Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn’t saying just as carefully as for what he or she is.
Nothing is as easy or natural as consumer brands want us to think – no problem is as resolvable. Your hair will fall out, eventually. Yet we do have these brands, and we line our shelves with them. There’s an inherent irony.
Whenever I do a comedy show I still just read poems, some of which are intentionally funny and some of which are just bizarre. The mix seems to work well.
I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they’d taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.
We just watch anything speed by. To stop and really ponder what a product label says, or the tagline on a TV commercial, might be inherently silly. Those are things that are almost designed to be thrown away.
Poetry is a way for me to explore a tingly feeling, to let it play itself out, and also to map it. I feel like I’m making little star maps when I write poems.
