When there’s emotional truth, there follows a rhythm, and I think a beauty of image, because you’re seeing clearly.
In 1996 Lucia Berlin’s students Kellie Paluck and Adrian Zupp interviewed her for a class on poetics. Published now at Lit Hub, via Picador, Berlin talks about her influences, plain-style poets like William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, and Ed Dorn, and the chronic homesickness and loneliness that forged her instinctual mode of writing.