Poet Alison Stone chats with me today about her new collection, Informed.
Bio:
Alison Stone is the author of nine full-length collections, Informed (NYQ Books, 2024), To See What Rises (CW Books, 2023), Zombies at the Disco (Jacar Press, 2020), Caught in the Myth (NYQ Books, 2019), Dazzle (Jacar Press, 2017), Masterplan, a book of collaborative poems with Eric Greinke (Presa Press, 2018), Ordinary Magic, (NYQ Books, 2016), Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award; as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, and many other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize, New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award, and The Lyric’s Lyric Poetry Prize. She was Writer in Residence at LitSpace St. Pete. She is also a painter and the creator of The Stone Tarot. A licensed psychotherapist, she has private practices in NYC and Nyack.
What do you enjoy most about writing poems?
When my writing is going well, I feel energized and calm, as though I’ve entered a different way of being than my usual task-oriented days.
Can you give us a little insight into a few of your poems – perhaps a couple of your favorites?
My new book is all poems in form – pantoums, ghazals, villanelles, a jeweled sonnet crown. I love bringing contemporary subjects into these ancient forms. My goal is to turn form from a cage into a hug.
What form are you inspired to write in the most? Why?
I’ve written well over a hundred ghazals. The rhyme and repetition are pleasing to me (I used to be a punk dj). Also, the fact that the couplets don’t connect except by formal elements works for me as a working mom. I can write a couplet or two, get interrupted or go to work, and then pick it up when I get my next break. There’s nothing lost, as it is when I’m interrupted in the middle of writing free verse.
What type of project are you working on next?
I’m doing revisions on my next manuscript, which is a mix of free verse and forms. There’s a form I invented that I’m very excited about.
When did you first consider yourself a writer / poet?
I wrote my first poem when I was six, a love poem to my beagle. “Your nose is wet and you’re my pet. You’re brown and white, you never bite … “ Mostly though I wrote prose. I was planning a novel, The Adventures of Scruffy, about a dog. But I never made it past chapter one. Then I wrote fiction only until I had to take poetry in college as part of distribution requirements. I was really into music, and poetry was closer to song, so I switched.
How do you research markets for your work, perhaps as some advice for not-yet-published poets?
I still use (the print book) The Poet’s Market. Also Chillsubs and Calls for Submission on Facebook. I also look in the acknowledgements of poets I admire.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I like to mix high and low culture – Greek mythology with punk, teen slang with larger philosophical issues.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A writer and an artist. Then a lawyer or a vet.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Don’t be afraid of form. Let it be playful and fun.
Links:
Website | YouTube and Tik Tok – Alison Stone Poetry