Jena Osman on "Dark Star Confit"
This poem was one of 32 "recipes" commissioned from various writers by the visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra (the project was published in the June 2010 issue of Esopus magazine).
Jena Osman
Crossroads
In Their Own Words
Jena Osman
Joanna Klink's "Aerial"
There was a small neighborhood park in Carroll Gardens where I would sit almost every day after the weather turned warm. Most of the people who stopped in the park were there to simply be: two-year-olds with their fatigue-ecstatic mothers, quorums of older news-bearing women, a guy staring at the grass, patients from a nearby hospital who had been wheeled into scraps of shade for an hour. I came to love this place.
Joanna Klink
Cathy Park Hong on "A Little Tête-à-tête"
This poem is a direct response to the introduction of Coleridge's "Xanadu-Kubla Khan" in which he explains thata most unwelcome visitor from Porlock disturbed his "anodyne" vision and ruined his inspiration for his poem.I was always fascinated with this poem: who was this friend? What business was Coleridge called to?
Cathy Park Hong
Meena Alexander's "Closing the Kamasutra"
How did I come to write this poem? Well the oddest thing started me off.
A friend told me that when she was in Chennai in the summer she had trouble with her computer. It wouldn't work. So she got a tech guy in, and guess what—there were insects in her keyboard. I had never heard of such a thing before but later, asking around I did hear similar stories from others. In any case what my friend told me stayed in my head.
Molly Peacock's "The Cup"
At first the poem "The Cup" came in response to an assignment I gave myself: try for 14 lines and a single domestic image. Obviously I didn't make it! But focusing on the cup let me channel the narrative drive of the poem. Originally it was only about how the cup smashed, the pieces of the event all squashed into 14 lines.
Molly Peacock, photograph by Andrew Tolson Katha Pollitt's "Lunaria"
I wrote "Lunaria" almost by accident, while working on another poem, which was about Judas and was not going well. In my poem, Judas was an ordinary man. Everyone knew Jesus had to die, including Jesus himself. Somebody had to make it happen, though, so that the story could unfold, and in that arbitrary way He has, God had chosen him. My Judas was like a character in a novel, who appears to be free, although in reality the writer controls him completely, only the Judas of my poem had the consciousness of a real person, and was completely bewildered to find himself standing on the street with that bag of money in his hand. It was as if Anna Karenina suddenly found herself on that train platform and thought, What am I doing here? Actually, I have alternatives!
Katha Pollitt
Ron Padgett's "Method"
My poem grew out of my thinking about a new dishwashing soap that I had discovered in a supermarket, a nicely colored liquid in a curvy bottle with an unusually abstract name—Method—which I associated with Descartes' Discourse on Method.
Robert Polito's "Hollywood & God"
"Hollywood & God" is the title poem of my recent collection of poems, a book that combines poetry and prose, and coming late in the sequence distills and reflects back on the issues of the entire proceeding. From the outset, I viewed the alliance in the title as the intersection of two streets – Hollywood & Vine, Hollywood & Gower, and Hollywood & God. The book, as well as this poem particularly, tracks a continuum along what traditionally you might style transcendence and what we've today come to call celebrity culture.
Dana Goodyear's "Quail"
This poem arose from a coincidence: the phonetic and visual (but not, as far as I can tell, etymological) sameness between the word for a small dun-colored game bird and the verb, often used in reference to the heart, that means to wither or falter or give way to decline.
Matthew Zapruder's"Kingdom Come"
I wrote this poem as part of a collaboration I did in spring of 2008 with the painter Chris Uphues. Chris and I met at a bar after a reading I had given, and he told me he was a painter. I had a feeling he would be good. He sent me photos of ten paintings via email and I was blown away by his work, so I took his titles and wrote ten corresponding poems.
Katy Lederer's "The Heaven-Sent Leaf"
"The notion that wants do not become less urgent the more amply the individual is supplied is broadly repugnant to common sense. It is something to be believed only by those who wish to believe. Yet the conventional wisdom must be tackled on its own terrain. Intemporal comparisons of an individual's state of mind do rest on technically vulnerable ground. Who can say for sure that the deprivation which afflicts him with hunger is more painful than the deprivation which afflicts him with envy of his neighbor's new car? In the time that has passed since he was poor, his soul may have become subject to a new and deeper searing."
