Kevin Varrone : How to Count to Ten

 

 

 

 

How to Count to Ten is a spin-off. A companion. For a number of years, I have been writing and editing a book-length group of poems called The Collected Letters, about the individual letters of the English alphabet (inspired by watching my three kids, all two years apart, wrangle with various stages of language acquisition). As a way to divert my attention from a number of impasses while writing that book, I decided to write a much shorter bunch of poems about the numbers 1 to 10. At the time I was reading a lot of counting books with my kids; Margaret Wise Brown’s The Important Book was also in heavy rotation; and I was reading (and regularly teaching) Erín Moure’s wonderful poem sequence “Homages to Water.”

Wise Brown’s book is simultaneously straightforward and strange, full of sentences such as, “The important thing about a daisy is that it is white” but also lovely and unexpected things like “it [a daisy] has a ticklish smell”; Moure’s poems attach surprising, compelling qualities to humble things like beets, onions, and cabbages (for example: “In the onion, there’s/something of fire. That fire known as/Fog. The onion is the way/fog has of entering the earth”). I just love that––and the idea of far-reaching associations, the impractical leaps of mind that poems seem best able to coax us to make.

I decided to borrow Wise Brown’s refrain directly from The Important Book, because I found that it worked really well for me as a generative device: as a way to start each poem, to ground it, to be a ready-made foundation from which I could then (hopefully) attempt some of the kinds of leaps I mentioned above–-to make a small, impractical counting book for grown-ups.

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin Varrone is the author of three full-length collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks. He lives outside Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University.