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Intimate, unfiltered conversations with major contemporary poets that reveal how craft, conscience, and lived experience shape poetry

Learning to Be Everyone and No One is a compelling collection of intimate interviews that captures poets speaking with uncommon candor about the making of their art. Through lively, unguarded conversations, Chard deNiord draws out moments of insight, humor, struggle, and revelation, revealing how poetry grows from lived experience and sustained attention. The result is an experience that feels immediate and alive, offering readers a sense of presence inside the creative act as it unfolds in real time.

Gathering voices that have helped shape contemporary poetry, the book features conversations with Robert Hass, T. R. Hummer, Major Jackson, Ali Kinsella, Halyna Kruk, Li-Young Lee, Ada Limón, Dennis Nurske, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Robert Pinsky, Charles Simic, Bruce Smith, Gerald Stern, Ruth Stone, and Chase Twichell. Together, these poets reflect on identity, politics, race, gender, memory, and the natural world with wit, urgency, and precision. More than a record of distinguished careers, this volume forms a chorus of perspectives that affirms poetry’s enduring power to challenge, console, and remain “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.