I’m enjoying the incredible syntax in GC Waldrep’s The Earliest Witnesses. Clemonce Heard’s poetry book Tragic City, which investigates the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, is brilliant. Emily Dickinson is a constant companion, especially Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them, edited by Cristane Miller.
That you need to be lonely in order to write is a myth. Other writers in your life will feed your art.
Status anxiety. The best way around status anxiety, Roberto Tejada once told me, is to be generous to other writers and to create a sense of community.
Probably a Lamy 2000 fountain pen. It’s an iconic design–in the Museum of Modern Art!
I can’t imagine any other vocation, but in my fantasy life I cook for a living, or I’m a ranger in Alaska, or an environmental land artist like Andy Goldsworthy.
Henk Rossouw is from Cape Town, South Africa. His book-length poem Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018, won the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. An assistant professor, Henk teaches poetry writing and literature in the English Dept. at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is also the co-director of the UL Lafayette Creative Writing Program.
