12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lindsey Webb

Lindsey Webb is the author of Plat (Archway Editions, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and two chapbooks: House and Perfumer's Organ. Her writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a Graduate Research Fellow in the Tanner Humanities Center and PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She edits Thirdhand Books.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Plat, hasn’t been out very long, but it’s already brought so many lovely people to me. That is perhaps my favorite way it’s changed my life. That said, I finished writing it a few years ago, and I’ve since moved on from some of its obsessions, its frustrations, and its questions. It’s been interesting to time travel back into those preoccupations. My current work feels less angry, perhaps — but I also don’t quite know what the shape of my current work is, either. Perhaps it will take me a few years to look back and know, as it did with my first book.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I always thought I would be a novelist, and only started writing poems when I was a teenager. When I took an introduction to creative writing class as a college freshman, my teacher suggested that I sign up for a poetry class, and I took her advice. It was one of the best decisions of my life. I still have aspirations to write a novel, and I'm at work on a collection of nonfiction — but at this point my brain has been fully corrupted by poetry and its strange relationship to time and scale. Thank goodness.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
All of my projects have arrived differently. Some things (like my above/ground chapbook Perfumer's Organ) take shape relatively quickly; some begin with a burst of energy but change over time as I come to see the project more completely. Plat started out as a thought experiment to see whether I could construct a building in language that couldn't exist in the real world, and was primarily a way to inject some play back into my writing after finishing my MFA. Only much later did I realize I was, at the same time, writing through bigger questions, like death and capitalism and the afterlife. Some projects, like almost all of my nonfiction and many of my poems lately, feel like they have to be dug out of the earth bit by laborious bit.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I love to work on a project that extends across multiple pieces. I always hope to find a thought that is too big for one poem, where an obsession bleeds over into the next day, the next approach. And I like to go back and mercilessly cut, rearrange, and reshape. I find stand-alone, slice-of-life poems extremely difficult to write.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
When I've been fortunate enough to be part of a local literary community, I like to read brand new work to see how it feels in my mouth and how it feels landing on the ears of others. It can be a useful gauge for me to see whether a poem is working, and can help give me a new perspective on things I don't understand about my own work. I get a little bored reading old work in front of people.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Ultimately, I think I am always writing about sensory perception, God, and capitalism. What do my senses help me understand, even if erroneously, about Big Things like God, capitalism, and power? What kind of knowledge, what kind of experience is available through and despite these “errors”? Even when I think I'm not writing about these things, they end up making their way to the page.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
My favorite writers are mischief-makers, agnostics, and seamstresses.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like being asked what I meant by a particular line, or phrase, or image, because sometimes I don't know. And sometimes I don't know that I don't know. Being asked to account for my words, at least in an environment where an editor or peer genuinely wants to understand, is incredibly valuable. It's a kind of generosity that, while sometimes difficult (usually the most useful questions are the ones I don't have answers for in the moment), is something I hope to never take for granted. When I’m in the role of editor, I try very hard to approach an author and their text with that mutual generosity in mind.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I don't know if this is something anyone ever spelled out to me, but it's something I learned by osmosis studying under Peter Gizzi: a poem's social life is more valuable than its craft or its aesthetic perfection. Poetry is a form of communication, both despite and because of its inefficiencies. And all poems are always speaking to one another, and have something to say to one another, across time and distances and languages. And if a poem cannot touch a social life, broadly defined — if it feels walled off, somehow, perhaps via an empty craft perfection or its perspective or something else, from the vibrancy of both the history of poetry and the now of daily speech — it can't be called alive. A good poem must have, in this way, a spiritual life.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Routines are difficult; I think I might be allergic to them. When I feel restless, I implement some discipline and do very low-stakes writing in the mornings. Lately, that’s been things like playing rhyming games or attempting to write down dreams. Eventually, some problem or question will begin to assert itself, often through something I've read, and I attempt to write about it or around it in order to understand it, or play with it, or follow it to an end. Sometimes these beginnings fizzle out very quickly, but sometimes they build into a long poem or, if I'm very lucky, the beginning of a book project. In those situations I can't get away from the page, and end up writing a large amount very quickly.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
This process means I go through long fallow periods. I've learned to not be too anxious about them. These can often last weeks or months, and during that time I read. Usually I have several books going at once and end up abandoning most of them. (A terrible habit.) But many times a project will begin to take shape from something I've read — even just a line, or a throwaway reference, that I want to chase down somehow. I find I get ideas that make me want to write from books that are nothing like, on the surface anyway, what I want to work on. That means lately I haven't been reading much poetry, mostly nonfiction and novels, such as the work of D.W. Winnicott, Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, and Kate Briggs' The Long Form.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
On rainy June evenings in northern Utah, where I'm from, the fragrance of blooming sagebrush is everywhere, even downtown. It gets carried down from the mountains and from the gigantic sagebrush steppe to the west. It makes me feel very teenagerly and romantic — probably because when I was young, I thought that no one else could smell it, because no one ever talked about it. It felt like a completely mysterious and private scent, whose source I only learned many years later.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
As I said above, I find myself most interested in exploring in language what feels — on the surface, at least — radically different from language. So, lately: perfume, sculpture, physical sciences. I'm also a classically trained pianist and vocalist, so music is probably the art that got wedged in my brain the earliest, and seems to be something I can never get away from.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I could list so many: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Etel Adnan, Clarice Lispector, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer. And those are just the ones who are no longer alive. That said, probably no book has been more influential on my language-sense than the King James Bible. (It got there first.)

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Give birth to and name the baby I'm currently carrying.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I don't see writing as an occupation in the traditional sense. I made a commitment to myself long ago that writing is something I will do no matter how I make my money. Even as I attempt to find a career teaching writing, I find it important to separate the two — I'm highly skeptical of the careerist mindset when it comes to the actual writing. I get bummed out by people who are "on the submission grind," constantly publishing, fetishizing productivity and networking relationships. As much as I, too, hope to find readers, I find it important for my own work to keep it sacred, to question and resist that mindset. To embrace what, to some, might look like non-productivity or anti-productivity.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Language is interesting to me, endlessly, in a bottomless way. It's interesting to me socially, aesthetically, and historically. It’s something that feels big enough to devote my life to. Perhaps there will come a day when I plumb the depths of that interest and I won't write anymore. In that case maybe I'd go back to music, or get better at making clothes, or go to divinity school. But for now it's the primary way I think about nearly everything.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I'm in the process of reading Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book, and loving it. Not too long ago I watched Bergman's Persona for the first time. It was all the things everyone said it would be — disturbing, beautiful, etc. — but I couldn't help but feel I came to it too late. By that, I think I mean it's possible to know too much about a movie before seeing it.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I'm working on a book of essays about land art and land use in the American West, heavily influenced by Lucy Lippard. The project started because I noticed that few people who write about land art actually live in the same communities the most famous pieces do — and, as someone who grew up a drive away from Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and other works like Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, I wanted to try to say something about them. The project, as projects tend to do, has ended up being about much more than that: it's also about extraction, and sonograms, and my own family history as miners and Mormon settlers in the west.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Michael Boughn, Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge

 

            The word “poetics” has been around for a while, though its meaning changes. Aristotle’s Poetics was primarily a set of genre definitions (tragedy, epic, comedy), desire effects (fear, pity, wonder), their result (catharsis), and the rules and methods necessarily to create them. Milton refers to poetics as the “laws of a true Epic poem.” Purely technical in the sense of addressing poetry (and drama) as governed by laws external to and formative of its composition, poetics became identified (and discussed) as prosody and aesthetics in later thinking. The only question facing the poet is whether or not he or she knows the rules and is able to master them well. (“Poetics’ Bodies—Some Poetry Wars, 1913-1990”)

I’m very much enjoying Toronto poet and critic Michael Boughn’s latest, Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 2024), with an introduction by Charles Stein, a delightful and lively collection of essays of consideration, reconsideration, histories, accumulation, agreements and disagreements, attending a sequence of curiosities around some important decades of contemporary poetic form and thought. Boughn focuses his collection around The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960), the infamous poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen that attempted to define the upcoming generation of American poets, as well as connect a diverse array of contemporary poetics around the country for the first time, clustering poets into genres (some thought, arbitrarily), from the Black Mountain poets, the New York School and San Francisco Renaissance. Stretching multiple essays on the anthology generally, and on specific poets such as (and specific arguments upon or around) Robert Creeley, Robin Blaser, H.D., Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, as well as pieces surrounding multiple of these and their concerns, battles and poetics, Boughn provides a wonderful foundation of information around an incredibly lively and productive period of American writing that still holds rippling effects across contemporary poetics across the United States, Canada (in part through influences into 1960s TISH, Talon and Coach House poets and poetics) and far beyond. His essay on the long poem, for example, I found particularly compelling, pushing me to reconsider my own long-held presumptions upon the form and its history. “But the questions lingered: Is a poem a long poem, as many have asked before me, just because it’s—long? And if that’s the case, then how long is long enough to be a long poem? Or is a poem a long poem because it can lay claim to some common generic feature—beyond indetermine length—some, say, structure or convention? Or, as Smaro Kamboureli has argued, to an ’evolved form,’ a specific, restless resistance to generic definition?” (“How Long Is Long Enough?”). Boughn has that most interesting blend of curiosity and resistance that provides new ways of thinking across questions that have run across poetics for decades; some of these may never find answers, but his questions extend new thinking beyond those original boundaries.

There is something incredible in the way Boughn writes from within the moment in and around the activity he articulates—he was co-editor and one of the co-conspirators of assembling Robert Duncan’s infamous The H.D. Book, after all (something discussed here but also within Lisa Jarnot’s recent lectures [which I reviewed over here])—but with the distance of time: years of working through and with this material as writer, critic, teacher and reader, all of which bring considerable weight to his arguments. If you want to know why the mentors of your mentors, the heroes of your heroes, didn’t get along, and what the disagreements were and how they began, for example. The essay on Robert Creeley’s anger, for example, is remarkable; but one remarkable piece within a collection of remarkable pieces.

In a culture that seems to hold too many young poets featuring content not only above but seemingly to the exclusion of a comprehension of form, Boughn offers his take on a myriad of threads, and an incredible background on a period of writing that exploded onto the larger consciousness in ways that most would either have forgotten about or have been completely unaware. As he writes to close the essay “The New American Poetry Revisited—Yet Again,” an essay that really showcases his strengths as a professor:

            This is a long, devious way from where I started, typical of the course conversations take in relation to this book. And it still doesn’t begin to cover the depths of thinking The New American Poetry brings to the table. The impossibility of fully opening those depths to the blank faces around the seminar room can be overwhelming, or it can become part of a move toward unleashing a ruckus in the room. At least if you’re lucky. That’s what makes teaching it, thinking about it, different than any other anthology. For the young people coming to it cold, in complete innocence, not just of the book, but of poetry itself beyond some meagre exposure to the Romantics and Eliot, it can be like running into a wall face-first. But if you can get them to address the wall as something they bring to their reading, and then show them how to begin to take it apart, it will begin to yield the book’s astonishments and clarities, introducing the students to a new modality of thinking and knowing. Some more than others, of course. But it seems to me that you probably couldn’t ask for more than that from a book.

The force of that anthology when it landed was immense, and there is a great deal of contemporary writing still feeling the effects. There is just such clarity here. One of the more readable critical volumes I’ve read in a while, and I actually found myself wanting more, once I worked through to the end.

Stan Persky, in a recent conversation, suggested to me that the first step in teaching poetry is to explain to students how poetry is a “linguistic mode of knowledge,” comparable to narrative or mathematics. A mode of knowledge, or, say, thinking, is like what I just called a register.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kendra Sullivan

Kendra Sullivan [photo credit: Laila Stevens] is a poet, public artist, and activist scholar. She is the Director of the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center; Co-director of the NYC Climate Justice Hub, a radical partnership between CUNY and New York City Environmental Justice Alliance to advance frontline-led climate justice research, teaching, and policy; Co-director of Women’s Studies Quarterly; and Publisher of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. She makes public art addressing waterfront access and equity issues in cities around the world and has published her writing on art, ecology, and engagement widely. She is the co-founder of the Sunview Luncheonette, a cooperative arts venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; and a member of Mare Liberum, a collective of artists, designers, and boatbuilders imagining other ways to inhabit coastal cities. Her work has been supported by grants, awards, and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Waverley Street Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Montello Foundation, the Engaging the Senses Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, and the T.S. Eliot House, among many others. Her books of poetry include Zero Point Dream Poems (Doublecross Press) and Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse).

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

This is my first book! Though I simultaneously, or nearly so, published a book-length dos-a-dos with DoubleCross called Zero Point Dream Poems, after Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero.  I produce a lot but publish a little. In my opinion, writing is socially produced and produces socialites. Publications need to be brought into the world by the right people by the right press at the best time if they are to be received as meaningfully as possible by the right reading public. While this is not always probable or even possible, working with MC Hyland and Anna Gurton-Wachter at DoubleCross in 2023 and Dan Owens, Kyra Simone, Serena Solin, and Milo Wippermann at UDP in 2024 checked all these boxes. 

More broadly, I break my weekly habit tracker down into three categories: being, doing, and making. My first book has shifted my way of being most: it’s a feeling state or felt sense of having landed somewhere. Or maybe it’s the felt sense of having finally cast off, the feeling state of “far out” or “offshore,” where, paradoxically or not, I feel most grounded. That felt sense is the biggest shift. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

The desire to write fiction is what propels me as a writer. Poetry that plays with narrative comes out when I sit down to write. It’s the shape my thinking takes on the page. I’m also an academic writer. But even as a scholar writing scholarly prose, I write associatively, sentence by sentence, without a roadmap or an outline. Whether I’m writing poetry or critical theory, language is like a stone pathway that precedes my arrival on the scene of the text. Step by step. I follow the stones. I don’t know where I’m going or when I’ll stop. 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Writing is like precipitation in my life. Sometimes the weather is too wet. Sometimes too dry. Most of the time there is too much rain and too little containment: flood. Some of the time there is too little rain and too much thirst: drought. Sometimes the weather meets the needs of its immediate terrain: poetry!

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’m a project-based poet and my books reflect that fact. A conceit becomes a preoccupation that I iterate until I’ve cycled through all possible variations on a theme or method available to me. The circuit of experimentation eventually completes itself and I begin to edit. Many times, during the editing process, subcircuits present themselves. Fractal arguments and counterarguments open doors into doors.  

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Only since having a child! Recently, my friend said to me that when she had a child she was able to forgive herself for existing. This is true for me, too. There are many societal reasons this is a very distressing sentiment! A subject for a scholarly essay or book, to be sure. But nonetheless, when I gave birth, I forgave myself for existing, and as a direct or indirect result, began to enjoy reading in public.  

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

So many! Too many to list, but here are some main preoccupations. 

Is empathy a virtue that affords greater social cohesion or a narcissistic expression susceptible to political exploitation? What is compassion and how do we act appropriately on its injunctions in contemporary life? How are we to live “the good life,” by which I mean a values-driven life that makes room for the possibility of joy, in the age of climate breakdown? 

Who am I; and who are you; and who are we; and where do we begin and end in relation to the total environment, if at all? 

Because I work in the knowledge sector, a lot of my poetry is concerned with the ideological and material conditions of knowledge production and circulation. I’m interested in knowledge economies in general, or where and how knowledge is made, received, and interpolated, and by whom. I’m interested in the ways situated, lived, or embodied knowledge is honored (or not) in mainstream scholarly discourses and policy development. I’m interested in research, or how humans learn what they need to know in order to live well and remove barriers to collective wellbeing. And I’m interested in meaning-making, or how humans weave together their personal and social lives through deeply contextual, cultural, community-led, and value-laden activities, like for instance, poetry!

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

In my poems, I often ask how we can loosen the strictures of Western, empirical knowledge regimes without descending into a pit of relativisms that render thought vulnerable to conspiracy, misinformation, and polarization. Can poetry help us live with integrity while accepting uncertainty? Certainly. Can we critique patriarchal scientific methodologies while embracing the fruits of scientific study and analysis? Yes, I think so. Does poetry contribute to efforts led by theorists working on the ground, in the streets, or in the academy who advance situated, embodied, and author-saturated understandings of the worlds we inherited alongside the worlds we want to pass along? Totally. Are phenomenological understandings of meaning-making inherently feminist? Subversive? Dissident? Is poetry research? What would it mean to read it as such? I don’t know!

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Helpful! The more dialogic the writing and editing process, which are continuous and coextensive in my practice, the more faceted the crystallized artifact of that interaction becomes. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Write in community. Deepen your relationship to your existing communities. Seek out new communities to be, do, and make with and for. Weave yourself into ever more complicated social fabrics with your words. 

I’ve just realized I didn’t really answer your question. That’s my advice. 

Advice that I recently heard and really appreciated is to ask yourself everyday, “what am I walking toward and what am I walking away from?”  Step by step, you can get “there” from “here,” wherever here and there are for you. Walking may be an alienating verb for some, since it implies a baseline of personal mobility and/or environmental safety that is not universal by any stretch. So if that’s your experience, maybe you could swap “walking” out with another  verb that resonates with your intrinsic motivations, like “writing.” 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to art to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I am a poet, a scholar, and an artist. My art practice is what is sometimes termed social sculpture. I build boats, teach people to build boats, and get people out on local bodies of water to talk about environmental ecologies and economies as part of a collective called Mare Liberum. I like to think that building boats has prepared me to move between genres: land and sea, public art and activist scholarship, academic administration and poetry creation. It’s a continuum of practice. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I have a small child who has more power over my daily routine than the sun and moon could ever hope to! I have no routine. I write whenever I find a minute. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I read. I wait. I exercise. I play. I work. I get outside. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

What a lovely question! It reminds of the PJ Harvey song, “You Said Something,” from Stories from the City. Stories from the Sea. While looking at Manhattan from a rooftop in Brooklyn she sings about the “smells of our homelands.” This line always reminds me that I don’t know where home is: the city (where I live) or the seaside (where I grew up). Depending on my mood, the smells of my homeland are either trash & heat (rising from asphalt) or salt & sulfur (released by dead and dying plants in the marshland). Home is such a scary place for so many. I am privileged to love my homes. 

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

All of the above! I would add that institution building and institutional ethnography both layer my thinking about poetry creation. The practice of institutional ethnography was developed by Canadian sociologist Dorothy J.Smith. It’s a research methodology that aims to describe how individual behaviors, beliefs, and activities, taken en masse, give form to the social. This way of looking at things helps me understand the coordinated doing, making, and working across scenes, sectors, and geosocial spaces that give rise to poetry as an institution. Counterinstitution is actually a more capacious and less contestable term to describe the work of poetry in the world. Ammiel Alcalay’s motto for Lost & Found is “follow the person.” I think of counterinstitutional ethnography, and I’m not sure he’d agree with me here, of “following the people,” to understand poetry and its operations at scale.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Too many to name! I’ll give a shout out to my Lost & Found poetry fam. Ammiel, Sampson Starkweather, Stephon Lawrence, Joseph Caceres, Tonya Foster, Coco Fitterman, Daisy Atterbury, Irish Cushing, Zohra Saed, Oyku Tenken, Miriam Atkin, and Marine Cournet. I’ll also shout out my Geopetics working group: Celina Su, Sahar Romani, Mónica de la Torre, Richa Nagar, and Kahina Meziant. And my poet.mamas listserve! 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Just keep writing, publishing, performing, and archiving. Write continuously, like Diane di Prima. Publish continuously, like Alice Notley. Perform continuously, like Mariposa Fernandez. Archive and activate/preserve archives continuously, like Lois Elaine Griffith. I’d also like to focus on a daily visual log, like Etel Adnan. I was trained as a painter and I’d like to paint more like I brush my teeth, every day, as a kind of maintenance. (Naming aspirations here; not making comparisons between myself and these phenomenal beings!) 

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I work my dream job. Even so, I have a fantasy that one day I’ll go to Yale’s forestry school. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It’s possible that I began writing seriously after 9-11 in NYC because painting and boat making, my two main visual arts practices, required too much storage. Poems don’t take up any space; on the contrary, they create space. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Richa Nagar’s Relearning the World through Radical Vulnerability. Alice Diop’s Saint Omer. Both, to me, in part, develop methods for building solidarity with near and far “others” without the crutch of identification. 

20 - What are you currently working on?

An institutional ethnography of CUNY called Uneven Ground: Making the Public University Work Anywhere People Gather, Learn, and Grow. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Kevin Prufer, The Fears

 

I keep returning to the image of a kitten
asleep in the engine

As a way of understanding
the history of my country.

So warm under the car’s hood,
the hidden sweetness in the dark machinery.

+

Start the car.

+

[The sound the kitten makes.]

+

Happy slaves on a lazy afternoon
sleeping in the shadow of hay bales.

A banjo lying in the sun.
Stolen apples.

A lithograph on the wall in my father’s office:
The sweet ol’ summah time. (“Automotive”)

I’m currently working my way through American poet Kevin Prufer’s ninth poetry collection (and the first I’ve seen of his), The Fears (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2023), following titles such as National Anthem (2008), In a Beautiful Country (2011), Churches (2014), How He Loved Them (2018) and The Art of Fiction (2021). There’s a meandering sharpness to these pieces, a movement that is incredibly precise, reminiscent of the late Toronto poet David Donnell for a kind of conversational tone that moves and sways and coheres in ways that are almost startling (although the language feels more exact than Donnell). I see this comparison most obvious in the rhythms of poems such as “W.H. Auden’s ‘The Fall of Rome’,” that opens with a pacing and a conversational kind of ease entirely comparable with Donnell’s catalogue:

In the final lines of his great poem “The Fall of Rome,”
Auden describes
                           not the facts
of the late Empire’s fall,
                                       but distant herds of reindeer
moving quickly and silently
across vast expanses of golden moss.
                                                            We don’t know
where those herds are,
                                     only that they seem impossibly
far from the troubles of men,
                                              not mindless but
beyond mind,
                       uncountable, twilit, inhuman,
unconcerned with the failures of empires.

Prufer’s poems begin with a moment, and then work to articulate every angle of it, unable to move beyond until every particle is properly considered. “He had become fascinated by the way / excellent poems sometimes failed to hold together,” Prufer’s title poem begins, “in ways he expected them to. / That is, / a poem, like a great mind at work / on an unsolvable problem, / might by necessity / meander […].” He manages his meandering in such deliberate motions, without a word or thought out of place, even through a sequence of explorations through and around language, perception and memory. “but Greek loneliness,” he writes, as part of the poem “The Greek Gods,” “seems closer to explaining / the forces that brought us here / and make me wander / the hospital skybridges / late at night, / watching that same McDonald’s blinking / into darkness.” Prufer manages meditative stretches that rhythmically extend and hold across great distances, and such intimacy through asking some rather big questions of existence and being, propelled through the pacing of what he describes as his fears; and his fears, one might say, are legion.