By: Bone/Hummel

Bone/Hummel — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 15:53:35 +0000

[...] reminded of Bruce Bond’s commentary in this very blog on Jessica Piazza’s “Strict Traffic,” another fine prose poem in this issue, when I read Maria Hummel’s “Unicorn.” As Bond [...]

By: Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 22:20:30 +0000

Thanks, Jessica. You are kind. Great poem by the way. I know what it is to layer a poem for some imaginary reader who, one fears, may never come to exist. Thanks for imagining the kind of reader that moves a poem toward a bigger consciousness, one that is soulful, artful, AND mindful. For what it is worth, poems with such imagined readers are the kinds that are more likely to change me, to move me (the relatively inclusive version of me) from one place to another. Our age is an age of noise, I know, with so much competing for attention that it seems unlikely folks will slow down for poems that do what poems do best in terms of the humanizing and revelatory complication of feeling and idea. So much “flash and honk of the new style,” as Charles Wright might say. Thanks for writing the kind of poem that rewards a slower, deeper reverie of meaning. For me at least, those are the poems that matter. God knows if they prevail more generally or historically. A lot of times they don’t. That situation is not exactly getting better, and my faith in the clarifying lens of history is not very strong. I guess writing critical responses now and then is doing our best to make poems matter via some reciprocity of care between writer and reader. It is odd, isn’t it, how frequently some of the most solitary and peculiar moments in our writing are the very ones that connect most powerfully. At any rate, many congrats, Bruce

By: Jessica Piazza

Jessica Piazza — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 18:17:39 +0000

Thank you, Bruce. Not only am I honored by your generous reading, I’m humbled by how keen your insights are. In every poem, I think most of us have a few tricks or ideas that we believe most readers might not get because they’re too buried or abstract or based on random allusion. But you? You got it. All of it. And that is an incredible feeling.

Thank you! Seriously.

Comments on: Contributor’s Marginalia: Bruce Bond on “Strict Traffic” by Jessica Piazza

By: Bone/Hummel

By: Bruce Bond

By: Jessica Piazza