Over at Via Negativa where the Poetry Blogging Network happens there are interviews using Bhanu Kapil’s famous “12 Questions“. Chen Chen uses “12 Questions” for a number of poems in his new book: Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother? What is the shape of your […]
Category archives: Process
Making chapbooks
I shall essay* to explain this process. I have been working out a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) type flipbook chapbook of haiku for nearly 3 months now. The number of options in how to read increases exponentially with more poems. A dozen haiku make for 1,726 possible readings. 18 haiku make for nearly 6000 possible readings. The […]
On reviews
About a month ago at periodicities, Phil Hall mused on reviews, “the absence of negative reviews might be why we are coming to have no reviews at all… What if I wrote one generic blurb with blank spaces for each new author’s name and book title—this would undermine the intent of having a blurb on […]
Format & Content
A themed collection where the thesis is restated for 80 pages. A collection of poems I done writ since the last book-thing. A narrative arc story as a poetry collection. A series of poems that add up to something. How? Why is this poem here with these other poems and not in another book? As […]
Behind the scenes
What we start with and what we choose has an impact on what we end up with but there’s a lot of manoeuvring room in between. In Toward a Blacker Ardour (Beautiful Outlaw, 2021) Phil Hall said, “I perk up as if revision were my only remaining trusted evidence of a future.” Conceiving of a […]