"National Anthem" is the first poem in my book "What Though the Field Be Lost" (LSU, 2021), and it's trying to introduce some of the book's over-arching ideas. I'm particularly concerned here to examine, in form and subject matter, the idea of synecdoche, the notion that the part stands for the whole. This is a rhetorical technique, a poetic technique, but it's also a technique at the heart of American democracy, as we see in a phrase like "E pluribus unum." Christopher Kempf on "National Anthem" |
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"The Lyric Decision: How Poets Figure Out What Comes Next"
"I've started thinking of this moment, this chess move where the poet breaks a line and almost resets the game, as the lyric decision. How do poets decide what comes next? How do they make us want to read another line, and another? There has to be a system of coherence to the poem—even a list of random horses has coherence, via theme—but it can't be unsurprising either. A series of lyric decisions is how we write something between order and chaos."
via THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Danielle Badra on Diane Seuss' "Still Life with Turkey""All of these cumulative experiences of death and all the ones yet to come and all the deaths that aren't even in my view, they are my beached whale. They are beautiful yet difficult to see up close. The only way I've ever been able to explore is from a safe distance. However, the exploration of death in all of Diane Seuss' poetry collections inspires me to zoom in a little closer, to love 'its saggy neck folds, the rippling, variegated / feathers, the crook of its unbound foot.'" |
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