Thinking about form and function ...

and thinking about the amazing work of Claudia Rankine, I stumbled across this interview on Poetry Daily. Check out an excerpt:

Where does the relationship of form and function begin for you?

Form has everything to do with content. We know this from Olson. I love the potential openness of the page – there is so much unspoken "underneath-ness" in language. I try to use the page to illustrate the mind's meanderings – to suggest silence, for example, and to represent all the ways the subject is approached in my own mind. The more I can open up the page to accommodate my own explorations, the more integrity the poem has for me.

In some of my earlier books, I experimented with ways to keep the text open. I was invested, perhaps crudely, in communicating the fact that the poem is a process without resolution. In order for me to begin, I need to come up with a form that accommodates an investigative poetics. For instance, the introduction of images in Don't Let Me Be Lonely was an attempt to acknowledge a total experience of being – to involve as many of our senses as possible.

All writing is a kind of performance, but modes that fabricate closure seem less authentic to me. When I was working on The End of the Alphabet, for example, which was in my mind about silence, about a darkness that felt crippling, the language had to be very different from the language in something like Don't Let Me Be Lonely, which is interested in mediated responses, the media, and the clarity or lack of clarity around our own connectedness.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Walking Home

*Gospel: poems* gets some love ...

Lambda Book Report recently reviewed my latest book, Gospel: poems.

Check it out:

Gospel, Samiya Bashir’s second book of poetry, begins “at the crossroads” where “[w]e argue as if Capulet or Montague./On neither red nor blue can we agree.” The opening lines reveal the tension and disagreement considered, literally and metaphorically, throughout the book. The reference to Shakespeare is the first in a long series of allusions that animate Bashir’s poems in this book. Bashir gathers stories and language from a range of cultural locations and weaves them into the imagistic and sonic qualities of the poems. The Norse gods make a dramatic and cacophonous appearance and, in one of her most effective rhetorical moves, Bashir utilizes a Ghanian call and response sequence that both effectively heightens the drama and energy in the poem and then brings it to rest at its conclusion. The poems of Gospel are rife with layered meanings while they immerse the reader in a landscape that is both familiar and reassuring as well as deeply unfamiliar and strange.

In “Topographic shifts,” for instance, Bashir deftly tells the story of a child born with “twelve fingers/twelve toes” which must be “corrected.” This deformity, described as “more common/than you’d think,” is one that seems to simultaneously exist in the present where it will be addressed with “precision” and “urgency” as well as in a world less known, where the body is remolded “into/image of body” with “a bit /of string” and “a tight bow/around each offending digit.//Pull.” In these lines, Bashir demonstrates her capacity to render the attention and focus of the reader to the painful and disturbing; this is one of Bashir’s gifts as a poet.

Click here to read Julie R. Enszer's full review.

Poem of the day ... for Homecoming

Dusting
by Marilyn Nelson

Thank you for these tiny
particles of ocean salt,
pearl-necklace viruses,
winged protozoans:
for the infinite,
intricate shapes
of submicroscopic
living things.

For algae spores
and fungus spores,
bonded by vital
mutual genetic cooperation,
spreading their
inseparable lives
from equator to pole.

My hand, my arm,
make sweeping circles.
Dust climbs the ladder of light.
For this infernal, endless chore,
for these eternal seeds of rain:
Thank you. For dust.

Oiling my Pistons

Ahhhhhh. Beautiful morning. Movement. River Rat track team quaking the
bridge. Kidney Walks. Sun on the water. Vociferous ducks: quacking.
Nice. Nice.