Charles Jensen | Writer

It’s Thesis Defense Season again….

It is so wonderful to be able to attend these on an ongoing basis. I didn’t really get a chance to go to as many as I wanted when I was a student (due to working full-time or working multiple jobs), but now I make time to go to as many as I can. The work is always brilliant, but my favorite part is the question-answer at the end.

What a gift it is to hear someone discuss—disarmedly—their poetics. To be privy to those conversations is far too rare, I think, although blogging does provide a lot of opportunity to overhear just those things. I love interviewing people; I love reading interviews; and I love getting people to talk about their own writing: what they’re trying to do, what they want to do, how they move into a poem or move out of it, etc.

This writing business can get so solitary at times that the reminder that other people work through the same issues and come up with new answers is something that can’t be measured. I’m thankful to have worked and known such brilliant people, and especially to have chances to witness their poetic brains picked of all their little gray cells.