New work and an interview with alumni Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) is published in The Kenyon Review:
Is there a story behind your KR poems? What was the hardest part about writing them?
The challenge of “The Sky, Now Black With Birds” was inherent in its subject matter. I don’t always go into a poem wanting to address a specific issue. I’m usually led by language and discover what’s nagging me through the process of arguing with a draft. The E.M. Forster adage, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” definitely applies to this process. When I want to address something specific, the “this-should-be-a-poemness” of a subject actually makes the process more troublesome. This is often true of elegies and poems where the trigger is a bizarre bit of trivia as well. These poems are in greater danger of mono-dimensionality, which in a poem with sociopolitical concerns leads swiftly to didacticism. I find that an idea can be so good or important or jarring or socially relevant the poet can be less naturally inclined to find the other spokes that make the wheel turn. My mentor Vievee Francis always said a poem needs torque. I take this to mean a poem always needs a thing moving against another thing around a fulcrum, because without torque nothing moves. I’m kind of old-fashioned in that I want poems to move people.
