"Avery County" comes from a time when I had left an academic job to be a bartender in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. I think this poem is partly about the relief of belonging to a realm of sense perception, objects, wild animals. But it's also about the scraps of ideas and language that float through the mind and intersect with the things of the world. Maybe the rifle is where the two meet and explode?
Sarah Stickney on "Avery County" |
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A Conversation with Ange Mlinko
"My ground is always the materiality of the language: not only regarding acoustics, but also the double entendres and false friends, the contranyms and the etymologies. When I write a poem, I'm not expressing myself; I'm collaborating with a resistant medium, which has expressions of its own."
via MCSWEENEY'S |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Leah Nieboer on Hillary Gravendyk's Harm
"I keep reading it because it makes me desire its inevitable cyborgs and monsters, its palpitated time-signatures, its 'pink dreaming riot.' I, too, want to get weaved in. Or—I am already weaved in, and desire a present, and future, that is livable with, and inclusive of, a chronic error-measure. Give me less of that narrative 'cure' imposed 'across an abrupt jumble of absences' and more of this speculative wildness." |
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