I never really know what I’m doing in a poem until I’ve done it. I do know what triggered each part of the poem. The first part started when I remembered trying to comb crushed plastic toys out of a shag carpet before I could move in. It was when I was a student. It seemed like hell’s anteroom. The second part started when I heard a commercial for some line of clothing. The designer (or an actor portraying him) was ascribing various abstract meanings to the way his clothes looked. It just made me feel old and tired. I wanted to say, “Enough already!”
Rae Armantrout on "Death" |
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Kwame Dawes in Conversation with Jesse Nathan
"Sturge Town, that village of mythic and historical significance, became the iconic totem for the collection. I believe that this has allowed me to write about my body as a product of Africa and the African Diaspora, and this has been a richly rewarding site for the aesthetic meaning of 'home.' So, is home 'which part you want to bury'? It is certainly a perfect meditative trigger, a concept that resonates with me—for in this conception of death lies the conception of pre-beginnings and post-endings."
via MCSWEENEY'S |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Sarah Ghazal Ali on Language as Form
"'Matrilineage [Umbilicus]' sprung from this unsettledness, not halfway into my first pregnancy, when my body ceased to be entirely mine. I came to the page eyes closed, hands outstretched to trace the contours of my thinking. I could not yet trace the face of my child, so I tried instead to touch each thought as it was born." |
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