Seven New Poems: A Dozen Nothing

I am grateful to start the New Year off with seven new poems in A Dozen Nothing. Shout out to my friend and past contributor, J.W. Marshall, for introducing my work to the editors.

These poems come from a project I started last year about this time and “finished” in April as a chapbook, The Humboldt Sea. I wanted to try my hand at writing poems about something very personal, as I normally loathe most kinds of personal poem-making. Well, anyhow, perhaps that’s too strong, but poetry turned into memoir and group healing exercises makes me squirm, and it certainly seems to be the trend in so much published poetry. I am not looking to make the reader’s life choices more comfortable.

I also wanted to try my hand at prose poetry. In this case, I think many of the pieces of this project are perhaps just prose. I have so much admiration for the work of Aaron Shurin and also dug out books by Ben Cartwright and Martha Ronk to look at while working on these, but getting out of the habit of lineation is challenging.

This project has been sitting mostly fallow, except for a few edits before these poems were published, and I am trying to find my way back into it with the idea of expanding to a full-length, but my brain is very much on our new books coming out with the press, press business issues, and some new Clare poems. That said, the time away from it has been helpful to see some new potential for deeper work.