Interviews
Interview with Robbie Gamble, Cambridge Common Writers
“The more I think about subject matter, the more I care about tone.”
Interview with Frances Donovan, Garden of Words
“More and more . . . I’ve found that the border between generative work and revision is at best a sometimes useful fabrication. For me, rewriting a poem-in-process involves just as much intuition as the first draft. I’ve traded in the word ‘revision’ for ‘completion,’ since that feels closer to what I do.”
Why We Write, a Podcast Interview
“I don’t think of reading as somehow separate from life, or writing as separate from life. I also often find it weird when people say, ‘Oh, another poem about poetry.’ And I’m saying, ‘Yeah, but maybe it’s a good poem about poetry and why shouldn’t poets write about poetry?’ It’s something that’s pretty central to their lives.”
“Like anyone who keeps at it for decades, I hope I’ve become my own writer, but I know that originality results from a chemical change involving interacting influences. It’s been pointed out frequently that ‘originality’ has as much to do with origins as with novelty.”
Interview with Massachusetts Review Online
“At sixty-five, I’d like to think I’ve become, more or less, my own writer, but I know that’s always only more or less the case.”
“’It is impossible to say just what I mean.’ I was 17 when I first read that line, and it pierced me then and still does. In some ways, Clangings pays homage to that one line.”
Interview with Steven Cramer on The Poetry of Recovery blog
“The structure of the pantoum—the insistent recurrence of its lines—seems like the right form for the way lost loved ones keep ‘turning up’ in memory.”
Interview with Steven Cramer at Memorious
“The more I learned about clang associations, the clearer it became that these speech patterns draw on the same mental well-springs that give rise to the associations of a certain kind of poetic language and thinking.”
Interview and Sarabande in Education Guide to Clangings
“For the roughly two years I wrote and rewrote them, that inner voice almost every artist knows—the one that says, who do you think you’re kidding?—was silenced.”
Interview with Steven Cramer at Litseen
“I don’t think writing—especially writing poetry—can be rightly described as a career. I’ve written poetry as often despite my career as because of it.”
Steven Cramer: Featured Poet at Perihelion
“Restraint, in art, grows out of formal challenge. Perhaps not surprisingly, subjects closest to my bones—say, mixing my parents’ ashes and burying them—have often led me to the strictest of received forms.”