Carl Boon

Oyster River Pages: Who are the writers who have made you who you are? 
Carl Boon: Jorge Luis Borges, Ron Silliman, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, St. Matthew.

ORP: What are the lenses that shape your worldview? 
CB: The psychoanalytic work of Freud/Lacan/Žižek; the climate change crisis; contemporary politics and the shift toward rightist/Fascist policy worldwide.

ORP: What’s the most important thing you’ve read/seen lately? 
CB: Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight—what a way to present a narrative.

ORP: What’s your least favorite word?
CB: Curmudgeon.

ORP: What’s your favorite thing that you’ve created? (line, image, story, etc.) 
CB: Perhaps a poem that appeared in The Charles Carter called “Pomegranate Town”—one of a few I think I got right.

ORP: What do you want to read/see more of in the world? 
CB: I think the Syrian refugee crisis will spawn phenomenal work. I look forward to reading it.

ORP: How do you pay it forward? 
CB: I’m a mad recycler. I also think that teaching, at its best, is a way of paying it forward.

ORP: What is the space that has shaped you the most? 
CB: The ferryboat from Beşiktaş to Kadıköy, Istanbul on a fall evening.

ORP: You’ve just written your autobiography. What’s the title?
CB: Summerdown.

Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Burnt Pine, Two Peach, Lunch Ticket, and Poetry Quarterly. His is also a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee. Find his poetry here.