The poems of Death Styles were written in response to an insoluble problem: How to survive the death of a child. How to reconcile grief's directive to thread the gaze backwards with survival's imperative to move forward in time.
The poem featured here could not have had a more mundane inspiration: being late to a child's dental appointment. Yet I held onto it like a life raft. Writing this poem was a way to survive a day.
In this way, I have survived all of them, so far.
Joyelle McSweeney on "Death Styles 9.2" |
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Ocean Vuong: "Have I Caught Up with Myself?"
"Every poem suggests its own kind of physics, each with its various dials for syntax, grammar, pacing, enjambment, line length/speed, and my work is to lean in and commit to that matrix, which is different for each poem. I have a deep suspicion or, more accurately, an ambivalence to the myth of 'style.' I believe the common anxiety for a writer to 'find' or 'establish' a style is actually incredibly limiting—and the longer I teach the more I find this to be true."
via THE GUARDIAN |
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What Sparks Poetry:
M. L. Smoker on "Heart Butte, Montana"
"It is then next to impossible for me to ignore the echoes that reverberate from beneath and across the earth’s surface. There is both a human and non-human story here. Such places formed by millennia, marked by water and ice, light and dark. Of shifting rock and the new formation of land, plateau, mountain range. Humans were taken in and the land cared for us—we were gifted survival and song by our plant and animal family." |
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