Bridget Talone Talks Process, Control for Bennington Review

Bridget Talone, author of The Soft Life (Wonder, 2018), is interviewed at Bennington Review! Henrietta Hadley has the interesting questions, e.g.: "How do you think about control in poetry, or is it something you think about?" Talone's response:

I think about it a lot now, but didn’t always recognize that control was a part of my poems or how it was operating. I remember meeting with a professor in grad school who told me he’d noticed the lengths of my phrases were consistently clipped. We talked about whether I was unwilling or unable to let the sentences go on. My dad had recently died after a long illness, and despite wanting my writing to get close to that experience, so much of my life and person was in pieces and felt unreachable to me. After that meeting, I started trying to work with the fragmented writing I’d produced, to see if I could shape it into something expressive or evocative of the subjects I wanted to approach. When I began to see it as related to reading and listening, exercising control became a process; a way to help a poem into its form. Lately, I’m interested in seeing what happens when I push toward longer, more unwieldy forms.

Please find the full interview at Bennington Review.