"In Transit" is based on an experience of youth, a time of sometimes excessive romanticism, where it can seem like the fate of the universe hinges on successfully conveying flowers to a loved one. (NB: It doesn't.) It took a long time to see how to transform this experience into a work of art, and I eventually decided to tie it in to the on-going transformation of the country, as well as to the work of Marc Chagall (who comes from this corner of the world). Old women poking people with needles to get by on over-crowded trolley buses was an urban legend, though we believed it.
Rimas Užgiris on "In Transit" |
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"Metaphor by Any Means Necessary: Destiny O. Birdsong's Negotiations"
"The speakers of these poems are harmed by others, themselves; their bodies harmed by other bodies, by their own. Not only does each party in such situations coexist—the situations they find themselves in must coexist, rarely by choice. But Birdsong writes her poems' speakers out of violence into joy and comfort, wit and love."
via THE RUMPUS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
John Robert Lee on Philip Larkin's "Church Going"
"I took, and still take, however subsumed, his neo-formal poetic forms, unfussy, concentrated, a modest musical tone playing on half rhymes and perhaps above all, the finely detailed and close, film-like observation of the world around him, physical, natural, and emotional. 'Church Going' was one of the poems I copied as I learned from him how to shape such pointed, accurate stanzas." |
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