What is Divedapper?

Glad you asked! It's a project devoted exclusively to featuring interviews with major voices in contemporary poetry. It has no affiliation with any institution, academic or literary or otherwise. All site content will be free forever to anyone with an internet connection.

Who are you?

Our names are Bradley Trumpfheller and Nabila Lovelace. Kaveh Akbar founded Divedapper, and ran the site for a few years before he passed it on to us. Our Assistant Editors, Sarah Miller Freehauf and Jacqueline Khor, are in charge of all transcription, good vibes, & copyediting. Our esteemed Creative Director, Alex Sperellis, designed the site you see before you, and our Developer, Boyma-njor Fahnbulleh, built it.

Divedapper HQ

Pleased to meet you all. What's a divedapper?

It's a type of grebe (a duckish water bird) to which Shakespeare compares Adonis in his “Venus and Adonis” (“Upon this promise did he raise his chin, / Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave, / Who, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in”). Our tagline, "A Constellation of Poetic Phenomena," is both an accurate description of our content and a play on this.

How do you decide who to interview?

I solicit interviews with poets whose work we can (and usually already have) proudly proselytize(d). They might range from academic titans to small press instigators—the only qualification is that one or both of us are able to back the work. We're interested in challenging any definition of poets & poetry, as well. If the poet is amenable, we move forward. As a rule, we don't interview people who request to be interviewed—it's nothing personal, we just feel like it changes the dynamics of the kinds of conversations we aspire to have here. n

Why are you doing this?

Kaveh: I want to be able to have meaningful conversations with the poets whose words have shaped the way I experience the world, and I want to share the artifacts of those conversations with as many people as possible.

Cool! Can I give you my money?

Absolutely—here's our online store.

When's your next interview coming out?

The first interviews we've done will be up in the coming weeks! Keep checking back towards the end of February; our goal is to put a new conversation up every other week, if we can.

All your interviews suck. Your questions suck. Your site sucks, you suck, and you should feel bad.

I sincerely invite you to make your own interview site and suck as much or as little as you please.

I have a question/comment/concern/ joy/rapture/sorrow to share with you. How do I get in touch?

Send all such queries to divedappereditors@gmail.com