Poetry Consultations with H.R. Webster

I am inspired by guts: bravery, mess, interiority. “What is this poem asking?” is more important to me than “what is this poem saying?” Ambiguity, illegibility, contradiction, the strange, the self-indulgent—I celebrate all these tendencies above static certainty. One of the most vital tasks of revision is to find a balance between language that captures the writer’s experience of the unexpected and language that revels in the labor of craftedness. Revision, at both the level of the poem and the level of the manuscript, can be a path back into surprise.

What excites me about revision is the way both wild experiments and small, precise shifts in syntax, lineation, and diction can open spaces of possibility and multiplicity of meaning. My approach to manuscript consultation is to celebrate the curiosity, ambition, and authentic questions that bring writers to the process. Useful dialogue during our consultation may take the form of insights into what your poems intend, incite, and explore: I hope to offer actionable tools that will further those aims. Useful dialogue may also take the form of instructive misunderstandings, gaps between what I see and what you hoped I would see, tools I offer that don’t feel quite right. I hope our dialogues forge a space for echolocation, sounding through the dark together for what you feel is most true for your poems.

My own writing draws on the rich topographies of traditional and experimental forms—both those that reveal themselves to the reader and those that are a private compositional experience for the writer. I love serious jokes, deceptive simplicity, approaches to natural, political, and interior worlds grounded in a particularity of language and experience. Poets whose work is close to my heart include Atsuro Riley, Diane Seuss, C.D. Wright, and francine j. harris, but I read widely and wildly, and I love discovering and recommending new writers to friends. I can’t wait to suggest books and poems in which I see an instructive echo with your work.