I wrote the poem “Evolution” out of that kind of lengthy, loose feeling. I was just in this expanse of time that not anybody I knew was in… and I was in the city. I don’t remember being particularly broke. But for this window of time, I was very free. And it was just really funny to be in this position where, at least for a time, I was experiencing New York City in an ideal way in my 60s that very much resembles me in my 20s, except that these days nobody else is living this way. I wasn’t teaching, I didn’t have any commitments. I don’t know what it was that I expected to be doing, but there I was. I had gone to Europe and finished my previous book, or had written a bit part of it, and then my relationship ended and by the fall of 2014 I was back in New York, but in a very different way. I had been in a relationship for about four years.
The poems in the book reflect certain rhythms and changes in my own life. Luckily I have poet friends who are willing to have late-night phone calls and neighborhood meet ups to talk about stuff like this, which has been really valuable. Everybody was willing to do that when I was in my 20s and 30s and virtually nobody is willing to do that now. It gets harder to find people who I’m comfortable with who will actually read an entire manuscript in an, “Okay, I’ll read it tonight” kind of way. I’ve never usually done that thing of putting the title poem up front in the book, but I talked to people about it this time around. And so when I know I’m in a mode, then I start to think about the book and the poems all start to hit against that idea.Īs for organizing the book, that’s also a tricky thing. Often, it’s just the texture of the poems, and the way they’re going about things. It’s kind of like I’ll be writing things for six months or a year or something and there’s suddenly a poem that starts to seem like a cluster of poems, or a type of poem emerges, like some new groove is occurring, it almost feels like a season or something. Still, I don’t think in terms of “books” with poetry so much, at least as an ongoing practice. Once you get this rhythm going of making books of poetry, it just becomes that every three or four years, generally, there’s another one. How did you move from one book to the other? How did Evolution, or any collection of poems, come together? Your last book, Afterglow, was a “dog memoir.” Your latest book, Evolution, is a new collection of poems.
0 kommentar(er)
