Moon Beams #23 - Dorsey Craft

To learn about how Dorsey Craft’s role as an editor at “AGNI,” teaching, and perspectives on child birth, gun culture, and apocalyptic literature have informed her poetry in episode #23 of “Moon Beams” was a gift on its own, and doubly exciting as all of these elements and more will be informing her second book, “A Brief History of Accidental Inventions,” due out in fall 2026 from Texas Review Press.

On writing with an editor’s eye, Dorsey shared that she has gained, “a really heightened sense of opening a poem very quickly, with something eye-catching and important, and really getting to the heart of what I want to say within the first two-three lines, and having the rest of the poem sort of work up to meet those opening lines.”

This approach is clear and strong when reading any of Dorsey’s poetry, most recently at “The Adroit Journal,””Six Finch,” and “Quarterly West,”

Her work also impresses priorities put on courage in critical thought, creative invention, and, of course, fun, which she told me guides her in steering students away from the rigidity of seeing poems as things “to be decoded and deciphered.” 

“My task every semester,” Dorsey said, “is to be like, ‘Please, calm yourselves. Enjoy the language, enjoy the sounds, and try to think more about how this poet achieves a certain effect with language, as opposed to what is the secret riddle of the poem.’” 

We explored a lot more in our conversation, including the work of Franny Choi, Jorie Graham, Carolyn Forché, the Cyborg Jillian Weise, Sharon Olds, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Khadijah Queen, Terrance Hayes, and Mary Ruefle.

More of Dorsey’s work is forthcoming and forthcoming at “The Prairie Schooner,” “POETRY,” and “Bennington Review,” and I appreciate Dorsey for the remarkable generosity, innovation, and guidance she has and continues to show the poetry community.