My poems have trash in them. Also: soccer balls, puke, toddlers, the New York City subway, dirty dishes, sex, my husband, toilet training, other poets, and groceries. It’s dangerous writing this way—I could slip on a banana peel or, worse, be labeled a “mommy poet,” which is this century’s version of those “scribbling women” Hawthorne scorned. Hawthorne complained that he had “no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.” I don’t think Hawthorne meant trash in the literal sense, but I do. I mean that I am occupied with a literary rendering of domestic material including trash and, even, sometimes, trashiness.

So I approached Wayne Koestenbaum and Matthew Rohrer—two poets I greatly admire and who also write about domestic material—about the pleasures and pitfalls of including the details of their domestic lives in their work. I wanted to know if they, too, experienced such content as dangerous and, if so, why they embrace it. I wondered if putting shopping lists or babies in their poems is even more taboo for them as men than it is for me as a woman, or if the privilege of the male voice protects them from censure. I wanted to know if and where they drew a line: were there things they would not write about?

Matthew, Wayne, and I met twice for lunch at Wayne’s apartment. It seemed fitting to meet in Wayne’s home rather than in a public space, given the subject of our roundtable. In between bites of lunch from a café around the corner, we talked about poetry and the domestic and the domestic in poetry. Speaking together at length was exhilarating and inspiring and also felt transgressive, which is exactly how I feel when I read their remarkable poems.

—Rachel Zucker

I. NURTURED AND EXPENSIVE ARUGULA

RACHEL ZUCKER: Let’s talk for a minute about how each of us defines the word domestic, what domestic is, or what we mean by domestic.

MATTHEW ROHRER: Well, I’ll start, because maybe it was my griping that made this conversation happen. I was thinking about some of my recent poems that are very “domestic,” and I was feeling uncomfortable about it a bit, thinking it would be something people would object to, or that I should have edited that stuff out before it even got to the page. Then I started thinking about how we live—especially those of us who teach in MFA culture—in this poetic culture that says there are no rules. But then I thought, The one thing you can’t do is be domestic. You can write about anything you want, but the domestic is attacked by...