“‘I’m going off-book now myself’: A Conversation with John Beer,” curated by Megan Levad



 
 
John Beer is the author of Lucinda (Canarium, 2016) and The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), and the editor of Poems (1962-1997) by Robert Lax (Wave, 2013). He teaches creative writing at Portland State University. Lucinda, his second full-length book, is a verse novella inspired by Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde. As Stephen Burt wrote of the 2013 chapbook version, published by Spork Press, Beer’s Lucinda “appropriates (as did his Waste Land) titles and lines from preexisting works, as if to show how they inhabit him, but then concocts effects that seem traditional, descriptive, emotional, even (cough) lyrical anyway.” In this interview, Beer reads from Lucinda, and discusses German Romanticism, boy’s clubs, pop music, and love.

 

Click here to listen to the interview >>