Our Book Pages columnist Erik Pedersen talks with the editor-in-chief of Copper Canyon Press, ‘Homestead’ author Melinda Moustakis shares some book favorites and more.
Spending an hour talking about poetry with Michael Wiegers of Copper Canyon Press is a part of this job that doesn’t seem like work.
“I would argue that Copper Canyon, and all the people who have been a part of it over 50 years, have helped build and increase an audience for poetry in this country and shown that actually there are people who want to read poetry if you’re able to get it in front of them,” he says. “We’re small, but we punch above our weight when it comes to the poetry field.”is located in Washington state at Port Townsend’s Fort Worden State Park, a former military installation turned arts complex.
Let me underscore that last bit: I’m no poetry expert, but this collection is rich and welcoming and it seems to contain something for everyone – which may be by design. Rather than choose poems himself, Wiegers asked poets, colleagues, interns, board members and others for input on what to include. Soliciting other readers’ personal stories and suggestions for the anthology had an unexpected benefit as well.
“I think also that impulse to want to, as I did with my mom, to try and tell her what that painting made me feel like or what I was seeing or what I was identifying, that’s kind of what I want to do as a publisher and an as an editor.” “It’s a good question,” says Wiegers, who invokes Robert Frost’s quote that “poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom” as well as a line from Hayden Carruth’s “The Impossible Indispensability of the Ars Poetica” , which reads: “A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is, is never to be known for which I have learned to be grateful.”“This may be a cheeky answer, but I think a reader makes a poem good.
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