Casie Dodd’s poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in places like Oxford American, The Windhover, and Front Porch Republic. Based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, she is the
Founder & Publisher of Belle Point Press.
C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking is now available from Acre Books. He’s the author of three chapbooks, most recently American Cavewall Sonnets (Bull City Press, 2021). He’s the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award in poetry. His poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, 32 Poems, RHINO, and elsewhere.
As I was preparing for this interview, I went back to my bookshelf and dusted off one of the earliest poetry books I own, Jorge Luis Borges’ Sonnets. It had been a while since I last read it, but the following lines from “1984” were just as moving to me now as they were when I first read them twelve years ago:
I want to forget our blood-drenched history,
the sword and all its battles, but not the poet
who sang of them so sweetly, not the secret
guardian music that holds our memory.
The world is tragic, and it is no doubt hard to forget the worst parts of history when writers cast life’s injustices toward a broader audience. For poets, these sentiments are heightened given the genre’s emphasis on economy of language, and when writing in the sonnet form, the task of revealing “the sword and all its battles” adds another dimension to the page. Casie Dodd and C.T. Salazar have accomplished something truly remarkable in Mid/South Sonnets (Belle Point Press 2023), an anthology of sonnets that brings together sixty-six poets with strong ties to the American south. Through traditional and experimental approaches that center on a myriad of landscapes and cultural perspectives, we are given the privilege of experiencing a collection that “enacts an attempt to struggle through the anxieties of home in the hope of finding a place to love and belong.”
Casie and C.T., I’m incredibly grateful for your time. As I just mentioned above, one of the earliest poetry books I purchased was Jorge Luis Borges’ Sonnets, presented in both Spanish and English. It was such an amazing collection of his work in that form, and it offered a world of insight that I hadn’t quite discovered with the sonnet yet. He made sonnets fun, and he offered me as a young reader “a moment of transformation,” as you say so eloquently in your introduction, C.T. How did assembling these sonnets from writers from the Mid/South transform both of you, as writers and individuals?
Casie Dodd: For my part, deciding to start a regional press focused on a less clearly defined area has largely been a process of intuition, often fumbling around to get a sense of any and every through line that could be said to represent this eclectic middle of the country with an ambivalent relationship to its “southern” identity. Knowing I am in many ways limited by a very particular experience, I’d really hoped to gain a broader range of perspectives, so it was a delight to see that hope take shape in this anthology—C.T. deserves much of the credit for that. At the same time, the form of the sonnet enabled us to see common threads in the poets’ approaches to wide-ranging themes, much as their common geographies also found expression in unique ways. As a writer with an odd blend of poetics in my own work, I was continually struck both by how our contributors adapted traditional form so smoothly and made it their own in ways I would never have imagined. I’m also grateful that working through this project helped build a friendship with C.T. that has made me a more attentive reader.
C.T. Salazar: That’s a beautiful question. Seeing the book take shape and trying to be a good custodian to its needs was transformative for me. This is my first time to be in any kind of editorial role, but when Casie described the project and we began thinking through a mission statement for the anthology, I knew this was a book I’ve always needed. We read so much good work and ultimately every poem in the anthology expands my understanding of the sonnet (and the South) a little more. Something I’ve taken away from the experience of making the anthology is how poetic form and place are similar in that we get to know it best through each other.
Esteban Rodríguez: While the United States is incredibly diverse, every region of the U.S. tends to be placed in a particular category, and with that category comes negative perceptions about the people that inhabit such places. A lot of nuance can be lost when someone says they are from Texas, or Arkansas, or Mississippi. But here, we see the financial struggles of a farmer (“The Reasons We’re Falling Apart” by Justin Carter), the journey of discovering one’s ancestry (“Double Sonnet Instead of an Introduction” by Steven Leyva), and the important role food plays in one’s identity and interaction with oneself and others (“hoppinjohn: a blues” by Ashley M. Jones). Mid/South Sonnets offers a variety of worldviews. What did you discover that you didn’t know before about the region and the writers who call this place home as you gathered work?
C.D.: I love your observations about the nuance often lost when discussing boundaries that are to some degree arbitrary or otherwise imposed upon us. I’m continually fascinated by the ways that even a single state contains various subcultures depending on how they relate to their respective borders, especially in this part of the country that’s surrounded by several more clearly defined regions. The examples you list are excellent case studies in the ways that we seem often to be bound by similar preoccupations—family, identity, and the limitations of place—but what stood out to me was how often the poets seemed to have traveled throughout the region (or beyond it) and continued to feel drawn to the same sense of home in different landscapes. It would seem that for a lot of our writers—and folks in general throughout this area—that something about the place sticks even if you try on a few different versions of it, or leave altogether.
C.T.S: Something that really became clear to me is the variety and depth of aesthetic practices and poetics. I already knew the South was far from a monolith, but there was something so strikingly beautiful about really seeing the brightness of all that life presenting itself specifically in sonnet form. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.’ Also echoing Casie, I don’t think either of us really expected to see so much work from folks who had left the South but were in many ways still writing from it, and folks with roots to the south maybe not as deep as lifelong southerners. We agreed early on that we wouldn’t police someone’s claim of belonging here. What makes a southerner, if all our borders and lines are really as arbitrary as they are? As William Bronk said, “We are always in some degree still no where in an empty vastness” –building this book really hammered to me that it’s something so much more than geography that makes us southerners, or neighbors.
ER: One poem that I kept coming back to was George David Clark’s “Washing Your Feet,” and in particular, the last lines really made me consider how unique every one, regardless of geography, truly is:
You’re no one, and you’re special,
drawn to leave before you’re even dried,
the paths bathed off revealing paths inside.
There will always be paths within paths, and I wonder how you see this anthology forging a path within the existing literature of the Mid/South? What do you hope it adds? What gaps do you think it fills?
C.D.: That’s a remarkable poem—thank you for singling it out. It feels in many ways to me kindred to Caleb Nolen’s poem, “Letter to the Man Possessed by Demons,” particularly its closing lines: “I will prepare a meal, / you will tell me your new name.” Both have this sense of transience that nonetheless finds refuge in a genuine sense of home, hospitality. One of the most exciting things for us so far has been watching the conversations between contributors across social media as they’ve started seeing how their individual work fits into the larger project—something that we had of course known for a while but found much more rewarding when it could be shared more fully. I think we hope that others will see that conversation in the way that we arranged the poems as well as in the wide range of backgrounds and identities represented. It can be difficult to balance the variety of voices and levels of experience in an anthology, but I think we managed to create something cohesive that will offer something to all kinds of poetry readers. I hesitate to comment much on filling gaps except to say that the concept of “mid-south” is still somewhat amorphous to a lot of people (including me at times), so I’d like to hope that this exploration of region in a more holistic sense will resonate with folks from anywhere and everywhere.
C.T.: I have to echo Casie! In so many ways, making this anthology felt like tuning our ears to a conversation that was already on-going. Putting just a small bit of that on-goingness to paper felt like an act of preservation. Your question makes me think of Randall Horton’s ‘almost sonnet’ (there’s an extra quatrain in it) in which he dedicates to the “almost forgotten”:
we had been landlocked by bodies, ours—
thinking about a lil’ song, no rhyme,
invisible thematic threads between
language of cartography, igniting
The title of Horton’s ‘almost sonnet’ is a question that –to me– became an arrow for the direction of the anthology’s development: “But Where To from Here?” A question like that leads me to believe the gaps cannot ever be fully known, but the path is that fifth cardinal direction Eduardo Corral describes in his poem “To Francisco X. Alarcon”: “Not the sky or the ground / but the person right next to you.” I hope what this anthology adds or fulfills to the existing literature is a sense that none of this is happening in a vacuum. That we’re all–our poetics, politics, oppressions and liberations–interconnected.
ER: We’ve talked a bit about how assembling this anthology led to a self-transformation, a reinforcement of ideas, and discovery. I haven’t had the privilege of assembling an anthology, but I have worked on assembling my own poetry manuscripts. Every part of the process is deliberate, from the placement of the opening poem to how the collection will end. So, I wanted to ask about the groundwork that went into the logistical aspects of this anthology? Were there discussions about which poems belonged where? When did you know that Mid/South Sonnets was in the form it was meant to be in?
C.D.: I really appreciate this question because it’s an aspect of labor I didn’t fully appreciate until getting into publishing. Those Word/Google doc dimensions don’t always translate well into actual books! Perhaps the biggest factor that influenced our logistical choices was deciding to print in a smaller trim size (5 x 7 inches), a space well suited to traditional/conventional sonnets but that quickly became challenging as we took on some of the more experimental poems (such as makalani bandele’s fantastic crossword puzzle sonnets). To be honest, I’ve almost forgotten why C.T. and I made that trim-sized choice, except that it felt right to both of us on an intuitive level. Some sonnets with longer lines we instantly agreed would work well oriented sideways, while with a few others the poets were gracious enough to edit certain lines within our space constraints. One favorite example in terms of typesetting was stretching Ashley M. Jones’ double contrapuntal sonnet, “hoppinjohn: a blues,” across a full spread; I’m grateful that Ashley made this suggestion and that we were able to do this remarkable poem justice visually.
As far as arranging the order of poems, I spent some time thinking about it on several levels: how I saw the progression of themes in broad terms (beginning in exile with Stacey Balkun’s “Carthage”—“Now, I’m the one asking // us to leave”—and ending with Raye Hendrix’s “Birmingham Double Sonnet”: “We were always meant to come home.”), spacing out the various perspectives and identities represented by the contributors, and balancing the conventional poems alongside more unusual approaches to the form. While the entire book works together as a whole, I hope that readers will see each poem in smaller conversations with the others surrounding it as well—as C.T. said, an ongoing conversation that can be read on many levels however you might choose to experience the anthology.
C.T.S.: Yea, I don’t remember how we decided on the size either! Something about wanting to be both fully contained and restless in that containment echoed the contents in a neat way. I’ve put together less books than either of you, so I felt far away from my comfort space. Carl Phillips says that a poem isn’t a map but a record of having been lost—there were several ‘versions’ of the order we were trying as we were accepting submissions here and there. Each time, it felt more familiar. Casie (those sharp editor eyes!) had a lot of breakthrough moments with the order where conversations across poems would be brought to light with greater clarity. Like she said, attuning ourselves to the needs of each poem spatially revealed the path, even if we can’t always say how we got there.
ER: I think maybe of all the different forms of poetry, sonnets are and will continue to be quite resilient (if I’m not mistaken, they date back to the 13th century). So given the abundance of sonnets that have been written in the history of literature, I must ask, do you have a favorite?
C.D: That’s hard! Most of the poets I’ve read closely myself haven’t been known for their sonnets, so my sense of the form has been from general reading and trying to catch up in recent years with poets like C.T., actually. For some reason, one that has always stayed with me is a “collage” sonnet by Ted Berrigan (XV in his Sonnets). The poem is read back and forth, alternating from the top to bottom lines—1-14-2-13, and so on—until meeting in the middle with the volta-turned-closing line (#8) “and the sonnet is not dead.” There’s something about it that I find remarkably moving, and the formal experimentation is just one example of the sonnet’s endlessly “resilient” qualities, as you say.
C.T.S.: One thing that was neat about working on this project with Casie was how our own sonnet ‘genealogies’ are so different from each other! I have so many favorites... Frank Bidart’s “Song” comes to mind though. I love how by the second stanza, “you” the reader have become the bear the poem is describing. What a volta, what a transformative moment. The mechanics of that poem are so simple, almost proto-sonnet-like with how the end words of the stanzas operate. Many of Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets sit as favorites in my head too. George Herbert’s sonnet “Prayer (I)” is also pure magic to me. Jericho Brown’s “Duplex: Cento” –the list continues, but every sonnet that stands out to me pushes the horizon of what I previously thought possible in the form.
ER: One of the most innovative sonnets in the book is Makalani Bandele’s “a little bit of blackitolism revisited with answers.” For readers to get a sense of what I’m talking about, the filled out version of the poem is below:

I’ve really spent some time with this poem, and it got me thinking about what is possible in the future. So, where does the sonnet go from here? What do you hope to see more of by writers willing to commit to the form?
C.D.: I’m sure C.T. can speak to this much better than I can, but one thing that has impressed me honestly is how many poems in the anthology follow conventional form yet practice it so effectively that they come off as fresh and natural to the ear. I think there can be a sort of misunderstanding across schools of poetry that traditional form is either totally outdated or is a dying art to be preserved by a select few, and many of our poets are excellent models for how to keep that tradition “modern” without compromising on form.
C.T.S.: I really love this question. What’s possible in the future is a question I’m constantly asking of the south, particularly of the Mississippi delta and the way racial capitalism has permanently altered the environment and dispossessed the folks who live here. If I make the subject of this question a matter of form, I’m still thinking about how daily folks around me are taking the materials of their circumstantial reality and re-working it into something more habitable. I think when we see innovation from an otherwise ‘worn-out’ form, we’re seeing poets use given materials to restructure it into something wholly remade to fit their desires, languages, demands. There will be poets who don’t recognize that need because the given materials still suit them and maybe were built for their expression, and when they look at what I’m describing they’ll say that’s not a sonnet. Wherever the form goes from here is where people are—participating in the work of building more habitable forms and spaces to suit them.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Lotería (Texas Review Press, 2023), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press, 2021). His work has appeared in New England Review, Seneca Review, Colorado Review, Adroit Journal, Poetry Daily, and American Life in Poetry. He is the interviews editor at the EcoTheo Review, senior book reviews editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and associate poetry editor at AGNI. With Jennifer De Leon and Ben Black, he coedited To Never Have Risked Our Lives: An AGNI Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing. He lives with his family in south Texas.