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Christopher Buckley is a canvasser of the human experience. From the Catholic theology of his childhood to new discoveries in cosmology, from the cultural revolution of the 1960s to Eastern Europe in the 1990s, from the art of Georgia O'Keeffe to the poetry of contemporaries like Gerald Stern and Pablo Neruda, his poetry explores the gamut of the physical and intellectual environs he has occupied. Always incisive, Buckley explains his investigations in direct terms: “One of the main reasons a person is drawn to art, to writing, to poetry particularly, is to try to make sense of his/her life. ...as you go at puzzling out any individual existence, certainly as you look back and try to put pieces together, you are making that myth of yourself.”

His process of mythmaking is mirrored by a technical facility that allows Buckley to pursue the elements of his craft most appropriate to parsing his experience. His lines balance rhythm and image to offer his reader a seat of comfortable distress that echoes the very complexities of life his work so consistently pursues. But Buckley is adamant—poets must also write critical prose, and he has done just that for thirty years, championing the work of young and underappreciated poets we'd be poorer without. And we'd be poorer without the mythic sense of life Buckley has created in fourteen books of poems, the most recent of which is And the Sea and Sky. Last year, Eastern Washington University Press released his second collection of creative nonfiction, Sleepwalk. And he has authored or edited, seven celebrations of poets and poetry, including A Condition of the Spirit: The Life & Work of Larry Levis (with Alexander Long), Homage to Vallejo, and Appreciations: Selected Reviews, Views, & Interviews—1975-2000. He has been honored with dozens of grants and awards, including four Pushcart Prizes. He is currently working on a collection of new and selected poems. Buckley teaches at the University of California, Riverside, and was kind enough to conduct this interview by way of electronic correspondence.