Dara Wier recommends...

"My childhood location, south of New Orleans, on the banks of the Mississippi River leaned me toward inclinations I think help with poetry's desires:

"What's coming around the bend, what might float by next on its waters, what weather will do to it, who will pass by, who will wave or hail and how, what's it like in the day time and in the night, how many waves will any particular ship's wake make, what tides do, how seasons are.

"Our farm's fields' rhythmical ways, a sensibly repetitive insistence, up on a mule is very high up for a child, seeds, culling, transplanting, cultivating, grafting, hoeing, picking and packing, selling on the road or at the French Market in the city, strangers one always met there, their accents, their stories.

"And schools (as in fish) and flocks (as in birds) and crowds (as in people as in Mardi Gras)—these keep their individual parts apart and then make such amazing configurations and shapes altogether seeming as one."
—Dara Wier, author of Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009)