Kristina Marie Darling is the author of nine books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (Ravenna Press, 2012), The Moon & Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell (BlazeVOX Books, 2012), and (with Carol Guess) X Marks the Dress: A Registry (Gold Wake Press, forthcoming in 2014). Her writing has been honored with fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Ragdale Foundation, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her newest poetry collection, Petrarchan, was be released by BlazeVOX Books in February.

LD: How did you find your way to this form? When you did, did it just run away with you? What, for you, marks off one project distinctly from the next?

KMD: I became interested in fragmented forms because of what they allow the writer to leave unsaid. When I was much younger, I used to write lyric poetry in the most traditional sense. But it was so difficult for me not to seem lofty or clichéd. Once I started writing footnotes, glossaries, and other types of marginalia, there was no turning back. I loved that these forms leave space for the reader’s imagination, allowing them to take part in the work of the poet.

LD: You note your sources at the end of the book—Petrarch, of course, and Anne Carson’s Sappho. What’s the role of source material? Do the poems find their way to sources or vice versa? If it’s vice versa, to what extent do you see yourself doing a kind of creative research? I’m wondering to what extent there might be a thesis. . .

Read the whole interview here