This poem originally began as a type of game with nouns. I simply started with the first haiku, then played around with certain words to see how their images and meaning could bend and snap against the other objects. The next haiku-stanzas then felt charged with a kind of magnetism from that newfound flexibility. The wind, silence, flowers, and petals all melded together into one spiraling wind of a poem.
"700 years after Dante was accused of corruption and condemned to be burned to death, his descendant is looking to clear his name. Sperello di Serego Alighieri, an astrophysicist, and the law professor Alessandro Traversi are working to see if Dante’s 1302 sentencing for corruption in political office can be reversed."
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"Real poetry, Itō reminds us, doesn’t only come from a poet simply saying something—it also comes from the ways that the poet resists the ordinary processes of saying. The writer unlocks new potential by subverting, manipulating, and defamiliarizing the patterns that structure our logic and expression. Poems need to be more than a series of simple, ordinary statements strung together."
