Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of three books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008) and The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press, 2009). A prose eulogy is forthcoming from Hooke Press in 2010. He has completed a manuscript of poetry commissioned by Atelos Books. His website is at http://home.earthlink.net/~suspend/
Poetics
Like many poets, I imagine, I keep a journal of phrases, images, snatches of conversation, etc. that I go to when I'm in the process of writing. I'm not a procedural or conceptual poet in the sense that I don't begin with an interest in a specific set of formal problems to engage, though I admire poets who appear to work this way. However, once I have a specific idea for a poem I do think about the formal matters most appropriate—or most inappropriate--to the subject matter (and by appropriate and inappropriate I mean, of course, sedimented traditions). And then I write and rewrite but it's very specific: some poems go through twelve, twenty, or more drafts, others, four or five. And I do believe in serendipity as I believe a poet must make his or her luck. My sense is that, for me and many others, the antennae are always up even if we are not always aware that they're in reception mode.
Affinities
Cathy Wagner, Brenda Iijima, Kit Robinson, William R. Howe, Dana Ward.
Poems by Tyrone Williams
Little x Little (from the book ON SPEC, 2008)
for malcolm…
The subdivision of area codes
follows. Housing evolves, as does
cliché. So too the “human,” “nature”—
everything except the abstract:
sediment for ground: ennobled baboons.
But what of these hypostatized lawns?
This back called my mule?
They it it—confounding Lockes:
union-free Negroes + cost-effective
labor =abbreviated angels
(formerly former). Hence the conundrum
coined blur. Dilemmas exchanged for rakes,
rakes for enigmas. Hope?
Acres squeezed into a steeple.
Despair? The fixed rate of interest
appreciates. Gated ghettoes:
know from know-how?
Went west (boyS to boyZ).
Mature::castrati—as reading is to
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