“The poem, to me, is a conversation between people,” writes Alex Dimitrov in the latest Craft Capsule installment, in which he talks about his 2014 project Night Call involving reading drafts of poems from his second book, Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), to strangers in their apartments in New York City. Through intimate conversations and exchanges, he is forever connected with these lives and places as the poem “keeps people’s voices and things right there, outside time.” Write an essay inspired by a conversation with a stranger you met in passing, whether at a grocery store, on a train, in a park, or elsewhere. Challenge yourself, as Dimitrov does, by including gestures or specific phrases you recall into the essay. How were you changed by this brief exchange?
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