Poetry Friday, Week 14: Interview with Matthew Forrest Esenwine

© Graphic by Amber Fleek

Irene at Live Your Poem has the poetry round up today.  She has a lot of cool poetry happenings like a poetry gumball machine.
Matthew Forrest Esenwine has published several poetry but this month he has a debut poetry anthology, A Universe of Rainbows: Multicolored Poems for a Multicolored World.  I was lucky to have Matthew answer a few questions about this anthology.

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JRM: This is your first anthology. What made you decide you wanted to create one?
MFE: When I first came up with the idea of doing a rainbows-themed poetry collection in early 2019, I began researching all the different rainbows in the world - many of which I never even knew about, like pilot's glories, rainbow scarabs, and Colombia's Caño Cristales (aka, the Rainbow River). But the more I thought about what rainbows represent, like hope and diversity, the more I thought pulling a bunch of poet friends together and creating an anthology of diverse voices would be a cool way to approach the project.

JRM: What surprised you about creating an anthology?
MFE: Several folks have asked me that, and I'm not sure I was surprised by anything, to be honest! Even though I'd never assembled an anthology before, I've contributed dozens of poems to anthologies and literary journals over the past few decades, so I had a good understanding of what I'd likely need to do; plus, I spoke with Lee Bennett Hopkins, the Pied Piper of Poetry himself, before I began the process to see what he thought of the idea. He loved it! He offered some advice for putting it together and was even going to write the flower poem for the book, before he passed later that year. I'm grateful to our mutual friend Rebecca Kai Dotlich for stepping up and writing a poem about what was to be Lee's subject.
JRM: Which came first: the categories or the poems from the poets?
MFE: The categories and subjects all came first. As I researched, I wrote down all the subjects I thought would make for good poems and had a list of at least a couple dozen, which was more than I needed. But as I looked over the list to determine which subjects would stay and which would go, I knew I needed some sort of narrative, or structure, to hold the collection together, to give the book some cohesiveness. So I grouped the subjects into categories of "water, rock, animal, etc." to see what I could come up with, and eventually settled on the five categories you'll see in the book:  "Rainbows of Light, "Rainbow Waters, "Living Rainbows," "Rainbows of Rock," and "Rainbows Beyond."

Not that it's immediately obvious, but there's a narrative here, beginning with miniscule rain droplets refracting sunlight and slowly getting bigger and bigger, expanding the book's scope from water to plant and animal to mountains and caves and finally to the largest rainbow we know, the Rainbow Nebula in Orion.
JRM: What kind of research did you do for the sidebars with the poems? In the poem “Hello, Pilot!”, did you know you would be researching the term “pilot’s glory"? Or was that a result of Renee M. LaTulippe’s poem?
MFE: The pilot's glory phenomenon was one I'd never heard of before, but I thought that, for a child, the idea of looking 'down' at a rainbow was intriguing - not just poetically, but visually. Once I had all the poems in hand, I sat down and wrote the sidebars so that I could reference the poems and try to make all the text as cohesive (there's that word again!) as possible.
JRM: Tell us more about your experience at the Zhangye Danxia GeoPark. It looks like it would be amazing.
MFE: I've never been there, but it does look like a fantastically amazing place to visit. Coincidentally, when I was signing ARCs of the book at NCTE in Boston last Nov., we ran out of copies and switched to half-size prints of that particular spread. As I was signing them, a young Asian woman in line exclaimed, "Oh my gosh, this is where I grew up!" We were all stunned! But it was true: she was from China and had grown up right nearby this amazing geological feature. Can you imagine living next door to that??
JRM: Was there a poem that isn’t in the book that you wish you had included?
MFE: Yes and no - I did write a poem about rainbow clouds, but ultimately opted to not use it because I felt there were enough sky/weather type poems already and didn't want to load up the book with too much of the same thing. So it's somewhere between a polished draft and final draft:

Rainbow Clouds
On arctic nights
          we ebb and flow
higher than the cirrus go;
bending light,
          begin to glow,
and in the sky - Oh!
                        What a show!
– © 2024 Matt F. Esenwine, all rights reserved
I do mention rainbow clouds in the anthology, though, as I thought they were an important aspect of the science behind rainbows. I make reference to them in the sidebar for the first poem in the anthology, Nikki Grimes' lovely "The Saturday of No."

JRM: What plans do you have for another anthology?
MFE: I actually have two more on the way! One is under contract with Eerdmans and will hopefully see the light of day by maybe 2028 or 2029, and another will likely soon be under contract with a different publisher, with a tentative date of 2028. I have plenty of others I'm submitting as we speak, too!

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With Jamey, his talented illustrator.

ICYMI

I missed last week's Poetry Friday.  I posted these videos from my Texas Women's University students.  I want to make sure people get to see them.

​This year for the midterm project, I took some poems from poetry friends as well as working with Heidi Bee Roemer who has a most excellent Steamed Power Poetry Contest.  Students selected from a variety of poems. They are encouraged to submit the poems to the contest but that is optional.  Here are the first five of ten poems.  Enjoy.

Mariana V.: At The Pet Shop by Heidi Bee Roemer. 
Clarissa R.:Welcome to the Science Lab by Heidi Bee Roemer
Sierra B.: Name That Seed! by Heidi Bee Roemer
Aisha L.: Ode to the Washing Machine by Rebecca Kai Dotlich
Victoria T.: My New Remote by Ken Nesbitt Note: The static audio at the beginning is intentional.