Hats Are The Enemy of Poetry by Bill Rector

“Do You Know What You Want” is a delightful conversation with the poetry of Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Seamus Heaney, through which William Rector exposes the machinery of poetry as a compass, a spool of time, the smallest chameleon in the world. It is also a meditation of the transience of life, memory, knowledge, getting to the heart of what it means to be human, what is means to write a poem. The lines sing and laugh in this conversation; the narrator is so charmingly present, that when you close the last page, you’ll feel as if you’d just left a truly lovely party.

–Marcela Sulak is the author of Mouth Full of Seeds, Decency, and Immigrant.