GETTING TO KNOW FRED MARCHANT AND HIS NEW BOOK SAID NOT SAID
Available now from Graywolf Press
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems?
Saul Bellow has said that “a writer is a reader who has been moved to emulation.” That was certainly the case with me. I had not read much poetry until I was in a freshman English class at Providence College, an introduction to literature, taught by Dr. Rodney Delasanta. We were reading Dante’s Inferno and lyric poetry from Shakespeare to Gerard Manley Hopkins and up to the then present tense. Something in the way poetry used language to say more and say it more intensely captured my imagination. I remember writing one of my first poems in the college library at PC, before class. I reflected on that moment in “Elephants Walking,” a poem in my first book, Tipping Point.