Retrospectives: An Interview with D. M. Aderibigbe May 1, 2026 – Posted in: Interviews
“The unquenchable thirst I have for language led me to poetry. And it still leads me to it, even now, even after all these years.”
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“The unquenchable thirst I have for language led me to poetry. And it still leads me to it, even now, even after all these years.”
Continue reading“Through combining language and ideas not typically found in relationship with one another, poems allow us to see the world we know (and so easily glaze over) as fresh and novel. It wakes us up, not to something brand new, but to what has existed all along.”
Continue reading“Poetry demands a kind of generosity that is difficult to practice in real life. I like thinking of poetry as a gateway into an ideal world, that talks about fun things and challenging things, with a level of trust that’s hard to come by in the world.”
Continue reading“The love of poetry as a whole, rather than one particular school, is freeing. I’m willing to explode whatever I did last and see where the pieces land. The questions I’m grappling with in an individual poem or larger project will reveal a corresponding approach and form. “Voice,” then, seems like a matter of discernment and intuition—in the universe of all possible things you could say and ways you could say them, what are you uniquely called to express?”
Continue reading“Can poetry, this thing I wanted and now have, hold everything for me?—all my joy and sorrow, my delight and regret? Should a poem have to? Then I wondered: How capacious is a poem? Almost immediately I knew my poems, for the foreseeable future, would be in proximity to this question.”
Continue reading“Writing is like working out a puzzle—not therapy exactly, but a kind of exploration. Entering an undiscovered country and trying to get the lay of the land. When you reach a high point, you suddenly see the horizon and understand how you got there and what might lie beyond. Writing is the place where I feel most myself.”
Continue reading“I think I eventually became loyal to a different kind of truth, an emotional truth that requires misremembering and collaging experiences from different phases of my life and imagination.”
Continue reading“At the intersection of my obsession with art, music, and the boundless worlds of books was poetry—a symphony for the page, a dance across the canvas of language.”
Continue reading“Give yourself permission. Don’t question yourself before you’ve begun.”
Continue reading“How do language, image, and form fight me on the page as I attempt to accurately map the full ecosystem of a feeling?”
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