Q & A
Q: Do you ever borrow from other poets?
A: Absolutely. It’s not larceny, it’s homage.
Q: Critics have said your poems are like Frankenstein’s monster, disparate pieces badly sewn together that end up lurching out of the laboratory and eventually frightening a young woman brushing her blonde hair before going to bed. What’s your response?
A: Say, that’s not bad. Would you mind repeating it slowly?
—from Rattle #46, Winter 2014
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Ron Koertge: “Tucson, Arizona. Graduate school. 1962. Gerry Locklin shows me some poems of his in The Wormwood Review. The whole magazine knocked my socks off and I said to him, ‘I’ll bet I could write poems like these.’ He said, ‘Give it a try.’ I wrote a few, showed them to him, he gave me some advice, and I put them in the mail. I was 23 or so then, 73 or so now and still at it.” (website)