Poet Spotlight: Cody Walker [he/him]

Artist Biography: Cody Walker teaches English and directs the Undergraduate Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He’s the author of two full-length poetry collections: The Self-Styled No-Child (Waywiser, 2016) and Shuffle and Breakdown (Waywiser, 2008). His awards include the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry from Shenandoah, the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize from Hunger Mountain, and residency fellowships from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, the Amy Clampitt Fund, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A longtime writer-in-residence in Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program, he was elected Seattle Poet Populist in 2007. His work appears in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, The Yale Review, Parnassus, Poetry Northwest, The Hecht Prize Anthology, and The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2007). He’s the director of the Bear River Writers’ Conference and the co-editor of Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan, 2013). He lives in Ann Arbor with the fiction writer Polly Rosenwaike and their two daughters.

Facebook: Cody Walker

Spotlight Transcript

Co-Executive Director and Program Facilitator, Dom Witten, interviews today's Poet Spotlight, Cody Walker

Dom: How would you describe your creative process?

Cody: I rarely start with an idea for a poem. I mean, there are subjects I reliably return to (political skullduggery, the inevitability of death), but I usually let sounds—maybe a rhyme, maybe some light alliteration—take me there. I believe in Robert Frost’s maxim, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” I try to catch myself in the act of being surprised and then hope that sense of surprise is felt by the reader. It doesn’t always work! But the more times I try, the better the odds become of something interesting breaking through.

Dom: In your writing style, content or relationship with poetry, what has remained constant and what has changed?

Cody: I’ve always relied on form to shake myself out of received language, received ideas. Left to my own devices, I’ll likely say what everyone else says! But the demands of form push me in surprising directions. For nearly three decades, I’ve been testing light-verse forms (limericks, clerihews, double dactyls, Mad Gardener’s Song stanzas) to see how much weight they can hold. Can a poet say something gravely serious within a form that has a built-in expectation of levity? My Ph.D. dissertation took up this idea as well; I examined “difficult laughter,” the kind of laughter that dies in the throat. So that interest has remained constant. What’s changed, I suppose (and this is a recent change; I’m not sure if it’ll stick), is that I’ve somewhat lost interest in satirizing the day-to-day horrors of the current administration. The targets of mockery are too easy; the harm is too vast. I miss writing silly poems about the Mitt Romneys of the world! Writing about Stephen Miller, about J.D. Vance, has become . . . dispiriting.

Dom: How does being in community with other poets and writers influence the work you're writing?

Cody: I have a group of friends from my Seattle days who I get together with every January for a writing retreat. When we’re not physically in the same place (which is the situation for most of the year), we still share poems on a private website. From the first day of 2015 to the last day of 2019, I posted a poem every day. 1826 poems! And most of the poems weren’t worth revisiting, but a few had staying power. These days I post less frequently; still, I share everything I write. It’s nice to have readers—and I’m sure our work rubs off on each other. Some of us have gone through health scares or lost members of our families in recent years, and the ways in which we’ve dealt with those difficulties on the page have been instructive for all of us. I hope I’m learning to dig a little deeper in my work, to not stay so much on the comic surface.

Dom: What are you excited about in your work lately?

Cody: I’ve been on the verge of putting a new manuscript together for the past few years—so, whenever I can finally bring myself to do that, I think I’ll be excited! My problem (and maybe it’s not really a problem) is that I have such different types of poems to potentially bring together. I have the funny/not-funny poems I’m always writing; I have poems about politics; I have poems about my father’s death and my mother’s Alzheimer’s. How do they all live together in relative harmony? Who gets the larger bedroom, the better closet? I’m excited to (this year? next year?) arrive at some answers.

Cody Walker will be visiting Alpena, MI for 2 FREE events on September 20th at 6:30pm for an Open-Mic at PIF Cider (no registration required) and September 21st from 11-12:30pm at the Granum Theatre at Alpena Community College (registration required).

Registration link: https://www.tpoeticslab.com/event-details/prominent-poet-series-formal-reading-and-q-a

Interview Published: 09/07/2025

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