Noah Falck : part five

Why is poetry important?

Poetry has the ability to teach you to read. Quite literally, several years ago when I was an elementary school teacher, poetry was the only text that many of my struggling readers felt comfortable enough to approach. It let them find language at their own pace, while simultaneously growing their confidence, curiosity, and joy. So that’s cool. 

Poetry also acts as a vehicle for empathy. It offers up a space to investigate our histories, both personal and political, through imaginative and emotional patterns of thought. It voices the complexities, the beauty, and the whole wildness of life.  

Noah Falck : part four

How did you first engage with poetry?

The first engagement had to be through song. As a toddler my parents would spin the Beatles and the Stones. I would sing along knowing most of the lyrics by heart, but not fully realizing the layers built into them, the time period in which they grew out of. 

Later, in high school I became obsessed with Bob Dylan at the height of the Grunge era. I would deconstruct his songs, make my friends listen continuously to “Desolation Row,” “Jokerman,” all of Blood on the Tracks, when they were all pining for some Pearl Jam. It’s funny to think about now realizing this sort of obsessive Dylan time period had, I think, a lot to do with a desire to play with language, and to be immersed in a world of discovery and invention. At that time, I didn’t really know anything about poetry or that poets were actual people walking up and down the sidewalks of our world. 

Noah Falck : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Lately, I’ve been reading more novels and collections of essays, which is rare for me. However, I’ve been slowly dipping into and finding joy in Rick Barot’s During the Pandemic, Mary Ruefle’s Dunce, Matt McBride’s City of Incandescent Light, and Adam Clay’s To Make Room for the Sea. I’ve been returning to W.S. Merwin’s The Lice, Larry Levis’s The Dollmaker’s Ghost, Lucille Clifton’s Collected, & Laura Kasischke’s Space, In Chains. 

Noah Falck : part two

What are you working on?

My daily water intake. Keeping the idea of the fairy tale alive in our house during a pandemic. The glow in the darkness of it all. The methodology of hide-and-seek. Flexibility both in idea and body. A fitness of empathy. And leaning into the joy of the tiny, of the small, of the momentary. Like the light in the room now, pooling through the window onto another virtual school day and later the noticing of a dog muscling through the magic hour in the field behind our house. Yes too, poems and sentences that are patterned out of the day, out of whatever time we use to build a life. 

Noah Falck : part one

Noah Falck is the author of Exclusions, You Are In Nearly Every Future, and Snowmen Losing Weight. He lives in Buffalo, New York. 

Photo credit: Marcus Jackson

How does a poem begin?

For the most part, the way into a poem is still a mystery to me. I want to say they all begin differently or they all begin the same. Like opening a door to a house you’ve never entered or never even knew existed, but are happy to learn that it does, and you walk through it as if you know exactly where the cookie jar is. Maybe that’s not right. 

Perhaps, it starts with the musicality of the language or an image that keeps appearing in the mind, in the notebook. Sometimes it starts with a question that has no answer or a deep memory that surfaces as to say something more about the self, something more about the world. It could begin in the shower, in a field, in a snowstorm, in bed next to the love of your life. I am certain it begins when you pay attention long enough.