Let this list be your new map of the winter. Let it also be your grocery list, and imagine which poet is which vegetable. Print it, write thank you at the bottom, and give it directly to anyone you love. What an exceptional list the latest installment of the New American Poets Series is! The feature is just as much fun for the prose statements from the writers as it is for the sampling of their poems. Some prose bits here, (though follow links to get the whole piece):
Jennifer Chang: “I wondered if the fog made the water or if the water rose into the fog. The train was fast and I thought that what I saw could also be two ghosts passing through each other. Two clouds collapsing into each other. Two anxieties panicking against each other. I became very concerned about what two things were doing what to each other and how. It was, I realized, less a problem of observation than directionality. Where was the fog going in relation to where I was going? And does water travel, enclosed as it is by land?”
Zach Savich: “I read the proofs of my book at Dunkin Donuts. I was surprised by how happy the poems seemed. I had thought they held only panic, desperation, folly. I had no idea I had written a happy book.
A teacher said: you need to decide if you think the world is meaningful or not. And then, whether it is or not, if art can be. And if art can be, shouldn’t it?”
Aracelis Girmay: “When the piece of a body is left (or a home is left) then the body begins being a constellation: one piece is there! one piece is there! If I leave my hair in the comb in my mother’s house & walk out the door to go to the airport, then all of a sudden the body is everything between me & that lost piece. The body is made up, then, of roads & crickets & azucena & mud. How large we are. How ramshackle, how brilliant, how haphazardly & strangely rendered we are.”