Amish Trivedi : part five

Why is poetry important?

Is it?

Amish Trivedi : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Music is more important to me than poetry. I spend many more hours considering what I’m listening to (and who I’m listening to) than I ever will poems/poets. The only reason I’m not a musician professionally is— why ruin a good thing?

Amish Trivedi : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

After 17 years of defining myself regularly as someone who writes poems, I still have no idea why I’m so bad at it. I find it difficult to keep doing I know I’ll never be good at.

Amish Trivedi : part two

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

My friend Ben and I generally share poems back and forth. We have a love/hate relationship with each other’s poems: he hates mine and I love his (and we both hate our own). Once I have a larger stack of poems, I usually end up sending something along to GC Waldrep.

Amish Trivedi : part one

Amish Trivedi is the author of Sound/Chest (Coven) and Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed. He lives in Maryland.

How did you first engage with poetry?

At maybe 5 or 6, I wrote a song for my brother’s band about a wolf. He didn’t like it. I kept writing from there, whatever I felt like writing. Reading, of course, too.