Gregory Lawless is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He has published in Contrary, La Petite Zine, nth position, and Stride, and has poems forthcoming in Drunken Boat, H_NGM_N, and Memorious. His poem “Snapshots of the Epic” was recently anthologized in Best of the Net 2007, which is published online by Sundress Press. He teaches literature and writing at Suffolk University in Boston.

In answer to our question of why he writes, Gregory responded:

“I believe that writing poetry testifies in oblique ways to your survival; each word, each line commemorates the difficult fact that you are still alive. And it is exhilarating to feel (artificially) that you are willing yourself into the future, and surviving, through art.

I started writing nine or ten years ago, and since that time I’ve escaped the stuttering and failed idioms that initially made poetry seem impossible. (I now feel allied to possibility, though possibility is not just permissive, but, like the world, potentially anarchic and destructive as well.) In that time, I’ve also watched my country, among other things, tilt needlessly toward ruin. I find it a strange, insulting coincidence: The better I have become at talking about the world, the more the world has lapsed under new apocalyptic pressures. Still, I feel that poetry offers me the sacred space to complain, compile ironies, and to exercise my imagination in the face of loss.”

 

 

 

 

   
 

 

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