The thing that I love most about writing poetry is that it lets me work sensually, intuitively, subjectively, imaginatively, with reason allowed no better than a tourist’s visa. Art is the discipline of the subjective. Images, lines, stanzas feel right or wrong without objective standards. I can imagine night with all its baggage; I can hear music as an aspect of night; I can see the shadow that is the dread darkness of night as an interloper in this image; I can hear the song that defeats the unwanted shadow. Well, why stop there? The voice is the agent of the song or perhaps it is the other way ‘round & the self substantiates the voice, etc. Everything is nature & so connects everything else. There never is a conclusion to any aspect of creation. Except that we require ourselves to conclude & so the parenthetical stanza. These lines are summary, I suppose; they explain in their way, they make the central image "turn" as the portraitists use the word. & then the last line takes us back up into the poem, as is natural.
A.B. Spellman on "Between the Night & Its Music" |
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A Conversation with Rick Barot
"The impulse that sparked my last book, The Galleons, was to elegize my grandmother, who had recently died at ninety-two years old. But early in my work on the book, I knew that I didn’t want to write a conventional sort of elegy. Instead, I wanted to situate my grandmother’s small individual story within the larger forces that shaped it, such as immigration, war, colonialism, capitalism, and history overall."
via MCSWEENEY'S |
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What Sparks Poetry: Luisa A. Igloria on "Caulbearer"
"It is believed that the child, this caulbearer, is marked with a kind of otherworldly protection; some say, even second sight—because for no matter how short a time, it knew what it’s like to inhabit a space in its transit from one world to another. For me, what we bring into poems as well as the poem itself lives in this same kind of liminal territory. It’s as if in the poem we are allowed a veiled glimpse of visions and insights from feeling and remembrance, mingled with the facts of our real and imagined lives and circumstances." |
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