What Sparks Poetry

Persona offered a path through the unimaginable. Throughout my first book, Theophanies, I wield persona to trace a foremother’s face in the dark—Sarah, Hajar, Eve, Maryam. I cannot know them, but in the absence of definitive knowledge, I can speculate. Through speculation, through the assumption of another’s voice, I can clarify my own. Using Sarah-as-foremother as a mouthpiece doesn’t reveal anything true about her. Rather, it illuminates my own inclinations, biases, and assumptions, long-obscured and buried. However frightening, however troubling. By braiding together multiple voices in a contrapuntal, I can better locate my own.

For me as a poet there’s a joy in sheer description, as there is also an excitement in the act of address. To describe, meaning to transpose experience (sensual or otherwise) into the register of language—communicable language.

Christ was laid out in a glass coffin, like Snow White. I visited and re-visited him. He looked so much like my father on his deathbed.

If you are writing a poem on the surface of the moon, you would likely have your back to the world, at least the back of your head: while you are absorbed in the poem on your desk, you are looking down, and the world is floating in the sky above you, as if its immensity were weightless. A blue balloon.

I am increasingly persuaded that American Christianity’s embrace of Donald Trump is simply the latest expression of a terrific counter-scandal, effectively another, much more gradual transvaluation of values, whereby the dominant American secular and religious visions have aligned themselves with a cult of progress, the technocratic human image for which power can only mean domination, exploitation, and mastery. The key joke of this era is the one where the man puts a gun to his head, and when his wife starts laughing says to her, “What’s so funny? You’re next!”

Form is, of course, at the heart of poetry, and it’s that friction between the laws of a form and the fresh take on it that provokes frisson, that outpouring of feeling in us.

There are five things enclosed in gauzy nets, each hanging between the spikes of some kind of desert plant. They are the only things blushed with color in a drab and dusty dreamscape. At the same time that I wondered when they would break free, I also wondered how they might survive in such an arid world.

What I found in the violin-echo of my own beating heart, was grief, a grief not only for my friends who had not made it out alive, but a grief for this world in which we are none of us good.

I remember how my father would explain how the moon and yes, satellites, stayed in orbit without falling out of the sky—I also learned that the moon is a natural satellite, although different from the human-made satellites which beamed information to and from earth, or vice versa.

Grief the weather over my desk as I wrote some of these poems. Grief fogging up the windowpanes in particular poems. Grief came with its own weird chant, grief that strange emotion where you know what you miss before you understand why.

The plum and the plum tree, then, became a philosophical center for me. Or, if not center, a lily pad of poetic thought, leading me to reflect on what exactly it meant for such fruition, such overabundance, to result in death, rot, and souring. And how, in a number of ways, these stages of growth remarked upon the trends of capitalism, (over)production and exploitation in Western society.

When I think of my own hearing loss, I think of irreparability, a loss that runs only one way, converting my skull to a locked vault, a cave. I like to be alone there, to study how it susurrates. Sonority, that tideline's arrival, retreat. Other losses are more acute, and I bear them bitterly. Like the constellations in the dark night of Greek thinking, the night sky overwritten with predators and prey. Washed with milk, they sink away to hide behind the sun.

We are left instead with anti-image. With possibility of/some great coiled energy. Anti-image, ironically, makes real the possibility, and possibility the real.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—. The moment I begin saying to myself Emily Dickinson’s first line, my tongue flicks rapidly to the roof of my mouth for the first sound in the first word “Tell.” The same exact little movement happens at the end of the line’s last word, “slant.” In this pre-industrial, bodily way the reader becomes the poet’s instrument. In a way, it is as though they were one. But in another way, the bodily nature of the line enacts the double solitude: the reader’s body absolutely itself, utterly separate from the equally solitary poet who made the line: solitaria. Ferry’s poem is about the empathic loneliness Johnson’s prose suggests but cannot embody.

Translations are acts of mimetic excess, they generate too-much-ness, volatility, transformation.