Learning to Be Everyone and No One by Chard deNiord is a striking collection of candid, illuminating interviews with twelve of today’s most influential poets: Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Charles Simic, Ruth Stone, Gerald Stern, Chase Twichell, Major Jackson, Bruce Smith, Ada Limón, Dennis Nurkse, T. R. Hummer, and Halyna Kruk. Through piercing yet conversational dialogue, these literary giants share spontaneous, deeply personal reflections on their craft, careers, and the life experiences. This compelling volume is a vibrant tapestry of voices exploring the enduring power of poetry to confront issues of identity, politics, race, gender, and the environment. With wit, wisdom, and candor, these poets affirm why poetry remains “the news that stays the news.”

This collection bears witness to ecstasy and grief through persona.  By inhabiting the voices of Adam and Eve, Abelard and Heloise, etc., deNiord reveals the enduring alterity contained within the self.  

Westminster West traverses the worlds of here and beyond. Chard deNiord divines “the everydayness of the mystery . . . in which being and making poetry are the same.” From posthumous correspondence between Abelard and Heloise to such poems as “Skywriting Over The Rockies,” “With A Bone In My Heart,” and “I Call Out To You,” this collection betrays a mortal charge, bearing witness to what Emily Dickinson called “each ecstatic moment/ to which we must an anguish pay” and which Aridjis in his defiance of death calls “dust in love.” 

Ambitious and masterful, deNiord renders such ancient subject matter as love, betrayal, landscape, loss, grief, aging, and ecstasy new throughout Westminster West. He transforms the echo chamber of futility, silence, and failure by aspiring to cross over to “the other,” whatever it may be, a stone or cloud or lover or garment, or cancerous lung, with a “negative capability” that allows it, no matter its identity, to speak memorably in a way that transcends simple definition and ultimately any personal connection to it.

Westminster West is divided into three sections that complement each other in their archetypal themes which range historically, mythologically, and cathectically. The poems in the first section imagine correspondences and dialogues between couples, including Heloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Odysseus and Calypso, a widower and his deceased wife in the time of Covid, and a lovesick husband in the air above the Rocky Mountains and his beloved on the ground. The second section also features love poems but focuses on more instructional and metaphysical themes that vary from metaphorical pedagogy on the topic of sex to “the harsh advice of loss” to the memory of a young couple’s transcendent, romantic walk by a river. Section three moves away from love poems to mortal and environmental themes, including elegies, pastorals, and a concluding confessional credo on the bittersweet reality of poetry’s irony and blessing.