In Conversation with Gjertrud Schnackenberg: Part One, Unstruck

Photo by Mike Minehan Tuning fork. Detonation. Lute-string . When we talked via email this January, Trude Schnackenberg was packing for a month in Rome and going, as she put it, "full steam ahead until horse latitudes are hove in." Here, in Part One of a conversation that will continue over the next few months in this space, she lays out several marvels. Kung-note. Big bang. Honeybees . ~~~~~ SUSAN GILLIS: How did you first come to poetry--or, how did poetry come to you? GJERTRUD SCHNACKENBERG: For poets, poetry is a call-and-response medium: poets write poems because they have first read or heard poetry. I first read a poem at the age of fourteen, and recognized at that moment that this would be my world; after reading poetry for five years, I began writing at the age of nineteen. Poetry comes from poetry, poetry begets poetry, poetry evinces, instills, brings about, generates poetry, in poets (and so too I think composers write music because they have first