by grand central station i sat down and wept summary

Right now I’m working on several book projects - among them, more sets of homage poems a fictional novel in poetry form that reckons with femicide, war, and global warming and a fun book I’m co-creating with my friend Peter Tunstall on experiences we’ve documented while in hypnagogic or hypnopompic states, the states in between waking and sleeping.Īh, and a sci-fi novel! What do you look for and appreciate in a piece of writing? These newer book projects are approachable to a general reader, yet I think still include enough elements of that subconscious world to achieve a satisfying but curious character. I used the same approach for my second poetry chapbook, without saying (Ethel Press, forthcoming in October 2020), an homage to a close friend who survived domestic violence. This time, however, I made an outline and followed a rigorous step-by-step writing and revision process.

I had often employed an automatic style of writing that stemmed from raw emotion. Then I wrote a memoir in poetry, because God loves the wasp (Unsolicited Press, forthcoming in 2022), about my teen years. My first chapbook We He She/It (Dancing Girl Press)-a set of angry, improvised prose-poems-was my first success in that struggle. Describe your work, intention, and successes as a poet.įor years, my writing was very strange, as I struggled to translate my inner network of tangents, imagery, and emotions into something understandable without sacrificing that essential peculiarity. I’m nearly 40 now and this is still the case. When in my mid-teens I found myself living through several traumatic years, writing poetry became my primary method of self-soothing and of processing the world. Each of these artists embodied freedoms-of form, sound, story, abstraction-which I reveled in. Around this time I also began to immerse myself in the strange, pointed, and often feminist lyrics of singer/songwriters like Tori Amos, Jill Sobule, and Liz Phair. It served as a strong awakening out of childish literary sensibilities and into the whish and whoosh of complex, forbidden feelings and sophisticated sonic textures. At that time everything I wrote was fiction.Īt age 13, I encountered Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “A Lovely Love” while thumbing through books at the library. As a small child, I loved to put together what I thought of as “grown-up” writing, like making homemade newspapers with interviews and hand-drawn comics, or stapling together books complete with title pages, blurbs from famous publishers, and illustrations.

By grand central station i sat down and wept summary