I got a rock. Actually, that's Serpentinite (thanks for the photo NOAA), and it makes an appearance in
Feast Days. And I got to talk about that cameo, plus a bunch of other things, thanks to David Starkey, who interviewed me about the chapbook for the
Independent.
Here's the beginning:
George Yatchisin’s newest collection of poetry is
Feast Days.
Yatchisin is the communications coordinator for the Gevirtz Graduate
School of Education at
UC Santa Barbara, and he writes about food and drink for venues such as
The Santa Barbara Independent and
Edible Santa Barbara.
You took some time off from writing poetry. Can you talk about that a bit and discuss why you’ve come back to it?
It was a good, no pun intended, 15 years off, actually. I came up with
two half-jokes to explain it. The first was, either I could write
poetry or be happy. The second was, you can only write the “language is a
tool that fails us” poem for so long before you at least convince
yourself. It was also that I didn’t feel language coming to me in poetic
ways; I didn’t stop writing prose, but you get to be easier on yourself
in blogging and journalism — there’s not that same need for precision
and concision. I say that with all apologies to brilliant journalists
like Joe Posnanski, Ellen Willis, Molly Ivins, etc. Then in some ways,
poetry came back to me.
Want to read the rest then do so at the
Independent's site.
