There's sort of a story to this collection of poems, which I'll paste and change a little around from an email sent to the Affrilachian Poets:
When I was in Washington D.C. for Split This Rock I began this writing project.
I was thinking back to my first and only poetry professor, Frank X himself--specifically when he told us to come up with descriptions of objects in the classroom. The room was pretty damn bare, so you ended up getting lots of people describing the same pencil sharpener. What was interesting to me is that regardless of the quality, these were very different descriptions.
So it only made sense to me that no matter how mundane the object, a poet should be able to write a classroom's worth of poems about it. I don't have 30 different minds, but I can inhabit that many. Or many more.
I decided to write what I thought "13 ways of looking at a blackbird" was going to be about before I read it, that first time. That is, I wrote 13 poems about the most boring object I could find: a single set of nail clippers, which sit here beside me even now. As you'd probably guess, this became increasingly difficult, and by the end, it sort of taught me about how I think, because none of these poems were about the nail clippers, or at least, none of them were just about nail clippers.
Anyway, the poems are "Chapel Carter is the Inventor of the Nail Clipper," ""Clippers, as Tends to Happen, Lost in Modernism," "What Does a Nail Clipper do in Meeting a Mole?," and "Mortality and Nail Clippers."
Now I gotta find a home for the other 9. haha
