Q & A American Poetry: Graham Foust

Last year, I returned many times to Martin Puryear's retrospective exhibit at a museum near where I live. In it was a piece called "Ladder for Booker T. Washington," a rather tall sculpture that gives its viewers the illusion that it's an even taller sculpture, though it's also true that one realizes immediately that what one is seeing is in fact not as tall as it looks. I take these facts and illusions—or facts and illusions very much like them—to be the central problems of the poet who writes in America.



Published 2010.