After a while - I guess Trump happened about midway through writing the book - the title seemed apt for our political moment. The title was a joke I said to myself at the vet’s but then I thought it was a good description of being a poet. And I always liked these strange records and 8 tracks that we would find in our parents’ record stashes as kids in the ’70s: So And So Sings Folk Songs Of Americaor whatever. I have a little dog who hates people touching him, and whenever I take him to the vet they put the tiniest muzzle on him because he gets really angry and starts trying to bite people’s faces off, but he’s so small and only has a handful of teeth left and it’s just so pathetic. They seem similar to me in their heft and color. But because I wrote these poems in a similar way at a particular moment in time there’s a way that I think they all belong together. I want to have words to play with at the desk in the morning. I don’t really have any deep thoughts or feelings I want to express anymore. So that his words would interfere with my thoughts and vice versa. But that Brodey book was an active Ouija board for me for a while.Īnd some of the other poems came out of things I typed while listening to Robert Duncan lectures.
I think only one poem in the book is actually a true erasure. Trying to write in his book in ways that didn’t feel like writing and then a few days later thumbing through it and typing stuff out, hoping to find a poem. I would give myself an assignment before bed: make ten questions using words from Brodey poems. Or used lines I made out of the words in one Brodey poem with lines I made from another. A good number started that way, though I always cheated. I would white out words in his poems to make my own. I had an extra copy of Jim Brodey’s collected poems, Heart Of The Breath: Poems, 1979-1992, so I started using one of them as a kind of notebook. That’s the feeling - the itch - I want to make something out of words and I usually look for piles of words somewhere else to make things out of.Ī lot of these particular poems for example started off as a game.
I begin a poem because I feel like making something out of words. How to answer this question? I don’t begin a poem because I want to say something about X,Y, or Z. To start, is there a theme to the poems in The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs Of Freedom? In the following email interview, poet Magdalena Zurawski discusses her second collection, The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs Of Freedom ( paperback, limited edition hardcover).
0 kommentar(er)
