"Tend" came at a real turning point in my writing. My attention was shifting from a more confessional, lyric poetry toward a collaged sense of meaning, sound, and visual impact. In other words, I was becoming way less interested in writing about myself. I see a humongous division in "Green for Luck" as a whole: the poems before and the poems after this turning point. In "Tend," there is still an I present, of course, but the I is secondary to what is happening beyond it. The I serves as a colander of sorts, through which the field of the material world is shifting. "Tend" is also a poem about missing a friend.Margaret Yapp on "Tend" |
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Elisa Gabbert on "The Art of Poetic Reference"
"Allusion is, unlike intertextuality, deliberate, and, unlike plagiarism, meant to be recognized. It presumes 'a community of knowledge,' a phrase I like for its fellow feeling. I like to think that people who have read the same poems—my A may be your B—are friends of a kind, across any distance, before and after death."
viaTHE NEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry: Soham Patel on Language as Form
"Place is a process with past(s), present(s), and future(s) that, according to geographer Doreen Massey, can be fragmented, dislocated, forgotten and reformed. Massey’s thinking through place in this era of super speedy space-time compression helps shape my sense of a poem’s ability to attend to place as an unending yet impermanent entity. A poem is a place where space-time compression must occur, and why place in all its durations inspires me." |
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