INTERVIEW: Rob Carney and Nano Taggart

We’re thrilled to be able to publish Writing Games, a chapbook by Utah poet Rob Carney in 2026 as part of our micro-dose series. It will include a number of his original writing prompts and poems sprung from those prompts. (Sugar House Review subscribers will receive this book.) Our editor Nano Taggart sat down with Rob to talk about the role of playfulness in poetry and teaching poetry. This conversation was also inspired by a panel Nano hosted as part of the 2025 Utah Poetry Festival, “Poetry and Play(fulness),” which you can view by clicking here.

Nano Taggart: What do we mean when we say that a poem is playful? Are we talking about humor? Are we referring to craft that shapes the sounds in a poem? Or are we talking about something larger that sociologists and cognitive behaviorists have long since defined—that (in the words of Thomas S. Henricks) “play is the laboratory of the possible”?

Rob Carney: I like that phrase a lot—“the laboratory of the possible”—and think it’s right and feel like I’ve had that experience. Like, one time I ran across an interesting fact: that our bodies are 72.8% water. Interesting because I’m pretty sure the surface of Earth is the same: 72.8% water. Which seemed cool, and more than a coincidence, so I decided I wanted to write about it. Instead I wound up playing around with other “facts,” or at least other declarations, and pretty soon I finished a catalog poem called “The Person You Love Is 72.8% Water”:

I don’t know if I’m going to hell,

but I like toast for breakfast,

and I can eat breakfast

any time of day.

A woman’s slender arms

make me wish I was a painter.

Cats belong in every bookstore. They’ll make the words

seep deeper in your bones.

If God and I were on a rocky beach,

we’d search out perfect skipping stones.

I’d tell Him my favorite miracle:

water into wine.

My favorite mood is Angry. That’s a lie.

My favorite sin is lying. That’s not true,

but it dresses up the story

like a good storm dresses up the sky,

like fire and fiddles take wood and make it speak.

I know, I know—water isn’t wine.

But at night, when someone’s thirsty,

you can bring it, cold as heaven. They can drink.

Is there humor in that poem? I hope so. But I don’t intend for it to be like comedy, where the structure is a setup for a punch line and laughter—the end. The humor comes earlier. And then the ending, if it is a punch line, is a rounding back to the title but with action now and some small demonstration of love.

(“The Person You Love Is 72.8% Water” was published in Story Problems, Somondoco Press, 2011.)

NT: Why do you think readers might seek out playfulness in the poetry they read?

RC: Readers might not start out knowing they’re seeking playfulness when they pick up a poet or a journal to read, but if they happen upon some playfulness, then whammo; that’s what they’re going to get excited about. I can use myself as an example. Reading Cream City Review, I found a poem called “The Pyromaniac and the Gas Station Girl”—great title, for starters—and it’s a poem I can still recite from memory after thirty-plus years. It’s the same with my own work—I like being surprised as I’m writing, and the only way to do that is with interesting, imaginative (hence, playful) language. New Phrasing = New Discovery, and new is why people like to write and read, or at least it’s why I do.

NT: Can you talk a little more about the first device in Writing Games, the one about starting with an intro phrase? And do you ever use other devices besides that one to spark play?

RC: Sure. Well, the stranger the intro phrase, the better. And if we can subvert the expectations raised by our title, that’s better again. Like this, for example: “When a black cat crosses your path,”—I definitely wasn’t going to follow that up by saying, “then it’s going to bring bad luck”:

WHEN A BLACK CAT CROSSES YOUR PATH,

it means you’re probably in a neighborhood.

When a narwhal crosses your path,

it means you’re in a boat. Somewhere

in the Arctic Ocean…

After that, I was in, and I wound up writing the poem. As for other devices to spark play, there’s this too—not something I made up this time; something that exists and always has—myths, fables, and origin stories. I write many of them, and think they’re like play. I’m pretty sure most readers think so too, even if they’re about serious subjects, because people recognize the old form but haven’t heard your new story, so they want to know what’s going on and find out how it ends; meaning, they aren’t reading for info, they’re reading for play, even if it’s serious play. Also, these old forms come with playfulness built in. Animals talk. Strange things happen. Causal connections are more emotional than logical. Listeners are willing to let magic just be magical since they know there will be an explanation, or some implied meaning, by the end. Even if not, the story will have been sad, or funny, or in some other way captivating. The other good thing is that these forms are built on metaphor, so listeners wind up thinking about how the plots and characters apply to their own lives. “In the Beginning Was a Girl” and “The Man Has a Heart Like a Kite” are examples. I have some newer poems I call “strange résumés” that sort of fit in these genres too.

NT: What about the crafting part of it, the work left to do after a draft has happened—can play emerge through the process of revision? I struggle with revision, at least with enjoying it. Can revision itself be a form of play? In other words, how do we make sure we’re enjoying ourselves, but not just entertaining ourselves?

RC: That’s a good point because the word “play” shouldn’t get reduced to goofing around. Play can be significant and add meaning and reengage the listener in ways that, say, just another fact or “sonorous sentence full of loaded import” might not. I mean, you said it yourself at the AWP Conference. You told me a good example of what you mean about playfulness with language is my poem “Story Problems,” which isn’t a humorous kind of joke poem. It’s more serious than that in the subject matter even if it leaps around a lot. Those leaps weren’t just some kind of sudden-outpouring-of-inspiration thing. They’re a product of both, of drafting and revising, of working and shaping and seeing something start to emerge, finding an order, then addressing the logic and rhythms of the whole by revising.

You said an example of what you’re trying to highlight when you consider this question was when I say, “On every day of my life but one, I didn’t see a moose.” Of course, the straight-up-info-syntax would’ve been, “One day, I saw a moose,” but that’s a lot less interesting, and it doesn’t set up the rest of what’s coming in a vivid way, and vivid is what poems and stories ought to be since vivid is what readers want. Plus, if we don’t let ourselves write lines like this, doesn’t writing start to feel like every other job?

Of course, now that I’ve said that, it sounds like a contradiction, like I’ll just wind up saying that we need to entertain ourselves, and that’s true, but we can’t be self-indulgent. There’s an audience, and the audience needs to be rewarded for the time we’re asking for their attention. I guess what I’m saying is it’s both, and revising is the work that makes the bothness happen.

NT: What about the consideration of length of a poem? Is there a generosity in giving a reader a brief snapshot that can sort of bounce around in their head versus a longer text?

RC: I talk about this in my book Accidental Gardens: New & Revised (Wakefield Press, 2021). It’s a collection of 48 flash essays about place, the environment, and writing poetry. I talk throughout about poetics, especially in the second section, “Wine Is Rain in Translation.” Those 14 essays include some other writing-game suggestions and thoughts about writing, which probably sounds like a plug, and I guess it is because it’s a book I’m really happy with, and I hope people read it.

More specifically though—or at least alongside your question—the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer said something that made a big impression on me when I was still in my twenties. It was on the dust jacket of a hardback I don’t own (I own the paperback), so this is just my memory of what Tranströmer said. He said that whenever he and his friends got bored in school, they’d pass notes to each other—little phrases and images and whatnot. He said poems are like that: Our daily life is going on all the time, with its routines and rules and boredoms, then a poem comes along and taps us on our shoulder and hands us a note. To me that explanation makes a lot of sense. Not because I don’t ever write long poems. I do. But those long poems might be sequences, or movements, or collages, or in some way a gathering-together of smaller parts. The Book of Drought is an example of this. Or a poem like “North and West of Winnemucca,” which you know well since it first came out in Sugar House Review.

NT: What about the poem as it sits on the page? Is enjambment a sort of play?

RC: Hmm. I’m not sure this answers your question exactly—for exactness I should talk about sonnets, probably—but this is something that happened recently that caught me by surprise and stopped me from doing what I was about to do, which was go to work early and spend the extra time grading. What happened was I noticed our cat. He wasn’t going to work early. He was like an art installation of napping, and that made me smile. And then a line popped into my head, so I sat down and wrote. I suppose you could call that another kind of work instead of play, and you’re not wrong. It’s work, and the world at large is kidding itself if it doesn’t think so and assign it value.

Anyway, I did still go to work, just not in my car yet and not on the minute-hand’s schedule, so it probably fits the definition of playfulness you’re getting at. Plus, the poem’s plot, so to speak, is about sometimes doing what you want to do, with your whole self invested, and I do use enjambment:

MEANING AND BUSY AREN’T SYNONYMS

Sherlock is keeping me honest

by sleeping in a chair.

He’s a cat, so he can suss things out,

consider the corners of his universe

between blinks,

between impulse,

between which small smells

the wind comes disclosing…

If it sounds like I’m praising an animal, I am;

I think it’s my job right now.

Not my timeliness

between parking spots,

not the beep-assault

of messages—

hell, Sherlock wouldn’t even type this up.

He’d stretch his paws.

Those first two lines enjamb, and that delay, where you have to eye-skip down, makes the second line more surprising. It isn’t the only enjambment in the poem, but it’s the one that matters most since it’s the hook.

NT: Seems like you write about cats a lot.

RC: Yeah, I guess so. I like them. To me, they’re a part of the landscape, a bit of wildness we’ve invited inside, and they’re as much a part of the house as the kitchen. Still, it’s probably just a subliminal thing since the homage poem in Writing Games is me riffing on Christopher Smart’s “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry.”

NT: Are there other poets you like to read who do this sort of language play? Poets who you’ve learned things from or whose work has served as an example?

RC: Yeah, Scott Poole, Jessy Randall, Anne Sexton, Frank O’Hara, Tomaž Šalamun, Vasko Popa, Richard Garcia. They’re the ones who jump to mind first. I like all of them. And they’ve got book titles like Hiding from Salesmen, Lunch Poems, and Injecting Dreams into Cows. If people think Sexton wasn’t playful (given her problems with depression and other things), yes, she was. Her style and language were playful. I mean, she calls cocoa “that warm brown mama” and praises ice cubes, saying, “for you are the perfect size for miniature polar bears to float upon.” So Sexton can be as serious as a storm or a fire, but she’s playful, too.

NT: Thank you, Rob. Your involvement with this project, this magazine, has been an important part of our story. I can’t believe it’s been 16 years since I asked you to send poems for our first issue.

RC: These were great questions. Thanks for asking them. And thanks for having me along for the ride.