I had a great conversation with poet and essayist Mary Pacifico Curtis, which is up at The Critical Flame: A Journal of Literature and Culture. Mary new's book—which I highly recommend—is called HAWK'S CRY.
Mary isn't the first person to point out that the table of contents for A Northern Spring, reads like a poem in itself, a kind of story of the COVID pandemic. It's been close to a dozen people, now, who've said more or less the same thing. It has me moving from wanting to turn it into a cento—from it being on the "to do" list—to actually doing the work of turning it into a cento. I wrote a similar cento, made from the titles of all the poems therein, called "Untitled" for my poetry collection We're the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland. This is proceeding slower than that and is presenting more obstacles to fruition. Form-wise, it has me, in its current iteration, returning to a style that dominated my work for a time when I lived in a great in ways and not-so-great in others, two-story apartment in an old mansion carved up in a college town for its income potential as a rental.
Mary's great reading of my book allows me to talk about my long apprenticing of myself to writing, my burgeoning interest in hybridity, the long tradition and current state of the urban/rural divide, and bridge-building.
Here's to more bridge-building, yeah?
Mary isn't the first person to point out that the table of contents for A Northern Spring, reads like a poem in itself, a kind of story of the COVID pandemic. It's been close to a dozen people, now, who've said more or less the same thing. It has me moving from wanting to turn it into a cento—from it being on the "to do" list—to actually doing the work of turning it into a cento. I wrote a similar cento, made from the titles of all the poems therein, called "Untitled" for my poetry collection We're the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland. This is proceeding slower than that and is presenting more obstacles to fruition. Form-wise, it has me, in its current iteration, returning to a style that dominated my work for a time when I lived in a great in ways and not-so-great in others, two-story apartment in an old mansion carved up in a college town for its income potential as a rental.
Mary's great reading of my book allows me to talk about my long apprenticing of myself to writing, my burgeoning interest in hybridity, the long tradition and current state of the urban/rural divide, and bridge-building.
Here's to more bridge-building, yeah?