The Art of Undoing: The Poetic Rebirth of Hudson Plumb

In this episode of Ink vs Algorithm: The Writers' Pod, Mookie Spitz sits down with poet and healthcare strategist Hudson Plumb, whose new collection The Art of Undoing (Finishing Line Press) has already become a bestseller. Their conversation revolves around rediscovery: how creativity can go dormant for decades, only to reignite when life strips you down to what matters.

Plumb recounts his journey from promising young poet to full-time professional and father who stopped writing entirely for twenty-five years. Then came the pandemic: Zoom marathons, cabin fever, and a sudden need for meaning. From that isolation, he picked up his pen again. What followed was a renaissance: reworking poems he’d written in his twenties, submitting to journals, enduring rejection after rejection, and finally breaking through with several publications and winning a 2024 Founders’ Prize in RHINO Poetry for his poem “The Son.”

Spitz and Plumb discuss how poetry sits at the intersection of music and thought, why ambiguity makes verse more alive, and how the best writing thrives in the tension between control and surrender.

• The Art of Undoing: How “undoing” — loss, reflection, and humility — can be a creative act in itself.
• Poetry’s Second Act: Why Plumb believes poetry is quietly resurging as the short-form art of our crisis age, and a return to lyricism in a time of noise.orm and Feeling: 
• The influence of Lawrence Raab’s poetry class at Williams College, and how one comma in Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening changed how he reads every line.
• From Fatherhood to Freedom: How family, healthcare work, and grief deepened his writing rather than silenced it.
• The Discipline of the Weekend Poet: Why Hudson writes in intense weekend bursts, like “assembling a watch blindfolded,” until the poem suddenly “starts to tick.”
• The Poems: He reads several, including Vancouver Island Whale Watch, The Largest Thing, and The Son which exploring life, death, and renewal through precise imagery and emotional depth.

The Guest

Hudson Plumb is a poet, playwright, and healthcare communications strategist based in New York City. His poetry has recently appeared in Humana Obscura (Issue 12), RHINO Poetry (2024 Founders’ Prize, Runner-Up), The Courtship of Winds, and Kaleidoscope Magazine, Exploring the Experience of Disability Through Literature and the Fine Arts. His poems have also been published in earlier issues of Webster Review, Missouri, and Kaleidoscope.

The poems in The Art of Undoing guide through the strange, luminous terrain of what remains after separation—and what may take its place. While tracing a path through personal and collective tragedies, these poems remain attuned to the beauty that appears unexpectedly: a whale surfacing beside a boat, “clouds passing/between the fingers of a eucalyptus tree,” cormorants “popping up with sideways prizes.” Rather than retreat from the brokenness of the world, Plumb’s lyric meditations gather its fragments into forms of quiet restoration. In scenes shaped by a father’s death in Argentina, a mother blinking glass from her eye in a Sagaponack storm, or hermit crabs crawling toward improbable survival, Plumb reveals undoing not only as loss, but as the possibility of pause and renewal.

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