The winter 2011 issue is at the press! In the meantime, enjoy some bonus material. We asked all the writers in our summer issue to tell us about the ideas that lead to their poems, stories, and essays. We’ll be posting their comments all month, until the new issue is out. Here’s what Kelly Davio, Eva Hooker, and Lew Klatt had to say:
Kelly Davio: As a child, I was fascinated with the idea that, even in complete silence, the body is surrounded by radio waves. I thought that if I focused hard enough, I might discover how to use my brain as a kind of transponder. While I eventually gave up that experiment, I’m still interested in the idea of the body’s interaction with intangible information. “Electromagnetic Compatibility” explores, with a bit of kid-like exuberance, what it might be like to find the secret to that interplay.
Eva Hooker: “Emblem of Increase” and “Labour” began as a teaching exercise. After we read The Tempest, I asked my students to imagine the pre-story and the after-story of the play and write poems. I fixed myself on Miranda’s mother. I had in mind a series of poems, a small fascicle, made for Miranda by her mother: “The Miranda Journals.” “Emblem of Increase” is, then, a gift-poem, each stanza imagined as a page in a book of “birth & kin & sisters,” made by the kind of woman who lived “cleaving unto study.” “Labour” is a gift-poem within the act of dying, just after birth. Mother gives her daughter sayings through which she can braid warrants of illusion and claim the caul & skin & nerve of wonder.
Lew Klatt: In “A Better Mousetrap” I found myself engineering weirdly symmetrical stanzas in pursuit of what the title suggests, a better mousetrap. It seems to me, though, that no matter how innovative they are, all poems fail at what they attempt; the poetic impulse cannot be captured in words without eventually killing it. In “A Better Mousetrap,” I’m wondering aloud about this paradox, as well as searching in the mouse’s (and my own) gray space for signs of life: an appetite for “greater things” and a desire to wander.
I began “King Salmon” on the steps of the courthouse in Seattle after another visit to famous Pike Street Market. Very quickly the poem became more than a meditation on fish and evolved into a slanted parable. The salmon in the poem are made to dream, and the question that begins to surface is how exactly those dreams will get realized—in the imagination of the fish or in the humans that consume them?
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