Eric Stiefel is a graduate of the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also served as junior fellow in poetry. He was named the winner of the 2018 Sequestrum New Writer Awards and a finalist in the 2018 Penn Review Poetry Prize.
Eric Stiefel
Interrupted in the Night
We were balanced on a tight wire,
but it was also
as if I’d called her from a séance or a dream, where a spider
could be the afterbody
Eric Stiefel
Interrupted in the Night
We were balanced on a tight wire,
but it was also
as if I’d called her from a séance or a dream, where a spider
could be the afterbody
to the part of oneself that tried to follow
the moon. Crawling across
the surface with a silver sheen.
You’re there and then that, she said, motioning off
between me
and the mechanical dark. Legs tangled
like clockwork. A pair
of dead lilies on the nightstand.
Just two.
Rose dressed like an acrobat in dim light.
We locked the window twice,
then another time for safe-
keeping. Inside,
the pattern we made with a dozen candles,
which was one way of trying to figure out
one’s life. It’s lovely, isn’t it?
That’s what they say,
huddled together in the night. They say,
There, there—isn’t it lovely holding the whole world in a glass?
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Eric Stiefel
What are 2 - 3 books (fiction, comic, memoir, poetry, essay, &c.) that you've read over the last year or less that really blew your hair back?
I was so in love with the beauty and the richness of the language in Mrs. Dalloway that it took me ages to finish it. I spent months reading a page or two at a time before putting it down or going back to reread a compelling paragraph. I finally got around to rereading Matthea Harvey's first collection, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, which is just as lovely, sharp, and cunning as I remember it.
Who is someone you admire who does work that you feel really benefits your community, and what kind of work is it that they do?
Justin Phillip Reed, a fellow poet, conducts workshops and small seminars for people in the community around St. Louis in comfortable, accessible settings. He's a brilliant, fiercely intelligent writer who's equally kind and generous to the people in his community, which is something I admire.
What is one thing you wish more literary journals did (differently) not so much in the submission process, but in style and content?
I think more themed issues and issues dedicated to ekphrastic work and collaborative work would be interesting. I know this exists to some extent in the literary world, but, as a poet invested in ekphrastic poetry, I would love to see more issues of journals where different poets respond to the same images or themes.
What part of a kid’s movie completely scared you when you were young?
If animals could talk, which would be the rudest?
I've known many cats who were rude even though they couldn't talk, and I'm having trouble thinking of an animal that might be more rude than a cat. Except maybe a chimp.