A 10 for 10 Mississippi

In this interview with Dwight Hobbes of the Daily Planet, Minnesota poet Steve Healey shares some of the inspirations behind his latest collection, 10 Mississippi, including post-punk, Wallace Stevens, and news stories of dead bodies found in the Mississippi River. Hobbes calls him another one of Coffee House Press’ “brilliant finds”:

What has proved most rewarding about [writing poems]?

The money! Just kidding. What I love especially is the process of making something, building poems word by word, line by line, as if they were little sculptures on the page. For the poem to work well, I need to keep looking for the right relationships between all the parts, the most interesting connections and collisions between images. My mind tends to work slowly but precisely, and I think I was attracted to poetry because it can benefit from this thinking style, so I felt as if it were something I could do well. It can certainly be frustrating to spend a whole day moving a few words or lines around on the page, but when it works, there's nothing more rewarding for me . . .