Megan Pinto on Moving With Language
First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Megan Pinto about her new poetry collection, Saints of Little Faith.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: You have a poem called “Across an Open Field”, and in there you have a line that says, “Does language move me closer or further away?” And I wanted to ask you what you meant in that poem, and do you have an answer to that question?
Megan Pinto: I think that’s one of the last poems I wrote for the book, and I am genuinely trying to answer that question, because when I write a poem, when I talk about these memories, they are ultimately constructed, and especially through revision. When I’m, writing the first draft, I think I do have an allegiance to this is what happened? But especially as I revise, I want the poem to be the best poem it can and so I edit and I change things and ultimately, I guess the question to answer is what is the truth that I’m trying to move closer toward? Is it the facts of what happened? Because then I don’t think my language is moving me closer toward that. But if the goal is something else, which for me, I think the goal is an emotional experience. I think sometimes language moves me closer, but ultimately, I want to get closer to the experience and to understanding and sometimes language takes me there, and sometimes language takes me somewhere else and creates and reveals a new experience or a new set of questions. So, there’s no perfect answer. And I think it’s a question that I am actively still thinking through.
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Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith, her debut collection. Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Lit Hub and elsewhere. She has won the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and Storyknife. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.
