Strangers on the Internet: An Interview with Kate Baer

“If one’s poetry is not political, what is it hiding?”

Whenever I teach poetry, I ask students to do an erasure of an old text. Find a classic book, a to-do list, a product manual, anything made of words, I tell them. Take a big black sharpie and strike out as many words as you need to create a poem, to make the text over, to let it find another voice, the voice you see bubbling underneath. I have always lo…