Poetry: Interview with Robert Wood Lynn, Guest Judge for 2025 Hurt and Healing Prize
Note: The interview below is in an experimental form. Enjoy the experience below.
Frontier Poetry: If you were forced to choose between speaking only in a whisper or speaking only by shouting for the rest of your life, which would you choose? Why?
Robert Wood Lynn: I suspect living life in a whisper would suit me, so I choose that. (Plus most of the practical problems it would create could be solved by contemporary microphone or text-to-speech technology.)
Most importantly, it would lower the volume of every social interaction while also raising the stakes—in a whisper everything seems like falling in love or planning a heist.
And maybe it would force me to think a little harder about how and what I said, since leaning in close asks a lot of the listener. Maybe it would get me to stop talking once and for all.
FP: Answer the first question again, using only three quotes from some of your favorite
poems.
RWL:
“We suppose Ms. Dickinson is like the abandoned / Lover of Orpheus & too, that she loved to masturbate / Whispering lonely dark blue lullabies to Death”
— Terrance Hayes, from “American Sonnet for My Past & Future Assassin [We suppose Ms. Dickinson…]” (American Sonnets for My Past & Future Assassin, 2018 Penguin).
“I am here at the waters / because in this space between spaces / where nothing speaks, / I am what it says.”
— Denis Johnson, from “Now” (The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems, 1982 Random House)
“Moments sweep past. The grass bends / then learns again to stand.”
— Tracy K. Smith, from “Us & Co.” (Life on Mars, 2011 Graywolf Press).
FP: If you could plan a dinner date with any poet, alive or dead, who would you choose,
and what would you cook?
RWL: Of course it would have to be Frank O’Hara. We wouldn’t cook anything, we would just walk around Manhattan alternating between bars and whatever museum is open late that night. I’d try to get him to gossip about painters and maybe James Schuyler too.
We’d end up in his old neighborhood, by the UN building, and I’d try to walk him to the water to look at the Pepsi-Cola sign across the way and ask him a bunch of questions about his poem “Nocturne” where it appears at the end with all the seagulls and the noise.
FP: Bonus: question: tell us a secret, but make sure it’s not true at all.
RWL: Isn’t that what a poem is? That’s what a poem is.
Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim
Robert Lynn
Robert Wood Lynn is a poet from Virginia. He is the author of the collection Mothman Apologia (Yale University Press, 2022) and the chapbook How to Maintain Eye Contact (Button Poetry, 2023). He is the recipient of the 2021 Yale Younger Poets Prize, the 2023 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. His work has been featured in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, POETRY, The Yale Review, and other publications. He teaches poetry at Juilliard and Brooklyn Poets.
