This is a poem that I wrote over a long period of time, in fragments, and stitched together quickly. After I wrote the opening of the poem--radishes, car, cemetery--I didn't know where to go. The headstone opened the door to talking about the father, so I pulled that diner scene from an earlier failed poem. The father's wrist seemed like another potential hinge, and I remembered these lines I'd written maybe ten, twelve years earlier about his watch. Once I had the watch, with its tiny spinning gears, I thought of my bike, which I had been riding obsessively since my dad died. And suddenly I had a poem about grief, compulsion, recalibration. It's one of my favorites in the book, probably because I didn't know what I was doing until it was almost done.
Edgar Kunz on "Tuning" |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Dong Li on Evan S. Carroll's Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel
"Vestigial shards of old legend and lore dart in and out of vertiginous fragments of human folly and futility, now like lightning on a clear day, now like fireflies on a talkative night. The 'I' slyly travails through historical significance and triviality until the tribulations of fear, faith, and ferocity surface in a dizzying dream state, hauling history into the prophetic present, where associative meanings are distilled into a crude and cruel illumination." |
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