Adam Penna’s autobio:

“I haven’t always thought of myself as a poet. But when I was a boy, my best company was the voice I heard humming in my head. I would like to think it was the gentle voice of the universe, but I will say it was my conscience, growing and learning the language of poetry. And poetry, for me, is a matter of conscience. It is my way of figuring out what is right or wrong, good or bad, excellent or unsatisfactory, and true or false.”

And if that won’t do, and something else is required, please consider this:

Adam Penna lives on Long Island in the United States. His poems have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies. He teaches at Suffolk County Community College and holds an MFA from Southampton College, LIU. Finishing Line Press will be publishing his chapbook “The Love of a Sleeper," and S4N Books will be publishing a manuscript containing two of his long sequences called “Little Songs & Lyrics to Genji.” He edits Best Poem, an online journal publishing, not necessarily every day, a poet’s best poem.

Rati Saxena, Indian poet believes: "I feel true poet always loves love." How do you find this statement? A beautiful motto? A pure fact? Or an ambiguous desire which needs clarification? I specially like to know where is the place of hate in poetry ?

Each poem in its essence is a love poem, even when it is a poem, which addresses the darker aspects of the human spirit. What is hate but the love of the wrong thing? This is what strikes me when reading Dante’s Inferno, for instance, that even in hell there isn’t the absence of love – though Dante’s God’s love is absent – but an abundance of love misdirected, distorted, confused, abused and stingily withheld. It is the love of and in a poem, which causes the pity and terror or the joy and excitation that the best works of art inspire in the human spirit. For the poet, his first love is the love of language, which – ideally – brings him to a love of the world. His job is to praise even the worst, and to cherish and celebrate the very best.

What is your interpretation of this line by Delmore Schwartz :
"The poet must be both Casanova and St. Anthony"

I suspect what Schwartz means is that a poet must be the world’s greatest lover and a hermit. Okay. But a poet, I think, must be more. He must be like Adam, from the story in Genesis. He must be like the first man, the first person, and name all things. Essentially, the poet says: this is blackbird, this is sunset, this is sleep and this is love. The first question a poet asks each morning and the last question he asks before he goes to sleep is: What is this? The poem is the answer. I like to think of poetry, then, as prayer – which perhaps makes, for me anyway, the poet more St. Anthony than Casanova – but it is more, too. A poem is both prayer and answer, both call and response, both a record of something and a thing itself. It is as if a he-bird called to its mate: “I am here, I am here,” and she answered: “So am I, so am I.” Perhaps this is how the poet is Casanova. He woos an answer, which always, if he asks the question, obliges, comes.

What is the difference between the losses caused by natural death and the losses caused by war ? I mean what is the effect of these two kinds of absence on you as a poet?

I feel both losses keenly and don’t necessarily distinguish, at least in my heart, between the two. Loss is loss, absence absence. Of course, in my mind there is a great difference between what happens as a matter of course and what happens because of an act of will. Poetry is a moral art, which encourages us to accept the inevitable (and death is inevitable) and reject and condemn the unnecessary. I am not prepared to say that all wars are unnecessary, but neither am I willing to allow that war is inevitable. It seems unfortunate to me that what passes for political discourse seems to vacillated between two extremes, where reasonable people can’t participate. Poetry asks us to participate in the heroic spirit, the best men and women are capable of doing, saying, being. What strikes me as a poet is that when things are at their worst, people can be at their best. I didn’t know my neighbors half as well as I did, when the neighborhood was hit by a terrific storm that uprooted the biggest trees. We worked shoulder to shoulder all that afternoon, until the way was cleared and we had learned each other’s names.

What is your idea about Kay Ryan as new Poet Laureate?And this lines by Julie:

"while the NYT didn't deign to mention it, the Washington Post had a lovely profile of Ryan today in which she talked about her partner of thirty years and their wedding in Marin County (the same day she was called to be Poet Laureate.) So a woman and the first lesbian since Elizabeth Bishop, who was a little less open about her female penchants and passions. "

I like her poems. I think they are gems, polished and gleaming. And the formal inclinations, especially the surprising rhymes, give a great deal of pleasure. The achievement of her nomination and her sexuality merely prove things have changed, at least in some way, in the states. But I try not to be more involved than that. I don’t think that a laureateship does as much good for poets or poetry as some might argue, and it may even do some harm, at least in the short term, if people come to believe that the one national representative of poetry represents all poetry is. I poll my students every semester to see if they know who the poet laureate is or what a poet laureate does. Very few know. Most don’t care. And yet I have been to the readings, where the poet laureate climbs to the podium and preaches, to the converted, the virtue of poetry. All the apologies in the world can’t convince a reader if the poetry can’t first. And the poetry, whosever it is, laureate or hermit, must convince on the most profound level, deep below the skin, in the heart’s chamber, in the heart’s home. The laureateship of the heart can’t be awarded. It must be won. Think, then, how many laureates there are! Every lover scribbling verse to his sweetheart is a laureate, and every sullen adolescent, who keeps her notebook under her pillow, too.

Do you agree with this saying: " the more "professional" we become as readers ,the more myopic we grow"

I do. I blame poets and professors mostly for the alienation from poetry many people feel. (This is true in the US, anyway.) It takes most of my energy and ingenuity as a professor to cure students of the belief that without professional guidance, they would be unable to enjoy a poem. After all, isn't it true that what we do as professional readers of poetry is attempt to find language suitable to the experience of reading? This is a worthy endeavor but oughtn't usurp the more essential activity. A good poem, when spoken directly to a sensitive and eager audience, works like an electric current. Meaning, formulae, articulation, all of this is secondary. If we confuse finding the meaning of a poem with having experienced a poem, we make the same mistake as the philosopher who spends his life attempting to find the meaning of what, had he stepped out of his dark garret and into the sunshine, he might have possessed utterly. This is why I became a poet, partly. This is why I continue to write poetry.

How do you see the purpose of religion as a poet?

In some ways, the aims of poetry and the aims of religion are similar. They are to direct the soul away from the surface of things and toward their essences. Poetry and religion stem from a desire first to find and then to love what is divine.

What does highten your sense of personal and cultural identity as an American poet?

I don't think of myself as an American poet. Not first, anyway. But there are aspects of my personality, and therefore aspects of my poetry, which are essentially American. Whatever spiritual yearning there is to be found, for instance, in my poems falls into the tradition of American poetry, which aims to discover what will suffice, even what might sustain. There is, too, a reliance on the natural world, the images of birds and trees and the like, to find answers. Incidentally, I don't see these qualities as American. I see them rather as human. I guess it is, then, the accent, which is American. The particular flavor, like one finds in regional cuisine.

Iverson believes that the act of teaching is much like writing poetry ;every question is difficult and every answer not always accessible. How do you see teaching?

Teaching for me is about revision. Each class, like each poem, is an opportunity to revise or change one's understanding. The best teachers, I think, and the best poets don't lecture. Rather, they explore, test. Not that the attempt to make a space, provide an opportunity, for change, for reconciliation with the truth, happens all the time, but that should always be the aim. Then even our failures might be beautiful.

Animals play a significant role in Iverson life because according to her:" they teach the unequivocal lesson of unconditional love " . May I know your own feeling as a poet about animals?

I look to animals all the time for wisdom and strength. They are so self-contained, efficient, alive. In some ways, I feel more at home in the woods than I do in the human world. However, the wild is a fierce place, too, and its brand of love far larger than what many of us, from custom, have come to call love.

How do you enrich your ability to preserve and protect a poetic wolrd of your own?

I take my time, a little of each day, to tend to that poetic world. There is no other way, as far as I can see, to be successful as a poet - and I don't mean famous or literary, when I say successful - than to spend what is most precious, time and life, attempting to find what is essential. I was thinking about this other day, how courageous it is, really, to be a poet after middle age. So much depends on mere survival that to suspend the getting and spending for even a moment, especially when poetic attempts end so frequently in failure of a sort, seems always extraordinary. I don't mean to place the poet on too-high a pedestal. His isn't the only way to reverence. But it is one way. And a worthwhile one, too.

Tsvetaeva says: " I am no good at proving things.I don't know how to live ,but my imagination has never brtrayed me , and never will."Please tell me how do you introdce yourself? what is your intrepretation of betraying of imaginations? or realities? Is the main ability of a poet to know how to die? I remember also
Sylvia Plath and her saying; " Dying is an art.".

Living, too, is an art. For me, poetry is a way of seeing the world, of being in the world. I don't typically introduce myself as a poet. This is because people so frequently see poets as people who write poems. But that's not quite what I do or want to do. So it's better to be a poet, in the best sense of the word, and let my good works, where they flower, speak for themselves. I would like to avoid merely being literary, which seems a terrible way to live or die.

What makes you happy besides your writing?

My wife, sunshine, a big moon, the sound of geese barking overhead, the glimmering water, my cat, the field at the end of my road, the smell of earth, a good book, clean prose, the spirit in all its manifestations, fierce love and fiercer forgiveness.

As a redaer how do you interprete this line by Forough Farrokhzad , Iranian poet?:
It is the flowers' bloodstained history
that has commited me to life.

I don't know the poet's intentions, but whenever I read the word "life" I always stop to wonder what exactly that means. I guess there is a part of us, a holy part, I think, which stands apart from nature, which needs to commit itself to life. One is wed, of course, to all that. And yet how marvelous to say, "I do! Yes!" to the world, which spins and moves through the heavens and would whether we said yes or not.

Every body in my country who has read the translations of your poems is agree with me that you are American brother of our great Iranian poet: Sohrab Sepehri whose poetry is the symbol of Eastern soufism. How do you find the reason?I mean who is this classic poet from the East living inside you ?

I am flattered by the comparison. And I would hope that wherever I am successful as a poet it is because I have stumbled upon the truth or some aspect of it, which any other earnest poet might also find, should he desire to find it. When you ask who is the classic poet in the East living inside me, I stop to wonder. I don't know. I see him sometimes, in glimpses. He is a friend and he waves and disappears. He may be all in me that is good. He corrects me when I misstep. He soothes me, when my spirit is agitated. He rises up, when my strength would fail. He warns me: leave a space for light because, though you doubt, it is coming.