The first setting of this poem was an interior view. The speaker asked to be taken to a door, not a lake, at the end, echoing Glück’s “Wild Iris.” Yet, in revision, external reference was replaced with the personal. A memory overtook the poem: being taken to Abiquiu Lake in New Mexico. A moment that was a realization of happiness and also a realization that I could not stay in my life as it was then.
Yanyi on "Aubade (The Lake)" |
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"Short Conversations with Poets: Hanif Abdurraqib"
"And so to come to poems later in my life, I feel like I had a slight head start, because I came to poems through slam, through performance poetry. Through hearing the way language would interact with other language, sonically, and knowing that I wanted to be a writer who made choices with sound in mind."
via MCSWEENEY'S |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Keene Carter on David Ferry's The Odes of Horace
"The genius for a simple clarity is what makes all of Ferry’s Horace and Virgil so commendable, and his verse is proof as well that 'simple clarity' is not 'economy,' nor less and stranger language. That he adds a word or removes a god is hardly worth attacking when the former makes for grace and the latter is a name we neither cared about nor said correctly. Instead, like the King James translators, he understands that another language is another material, and one cannot build a wooden house from marble. The attempt will last forever." |
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