Crystal Stone : part five

How does a poem begin?

A poem is continually happening for me. It’s how I perceive the world. I’m more often than not a silent observer in public spaces, taking notes of what’s around me. I record everything. Dialogue overheard from strangers. Dialogue directed at me from strangers, friends, or students. Quotes from poems I love. Words and images I misread into poems when I tried to move too fast. Headlines I’ve seen. Memes that seemed almost philosophical. Somewhere in the process of taking notes of all the things I witness, a poem emerges and I realize why I’ve seen all the things I have. For me, life is a living puzzle; a poem is the exploration of why and how those pieces fit together.

Crystal Stone : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I just finished reading The Babies by Sabrina Orah Mark. I’m currently working my way through MOTHERs by Rachel Zucker and then I’ll start Blue Lash by James Armstrong, and Ghost Fargo by Paula Cisewski. I try to read a new one every Sunday.

Crystal Stone : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry is intimate, vulnerable, and shameless. It can take a form, or it can reject it altogether. Journalism has to present facts, comedy has to tell a joke, but poetry can do all of that while capturing the breadth of the emotional moment. A poem doesn’t have to stop at facts or the punch-line: a poem can tell the whole story. It preserves emotional memory in ways that the other forms don’t. It can be simultaneously depressed, beautiful, and funny, like the true human experience. It can tell the whole story or just part of it. There’s a responsibility to the reader and the people who populate the poems, but it’s also easier to preserve anonymity of the people discussed in a poem, too, because the character’s identities are less important than their reactions and actions in the world.
 

Crystal Stone : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I don’t. A poem is never really finished, but good enough to share. If you hold onto your words too long, they sometimes lose timeliness. And one of my goals is to write about current events, to touch people in the moments they need a poem. There are so many rapid changes happening right now in our country and they need a poet’s response.  

Crystal Stone : part one

Crystal Stone grew up in Pottstown, PA and received her Bachelor’s from Allegheny College. After spending two years teaching math in Jackson, MS, she returned to school to get her MFA in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various international journals including Driftwood Press, New Verse News, Occulum, Anomaly, BONED, Eunoia Review, isacoustics, Tuck Magazine, Writers Resist, Drunk Monkeys, Coldnoon, Poets Reading the News, Jet Fuel Review, Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, North Central Review, Badlands Review, Green Blotter, and Southword Journal Online. She gave a TEDx talk called “The Transformation Power of Poetry” the first week of April and her first collection of poetry, Knock-Off Monarch, is forthcoming from Dawn Valley Press this autumn. You can find her on Twitter @justlikeastone8 and on instagram @stone.flowering.

Photo credit: Yve Sojka

How did you first engage with poetry?

I first found poetry as a middle school student and continued to study it throughout my undergraduate career. Then, I stopped writing and reading poetry for two years. It was a tumultuous time. I was a middle school algebra teacher in Jackson, MS. My housing situations were never permanent. My support system didn’t exist. And it was there, in my second year of southern living, that I went to the Mississippi Book Festival and met Caroline Randall Williams, author of Lucy Negro, Redux. She sang “Lucy, Lucy, where you been?” and I was found again, even though I’m a white poet and it wasn’t meant for me. I bought her book and read it over and over. I bought other books like that one. Reginald Dwayne Betts, francine j. harris, Terrane Hayes, Danez Smith. I’d spend my Saturday’s at a lake or swamp reading poetry, a brown beer in one hand and pencil in the other, listening to the water, listening to the poets. I had something to say about all of it. I listed to the poet in others and found the poet in myself revived. That actually inspired me to go to graduate school and enroll in the MFA program I’m in now.