Q&A with Wade Stevenson

  

 

 

 

Wade Stevenson is the author of the new poetry collection The Human Core. His many other books include In the Country of the Peregrine. 

 

Q: Over how long a period did you write the poems in your new collection?

 

A: The time it took, perhaps a year or so, is not important. This book, perhaps more than my others, tended to write itself, to find the words that could best convey the deep, unwritten feelings of both heart and body.

 

The physical act of writing took a year or so. The real act of writing, of being able to join memory and feeling and time, has taken me most of my life.

 

My wife Lori just helped me celebrate my 80th birthday, so as the first 20 were for learning and absorbing, it would be fair to say it has taken me about 60 years. I know I couldn't have done it when I was 30, or even when I turned 60.

 

I think now is just about right, when I have at last accumulated and understood the experiences of the heart, as well as the beautiful and bitter reality of the lived in body.

 

Q: The poet Emma Bolden said of the book, "With graceful, open questions, Stevenson gently invites us to consider what it means to live and to live well, to love and to let love transform you." What do you think of that description?

 

A: That's a good description. To know the true feeling, you would have to read The Human Core.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: The question the book asks is relatively a simple one: "When does a moment / Become a moment? When it ceases to be / The moment it was, / Has not yet become / The moment it will be."

 

Or as the poet writes at the end of the poem titled "The Human Core": "Faithful as the sun, a spanking new moment / Will rise and shine in the darkness / Of all the moments to moments you lived, / Tightly wound around the human core."

 

If an emotion or feeling could be translated without loss into words, those are the words I would like the reader to take away from my book. If he or she were to do that, I would be happy because it would no longer be my book --- it would also be their book, the book that tries to go back to the beginning, the human core.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: My new book, a novel, or perhaps a work of autofiction, will hopefully see the publishing light of day in 2027. It's an amazing love story that unfolds in dramatic sequences in New York, Paris, Barcelona, Florence, Casablanca, Istanbul, and elsewhere.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Wade Stevenson.