In celebration of National Poetry Month, 15 Bytes is pleased to present a conversation and reading with Utah poet Shawn Dallas Stradley, interviewed by 15 Bytes editor Shawn Rossiter.

In their conversation, Stradley reflects on a life spent writing—beginning in adolescence and continuing through decades of artistic and personal evolution—and on how his poetry has changed over time. Where earlier work often leaned toward abstraction, he describes his more recent writing as more authentic, more immediate, and more rooted in the physical world: objects, landscapes, textures, and the charged particulars of lived experience. “The physicality is conveying the emotional content,” he says—a simple phrase that offers a key to understanding his work.

That sensibility is evident in recent poems such as “Painting the Cave” and “Still Life with Fly,” published in the latest Breaththroughs issue of NOMAD—poems that gather domestic ritual, memory, art, and the natural world into layered meditations on home, making, and meaning. In this recording, Stradley reads from work spanning more than two decades, including selections from Fragile House, a forthcoming chapbook from Moon in the Rye Press, the mobile micro-press created by Utah Poet Laureate Lisa Bickmore, as well as a formative poem by W. H. Auden that helped shape his own poetic path.

This audio portrait is a snapshot of a poet thinking aloud about craft, memory, authenticity, and what it means to make language equal to a life fully observed.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.