A fascinating look into the mind of poet Marilyn McCabe as she crafted her chapbook “Being Many Seeds” both as a print and an audio/visual experience. Check it out!
So with the birth of a new collection of poems, I thought I might share the backstory, as the poems came together in an unusual way, for me.
The poems in this book began as a monthlong exercise in imitations. Each day I’d choose a poem from a literary magazine or book of poems I had lying around, and I’d try to do a word-for-word imitation, but trying often to use opposite words. That is, if the poem started “One early morning…” I might say “Every late night….” I tried to choose poems that seemed unlike anything I might write: longer lines, narrative rather than lyric.
I didn’t overthink the process, I just let words rise up as prompted by the original poem, and figured whatever subject matters were lurking in my brain would arise naturally from this process. So then I had thirty or so of these, and looking…
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