Amish Trivedi : The Universe in an Earth-Shaped Urn

 

 

 

It’s hard to know what to say about this little chapbook. I started out trying to do something other than what I had been doing (however one might define that) but I also knew that in attempting to do something different, I would end up still sounding like me. I can’t unsound like me, however much I want, which is a terrible feeling when you don’t particularly like the work you’re doing. What do I mean: I feel like my tone is always lecturing, overly dramatic, overly serious, which is very much not me outside of poems (I always sound like I’m unserious— “Everybody’s serious but me,” obviously).

I wanted to capture a mood that I wasn’t capturing the rest of the time, in the other projects I’ve done or am working on. I wanted a chapbook-length work, something self-contained in a kind of space, and I wanted it to be, in short, moody. More lyrical, maybe? But I always wanted to avoid the voice— not my voice, but rather the perceived voice of the reader. I wanted to try doing some of the things I was afraid to do, some of the things I was avoiding elsewhere. I wanted to give in to my worse impulses: moody, brooding— just lean in on it because why not? What is there to lose? But I always wanted to make everything feel deliberate, feel strangely delicate, pulled with tweezers from the nail of the poem. This meant skipping the line breaks and heading into prose poems, not as a blur of genre, but rather as a way of removing any sense of arbitrariness or further questioning.

In a way, I wanted to be decadent, wanted to give myself something that I wouldn’t normally be alright with, to give in and to be giving, but in a short space, in a tiny volume vs spending years on a book manuscript that gets sent around, etc. A brief project, one that could be written and we could all move on.

Of course, part of that is rob, who always has the wonderful tendency to come along right in the moment where one doesn’t know what to do with a thing and offers the outlet. In this case, I had written this set of poems and set them aside, thinking that was it. You can’t always write for publication, you can’t always spend your time in the poetry world trying to make everything for everyone else. Sometimes you have to, of course, but this chapbook wasn’t for anyone else, just indulging myself and trying to break out of some habits that I had noticed developing. Sometimes we stick the things we cannot rid of in small urns we hold onto forever, even when they don’t belong.

4 January 2021

 

 

 

 

Amish Trivedi wrote Sound/Chest (Coven 2015) and Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed (Shearsman 2019), as well as three chapbooks published through above/ground press, the most recent of which is The Universe in an Earth-Shaped Urn (with a further forthcoming). He has an MFA and PhD and lives in Maryland.