Musing on My New Chapbook

Posted on by

From where do these poems come?

Beats me. I can’t explain how I write poetry. It just happens, generally at a desk, word by word, without prior planning.

So it was with the pieces in I Have a Bird to Whistle (7 Palinodes), my latest chapbook. I was staring out the shack’s window, through the bird imprint (months earlier, a dove had smacked into the glass, leaving its body’s smudged outline behind), when the first words of the poem came to me: “What falters in translation?”  Which of course led to thoughts about assumptions and traitorous actions, passageways, Robert Johnson, slide guitar, truth, perception, flight, refraction, etymology, deflection, Jung, and much, much more. Thus the book’s title is taken directly from Robert Johnson’s lyrics, inspired by a dove’s misperception, and filtered through my mind’s colander, with the residue dumped out on the page. Not en elegant process, nor a quick one, but there you have it.

The book is available here to U.S. residents for $7.50, shipping included.

Non-U.S. purchasers can order it directly from me by emailing aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com.

 

20 thoughts on “Musing on My New Chapbook”

Leave a reply to Gud-Sol Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.