two magic moments

In the poems of this series I’ve made more references to myself. The opening poem “A Note About The Author” is all self-referential and a bit self-deprecating. As my work has developed, I’ve begun to center around two ‘magic moments’ that I want to create. The first kind of moment happens when someone is reading a collage and thinking ‘oh, this is somebody else’s words he’s using’ and then suddenly, in the middle of the poem, it comes over him or her—‘this is him talking, this is autobiography.’ A person rises up out of the wreckage.

The second moment I want to create is the one that happens every time we read. Collage wakes us up to the reading process, the line is uneven, there are distracting breaks in the middle of phrases. In a collage poem the reader has to put together the words in his head to find the sense. But then this gets faster, and once the reader has read perhaps 10 poems, the collage is working in the background and he or she is feeling the emotion of the poem—caught up in the characters, or the mood, the ideas, the claims being made.

In that way, I want the poems to be poems. The collage process is not ‘instant poetry’—it’s just a method that creates particular effects. But I want them to be good poems in a traditional sense, considering sound, meter, musicality, etc..Ultimately, I want to have poems that have trouble talking, have trouble referring to things, but sometimes do, are sometimes very personal and heartfelt, if fleetingly.