Fossils in the Making

The Making of Fossils in the Making

By admin in blog posts, Fossils in the Making

Thanks to EcoTheo Review for 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.

You can read the full essay here.

Interview with Chicago Review of Books

By admin in Fossils in the Making Tags: , , ,

I talked with Amy Brady at Chicago Review of Books about Fossils in the Making and how it addresses ecological crisis. We discussed the suburbs, the relationship between science and poetry, and what, if anything, poetry can do to contend with climate change and other forms of violence:

I think that, climate-change deniers aside, most people accept the fact that scientific disciplines can tell us something true about the world. There’s an unquestioned belief in scientific objectivity, faith in its ability to impartially apprehend “reality.” I think people are generally more skeptical of the claim that art can tell us something true and necessary about reality as well. However, scientific instruments are still mediating objects constructed by humans, and the knowledge they produce must be supplemented with other ways of knowing, as the sciences do not have privileged access to what is “real.” Throughout the collection, I’m interested in exploring the relationship between scientific “objectivity” and lyric “subjectivity” and the places where these methods of knowing contradict and supplement each other. I’m also interested in what a poem itself proves, if anything. Is a poem a proof of thought? The residue of experience? Can its figures and forms manifest what is intangible, unconscious, ungraspable? Or does it merely prove, again and again, the failure of language to close the gap between the world and our own bodies?

Read the rest here. 

 

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