Pssssst … Over at Marshall's Super-Sekrit Clubhouse

Marshall Payne continues his tradition of excellent interviews in ‘da House’. Today we have David Kopaska-Merkel (who is one of my Daily Cabal colleagues and awesome to boot). The interview itself is by Jaime Lee Moyer.

This week’s interview in the Clubhouse is conducted by Jaime Lee Moyer ([info]stillnotbored). I hope you enjoy this fine interview she did with David Kopaska-Merkel ([info]dreamnnightmare).
You’ve been a fixture of the spec poetry world for many years, both as an editor and a poet. What first drew you to writing speculative poetry?

David Kopaska-Merkel is a well-known figure in the speculative poetry field. He publishes Dreams and Nightmares, a magazine of science fiction and fantasy poetry that he started in 1986. In 2006 a poem David wrote in collaboration with poet Kendall Evans, won the Rhysling Award for long form poem. David has had poetry published in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, Ideomancer and Star*Line, and his list of publication credits—poetry, fiction and non-fiction—numbers over a thousand. His flash fiction is currently being published at The Daily Cabal. David lives in an old farmhouse in Alabama with his family of accomplished artists and his cats.

When we were expecting our first child, I decided I was not going to have time to write any more fiction, so I switched to poetry. Looking back, it seems like a silly reason, although it’s true that more hours are spent on a short story than on a poem, good or bad. At first I mostly wrote horror poetry, very bad horror poetry, and some nonsense verse (Walt Kelly is one of my heroes). After a couple of years I started to branch out and to improve with experience. I soon realized I could write better poetry than I could fiction.

The rest lives here http://marshallpayne1.livejournal.com/102015.html

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