Reading “Lost and Found” alongside “The Barnacle,” Alicia’s new poem in Poetry, is a wonderful reminder of how much this poet brings to the party. The longer poem is rich with bright threads of playfulness woven into a more somber-hued fabric of erudition and emotional profundity. And the short one is an example of light verse that combines serious heft with its jokey, frisky fun. (Alicia’s classical learning and intellectual firepower have never dimmed the twinkle in her eye. She was the Light featured poet some years back, and more recently wrote an insightful essay of appreciation for Julie Kane’s feature.)
As for the interview, I particularly love her answer to the question about “your allegiance to traditional or received forms.” She replies, “I wouldn’t say I had an ‘allegiance’ to form, rather a knack for it.” That’s not only wicked smaht, as they say in Boston, it also strikes me as delightfully subversive. In some precincts of our small world, formal poets adopt the attitude that writing in rhyme and meter amounts to professing a creed or waging a crusade, not playing an enjoyable game that we happen to be good at. So her answer does the opposite of telling formalists what they want to hear. The interviewer’s questions may be pat and uninspired -- poet interviews, like post-game athlete interviews, have their conventions and cliches -- but I sure don’t see any liveliness deficit on Alicia’s side of the exchange.
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