Authors Talk: Amie Whittemore

Amie WhittemoreToday we are pleased to feature author Amie Whittemore as our Authors Talk series contributor. In her podcast, Amie uses Maxine Kumin’s essay, “Coming Across: Establishing the Intent of a Poem,” to describe the variable beginnings of poems. Specifically, Amie discusses her own poem, “Lunar Eclipse,” which was a “given poem…a gift, the poem that flows easily.”

However, Amie does not want the listener to think this means it was an easy poem. As she says, “There is no easy poem, there is no love at first sight. What there is, is invitation and readiness.” She emphasizes that poets should be “like a shovel…purposeful but often idle” because “the given poem won’t give itself to us if we are distracted, bottled up, not embracing our shovelness.”

You can access Amie’s poem, “Lunar Eclipse,” in Issue 18 of Superstition Review.