This weekend has been busy, filled with the best kind of busy, celebrations and milestones, punctuated with warm weather and cherry blossoms. My eldest turned seven on Thursday and that night we had a family birthday celebration, with the next day his friend party with six friends from school. The next day was my sister's wedding, and the next was Easter and my youngest's first egg hunt. My middle child discovered his first loose tooth on Thursday evening, too. I also made from scratch for the first time Angel Food cake, creme anglaise, and a pavlova. There was tide-pool exploring, kite-flying, and playground visiting crammed into this glorious weekend, too. Oh, and that radio interview happened, too.
Today, my husband wanted to listen to it and I found it for him then hid in the bathroom when I heard my voice. Eventually, I returned to the living room and listened to the rest of the interview with my family. I didn't come across as awkward as I had felt, my nervous laughter wasn't grating, and my tick of starting every sentence with "Umm..." wasn't nearly as pronounced as I had feared.
If you're curious, you can listen here. There is a long musical interlude at the start, so if you want to get right to it, skip to the 2:00 mark.
Showing posts with label audio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label audio. Show all posts
1 April 2013
16 August 2011
Glossolalia Installation: Louisa Beaman
I had fun putting this installation together, going through all the scraps of ribbons and fabrics I've accumulated, in addition to the strange ephemera I seem to amass. I wanted the piece to be very tactile and textured. My favourite detail is the mini-teapot on the tiny vanity I picked up at an antique mall in Edmonton. During the planning stages of the installation, I took out about four costume/historical fashion books from the library to get an idea what women wore in that time. I'm not much of an artist, so the sketches of Louisa's dream dresses are not the best. She was believed to have been a seamstress, so I'm sure she would have done much better drawings.
Although weddings in those days were nothing like the events put on today, they were obviously very important, arguably more important in the lives of women then than now. I tried to envision what it must have been like for a young woman to have to give up her wedding day dreams, only to be married to a man that she was not publicly allowed to acknowledge as her husband.
(Louisa Beaman is the first polygamous wife of Joseph Smith that the church recognized. I won't go into it all here, but if you are interested in the real story, can find a comprehensive background on the woman here.)
13 January 2011
In Conversation: Jenna Butler
Time to make another pot of tea, dear readers. I had an email conversation with friend and poet, Jenna Butler, after she so kindly recorded "Inter-Tribal" from Aphelion for me. It was one of those conversations that I didn't want to end. Please take a listen and enjoy!
Jenna Butler was born in Norwich, England in 1980. An educator, book reviewer, editor and poet, Butler has edited more than twenty-five collections of poetry in Canada and England. She is the author of four short collections, Forcing Bloom, weather, Winter Ballast, and Nyctogram: The Lewis Carroll Poems, in addition to a recently-released full-length collection from NeWest Press, Aphelion. A fifth short collection, Lepidopterists, is forthcoming in 2011. She teaches Creative Writing at MacEwan University in Edmonton during the school year; in the summer, she lives with her husband, three resident moose, and a den of coyotes on a small organic farm in the north country.
Jenna, thank-you for reading “Inter-Tribal”. It is such a rich poem and I have so much I want to ask you, but can you start by talking about why you chose this poem to read? Does it represent something of aphelion or do you simply like to read it?
I chose "Inter-Tribal" because it encapsulates, I think, what Aphelion is about: the notion of trying to find home amongst so many places, cultures, and people. That sense of walking between cultures is one I have been deeply aware of all my life, not just in my own history, but in the histories of many other friends here in Canada. The inter-tribal dance at the Songhees Pow-wow I wrote about invoked a number of things for me: my mother's lost history in Tanzania as a child, my father's home in rural England that he left behind when he came to Canada with my mother, and my own background split between Canada, rural England, and a history in Tanzania that I never knew. Through my father's work in Alberta and many First Nations friends through the years, I grew up around a number of First Nations stories and traditions, and those really resonate with me. So when the inter-tribal dance was called at that pow-wow, I found myself dancing all that varied history and all my senses of home, from the landscapes that draw me to the people who anchor my heart. Walking those margins between cultures, hearing so many different people's stories, is a place I am very honoured to be. It's a generative place.
You say it so clearly in the second to last stanza "we dance......what hold us/sustains us......sends us on". As the daughter of two immigrants who came from very different backgrounds, this really resonated with me.
But I want to go back to the beginning of the poem. “Inter-Tribal” starts and ends with ravens. What do they mean to you?
Raven is the trickster figure; for me, it is also the mediator between worlds, between cultures. The raven that danced over the pow-wow circle is the same one that dances over my north country organic farm. It is the one that appears, also, throughout Norse and Celtic legend. It connects all my homes. The raven embodies for me the liminal space of the bridge between cultures and ways of life.
It's interesting that you use the word 'liminal'. When I was at the Writing Studio in Banff, a fellow poet was working on a manuscript that explored the theme of liminal spaces and one poem of hers that I still remember focused on the magpie, another corvid, as a liminal creature. This reminds me of someone on FB asking a few months ago if we all have a corvid poem in us. I know that Ted Hughes did Crow, but do you think there is something inherently Canadian about corvids? Are we a liminal country? And what else is "part of the deeper dark," in the last stanza of your poem?
Gosh, that's a can of worms -- Canada as a liminal country. I'm going to respond to your questions backward:
I guess my response would be yes, I think there's definitely a sense of heightened awareness of borders in Canada (between cultures). We're not unique in being aware of that liminality, but I do believe we're in a more privileged state to acknowledge it and constructively learn from it. And it is so very necessary. If I can share a story with you, my parents chose to come to Canada because they thought it would be a safe place in which to raise the children of a multicultural marriage. I think it was a relief for them to live in a place where most people around them were also "from away," relative newcomers, trying to retain their own cultures while also trying to find some sort of community. We're always engaging with the touch-and-go nature of borders in this country. Some are more fluid; some kick back. There are times when we succeed in navigating those borders between cultures respectfully; there are times when we fail.
I suspect that there's an element of the go-between to corvids; they do appear in so many cultures already. I don't want to generalize and say that Canadian writers inherently reach for crows, magpies, & so forth because there's a "shiftiness" to them, a bridging nature. I can only speak for myself here -- I reach for ravens because they're go-betweens, but they have that underlying darkness, too. It's the "deeper dark" you picked out of the ending of "Inter-Tribal" -- that blackness outside the brightly lit dancing circle. For me, that dark is the danger of not knowing your stories, where you come from. Not having that very elemental grounding.
There are some lines in Inter-tribal that really struck me, particularly "the trucks racket in/like wagons", "bitter lengths of coffee farms", and "a gleaming rind of moon". Can you talk about how one or all of these lines came to be--careful crafting, happy accident, divine intervention?
Glad you liked them!
I'm really attuned to sound when I write. When I draft lines, everything is about playing an image off the sound it makes, the sounds it incorporates. I cut and cut and cut if the line isn't exact in the ear.
For example, the hard ts in "trucks racket" cause the sounds to jolt off one another like the trucks jouncing over rough ground. The double ts and fs of "bitter lengths of coffee farms" extend the line visually on the page, mimicking the stands of plants reaching off into the distance. And in "gleaming rind of moon," the sounds of the rounded gs play off the full os in "moon" -- I'm reaching for something full-bellied here, replete and glinting, implied by the sickle curve of the crescent moon. I get really focused on line breaks, too -- where to cut the sound, how to play with the resonances present within/between images. I have synaesthesia, so I'm hypersensitive to sound/colour anyway; I'm sure that has something to do with the aural quality of the lines being so important.
I didn't know you had synaesthesia! Fascinating. I was going to comment on all the colours in the poem, too, how very present they are--black, red, bronze, blue are all named, but even more are alluded, too. It's very visual. You mentioned the importance of getting the aural qualities right in the lines; I'm curious how synaesthesia plays into the crafting of your work, both in a general sense and specifically “Inter-Tribal”.
I think it underwrites all my poetry. I'm constantly reading word combinations and lines aloud as I write, trying to get the cadence right, probably because sound is such a focus in this type of synaesthesia. I see different volumes as shades of a colour; for instance, a bolded word on the page, read louder, evokes a more saturated hue than a word in regular type. I perceive music in the same way, with volumes and pitches at different hues.
Because there's this constant focus on colour, I think the various names of tones make their way into my writing, as you pointed out. I'm always striving to capture the exact sense of a hue. For instance, in Aphelion, there's a poem, "Wild Indigo," where the colour of the plant in the dry midsummer garden is described as being "dusty blue/like sky or midwinter stars." I find myself grasping at colours, sometimes flailing when the right words don't come. It's not just a blue -- it's a smoke blue or a wild flax blue or a delphinium blue. In the poem "Petroglyph Trail," the sunlight's not just amber, it's citrine. How best to describe it without overloading -- that's the catch. I'm writing the same colours into the poems that I'm seeing in my mind's eye as I go through the day, listening. I can get really hung up on colour -- probably because I walk around with it in my head all the time!
In "Inter-Tribal" specifically, I use a lot of os throughout. Aurally, I find them expansive, and the poem's trying to evoke the sense of a lighted place pinned against a vast, dark backdrop. There's the sound element. To reinforce, I use several colour tones -- "blue air/rigged with smoke" -- in the wording of the poem; the visual element.
This probably sounds really "out there," sorry -- I haven't explained synaesthesia in my writing to anyone before! It's a strange internalized process I go through.
Jenna Butler was born in Norwich, England in 1980. An educator, book reviewer, editor and poet, Butler has edited more than twenty-five collections of poetry in Canada and England. She is the author of four short collections, Forcing Bloom, weather, Winter Ballast, and Nyctogram: The Lewis Carroll Poems, in addition to a recently-released full-length collection from NeWest Press, Aphelion. A fifth short collection, Lepidopterists, is forthcoming in 2011. She teaches Creative Writing at MacEwan University in Edmonton during the school year; in the summer, she lives with her husband, three resident moose, and a den of coyotes on a small organic farm in the north country.
Jenna, thank-you for reading “Inter-Tribal”. It is such a rich poem and I have so much I want to ask you, but can you start by talking about why you chose this poem to read? Does it represent something of aphelion or do you simply like to read it?
I chose "Inter-Tribal" because it encapsulates, I think, what Aphelion is about: the notion of trying to find home amongst so many places, cultures, and people. That sense of walking between cultures is one I have been deeply aware of all my life, not just in my own history, but in the histories of many other friends here in Canada. The inter-tribal dance at the Songhees Pow-wow I wrote about invoked a number of things for me: my mother's lost history in Tanzania as a child, my father's home in rural England that he left behind when he came to Canada with my mother, and my own background split between Canada, rural England, and a history in Tanzania that I never knew. Through my father's work in Alberta and many First Nations friends through the years, I grew up around a number of First Nations stories and traditions, and those really resonate with me. So when the inter-tribal dance was called at that pow-wow, I found myself dancing all that varied history and all my senses of home, from the landscapes that draw me to the people who anchor my heart. Walking those margins between cultures, hearing so many different people's stories, is a place I am very honoured to be. It's a generative place.
You say it so clearly in the second to last stanza "we dance......what hold us/sustains us......sends us on". As the daughter of two immigrants who came from very different backgrounds, this really resonated with me.
But I want to go back to the beginning of the poem. “Inter-Tribal” starts and ends with ravens. What do they mean to you?
Raven is the trickster figure; for me, it is also the mediator between worlds, between cultures. The raven that danced over the pow-wow circle is the same one that dances over my north country organic farm. It is the one that appears, also, throughout Norse and Celtic legend. It connects all my homes. The raven embodies for me the liminal space of the bridge between cultures and ways of life.
It's interesting that you use the word 'liminal'. When I was at the Writing Studio in Banff, a fellow poet was working on a manuscript that explored the theme of liminal spaces and one poem of hers that I still remember focused on the magpie, another corvid, as a liminal creature. This reminds me of someone on FB asking a few months ago if we all have a corvid poem in us. I know that Ted Hughes did Crow, but do you think there is something inherently Canadian about corvids? Are we a liminal country? And what else is "part of the deeper dark," in the last stanza of your poem?
Gosh, that's a can of worms -- Canada as a liminal country. I'm going to respond to your questions backward:
I guess my response would be yes, I think there's definitely a sense of heightened awareness of borders in Canada (between cultures). We're not unique in being aware of that liminality, but I do believe we're in a more privileged state to acknowledge it and constructively learn from it. And it is so very necessary. If I can share a story with you, my parents chose to come to Canada because they thought it would be a safe place in which to raise the children of a multicultural marriage. I think it was a relief for them to live in a place where most people around them were also "from away," relative newcomers, trying to retain their own cultures while also trying to find some sort of community. We're always engaging with the touch-and-go nature of borders in this country. Some are more fluid; some kick back. There are times when we succeed in navigating those borders between cultures respectfully; there are times when we fail.
I suspect that there's an element of the go-between to corvids; they do appear in so many cultures already. I don't want to generalize and say that Canadian writers inherently reach for crows, magpies, & so forth because there's a "shiftiness" to them, a bridging nature. I can only speak for myself here -- I reach for ravens because they're go-betweens, but they have that underlying darkness, too. It's the "deeper dark" you picked out of the ending of "Inter-Tribal" -- that blackness outside the brightly lit dancing circle. For me, that dark is the danger of not knowing your stories, where you come from. Not having that very elemental grounding.
There are some lines in Inter-tribal that really struck me, particularly "the trucks racket in/like wagons", "bitter lengths of coffee farms", and "a gleaming rind of moon". Can you talk about how one or all of these lines came to be--careful crafting, happy accident, divine intervention?
Glad you liked them!
I'm really attuned to sound when I write. When I draft lines, everything is about playing an image off the sound it makes, the sounds it incorporates. I cut and cut and cut if the line isn't exact in the ear.
For example, the hard ts in "trucks racket" cause the sounds to jolt off one another like the trucks jouncing over rough ground. The double ts and fs of "bitter lengths of coffee farms" extend the line visually on the page, mimicking the stands of plants reaching off into the distance. And in "gleaming rind of moon," the sounds of the rounded gs play off the full os in "moon" -- I'm reaching for something full-bellied here, replete and glinting, implied by the sickle curve of the crescent moon. I get really focused on line breaks, too -- where to cut the sound, how to play with the resonances present within/between images. I have synaesthesia, so I'm hypersensitive to sound/colour anyway; I'm sure that has something to do with the aural quality of the lines being so important.
I didn't know you had synaesthesia! Fascinating. I was going to comment on all the colours in the poem, too, how very present they are--black, red, bronze, blue are all named, but even more are alluded, too. It's very visual. You mentioned the importance of getting the aural qualities right in the lines; I'm curious how synaesthesia plays into the crafting of your work, both in a general sense and specifically “Inter-Tribal”.
I think it underwrites all my poetry. I'm constantly reading word combinations and lines aloud as I write, trying to get the cadence right, probably because sound is such a focus in this type of synaesthesia. I see different volumes as shades of a colour; for instance, a bolded word on the page, read louder, evokes a more saturated hue than a word in regular type. I perceive music in the same way, with volumes and pitches at different hues.
Because there's this constant focus on colour, I think the various names of tones make their way into my writing, as you pointed out. I'm always striving to capture the exact sense of a hue. For instance, in Aphelion, there's a poem, "Wild Indigo," where the colour of the plant in the dry midsummer garden is described as being "dusty blue/like sky or midwinter stars." I find myself grasping at colours, sometimes flailing when the right words don't come. It's not just a blue -- it's a smoke blue or a wild flax blue or a delphinium blue. In the poem "Petroglyph Trail," the sunlight's not just amber, it's citrine. How best to describe it without overloading -- that's the catch. I'm writing the same colours into the poems that I'm seeing in my mind's eye as I go through the day, listening. I can get really hung up on colour -- probably because I walk around with it in my head all the time!
In "Inter-Tribal" specifically, I use a lot of os throughout. Aurally, I find them expansive, and the poem's trying to evoke the sense of a lighted place pinned against a vast, dark backdrop. There's the sound element. To reinforce, I use several colour tones -- "blue air/rigged with smoke" -- in the wording of the poem; the visual element.
This probably sounds really "out there," sorry -- I haven't explained synaesthesia in my writing to anyone before! It's a strange internalized process I go through.
15 December 2010
Glossolalia Installation: Sarah Ann Whitney
(Again, I apologize for the picture quality. As you can see in the top one, this installation ended up with a lamp to lend warmth to it, but I didn't get a proper close-up of it. Oh well.)
The installation for Sarah Ann Whitney was the most abstract of the six (with Emily Dow Partridge a close second). I wanted to highlight her youth, but didn't want to be too overt about it either. I had a Jacob's Ladder toy (which in finding this link I have discovered is probably an anachronism!) which references the Jacob's Ladder in the Bible. I also made five fortune tellers out of old maps, with the fortunes varying greatly from schoolgirl silliness (one featured desserts to eat) to commands (such as "compliment the next person you see" and "write a letter to that friend--you know who" to something, I hope, more profound (such as "don't be afraid to show your love" or "do not underestimate the power of a shared pot of tea". (In addition, I had ordered two antique keys from Etsy that failed to arrive in time, which I had hoped would allude to Joseph's hiding, Sarah Ann's visits with him, and all the secrets.)
While I tried not to hover over the good people who went through the exhibit, I was able to watch a few of them and noticed that most did not interact with this exhibit. I had hoped people would have found their fortunes and read those of others, but it rarely happened, although the Jacob's Ladder was picked up fairly often. If I have the opportunity to do this again, in this form, I'll have to figure out a way to make it more inviting to people to interact with the pieces. If you have any thoughts on this, please share them!
9 December 2010
In Conversation: Ariel Gordon
Welcome to the inaugural of what I hope to be a long-running series of conversations with poets about single poems of theirs. If you have any thoughts on what or who you'd like to see in the series, please let me know. And I hope some of you will be inspired to continue the conversation in the comments.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer whose first book of poetry, Hump, was published in spring 2010 by Palimpsest Press. How to Prepare for Flooding, a collaboration with designer Julia Michaud, is forthcoming from JackPine Press in 2011. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.
Now, grab a fresh cup of tea and listen to Ariel read "Toddle" which appears in Hump, a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban / nature / love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto of sorts.
Thank you for reading “Toddle” from Hump and agreeing to chat about it with me. Can you tell me a bit about the inception for this poem?
Strangely, though I remember the moments the poem records, I don't remember much about the crafting of the poem. Which is strange on two counts. Because I usually have a mental inventory of the changes a poem goes through or at least a computerized version of said inventory.
But, as the mother of a four-year-old, I apparently have too many random daycare documents and poems/letters with the word 'toddler' in them to be able to find the first drafts of this poem.
So I'm forced to rely on my memory. And all I remember about the crafting of this poem is that it's conjoined, a Siamese twin of a poem. Which means that it's composed of several short bits that didn't work alone but seemed to work when placed in close proximity. To hum, like finished poems do.
I don't usually write this way. Usually poems come relatively fully formed. Then it's just a matter of pruning, with the ones that work, or discarding, if they don't.
What I can tell you is that, since the girl appears to be approximately a year and a half to two years old in the poem, it was written in bits and pieces sometime between early 2008 and...December 2009, when I submitted the manuscript to Palimpsest. Heh.
One of my favourite parts of the poem is the end, the honey, honey, honey. I loved hearing you read it too, because I was so curious to how you would. It was different from how I read it to myself. Repetition can be hard to pull off well, but so effective when it does. What does repetition of honey in "Toddle" signify to you?
It is one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me and, also, seemed to be the perfect way to end the poem.
I'm curious. How did you read it to yourself?
That's hard to convey in print, but I'll try. I read them softer than the rest of the poem, and much closer together than you did, in a wistful, soothing tone, if that makes any sense.
Hm. I hadn't thought of that. I read them the way I read them, with pauses between each of them, because I want the audience to come away with at least one honey. Since I usually read “Toddle” last if at all, and since the honeys come at the very very end, I pause.
You said that “Toddle” is composed of many short bits that work together, and that this is not how you normally write poems. I'm wondering how you made them work together. Did you work on sounds, images, and rhythm after choosing the pieces, or did you choose the pieces because of certain aspects that worked together? And if so, what stood out to you?
Looking over the poem now, it feels very 'buggy' to me. And not dreamy-dragonfly-pastoral buggy but live-with-us-urban buggy. Also, the first part of the poem - with its syllables battering against the rearview - makes it seem as though there's a swarm in the car and not a distressed kid. My kid.
That's all after-the-fact guessing. Because I didn't make any of those linkages when I was writing all the bits or when I was grafting them together.
The best I can do is that they all seemed to sing in the same key. Now, of course, I regret how parts two and three end on the same note - "your hair / lifts" is too similar to "Your hair & skin / gleaming in the sun / a small sting."
Sometimes, when I'm being careful on time, I cut out part three. Plus, three's hard to read. Especially the first line. And I never know how to read the middle stanza, with its parenthetical aside. It works fine on the page, I think, but I stumble when reading it.
I like how you describe the first section as a swarm. When I read it, it feels dense and I think it's because of the heavy "b" sounds. It works well, and I know how it is being stuck in a car with a toddler who needs desperately to fall asleep and fights it with as much noise as possible. The denseness of sound that fills the car.
I love "your face goes china, goes bone". Can you talk about that line at all?
Also, you mention that you sometimes skip the third section when you read it. I feel sorry for your audience! It feels vital to the flow of the poem. But I understand how some poems just are too difficult to be read aloud, although I don't think this is the case with Toddle. How do you choose your poems for a reading? What's the process? And why do you often end with "Toddle"?
I hafta admit that I love that line. It's a darling I didn't have to kill.
The most mysterious thing about babies is that they turn into waxworks when they fall asleep, as opposed to adults, who sigh and fart and snore and look like they've been stepped on. Anna is very pale and so she'd go very nearly translucent, like bone china or marble.
And this line was the closest I could get to the feeling of watching her in the rearview, all hopped up but also fascinated.
I pick poems for all kinds of reasons. How long I have. Who will be in the audience. How nervous I am. How bored I am with reading the poems I read when I'm nervous.
I like ending with “Toddle” in particular because it's very recent and feels like the best I can do at this moment in time.
It's also a good representation, I think, of who I am as a writer and what I like to talk about: the city, nature, my breasts.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer whose first book of poetry, Hump, was published in spring 2010 by Palimpsest Press. How to Prepare for Flooding, a collaboration with designer Julia Michaud, is forthcoming from JackPine Press in 2011. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.
Now, grab a fresh cup of tea and listen to Ariel read "Toddle" which appears in Hump, a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban / nature / love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto of sorts.
Thank you for reading “Toddle” from Hump and agreeing to chat about it with me. Can you tell me a bit about the inception for this poem?
Strangely, though I remember the moments the poem records, I don't remember much about the crafting of the poem. Which is strange on two counts. Because I usually have a mental inventory of the changes a poem goes through or at least a computerized version of said inventory.
But, as the mother of a four-year-old, I apparently have too many random daycare documents and poems/letters with the word 'toddler' in them to be able to find the first drafts of this poem.
So I'm forced to rely on my memory. And all I remember about the crafting of this poem is that it's conjoined, a Siamese twin of a poem. Which means that it's composed of several short bits that didn't work alone but seemed to work when placed in close proximity. To hum, like finished poems do.
I don't usually write this way. Usually poems come relatively fully formed. Then it's just a matter of pruning, with the ones that work, or discarding, if they don't.
What I can tell you is that, since the girl appears to be approximately a year and a half to two years old in the poem, it was written in bits and pieces sometime between early 2008 and...December 2009, when I submitted the manuscript to Palimpsest. Heh.
One of my favourite parts of the poem is the end, the honey, honey, honey. I loved hearing you read it too, because I was so curious to how you would. It was different from how I read it to myself. Repetition can be hard to pull off well, but so effective when it does. What does repetition of honey in "Toddle" signify to you?
It is one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me and, also, seemed to be the perfect way to end the poem.
I'm curious. How did you read it to yourself?
That's hard to convey in print, but I'll try. I read them softer than the rest of the poem, and much closer together than you did, in a wistful, soothing tone, if that makes any sense.
Hm. I hadn't thought of that. I read them the way I read them, with pauses between each of them, because I want the audience to come away with at least one honey. Since I usually read “Toddle” last if at all, and since the honeys come at the very very end, I pause.
You said that “Toddle” is composed of many short bits that work together, and that this is not how you normally write poems. I'm wondering how you made them work together. Did you work on sounds, images, and rhythm after choosing the pieces, or did you choose the pieces because of certain aspects that worked together? And if so, what stood out to you?
Looking over the poem now, it feels very 'buggy' to me. And not dreamy-dragonfly-pastoral buggy but live-with-us-urban buggy. Also, the first part of the poem - with its syllables battering against the rearview - makes it seem as though there's a swarm in the car and not a distressed kid. My kid.
That's all after-the-fact guessing. Because I didn't make any of those linkages when I was writing all the bits or when I was grafting them together.
The best I can do is that they all seemed to sing in the same key. Now, of course, I regret how parts two and three end on the same note - "your hair / lifts" is too similar to "Your hair & skin / gleaming in the sun / a small sting."
Sometimes, when I'm being careful on time, I cut out part three. Plus, three's hard to read. Especially the first line. And I never know how to read the middle stanza, with its parenthetical aside. It works fine on the page, I think, but I stumble when reading it.
I like how you describe the first section as a swarm. When I read it, it feels dense and I think it's because of the heavy "b" sounds. It works well, and I know how it is being stuck in a car with a toddler who needs desperately to fall asleep and fights it with as much noise as possible. The denseness of sound that fills the car.
I love "your face goes china, goes bone". Can you talk about that line at all?
Also, you mention that you sometimes skip the third section when you read it. I feel sorry for your audience! It feels vital to the flow of the poem. But I understand how some poems just are too difficult to be read aloud, although I don't think this is the case with Toddle. How do you choose your poems for a reading? What's the process? And why do you often end with "Toddle"?
I hafta admit that I love that line. It's a darling I didn't have to kill.
The most mysterious thing about babies is that they turn into waxworks when they fall asleep, as opposed to adults, who sigh and fart and snore and look like they've been stepped on. Anna is very pale and so she'd go very nearly translucent, like bone china or marble.
And this line was the closest I could get to the feeling of watching her in the rearview, all hopped up but also fascinated.
I pick poems for all kinds of reasons. How long I have. Who will be in the audience. How nervous I am. How bored I am with reading the poems I read when I'm nervous.
I like ending with “Toddle” in particular because it's very recent and feels like the best I can do at this moment in time.
It's also a good representation, I think, of who I am as a writer and what I like to talk about: the city, nature, my breasts.
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