3 Questions and a Poem–in which one of my favorite poets is interviewed and shares a poem.

Question 1

What do you consider the three most important elements of a poem?

What is the poem’s message? One could argue that a poem does not have to have a message in order to be a poem. Think of extreme abstraction or surrealism. But even in the absence of an obvious message, what isn’t on the page can convey almost as much as what is. However, a good poem leaves the reader with at least a direction toward an intentional message, even if the reader is the one supplying it. The message is best if it has not previously been said in the particular manner the poet has chosen.

How does the poem convey its meaning? Sounds matter. Assonance, sibilance, consonance, alliteration, etc. These are the elements of the music of a poem. Images that startle the reader awake and beg for interaction. No cliches or overused tropes. Incorporate all of the senses. Make the reader exist in the poem.

How does the poem attract the reader’s eye on the page? Form is essential, even in a free verse poem. Couplets or quatrains? Tercets staggered on the page? White space instead of punctuation. One stanza or several. Is the poem one long sentence? A single stanza?

Question 2

What’s your best advice for writing poetry?

In order to write good poetry, a poet needs to read good poetry about themes and from regions outside of the poet’s own experience. We naturally find comfort in reading about our own environs and those who have faced situations most relevant to us—we tend to like the view from our backyard so we want to see more of the same. However, limiting oneself in such a way may leave one myopic and even stuck writing the same poem(s) repeatedly. In order to truly say something new in a fresh way, one needs to be exposed to new delights and even disappointments. I don’t always like a prize-winning book of poetry I’ve picked up off the shelf. But in reading it, I may have learned what I don’t like and I am sometimes even challenged to see if I could write something better. Some of my own favorite poems have come about this way.

Question 3

What’s the one poem that everyone should read today?

Everyone should read Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Song” from the book by the same title. This poem will haunt you; once read it cannot be forgotten. It is beautifully disturbing, written in a way which incorporates all of the elements mentioned above. “Song” is the poem of a poet’s lifetime. I won’t spoil it by elaborating further.

Beneath Occluded Shine chapbook summary:

From hummingbirds to heaven, Beneath Occluded Shine responds, often by seeking more answers, to themes of faith and doubt through poetry to sixteen of Pablo Neruda’s questions from his Book of Questions.

Beneath Occluded Shine by Claudia M. Stanek

$17.99 Original price was: $17.99. $15.99 Current price is: $15.99.

Fifty years after Pablo Neruda completed his Book of Questions, Claudia Stanek bravely reaches back through time—long before Neruda, into the deepest parts of our shared humanity—in search of answers. Threaded with the spiritual, the historical, and the natural, Stanek weaves together these 16 short but powerful poems in Beneath Occluded Shine that embrace the surreal, push up against the paradoxical, and remind readers that sometimes a question can only be answered with another question.

–Denton Loving, author of Tamp

Claudia Stanek‘s Beneath Occluded Shine is filled with questions of life and death–what’s here, what’s gone. Nature with its clouds, land and sea mingle with the invisible as well as language. At the same time, a ribbon of the divine, like a reverent of seasons, winds itself through her lines, as she deals with what must be kept for the living. Her use of rhyme blends into the sounds of what comes before and what comes afterwards in this topography of disappearances and returns.
Fireplaces, foundries, forest, foliage, full…”a standard of tender remains.”

–Gail Hosking, author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter and poetry books, The Tug and Retrieval.Claudia Stanek‘s poems answer Neruda’s Book of Questions with her own expansive and cantatory meditations. This book is a harmonic and lyric duet, each poem a distillation of the poet wrestling with life.–Catherine Faurot, author of Theology of the Broken.

& a Poem

Transparent Language 
(Originally published in Modern Poetry Quarterly Review)

Is it true they scatter
transparent letters across the sky?
Neruda


When you raise your eyes
to the punctuated sky, you see
letters of all scripts, scattered
in mock collage.


When you shield your eyes
from the glory of the sun, you see
the random spatter of the words
that matter most on your palm.


When your eyes no longer see
anything but a mist of light,
the magnifier that should illumine
sentences will brand your hand.


When you wish you had never
known sight, you will listen
for transparent clauses
but hear the lonely Braille of “I.”

~From my soon to be released chapbook Beneath Occluded Shine (Finishing Line Press, 2025)

About the Author

Claudia M. Stanek’s work has been turned into a libretto, been part of an art exhibition, and been translated into Polish. She is the author of the chapbooks Language You Refuse to Learn (BHP, 2014) and Beneath Occluded Shine (FLP, 2025). Her poems appear in The Windhover, Cutleaf, Ekstasis, Solum, and Book of Matches. Claudia spent a Writer’s Residency in Bialystok, Poland.  She holds an MFA from Bennington College. After a lifetime in the frozen tundra of Western New York, Claudia now lives in East Tennessee with her elderly dogs, where she also rescues the occasional overheated hummingbird. She may be found on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/PoeticEffect/,

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/claudiamstanek/,

Linked In https://www.linkedin.com/in/claudiastanek/

and Finishing Line Press https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/beneath-occluded-shine-by-claudia-m-stanek/