Dede Cummings

"With poetry," Billy Collins says, "you don’t have to go through a windshield to realize that life is precious." My work is very autobiographical and true-to-life. I've spent lots of hours working with it over the last ten years or so, cutting, polishing, moving things around. I look for meaning and truth in the poem and then try to chip away the excess—to clarify the arcs of each poem and make sure that every word and each line is important, and will be important to the reader.