Marc Woodworth: I often write in the voices of different people --- Sophia Tolstoy, Adrian Leverkühn from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder --- and there's something of me in each of their voices. I'm not sure if poems that appear to be written in a more directly autobiographical first person voice carry more or less of the writer's identity --- in some cases more, in others less. A poem like "Lovis Corinth at Walchensee" --- the interior monologue of a dying German painter in the early years of the twentieth century--seems to define me, if that's what it does, as much as a poem like "Children and Cigarette" which comes more directly out of my experience as someone who lives at this moment in time and has seen the kids who are the subject of the poem with his own eyes.
Richard Matthews: No. My poems and I have negotiated a kind of don't-ask-don't-tell policy: I don't define them (and here we anticipate problems with question # 9) and they don't define me. Others have suggested that a poem such as "Of Mere Virtuosity," with its themes of apotheosis through art, its conflagratory imagery, might be somehow defining of the work if not the worker exactly.
Mary Jo Bang: No. I can't imagine how a person could be adequately defined by language.
Billy Collins: The poem that defines me would be the next poem that I write. I have no interest in what I have already written, certainly not as a way of defining myself.
Marge Piercy: No. I have written hundreds of poems and I am still at any given period reading poems I wrote thirty years ago and poems I wrote last week.
Cornelius Eady: Not really --- I have a pretty restless nature, and I think anyone who closely reads my books will get a sense of that. There are some poems and books of mine I feel more strongly about than others, and I'm sure there are people who could easily break down the various elements that make up my work, but I don't feel there's any single poem that sums me up as yet.
Honor Moore: Right now the poem of mine that defines me is the title poem, "Darling" of my new book Darling. Poems by others that I love now are "I ask for Silence" by Pablo Neruda in Alistair Reid's translation and "An Elegy" by C. K. Williams in the current Threepenny Review.
Jeffrey Greene: I wrote a sequence poem "Glimpses of the Invisible World in New Haven" that doesn't define me so much as it defines my personal approach to poetry and my particular style. The sequence juxtaposes short lyrical and narrative poems in order to allow me a greater range in content, tone, and point of view. Much of my poetry deals with social issues and their complexity and the sequence has allowed me access to this material.
