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Poets and Citizens: An Interview with the Editors of I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights

In 2007, two Montana poets—Melissa Kwasny and M. L. Smoker—were asked by Christine Holbert, the founder and publisher of Lost Horse Press, and then-president of the human rights task force in Sandpoint, Idaho, to edit an anthology of poetry concerned with human rights. They issued a call for poems, stating, in part: “We are increasingly witnesses to torture, terrorism and other violations of human rights at unprecedented degrees. What do our instincts tell us and what is our response to these violations? What is our vision of a future wherein human rights are not only respected but expanded?” Two years and hundreds of poems later, they produced I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights (Lost Horse Press, 2009). The anthology contains sixty poems by sixty different authors, ranging from poets with national or regional reputations to prisoners and human rights activists. In this interview conducted through email exchanges, the editors discuss their selection process, several poems and thematic threads among poems, and the role of poetry in the human rights arena.