Why is poetry important?
Poetry presents new syntaxes with which to reimagine and reshape the world.
Monday, 31 December 2018
Heather Sweeney : part two
How do you know when a poem is finished?
This is a tough call. I think it’s finished when the poem stops keeping you up at night. When it stops being annoying. When it stops breaking your heart. When it can live on its own without you.
This is a tough call. I think it’s finished when the poem stops keeping you up at night. When it stops being annoying. When it stops breaking your heart. When it can live on its own without you.
Sunday, 30 December 2018
Eric Schmaltz : part three
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
I’ll mention two recent and compelling reads: First, Aditya Bahl’s Name-Amen, a beautifully designed and published chapbook by Malmö-based small press Timglaset Editions. This book of visual poems––in which language is fractured, overlain, magnified, reflected, and refracted––confronts the English modernist tradition and emerges from a “very painful and traumatic breakdown of the language [Bahl] had been working with” (n. pag.). Second, The Awful Truth by Diana Hamilton is part-long poem and part-novella, and navigates the complex relationship between author and self and the problems of exercising control over either of those figurations.
I’ll mention two recent and compelling reads: First, Aditya Bahl’s Name-Amen, a beautifully designed and published chapbook by Malmö-based small press Timglaset Editions. This book of visual poems––in which language is fractured, overlain, magnified, reflected, and refracted––confronts the English modernist tradition and emerges from a “very painful and traumatic breakdown of the language [Bahl] had been working with” (n. pag.). Second, The Awful Truth by Diana Hamilton is part-long poem and part-novella, and navigates the complex relationship between author and self and the problems of exercising control over either of those figurations.
Saturday, 29 December 2018
Elizabeth Robinson : part three
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry can stop time or create various simultaneities. I feel that one of the great gifts of poetry is that it is an open form of inquiry. It may include narrative, concrete images, epiphany, resolution—but it may not. So often, everything in popular culture assumes a conventional narrative patterning, but this differs from the way life really works. Many of our most important projects (art-making, loving, creating constellations of family or community, for example) are characterized by waxing and waning, by ad hoc patterning, by varying rhythms. Of course there’s a lot of great literature in fiction and nonfiction that can do this, but I tend to feel that innovation in other genres uses poetic patterning as its model. Poetry has almost infinite elasticity which makes it an incredibly responsive and resourceful art.
Poetry can stop time or create various simultaneities. I feel that one of the great gifts of poetry is that it is an open form of inquiry. It may include narrative, concrete images, epiphany, resolution—but it may not. So often, everything in popular culture assumes a conventional narrative patterning, but this differs from the way life really works. Many of our most important projects (art-making, loving, creating constellations of family or community, for example) are characterized by waxing and waning, by ad hoc patterning, by varying rhythms. Of course there’s a lot of great literature in fiction and nonfiction that can do this, but I tend to feel that innovation in other genres uses poetic patterning as its model. Poetry has almost infinite elasticity which makes it an incredibly responsive and resourceful art.
Friday, 28 December 2018
Frances Boyle : part two
What are you working on?
I actually am working on a novel, of all things. I signed up for NaNoWriMo with the notion of expanding one of my draft short stories into a longer-form work. I almost certainly won’t reach the 50,000 word target for the month but I’m fine with that, and also fine if I never end up with a novel. My real objective is to get deeper into the world of my story —to know my character(s) better and find out what’s behind my rather sketchy plot. If the pages and pages of back story and internal musing I write in November help me craft a short story that’s ultimately richer, I’ll be more than satisfied with that. And, of course, I continue to germinate poetry, and to work on revisions of both my poems and my other short fiction.
I actually am working on a novel, of all things. I signed up for NaNoWriMo with the notion of expanding one of my draft short stories into a longer-form work. I almost certainly won’t reach the 50,000 word target for the month but I’m fine with that, and also fine if I never end up with a novel. My real objective is to get deeper into the world of my story —to know my character(s) better and find out what’s behind my rather sketchy plot. If the pages and pages of back story and internal musing I write in November help me craft a short story that’s ultimately richer, I’ll be more than satisfied with that. And, of course, I continue to germinate poetry, and to work on revisions of both my poems and my other short fiction.
Sacha Archer : part two
How does a poem begin?
How does one write? Over here it’s an emptiness that demands filling—even if that is a pipe dream. How can the empty world be made to speak? It comes out gibberish, mostly. That’s fine. Gibberish is an accurate reproduction of what really goes on. I look for the gibberish that we cling to and cling to it. The gibberish I produce is the product of my failure to believe in the meaninglessness that we are expected to ignore. It is amazing that people can ignore a hammer hitting their head. Am I in shock? Survival is editing. The poem begins, for me, in recognition of those habits that erase us. A poem begins in catching myself off guard, noticing something I always notice but somehow never process—the wealth of the blind spots.
How does one write? Over here it’s an emptiness that demands filling—even if that is a pipe dream. How can the empty world be made to speak? It comes out gibberish, mostly. That’s fine. Gibberish is an accurate reproduction of what really goes on. I look for the gibberish that we cling to and cling to it. The gibberish I produce is the product of my failure to believe in the meaninglessness that we are expected to ignore. It is amazing that people can ignore a hammer hitting their head. Am I in shock? Survival is editing. The poem begins, for me, in recognition of those habits that erase us. A poem begins in catching myself off guard, noticing something I always notice but somehow never process—the wealth of the blind spots.
Alina Pleskova : coda
How does a poem begin?
With the light just-so, a change in external or internal weather, or feelings getting fucked with by the state or the state of things. With something a brilliant friend says offhandedly while fiddling with their jacket cuff on the porch. With looking at the moon. I mean, look at her.
With the light just-so, a change in external or internal weather, or feelings getting fucked with by the state or the state of things. With something a brilliant friend says offhandedly while fiddling with their jacket cuff on the porch. With looking at the moon. I mean, look at her.
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