What if the best poems come when you’re not looking for them? What can a writer do when it’s time to get to work? Poet David Keplinger offers a writing prompt that will trick your mind into that generative kind of spontaneity. We also hear an intimate moment with his mother and a forbidden chair in this Inspiration Takeover, a series of mini-episodes with different writers who offer us a little dose of inspiration.
David Keplinger is the author of Ice (forthcoming, Milkweed Editions, 2023) and seven other collections of poetry, including The Most Natural Thing, The Prayers of Others, The Clearing, The Rose Inside and Another City, winner of the 2019 UNT Rilke Prize. His work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and American Poetry Review, and has been translated into several languages and included in anthologies in several countries. He has translated Jan Wagner’s The Art of Topiary and Carsten René Nielsen’s World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors and House Inspections. Keplinger has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as support from the Soros Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the D.C. Council on Arts and Humanities, and the Danish Council on the Arts. He has also received the T.S. Eliot Award, the Colorado Book Award, the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International and the Erksine Poetry Prize from Smartish Place. Keplinger teaches in American University's MFA program in Washington, DC.
