Thank you for your kind assessment.  I think it was more of a happy accident, in this case.  At the same time, it could be said that any poet’s work revolves around homogenous topics, repeating concerns, recurring tropes. To a degree, these details evolve as a poet goes through life. The poetry in this selection is from the same year or so, which may have contributed to a greater consistency.  This work is consolidated in my collection “Say Me with a Dry Leaf,” for which I am currently seeking a publisher.

 

In general, my own experience points to a tremendous part accident plays in literary creation.  When I start writing, it’s very rare that I have the whole work in mind, be it a poem or a novel.  In a poem, usually a line occurs to me, and I write it down, waiting for the next line to follow.  By the time the poem is done, I am as surprised by it as any reader might be (if I succeeded at making it a good one).  In that sense, one might say a poem is a guided series of accidents.  I make my way through a poem by guiding my intuition and being guided by it.

 

 

That’s an interesting and witty question to ask, and I will try to do it justice.  I suppose memories and poems are alike in that they capture a moment, a feeling, a thought, a story, a conversation.  They create a reference point in our perception of life in its continuity.  They confirm that something happened, in a world where most things that might happen do not.

 

Poems are different from memories in that they transcend the individual realm.  They become highly customizable hyper-memories with volunteer subscription.  Any reader that is aligned in tune with the poem may embrace it as a part of their own experience, interpret it in their own specific way relevant to their circumstances.  Another way to put it is: poetry is part of the collective memory of the humankind.

 

 

Thank you.  Most decisions such as line breaks are intuitive, based on my perception of how the poem wants to lie on the page and to sound in the reader’s mind.  Because I usually don't use punctuation in my poetry, I rely on line breaks to make sentence structure easier for the reader.  I don’t really sculpt the words, in a visual sense – that’s not my intention.  I suspect that my choice to center the poem on the page causes an appealing look which might seem more thought-out than it is.  These are simply centered lines.  They are centered because I don't see any reason to left-align poetry.  Doing so is just a convention that doesn't make any tangible sense.

 

 

Last month I completed a chapbook-sized cycle of poems, “The Melting Hourglass”.  I think of it as a novel in 1,200 words – I had much fun running it by my two writers’ groups (The Guttery, www.theguttery.com and The Moonlit Poetry Caravan, www.meetup.com/MoonlitPoetry).  Some friends have pointed out that in many ways, this work represents a summary of my poetic pursuits up to now.  I’m excited about it.  For the moment, I’m not planning another ambitious poetic project yet, focusing instead on completing my second CD, “Frozen Angels”, and writing a few poems a week as I typically tend to do.

 

 

Thanks again for your kind words.  You just published one of John Sibley Williams’s poems the other day.  He is a good friend and (along with Shawn Austin), a co-founder of the Inflectionist poetry movement (www.Inflectionism.com).  Needless to say, John’s aesthetic and mine are very close.  In my opinion, his work is wonderful, insightful, unexpected and downright staggering.  For this poem, I decided to use some of his tropes, turns of phrase – to construct the poem in a way he might construct it – while still keeping it my poem.