Several years ago I was browsing the sidewalk stalls of Strand Books in New York. I came across a book of poems—I no longer remember the author or the title—that spoke to me immediately. Not so much the content (if it’s possible to separate the two) but the form, seemingly unconnected lines separated by double slashes rather than line breaks. They weren’t quite prose poems, but they weren’t regular poems either (whatever that means). So many kinds of poetry just don’t seem right for me but here was a form that I thought might work, a shoe that might fit.
The book’s price was a dollar but I didn’t buy it. I thought that if I read them too closely, they might kill the initial inspiration. All I needed was a look, something akin to Henry James wanting a glimpse—but no more—into a lighted window to get the idea for a story. While still in the city I wrote the first sequence (‘various Kinds of sake) and found myself quite elated. But I didn’t write the second (‘dutch novels’) until a few years later and so on. I know that I had a strategy of sorts for the last two (‘Any Moment Now’ and ‘waiting by my father’); I would write a certain number of lines on a certain number of subjects but always in a different order. A memory from childhood. My daughter’s new puppy. An overheard remark. A quotation. The moment I was living in. A fear. Perhaps I did the same for the first two but I can’t remember and don’t want to dismantle them to figure it out.
I don’t think my poems feel anything like those in the book at the Strand. Her poems (I remember the poet was a woman) were more surreal and less personal, at least I think so. I understand why I needed to avoid looking at them more closely but I wish that I could read them now that my own poems are done.
I do think they are done. At some point I decided that four sequences of four poems each just seemed right. It took me a couple of years more to write the last ones but once they were done (fittingly, back in New York three months ago), if felt as if I was finished with the form. I already look back at them wistfully; they were a way to be in the present moment and the past at the same time, to feel time moving through my mind in more than one direction.
Cary Fagan has two books coming in 2025, A Fast Horse Never Brings Good News (book*hug) and Robot Island (Tundra Books). He is the co-publisher of the chapbook house espresso and the publisher of another chapbook house, Found Object and occasionally reviews chapbooks on word.music.blog.
