PN interviews poetry contest judge Kevin Latimer
Associate poetry editor Lisandra Perez talks to Kevin Latimer, guest judge of this year’s Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. Latimer is a poet and playwright from Cleveland, Ohio. He is the co-director of Grieveland, a poetry project. His recent poems can be found in jubilat, Hobart, Poetry Northwest, Storm Cellar, & elsewhere. His plays have been produced by convergence-continuum. He is the author of Zoetrope. Find him at squeezegently.com.
Lisandra Perez: Your poetry so effortlessly weaves and invokes a variety of genres such as flowcharts and playwriting. “Last Dispatch From my Dying Mouth” lends itself to this hybridity, which left me clutching my chest. When considering poetry, are you drawn to any particular elements, such as genre or visual experimentation?
Kevin Latimer: In my own poetry I am very interested in the idea of performance: punctuation as actors, the ‘reader’ as the audience. That is not necessarily what I am looking for when I read poems, though. So much of the fun in poetry is the learning of new possibilities, alternative histories and futures. I am drawn to poems with animals. I am drawn to poems that take chances with white space and sonics. I am drawn to poems I have to read again, discovering more.
LP: Congratulations on publishing your debut poetry collection, Zoetrope, this past August. I feel as though I could barely bring myself to pick up a pen last year. What (or who) has motivated you to continue writing during this time? Any advice for writer’s block in the pandemic?
KL: Thank you! It is weird in the way that what happened was never planned to happen, but did. I finished Zoetrope after two years of work during quarantine. I just finished another book. I don’t know if I quite remember when the second book started and the first ended. A year of grief, some heartbreak, a roaring engine. The engine is sometimes what I need to get a poem going: maybe I imagine my childhood home; everything in the pantry expired. I am hungry. Now there’s a poem in my brain. All this to say, maybe hone a good sense for looking. What sparks that wonder? That sense? Chase that. No matter how small.
LP: You're also a playwright. Can you think of a play that is ALSO a poem?
KL: I very much love Dalton Day’s collection of one-act dramatic plays Exit, Pursued and all the work of Sarah Ruhl—Melancholy Play and Eurydice, especially.
To learn more about Passages North’s Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, visit our submittable page. Deadline April 15, 2021.
