The poem works through a poetic witness who is striving to reconcile ways we memorialize departures. The poetic place of the poem is rooted in memory as the space of the poem remains subject to the changes the poetic body experiences in memorial space and departure from that space. For me, the poem hinges on a phrase within the poem that crystallizes a lack of comprehension of how lasting memory retains a remainder of life in place. The phrase reads "departure's sun borne reflect." That phrase encompasses the crystallization of everything I was writing toward in bringing in this poem to words. The sun reveals our reflective relationship of movement through time, as if to alight on memory, to remind us of what we are seeing in passing moments.
Gordon Henry on "It Was Snowing on the Monuments" |
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"The Past Is Present: A Conversation with Tracy Fuad"
"It's funny because I was kind of surprised to find that I had written PORTAL at all. The poems were written mostly after about:blank had come out, and during a time when I felt like I couldn't think and couldn't write. I think this produced very strange poems in a way, but also poems that were more unselfconscious. I didn't perceive this big shift or change as much as have it mirrored at me at readings. When I would read a work, people would always remark how different it was from my previous book. My experience is that you don't really see or know necessarily what a book is about until it exists as this proto-book that you know is going to exist as a book-object. Then it coheres a little bit."
via LARB |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Emily Tuszynska on "Floodplain"
"Like Shepherd, I too was aware of myself as connected to the world in profound interdependence, an understanding that philosopher and biologist Andreas Weber refers to as 'enlivenment.' Every living thing around me had been animated by the same irresistible force, a 'wordless insistence' to which my body was now yielding, 'bowing / then kneeling / to each contraction as it came.' The force that was driving my daughter into the world was the same force that drove the tulip poplar's leaves to burst from their buds and their winged seeds to root themselves in the soil." |
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