features DAVID LUNTZ

Eve Anthony Hanninen: Did you feel constricted by the form, pattern or format of your project requirements, or did you find it stimulating, provoking?

David Luntz: I found the idea of trying to come up with alternate endings to a poem intriguing and stimulating, as I have always been interested in the idea of "endings"; to a large extent, endings are an artifice or social construct that are necessary to keep our social machinery running smoothly. A story, play or poem must end at some point, because the reader or viewer will get bored and the work will become part of the mundane from which we often turn to art to escape. In that mundane world, our social encounters, too, often have formal or tacit endings built in to them. But the idea that there could be one of several possible endings to any choice we make intrigues me, because it plays on the notions of chance and fate.

EAH: When or where have you learned the most about writing poetry – through formal education, personal passion, mentor, or equal combinations of resources?

DL: I have been writing for publication for about one year. I have not really studied much or taken workshops, so it's always edifying to meet an editor who is willing to offer their analysis and critique about my submissions. Apart from some high school and college exposure to poetry (which I enjoyed), I also wrote a little in my twenties, but I did not have the maturity and patience to revise the work. I think what I have learned most now about writing, as someone in their late thirties, is that it takes a lot of revising. I often rework pieces fifty to one hundred times before feeling they may be presentable. I think people who do not write have certain misconceptions about poets, that the poems almost "spontaneously generate" on the page in some transcendental or "higher consciousness" poetic fit. In my case, and I suspect for many other writers, it's more about patience, effort, and dealing with the frustration when the poem fails to materialize.

David Luntz began writing poetry in 2005 and his work has appeared in Mastodon Dentist, TMP Irregular, Facets, and White Leaf Review. He is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye. One of David's poems was also recently nominated for a Pushcart prize.

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