I love reading, first and foremost, and then writing is, maybe, something that is a response to that love.
Thanks to Montse Andrée Carty and the Musings of the Artist podcast team for hosting AHP author Darius Atefat-Peckham in a wonderful interview! Darius is the writer of Book of Kin, which won the 2023 Autumn House Poetry Prize.
On the relationship between grief and poetry, Darius had this — and much more — to say:
Poets tend to be pretty in tune with their mortality, and not only that, but understanding what they’re doing is speaking out from a place that we have existed before, and will exist in again, and then that somebody, sometime, might connect, wherever they are… That’s why when I have conversations with people who have read their work and have connected with it, that’s what it’s the most fulfilling thing… I made something lasting in the world, and in this person, and in myself.
