"A Conversation with Gabrielle Bates"
"So much of my process is cutting back; I find it very pleasurable to see the shape of a poem getting sharper edges. I really love it. I know there’s a danger implicit in that too though. You can cut back too much, you can become unkind to yourself. But I see cutting as a form of humility, really; being willing to let anything go in service of what the poem wants to be and trying to really honor that more than whatever intention or hope I may have originally had for it."
via THE ADROIT JOURNAL |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Andrew Zawacki on Sébastien Smirou's "The Lion"
"The orthodox part of the evening once completed, we turned to our current project—very much under construction—namely, the English translation of Sébastien’s sophomore book, a bestiary titled Beau voir....The plan was Sébastien’s, inspired tangentially by the so-called 'torture test' that Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alferi had devised, which involved translating Robert Duncan’s falconer-mother back and forth between English and French, so the original would bloom anew through its successive degradations." |
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