Interview with Steven Espada Dawson
"I did decide to arrange the book into four 'chambers' pretty early on in the project. A heart is a muscle that empties and fills itself again and again, so I wanted to borrow that organic architecture. Those elegies, too, feel like a pulse check that helped me order the collection. The title poem is in four parts for the same reason. In poetry, things in fours—like stanzas with four lines—are sometimes considered the slowest because they don’t build forward momentum as quickly as other arrangements. They thrive on symmetry, which can be counterintuitive to movement. When elegies are the coal that powers the engine, I’m also thinking about how to slow things down, so fours felt right."
via VARIANT LIT |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Kristin Dykstra on Other Arts
"Dissonance dwells around a dirt road. Dirt roads appear stable, but with time you perceive that they exist in flux. Dissonance became a book of time. Time turns various and nervy–a click marking a photographic moment, a slow burn of interior pain. Photographs interrupt time, invite you into its astonishment. They propose other dimensions, reminding us that even our thoughts enter the past as they travel through the mind." |
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