Go Ahead and Speak Meaningfully with Divedapper

Finally, a new literary journal devoted solely to interviews! The newest literary powerhouse, Divedapper, is edited by Kaveh Akbar (rhymes with "snack bar," as he puts it). If you've got a hot interview with a literary guru burning a hole in your pocket, here's the 411:

What is Divedapper?

Glad you asked! It's a new project devoted exclusively to featuring interviews with major voices in contemporary poetry. It has no affiliation with any institution, academic or literary or otherwise. All site content will be free forever to anyone with an internet connection.

Who are you?

My name's Kaveh Akbar (rhymes with “java snackbar”). I founded and edit Divedapper. Sarah Miller Freehauf, our new editorial assistant, handles transcriptions and general good vibes. Our esteemed Creative Director, Alex Sperellis, designed the site you see before you, and our Developer, Boyma-njor Fahnbulleh, built it.

Pleased to meet you all. What's a divedapper?

It's a type of grebe (a duckish water bird) to which Shakespeare compares Adonis in his “Venus and Adonis” (“Upon this promise did he raise his chin, / Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave, / Who, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in”). I've always loved the poem and that line and its pun and it's just a nice sounding word, isn't it? Our tagline, "A Constellation of Poetic Phenomena," is both an accurate description of our content and a play on this.

You'll want to hit up their "About" page to read on about the project. Fresh to the site as of yesterday is this great interview with Gerald Stern. We'll get you started with the first couple of Qs and As and let you travel on from there:

If it’s safe to call Lucky Life your breakout book—

Right, it was.

Then, I was wondering if you might talk about your life prior to that book coming out?

I was writing books at fourteen and fifteen. Most poets in my generation like Phil Levine and Robert Bly, they published their first books and had nine readers. Then their second book came out and they had twenty-nine readers, and the third book was their breakout book. I was a severe critic of my own work and I buried myself in the attic, so to speak.

I did publish one book before Lucky Life called Rejoicings. I called myself a poet and I was a poet but I was somewhat lost. I got stuck in various projects and then life itself and work and such. I spent my twenties as a kind of a bum, wandering, living in New York, wandering between New York and Europe on the Dutch freighters and such. I wrote a few good poems but I was never part of a group.

I didn’t make a kind of connection I could have made, should have made, might have made until I was in my late thirties. Lucky Life came out when I was probably fifty or something. I had friends who were poets. In Pittsburgh where I grew up I was connected with two other people, Jack Gilbert and Richard Hasley, who was a good poet too. He had all the makings, traditionally and conventionally as a poet, he knew nature. He was more at home in nature, knew more about it than anybody I ever saw. He could recite thousands of poems by heart. He was in theater groups and so on but he didn’t have the will. I think that to become an artist, it’s thirty percent skill, twenty percent luck, and fifty percent will.

Read on and then browse through the archive of interviews—quite the cache already!