I made a playlist for Fossils in the Making! Listen and read more about it at Largehearted Boy.
My poetry is grounded in music. I do not consider sense to be more important than sound in any hierarchy of “meaning” and often trust what I call the “sonic logic” of a line or phrase more than its semantic logic. For this playlist, rather than choosing songs that influenced or inspired individual poems, I collaborated with musicians Trevor Welch and Levi Bagdanov to do the reverse: to find songs that were conjured or evoked by the music in the poems themselves. What follows, then, is a type of sonic accompaniment for Fossils in the Making that echoes, recalls, and responds to different aspects of the collection.
Thanks to EcoTheo Reviewfor asking me to discuss the process of writing Fossils in the Making as part of their Micro-Essay Series on First Books.
No one’s asked me for advice, including this essay prompt, but if I were to offer any, it would be to pay more attention to these quiet poems. These poems usually don’t get published. They don’t like being alone. Like our own selves, they are formed through their relationship with others, emerging from the ecology of the book rather than being inserted, fully formed, into it. I think this is where the real joy of a collection comes from—the surprising turns and pitches and swerves that propel the reader through it. Journals and magazines tend to favor poems that resemble hit singles, especially in this like-and-share-driven literary market, but you need quiet poems to bring those poems down to earth and draw them into conversation with one another. Nurturing these interstices is, I think, what turns a collection of poems into a poetry collection.
As I sit down to write this reflection, I feel an overwhelming sense of dread. Not for the task at hand, but for the future. Is this what haunting is? I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts, at least not how they tend to be portrayed in movies and books. Specters don’t confine themselves to our simple dichotomies of absence and presence, life and death. They are both and they are between. Haunting is an atmosphere produced by these intra-worldly beings: specters of past lives, of present violence, of the seemingly unalterable conditions of what world will be. The four long poems in this issue will haunt you. You will see in them the faces of children who have been relegated to sacrifice zones; how the smallest measure of matter becomes the destroyer of worlds; how a home buckles under the weight of its history.
“Un- is the prefix of negation. Its identity is opposition, its power, reversal. Finish, on the other hand, signals completion, achievement, and conclusion. Self-help books proselytize the benefits of list-making, how completing daily tasks will make me fitter, happier, more productive.”
The new issue of Ruminate is here and so is my Editors Ruminate blog. Get a sneak peek at these beautiful poems and order a copy today.
O small ones, To be born!
—“Eclogue,” George Oppen
Small often means vulnerable. As when one person uses power to make another feel small. As when an individual seems insignificant within a sprawling system. Or when a hurricane decimates a city and we witness the extreme precarity of life. But smallness can also be a source of strength. It’s no surprise that this theme is often repeated in children’s stories: The Little Engine That Could, Jack and the Beanstalk, Thumbelina. Smallness can be the glitch in the system, the wrench in the machine. It can also be a line of poetry that reconfigures how we see the world. An image that unlocks something new. The poems in this issue explore the many implications and iterations of small, from subtle gestures of kindness to passing moments that accumulate to become something bigger than even the poem can hold.
“A poetics of this material dynamism might be articulated as lower limit stone / upper limit air.That is to say, literary forms mediate ecological crisis via multiple scales and materialities—climate change is not inaccessible, as some have argued, but merely illegible when we confine our investigation to any single literary period.”
Jessica Piazza from Poetry Has Value interviewed Brianna Van Dyke (editor-in-chief) and me about how and why we pay contributors to Ruminate Magazine. Here’s an excerpt of her introduction:
The intelligent, practical and, well, real way the editors articulate the struggles with and importance of sound business focus in the poetry world was so important for me to read. And I think it’s important for you to read, too. We could all use a little more straight talk and, perhaps, a little less fear that we’re ruining our art when we try to perceive the many ways it’s valuable, including economically.
Read the full interview here and be sure to follow her project to hear about what other magazines are doing to help change the conversation of value and worth in the poetry world.
I really enjoy making infographics, so like last year, I compiled Colorado Review’s 2014 submission statistics and put them into pretty shapes and charts. Can’t believe it’s my last year interning there!
Click here to read about our 1% acceptance rate and our lovely VIDA numbers.
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