How did you get started writing poetry?

I bloomed late. It wasn't until high school that I encountered any poetry at all; the ones I remember liking---Shelley, cummings, Dylan Thomas---I rarely read anymore. I wrote lots of bad, emotionally incontinent "poems" throughout my adolescence, when I still hadn't realized that reading poetry is essential to writing it. Then, for most of my twenties, I was trying to remedy that ignorance and I ended up becoming paralyzed by the weight of the English-language poetic legacy. What a scholar wants to know about poetry, and what a poet needs to know, are two very different things, and I mistook the one for the other longer than I should have. The first poem in what I now recognize as my own voice, such as it is, only came when I was nearly thirty. But when I wrote it, I knew.

Who has had the biggest impact on you as a poet?

The first poet I read purely for pleasure, which of course is really the only reason to read poetry at all, was Wallace Stevens, but his example didn't help me to write---in fact, quite the opposite. For better or worse, he remains my touchstone. The first poet whose work actually inspired me to dare writing only to please myself was Philip Larkin; the one who taught me the most about craft was Frost. And from my earliest reading days, the one poet whom I have kept rediscovering is Emily Dickinson.

What inspires your poetry?

Almost all my poems emerge from an experience I've had while out walking: here in NYC or on a trip somewhere, alone or with someone else, in the country or the city, soon after it happened or months, even years, later. Other sources are works of art, memories of childhood, and very occasionally something I've read. Once the poem gets going, of course, lots of other things (including politics and the news) can find their way in. When I look back at whatever initial jottings I made---images, lines, subject matter---I usually find that the farther the final poem has journeyed away from its origin, the better.

What is next for you?

I'm putting together the poems that will make up my second book, which I hope to see published later this year or early in 2024. My first book, The Stargazers, contained pieces written over the course of seven years or so; this next volume will draw on less than half that span---though because it covers the years of Trump and COVID and January 6th, it feels just as long.

James McKee enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. His debut poetry collection, The Stargazers, was published in the otherwise uneventful spring of 2020, while his poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Burningword Literary Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New Ohio Review, Grist, New World Writing, Illuminations, CutBank, Flyway, THINK, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere. He spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.