Combustus 13 Interviews Peg Boyers
"I don’t think that there exists one universal topic that we all would be served to write about. Whatever the topic, however, my experience is that all good poems share one quality, that of honesty. We need to be as honest as we know how to be as we dig and dig, trying to get to the bottom of a given episode, relationship, feeling or dynamic.
Even if the facts offered are not literally true, they need to be true in spirit. It’s strange, but I always find that if I am taking some sort of emotional short-cut to tie up a poem in order to avoid getting mired in complexity, I never succeed in hoodwinking that poem into being. It just doesn’t work. The more important the poem, the truer this is. The poem resists such maneuvers. Perhaps this goes back to an earlier question you asked about some themes, some poems, just being too daunting. One tries and tries, but as Borges put it so well in 'Matthew XXV:30':
You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.
There may not be a single topic we all might be well served to address, but there is The Poem each of us needs to write. And reaching for that poem, time and again, is what this curious enterprise of being a poet is about. It is the reach that we are all well-served by."
--Peg Boyers, Executive Editor of Salmagundi Magazine, in her interview with Deanna Piowaty of online arts and literary magazine Combustus 13.
Below, Peg reads her poem "Ambition of Sand" at the New York State Summer Writers Institute.