Readings

April 6th, 2025
Asheville, North Carolina

Malaprop’s Bookstore Poetrio Series
55 Haywood Ave., Asheville, N.C., 4:30 pm

Press

Interview with Forget the Box Arts Magazine

Montreal Review of Books review of Tidal by Carlos A. Pittella

The Informer, Montreal West Viewspaper, November 2024, Vol. 52, No. 8

Literary Database of Quebec English-Language Authors Listing

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Author Interview with Zoe K. Korte, Chestnut Review staff writer:

ZKK: Tidal is your debut poetry collection. Were there lessons to be learned from putting together a manuscript that you had not previously understood in the process of publishing individual pieces?

MDL: A manuscript is more than a collection of individual poems, there has to be an arc or current of a story, and poems need to speak to each other.

ZKK: The collection is portioned into two parts. What was your intent in selecting the first and last pieces of each section? What can these four pieces reveal about the arc of the book?

MDL: First of all, the first and last poems of sections need to be strong poems or important in the arc of the book. They invite the reader in, set a tone, signal transitions. “Cardinal Flower” and “The First Climber” in the first section communicate critical information about the narrator, confronted with the red blooms that resist taming and wrestling with a child who is a climber. “Tidal” and “East Beach” in the second section give more texture and depth to the forces out of our control, alongside the beauty, and the impact of close kin and loss.

ZKK: To expand on the previous question, the poem “Dear Daniel” concludes with the line, “Do you still have dreams / about where we go from here?” Will you continue on the trajectory of Tidal in future work, or do you feel satisfied with how thoroughly this work builds its own discrete realm?

MDL: I don’t really know where I’ll go from here, can’t say I feel “satisfied” or “finished” with what I created with TIDAL. But I hope there will be new directions, things to discover.

ZKK: Sometimes poetry can make the reader squirm with simultaneous rapture and repulsion, which is to be desired in a medium that excavates exquisitely uncomfortable truths. In the poem “Seesaw,” the speaker cites their “own antsy urge to disturb.” Did you choose such raw material to ruffle feathers in your audience, digest some nagging nostalgia, or an amalgamation of the two?

MDL: I would say “Neither!” I think I only discovered, claimed the “antsy urge to disturb” in myself in the process of writing “Seesaw” and thinking about the impulsive and provocative behavior of my boy cousins, wondering why I was never the one disturbing the balance and causing a ruckus. And then related that to my later life twists and turns.

ZKK: In “Bottom of the Well,” the speaker narrates, “I peer into the depths with a special lens… to figure out what survives in the black hole.” What “special lens” do you use to find sources of inspiration?

MDL: The “special lens” that serves as a source of inspiration for me comes through what I observe or feel, often with great intensity, what I hear in the wind when alone and tuned in. It’s an honoring of place, physical and otherwise, and people that I care about, people who see me.

ZKK: The speaker refers to the biographical subject of “Higher and Higher” as “all technique, no sentiment.” When it comes to writing poetry, what is your preferred equilibrium between technique and sentiment? How does each crucial element refine or dilute the other?

MDL: With poetry I find it’s the same as with music (playing the piano)—you have to achieve a flow between the two (technique and sentiment), to avoid letting one get the upper hand, unless just for an instant that lassoes you back to a better balance.