry, the most recent of which are Two and Two, Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems, The Star-Spangled Banner, and Kinky.  She is a recipient of a NEA in poetry and currently teaches in Florida International University’s MFA program. Denise was kind enough to agree to this interview in February of 2006 when she read at Purdue University.

 —Cody Lumpkin and Leslie St. John

Sycamore: What are you reading lately? What are you jazzed about?

Duhamel: I really like Beth Ann Fennelly. Both of her books, Open House and Tenderhooks, are very strong. I always look for her poems in magazines.  There’s another young poet, Deborah Landau, whose book Orchidelerium is really good.  I feel like whenever I make these lists I’m going to leave out someone really important…Major Jackson.  Leaving …MORE

BY JULIETTE LUDEKER

SR: You have a unique style that is reminiscent of early 20th century artists such as Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. And much of your work is images made of contemporary objects but with a referencing of the past. Can you speak a little but about your influences and motivation in creating work? How did you come to work in a style that is far from the slick, hyper-real images many people associate with photography today? What ideas, reference, emotions, etc. are you hoping to trigger in those who view your images?

Hayman: Nostalgia has always affected me and influenced my work – I want to be careful and not fall into the trap of being nothing more then a copyist however, so I work in ways that my influences can be seen but that I can still maintain a contemporary footing. In terms of emotions triggered by viewers …MORE