Bryan Roth has been called a poetry curmudgeon for his insistence on the highest standards and his fearlessness in
revealing the lack of "the emperor's new clothes" in the practice and business of contemporary American poetry. An
editor, writer, poet, and graphic designer, Roth lives in Colorado and has edited award-winning poetry books, as well as
serving twice as a finalist judge for the prestigious Colorado Book Award.

You're an editor of poetry and poetry books and have served as a screener and judge of contests.
What is the best way for a poet to improve his or her chance of winning a contest?
Write better poems! I know that sounds flip, but that's really all you can do. Entering a poetry contest is like being
blindfolded at night, and shooting into the trees at an invisible, moving target: you can't possibly know who else has
entered a contest, how good their poems are, or even what poem or book of poems will just happen to strike the fancy
of the judge. You could have ten poems or books of poems that are all equally great, but someone submits a book of
poems about aardvarks, which just happens to be the favorite subject of the judge. There's no predicting it. All you can
do is write the best poems you can, and enter your best, just like when you submit poems for publication.

What do you think has been the effect on poetry of poetry contests?
Everyone likes to win contests, and we're a nation obsessed with being "winners," but the truth is that most people
should spend more time reading poetry, studying the craft of writing poetry, writing and revising, and less time worrying
about winning contests.

What is an editor's role in enhancing a poem or a poetry collection?
Simple. To make the poem or the collection as good as it can be. That doesn't mean imposing your sensibilities on the
writer's work, but bringing out the best in them, according to the needs of each poem, so that they fulfill their potential
as poems, while remaining true to the sensibilities of the writer. That's probably a boring and not very helpful answer,
because it doesn't explain what an editor actually does with a poem or book. Let's just say it's an editor's job to make
the writer look as good as possible.

What is the mistake most often made by practicing poets?
Thinking that everything they do is great poetry, or publishable — or should even be shown to anyone. Falling in love
with their own voice. There are not a few poets who seem to get this malady of success. They've achieved a measure of fame (as far as that's possible for a poet), and are apparently surrounded with people who tell them everything they
write down is brilliant, when actually, it's quite mediocre. You sometimes wonder if some poets have anyone around
them that will tell them the truth, or if they have an editor. I attribute this to the fact that most poets have a small circle
of friends (mostly fellow poets) whom they vette their work with before publishing it. This phenomenon isn't confined to
poets; we see it with bands that release a mediocre album, actors or musicians who release a book of poetry (Jewel
comes famously to mind, as well as "John Boy" from the TV show The Waltons, or Leonard Nimoy from Star Trek ) or
actors who record an album (William Shatner comes hilariously to mind, not to mention Keanu Reeves, Juliette Lewis,
Joaquin Phoenix, and a slew of others).

What has influenced your work other than poetry? Music? Pop culture?
I'm influenced by everything, as a writer, as an editor, and as a designer. I happen to like pop culture (well, it's more of
a love-hate relationship, probably). I never listened to rock and roll until I was in high school, but I love it, and pop
music, and pop art—there's a certain naοve exuberance about it that I like, possibly. It's about enjoying life. I love mid-60s pop culture, especially.

What kinds of literature and other arts have influenced you?
All good writing influences my writing of poems, just as writing and reading poetry influences my prose. I particularly
love reading 19th century British fiction, and 18th century political philosophy— it's all so exquisitely articulate! Poetry
has much in common with music, of course, and I actually started getting my first ideas about how to organize a book
of poetry when I was quite young, by paying attention to the way songs on "concept" albums were organized to tell a
story. The Moody Blues ("Days of Future Passed" or "To Our Children's Children's Children"), Pink Floyd ("Dark Side of
the Moon," "The Wall"), and U2 ("The Joshua Tree") are good examples of bands that definitely influenced my writing in
that way.

What is the role of inspiration versus revision?
Inspiration is something that's talked about a lot, and I think it's really not very helpful, mostly. I'm reminded of the story
of Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier, who acted together in the movie Marathon Man. Dustin Hoffman is infamous for
being a perfectionistic method actor, and for one scene where his character has gone without sleep for days, he
supposedly stayed up for real, so he could really know how that feels, and his acting would be more genuine. After
finding this out, Olivier is supposed to have said some variation of "My boy, why don't you just try acting [instead]?" I
feel the same way about inspiration. Instead of waiting for, or relying on inspiration, why not just learn how to write? A
long-distance runner doesn't rely on "inspiration," after all; he trains daily and just runs.

What is inspiration?
I think what most people call "inspiration" is just that little adrenaline rush of excitement that you experience when you
have an epiphany or some other idea you think clever. It excites you; you feel it, viscerally. So you give that excitement
a name, and that name is inspiration. But there's nothing mystical about it. You still have to do the work of writing, and
that work is mostly the work of revising that epiphany until it's art. It's about knowing your craft.

How often, or over what period, do you typically revise a poem?
It depends on the poem. When I was fifteen, I did believe in "inspiration," like everyone does at fifteen, and because
somehow I'd gotten the idea that's what a poem was—a moment of inspiration, preserved in time— I thought I had to
preserve that moment, as if it were something sacred. I actually thought you shouldn't revise. So I didn't. Consequently,
I could write a poem in fifteen minutes and confidently declare it "finished." Of course, just like when you get in an
argument, and walk away after it's over, an hour later you think of something better to say that you wish you'd thought
of at the time.

In this respect I was fortunate to be a perfectionist, even at age fifteen, because it began to bother me not to change
something to that better thing thought of later, more than it bothered me to alter the original "moment of inspiration."
Thus I taught myself to revise, with a will. The period of revision has generally grown longer over the years, but some
poems come quickly, without extensive structural or textual changes; others grow like trees accrete rings every year,
and I have poems that I have been working on for years. Of course, I don't work on poems every day, so that's not really a very accurate measure. I do think it helps to put poems aside for a while at various stages in their development,
although it's probably not necessary to do so for as long as I do, although I think one ancient Roman poet said you
should put your poems in a drawer for nine years before you show them to anyone, and Alexander Pope (if I remember
correctly) reduced that to one year.

What do you think makes a poem memorable?
Lots of things can make a poem memorable, and that probably varies from reader to reader, depending on what
subjects move a particular reader. So, the subject matter, for one thing. Its uniqueness, meaning it's something you've
not heard put quite that way before. Memorable language always helps— like Yeats' "What rough beast, its hour come
round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" Or any number of examples. Poetry should have the ability to
excite the mind or spirit, like good oratory, have "quotable" language, and hopefully to make you think or feel
something you hadn't before, or to think or feel in a new way about something you'd previously taken for granted.

Who are the best poets now writing?
I think Stephen Dobyns is absolutely a genius in the true sense of the word. He's arguably the best American poet
alive, for his inventiveness, imagination, and the fact that he doesn't just churn out book after book about the same
subject, in the same form. If you look at any two of his books, there's a good chance they'll seem so different you
might think they were written by different poets. In a sense, they were, because he is someone who's always growing
as an artist, always trying new things— and does whatever he tries exceedingly well.

Stephen Dunn is another poet who's consistently great. I really could list dozens. I probably have more favorite female
poets than men, though, and I think there probably are more good female poets than male poets: Kim Addonizio,
Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Mary Karr, Barbara Hamby. I think Ai, who recently passed away, was really great. I
don't know if that's because women have more to write about (they can give birth, for example), or they're just more
willing to put themselves out there, on the page—you have to be willing to take risks to be an artist, and that means the risk of exposing yourself, of putting real emotion and honesty into your poems, of making yourself vulnerable, in a word.
But don't get me wrong, there is no shortage of good male poets. Eliot Wilson, here in Colorado, is a great young
poet, for example. And speaking of younger poets from Colorado, I should mention, at least, Lisa Zimmerman, Ruth
Ellen Kocher, Jane Hilberry, and Sheryl Luna. I'd better stop now, or I'm going to have two pages of names for you!

How did you get interested in poetry and what sustained your interest?
What kept me writing poems is that I discovered that I could write about things in poems that you weren't "supposed"
to write about (or talk about, or think about) in any other form of writing— or talk openly about, for that matter. After
awhile, though, I wondered why I was bothering, since I didn't seem to be improving (I wasn't, because I wasn't reading
good contemporary poetry!), and was trying to decide if I should quit "wasting my time" on poetry, when I took a
creative writing class in college from the late Linda Hull, who introduced me to the poetry of Stephen Dobyns. I was
blown away, and re-excited about poetry; I still don't know if I'll ever write good poetry, but I'm resigned to writing it now,
Don Quixote-like, as if on some impossible quest for perfection that I know I'll never attain. Kind of like playing golf, I
like to say (although I'm not a golfer).

Bryan Roth is the owner and editor-in-chief of Roth Editorial, Design & Communications (RED C), and the publisher of a soon-to-be-launched poetry press. He serves as the Executive Director of the Colorado Poets Association and can be reached at rothwrites@yahoo.com.