Riding Bareback on a Good Associative Leap!
“But as soon as I notice how happy I am. how close to the sun, there I go plummeting into the background of the same same painting as ever.”
Talking with the poet, Craig Morgan Teicher about his most recent collection of poetry from BOA, Welcome to Sonnetsville, New Jersey. Really what we’re discussing is a lot about the trajectory of a poets’ life, in parenting, publishing, editing, and reckoning with the past.
We discuss the process of creating a manuscript during the trump years and quarantine; the poet with a troubled childhood having children themselves, and what a unique experience it is to be able to explore that frightful and fascinating experience in poetry.
Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books of poems, Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA, 2021); The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017), which won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012); and Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, (CLP, 2007), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry. He also wrote Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA, 2010) and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums (Omnidawn, 2014). His collection of essays We Begin in Gladness, was published by Graywolf in November, 2018.
Teicher edited Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions, 2016) and serves as a poetry editor for The Literary Review. He writes about books for many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The LA Times, and NPR. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and children. He worked for many years at Publishers Weekly and is now Digital Director of The Paris Review. He is a 2021 recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.
