Strangely, I worked on "Dragstripping" for over twenty years. I felt it in my body, but I needed to grow as a writer, as a human to access the complexity that I knew the poem needed. I finished it at Storyknife, the amazing writer’s residency in Alaska, where I collided stanzas from an older poem about violence—I had to find a way to create abrasion in the poem, to create a drop, an elation in the midst of desire.
Jan Beatty on "Dragstripping" |
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Paul Reitter on "Why (Re)translation Matters"
"Part of what draws me to retranslation, for example, is its conversational dynamic. I enjoy the process of engaging with and adding to other takes on a primary text. Since I come to retranslating from literary scholarship, it’s the writing dynamic I know. However, retranslation is also thrillingly unlike literary scholarship—when I retranslate, I join a conversation not by producing a scholarly text about a primary text but rather by producing a new version of the primary text itself."
via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS |
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What Sparks Poetry: Mathias Svalina on "Thank You Terror”
"The best description I know of the creative process can be found in Remedios Varo’s 1957 painting The Creation of Birds. In the painting, a figure—either half-owl or a person in an owl-costume—refracts distant starlight through a triangular magnifying glass. The refracted starlight dries birds drawn with a pen emerging from a violin worn around the owl-person’s neck. The birds, as their ink dries, lift off the page & into life." |
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