In 2025, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Randall Mann discusses his curatorial approach and his own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, senior content editor at the Academy, and I’m here today with our Guest Editor for August, Randall Mann. Randall is the author, most recently, of Deal: New and Selected Poems. Randall, welcome and thank you for joining me.

Randall Mann: Thank you so much, Mary. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Poets.org: Pleasure to see you. Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for August?

Mann: Well, I sort of took a really simple approach. I thought of poets I admire and then reached out to them, and … Presto! Most of them were able to send me poems. I was extraordinarily pleased by the response and by the poems, and so I feel incredibly lucky. I feel like it’s a banger of a month. [laughs] It was not too complex. There are so many wonderful poets. I just narrowed it down and people were kind enough to send me some work.

Poets.org: The simplest approach is often the best, right?

Mann: I one hundred percent agree. [laughs] Yep.

Poets.org: Speaking of things that you like or poetry that you like, if you could direct readers to one poem in our collection at Poets.org, or more than one poem if you’d like, that you have it curated, what would it be and why?

Mann: So … I mean, there are so many, but I have to think about the poem “The Moose” by Elizabeth Bishop, which is one of my favorite poems. Just the way it unfolds, the story behind it, it was written over so many years, I think maybe even eighteen years, and one can feel the care in the unfolding. The thing I love about Bishop’s work is that I’m always taken on a journey with her, and it’s as if I’m discovering it in real time as the speaker is discovering here. And in this case, we have this somewhat ordinary ride on a bus where are all these different cast of characters are talking and speaking and talking about the dailiness of things and the small griefs.

And then in one of the most famous moments, I think, in American poetry, the bus stops and the poem stops, and you have this incredible moment in a poem where this moose comes up, and it shows itself in the smoke with the bus and the headlights. And suddenly there is this shared moment of wonder. And it is so incredible. It's so moving. It’s one of those things where even talking about it is an emotional thing because it’s this shared … we all feel it, in its parenthetical. And it opens up, the poem opens up to allow the reader and everyone who is in this poem on that bus to share a kind of universal looking at this creature that is representative of whatever we want it to be, but all things bigger than us, and kind of the wonder of seeing. It’s just so incredible. It’s so incredible. It’s something that I aspire to. Well, I will always aspire to this moment when I’m writing. I think it’s a perfect moment in literature. And it’s also just so inexplicable, you know. Just as the moment itself, the poem itself becomes so inexplicable in the best sort of way. And I think that I read this poem and I think, Ah, this is why. This is why. This is why I’ve devoted my life to reading poems and writing poems. I feel very passionate about this poem, but every single time it has this effect on me, and it’s a poem I know in my heart, and yet it still has. It’s just out of reach, and that is the most wonderful thing about a poem.

Poets.org: Agreed. What are you reading right now?

Mann: Recently, there’s a colleague of mine, Tom Grattan, Thomas Grattan. His second book is a novel called In Tongues. And I’m sort of only about fifty pages into it, but it’s this wonderful story of this young queer man who goes to New York from Minnesota. He just walks in a bus station and he’s like, “Take me somewhere.” And he’s like, “Well, I have to go to New York, obviously, because that that’s where my people are.” And he starts dog walking, and then he meets this couple. And then intrigue ensues? I mean, I haven’t quite gotten there yet, but so far there’s an elegance and an ease and a real kind of aesthetic humility to the way he’s writing. And I’m really drawn into the sentences. I heard him read at Bennington and I was like, “Oh, I have to read this book.”

The funny thing is about reading, I met him and I really liked him as my colleague. And then I’m reading the book, and I’m like, we so are who we are in our writing. We can’t hide from the self, and it’s so remarkable all the things that are wonderful, all the betrayals, all the lies that we tell. It’s all revealed in the writing. I met him, and I can see some of his personality in the book, and it’s kind of wonderful. It’s just kind of a side note. The book itself is really fantastic thus far. I mean, stay tuned, but I don’t imagine it sort of turning terrible. So anyway, I’m really enjoying that. And I find contemporary novels often difficult, you know. I do. I can’t really see them, and I think, Oh, why am I reading this? There’s The Uncollected [Stories of] Mavis Gallant that just came out. Why am I wasting my time? You know what I mean? Which may or may not be charitable, but it's my truth. [laughs] But it’s showing me that real work is being done in fiction at this moment, and so I’m really enjoying that.

Poets.org: And what are you working on currently in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Mann: Well, you know, I’m always just working on a poem [laughs], which somehow sort of balloons up to maybe a manuscript of poems over time. I try not to think about it too much because I’m very superstitious, I guess, if that’s the right word, about these gifts. I’m very gentle with the idea that there’s a curation before the curation happens. But, that said, I think I might be finishing a manuscript, which is great. I just finished my teaching session at Bennington, so I’m working with those students. I think literary citizenship is important. I’m not patting myself on the back, but I do think that things like being in community, you know, doing things like blurbs, helping, doing forms of mentorship and whatever, I think it kind of just goes without saying or too much fanfare. And I think that that’s really important in our world of writing. I’m drawn to people who do that, and I am put off by selfish people who do not do that. I’m part of a great writing community here in the San Francisco Bay. I participate. I’m grateful.

It’s fantastic to have a thing, you know, to get up in the morning and have a thing. I mean, sometimes the muse turns on me often … and demanding, the muse is demanding [laughs]. I come up short sometimes. But it’s also, it’s really great to have a thing to be like, Oh, I have this pull every day toward art and literature, and toward creating the conditions in order to create or possibly create. Yeah. So it’s steady work, but it’s good work. So yeah, that’s what I’m working on.

Poets.org: I like very much your use of the phrase, “being in community.” I think that puts it very, very well. I appreciate that. I also appreciate reading your work. I’m a fan. I’m reading your work, particularly the poems in Deal: New and Selected Poems. One notices a very strict attention to traditional formal devices. You’re someone who really employs rhyme and meter. There’s wordplay in there very often. And those kinds of devices are less commonly used today. I’m very curious about your influences. Clearly, Elizabeth Bishop is one. And I’m very curious about what draws you more to this mode of composition over free verse, let’s say.

Mann: I mean, I think it’s something to do with my influences. Very early I read Emily Dickinson and [John] Keats, and there was Robert Frost. We sort of had it on the coffee table at home. And I read Thom Gunn early and Thomas Hardy. These were all some very early people. And then when I started as an undergraduate, various formal structures shifted a bit. So I did read people like Seamus Heaney but then also Countee Cullen and Gwendolyn Brooks. Sort of the broadening of the aesthetic, I think, was wonderful. And then Marianne Moore to Bishop.

So I saw these examples, and in these examples it wasn’t all strict forms, say, but I think what I was shown was a poem has perhaps an ideal container or way that it can become itself. And I prefer describing these things in terms of architecture, the build of every poem, because I do think every poem is a formal poem. Formalism is just finding the ways in which one can best bring about the content therein in the poem. And so the idea of formalism can sometimes be, I think, alienating to some people, but I don’t even necessarily think about that. I just think about formalism as choice and possibility. And I think the great thing was that I was shown so many potential ways to build a poem. And I think things like strict forms or free verse, anything, it’s all very benign to me. It’s just like a toolkit, you know. So part of learning, for me, in reading and writing is just being, what shall I reach for if I’m listening to this poem, listening to the idea of the poem and then letting the poem guide me to where it might go?

So yeah, I feel like if something needs to be repeated and there’s maybe an emphasis and a containment, then I think, Oh, maybe a pantoum might be a great path for that. That happens to be my favorite form. I’m like an addict with pantoums. I just can’t stop. But, you know, sometimes it doesn’t. I mean, if there’s a sense of compression, then I have a number of poems that are written in short lines, which are technically free verse, though nothing’s free. But I love using rhyme because that often takes me to the next idea. I think sometimes it isn’t even a regularized rhyme. There are a number of poems in Deal that have short lines with you have rhymes in the poem, but it’s not a kind of formal scheme. But there is a sense of unfolding. And I think that the great thing about rhyme, I don’t even know how to write a poem without rhyme anymore, and it always strikes me as very curious that people seem to push against rhyme in a poem. People can write whatever they want, but it’s also like rhyme is everywhere, like literally everywhere in the culture. And so why are we keeping it out of poems? [laughs] That said, I don’t even know how to write a poem without rhyme, so I just lean into it. And it provides me all these wonderful gifts, because I’m like, Oh, I didn’t see that I was going to rhyme this with this, but look at that. Oh, poof! You’ve got content. And the poem swerves into a corner which I never would’ve expected because of the sonic possibility creates the content possibility. And so form and content, there’s no difference. I mean, if a poem is working, there’s no difference. If it isn’t, then you start to see the rift and then you come out of the poem and you’re like, Huh, why are they at odds? So I do believe it’s the same thing, or aspirationally, it’s the same thing. 

And so yeah, I just love exercising all these possibilities. Sestinas can be a kind of storytelling, say. Or it’s often used for a comic poem. So it’s just great to reach to possibility. And also, you know, I think in terms of those strict forms or received forms, I’ve often heard kind of, and to some extent correct, it comes from sort of a patriarchal place. Definitely there are precedents which oftentimes are at odds with what I might want to say. And then I’m just kind of like, but they don’t get to have that. [laughs] I was like, that’s a form of architecture, which just because somebody used it … I was like, nope.

So I do think of these things. It isn’t always top of mind. As a writer, I am doing my own form of reclamation. You know, I’m not necessarily calling that or congratulating myself, but I’m like, just because a villanelle, and you have some of these examples that may or may not be relatable to me or germane to what I want to talk about, it’s like, well, the form is still freaking rad! [laughs] So I’m just like, I’m going to use it and not really worry about them and create my own rehabilitation space. People can judge my poem on its own terms. Every poem is an exercise in allusion to some extent. So if one knows that going in, one can sort of grab what one needs and then make it one’s own. And therefore, it’s just a continuation of making it new.

And so, I try to see possibility not limitation when it comes to creation. And I don’t know, jury’s out, you tell me. [laughs] But I know that in terms of creating, that feels like an open space. And I cannot approach a poem closed because when I sit down to write the poem, that is not sort of the end game, the given. That’s when I start to listen and say, Okay, now what, poem? I have this cute line. I have this idea. I have a half formed idea. What is the poem gonna say? And so it’s this constant letting go even as I’m trying to write the poem itself. I mean, this all sounds a little woo woo, but the truth is that a poem has its own ideas and it doesn’t really matter what I think. So anyway, it’s a long-winded answer [laughs], but I appreciate the question.

Poets.org: I appreciate it. There are so many content possibilities in your poems. I was reading Deal yesterday and thinking the word heteroglossic came to mind. You have these very tightly composed poems, but so much is going on in them. There was one poem in which you mentioned both giallo films and lyrics from a song by the 1990s girl group, Jade, the song “Don’t Walk Away.” I was like, how does he incorporate all of this [laughs], these very different references within this very tightly composed poem? So your mind is just firing as you’re writing. I can see it on the page.

Mann: Yeah. You know, another thing I wanted, I’m trying to make my poems ... I just want to say what I think in some ways, and I want to include what’s on my mind. Obviously a poem is asking for a kind of organization. And even if it’s loose, the suggestion of an argumentative thread or threads. Things are not arbitrary. But at the same time, I do love the tension of “this is what’s on my mind right now,” you know, and it doesn’t have to be tied up in a bow, but definitely the associations I think are interesting. And yes, I often think about giallo and I am basically living in those nineties songs like one hundred percent of the time. I may or may not have listened to “Don’t Walk Away” this morning, okay? [laughs] So it’s like, this is what I think about. And I’m kind of like, why do I? I’m always quoting with my friend Miguel Murphy, who has a poem that I’ve curated for this month. We’re always quoting song lyrics with each other. Apropos of nothing we’ll be like, “Back and forth, like Aaliyah.” [laughs] Just being ridiculous. And I’m like, wait a minute. Why aren’t these in poems? And so, yeah, that’s part of my thinking.

Poets.org: I love it, and I’ve loved this conversation. This was fun. Thank you so much for joining me, Randall.

Mann: No, thank you so much. It was my pleasure.