An Interview with Mike Bagwell

Josh Dale: As a seasoned author, how does this chapbook complement your previous works?

Mike Bagwell: This is the third chapbook to excerpt from a book-length poem, Poem of Thanks. That work is a sprawling meditation on parenthood, mysticism, and the weight of history. Each section is structured by correspondences with a tarot card, this section collecting the Two of Swords, reversed Six of Swords, and the Devil. So it extends and deepens the symbolism established in the earlier releases, but is also the first to come out in print.

JD: What were the challenges and goals you set for yourself when compiling this manuscript? If willing, how many times was this submitted before being accepted?

MB: This section had a wide variety of threads to stitch together. The voice moves instantaneously from political outrage to paternal joy to distracted thoughts to mysticism. Keeping that balance was a real challenge and something I was constantly tweaking. There’s a sense of rhythm and melody to the space where the tender, surreal logic of my daughters’ language can coexist with the rigidity of political anger or abstract, metaphysical thought. Listening for and staying true to that was most of the challenge. As a chapbook, this was actually the first and only submission. As individual segments and isolated fragments, it probably comes to around 25 total submissions.

JD: What’s your opinion on the hand-made aspect of TW chapbooks?

MB: I love hand-made books! In an age of digital overload and continuous streams of information, presses taking the time to present poetry with methods that require human touch are deeply appreciated.

JD: Tell me how do you ‘escape the mundane’? Think habits, rituals, non-creative things; be as detailed as you wish.

MB: Reading poetry is my most effective means of transport into whatever realm it is that ideas swim in. I like putting on some weird or cosmic music, making tea, and spreading out two or three recent book finds. They might not have anything to do with the poem that emerges, but the act of reading is often a springboard. Lately, I’ve found very long bike rides to be mind-cleansing.

JD: What is the biggest accomplishment your chapbook has made?

MB: The political voice that emerges here is the sharpest I’ve crafted, visceral in its anger and cutting in its brevity and directness. I was always under the common impression that my life did not warrant writing about, that there was nothing interesting occurring there or that I had no privileged position from which to say anything that originated in my lived experience, so I’m immensely proud of the manuscript and this section’s voice in particular.

JD: What is your next book goal, whether it’s a signed contract or abstractly brainstormed?

MB: I have a couple of prose projects I’d love to return to. Each is highly weird, deeply structured according to some essentially arbitrary logic, and inhabits a unique mindset I have to slowly settle into such that they’re hard to whittle out time for. I also have an ongoing experimental, multimedia Gilgamesh translation that I love working through as it allows for alternative visual and linguistic modes of thinking when resolving the Akkadian and Sumerian cuneiform into my own interpretations.

JD: Pick 1 of each to bring to an island retreat for 1 month: book, album, movie, personal item

MB: Book: Poems for the Millennium ed. by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, Album: John Coltrane’s Ascension, Movie: Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Personal Item: Notebook.

JD: Pick a number between 1-1000.

MB: 743

JD: That's 743 pets for my cat, Grey. He is overstimulated! Thanks for speaking to me.

get Poem of Thanks

Mike Bagwell is a form of mutual antagonism towards the sky. He received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence, and his work appears in Poetry Northwest, Action Spectacle, The Texas Review, ITERANT, Sprung Formal, Afternoon Visitor, HAD, Tyger Quarterly, Annulet, and others. Recent chapbooks include Poem of Thanks: A Court of Wands (Metatron 2025), A Collision of Soul in Midair (Bottlecap), and micros from Ghost City and Rinky Dink. He runs the Ghost Harmonics reading series in Philly. Find him at mikebagwell.me, @low_gh0st, or playing dragons with his daughters.