He who loves white space and the moon

Poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson talks with Peter Moysaenko of BOMBLOG about his fondness for grey mornings, compelling quagmires, the slash and burn method of writing poetry, and Selenography, his latest collection.Wilkinson's Selenography poems are complimented by the Polaroid photography of  Califone frontman Tim Rutili (who happens to be  Josh’s friend).

Read more at BOMBLOG:

PM: What’s the phrase—

I write to remember, write to forget, write to remember that you forget? Participating in a poem as either reader or writer, are you after reception or apprehension, accuracy or mutation? The line that impresses itself upon the mind or the passage that eludes static meaning, will not readily commit to memory? Is any simple statement suspect?

JMW: As a writer, I’m interested in making a little world I like the look and sound of, but that isn’t mastered or all-the-way known to me. Its mystery stays intact, and it haunts. However small it is (even two lines, or a line), I want it to feel like I can stay a while. I don’t want to create a perfect little bauble. I fight myself to leave in moments that still resist me, but that I’m nonetheless compelled by. I’m bored with a poem if it feels like I get it immediately. I think that’s where I overlap in sensibility as both reader and writer. I’m not interested in getting to the epiphanic moment at the end of the poem. I like befuddlement, I like a quagmire. But I like a seduction too. It’s easy as hell to be vague—and thus adopt a pseudo-philosophical stance—in a poem. How to make a compelling quagmire (where things are clunky, things don’t fit all the way, there are elements that seem not to belong, but it’s no less an articulation of desire, curiosity, intellection, memory, experience, etc.)—that’s what I’m most interested in.