Moon Beams #22 - Colby Cotton

“As poets, we know that the poem comes out of often, if not always, a form of uncertainty, that we don’t know where this comes from,” Colby Cotton told me in our conversation on episode #22 of “Moon Beams,” a perspective I found shared, unafraid of exploration, and, along with the world-class influences in Colby’s education, has guided him well in his craft. 

Among the many gems from said influences and instructors that Colby spoke to, Eavan Boland, offered that “the poem is not a mode of expression, it’s a form of experience,” Louise Glück as workshop instructor “instilled in all of us that feeling of an involuntary inevitability in our poetry,” and James Dickey’s poem “For the Last Wolverine,” gave Colby an impression “… filling me with a sense of capaciousness in poetry, and a rhythm that was more important than logic in some ways at that time.”

We got into plenty of other guiding lights from there, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Mark Strand, Susan Morehouse, Juliana Gray, Andrew Hudgins, Stuart Dischell, Ansel Elkins, Kenneth Fields, Patrick Phillips, and Philip Levine. 

Colby was also generous enough to read “Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night” by Charles Wright (read by Wright himself here), carrying the theme of humility and appreciation in light of the unknowable with extraordinary grace. 

I am grateful to Colby for his time and energy, the leadership he shows as an instructor himself guiding young people in the world of literature and writing, and look forward to seeing new poems he will see published soon by “Boulevard,” “Bennington Review,” and the “Southern Indiana Review.”