Saccades iii, Louie Van Patten
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Q&A
Tell us about the conception of this poem.
It's kind of a mash-up between riffing on Ovid's Metamorphoses and the slender man meme.
If not the forest, where else?
Only the forest. It's always the forest. The city is still the forest. I hear Wall Street has wolves.
What or who has transformed your work?
I'm a poet because I'm a reader. And as a teacher, I often re-read books dozens of times. That sort of reading feeds my work endlessly, as Homer and Ovid and Szymborska have plenty to say the ninth time around. The poems are smarter than we are.
What are you currently working on?
One about a man who, in his search for something authentic, begins eating stones.
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Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Best New Poets. He is the author of the chapbook The Imaginary City (OW! Arts, 2012). His first full-length collection, You Must Remember This, was the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry; it will be published in the fall of 2014 by Milkweed Edition