Maybe the Saddest Thing: Poems (National Poetry)
What breed of human am I?
- The Millions: Maybe the Saddest Thing: Poems (National Poetry) by Marcus Wicker?
- Backbone Press – Review: Maybe the Saddest Thing, Marcus Wicker!
- Talking Teddy!
What type of man walks around with rhythm rattling the trunk of his dome? My walk alone could make tight pants fit. But delight, all by itself, rarely seems wide enough for the persistent emptiness of a page. Wicker writes poems whose timely pleasures keep verging on timeless sorrows, and where the social issues of our time persistently evoke enduring human need.
In the process, he captures the odd ways that our larger-than-life moment lives inside our pending irrelevance—and the compassion such knowledge allows. In any hue," he writes, watching the inferno after a meth lab explodes. And, earlier in that same poem,. A fist of ash like nail polish scorched with salt blasts. Everything disintegrates from this angle…. From this point of view soot cloaks stars.
First off, were you always interested in writing, or did some event, person, place, or story lead you to it? From an early age, maybe five or six, I was always writing things- penning "Who Done It" capers in composition notebooks or scribbling what seemed like super important feelings in my journal, but I decided poetry was a viable form of self-expression in 10th grade. My journalism and American Lit teacher, Ms.
I saw teens my age writing inventively and bravely saying some of the same things I'd been thinking about the world, about the self. I thought, maybe I could do this. Maybe I could take writing seriously. Here's a question to further break the ice: Oh, can I say the beginning of the Post-Bop Jazz era? Is that a thing? It seems to me that folks like McCoy Tyner, John Coltrane, and Wane Shorter pushed the limitations of improv and instrumental proficiency in a way that competitively propelled one another toward virtuosity. That's the kind of cohort I can get behind. Have you ever written nonfiction, fiction, or other sorts of prose?
What is it about poetry that fascinates you? I've tried my hand at all the genres, but the simple answer is: I don't yet have the stamina for the long form. I dig the challenge of concision. That is, the sometimes volatile, sometimes vulnerable nature of working with highly pressurized language. It's all very risky, poetry.
Marcus Wicker’s poetry buzzes with the energy, and loneliness, of pop culture.
Let's talk about your first collection, Maybe the Saddest Thing. How would you describe the style of the collection? What about your process of writing it? Maybe the Saddest Thing refers to a speaker's obsessive impulse and willingness to interrogate everything. Employing popular black icons, humor, and sonnet-like "self dialogues" as springboards to address those themes, the returns that occur throughout the manuscript are also "the saddest thing. The book began as my MFA thesis circa I remember complaining to my classmates about the lack of simultaneously funny and seriously crafted poetry collections, so that's the book I set out to write.
- Ann Arbor native Marcus Wicker receives accolades for debut poetry collection!
- Marcus Wicker | Fishouse.
- Le journal de Louise B. (Hors collection) (French Edition).
- Des Plaines Public Library - Resource not available?
- Ann Arbor native Marcus Wicker receives accolades for debut poetry collection.
- Yakety Yak.
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- Child Survivors in the Shadows.
- Lettera ai giovani (Italian Edition)!
It turns out I just wasn't reading enough. MTST really took shape in during a 7 month fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, where I had ample time and space away from the classroom to get ruthless-hack away at apprentice poems and replace them with more nuanced and cohesive ones. Now, in the wake of the collection, do you think your writing has shifted in certain ways?
Marcus Wicker’s Maybe the Saddest Thing: Poetry reviewed.
Anything specific that you think caused this shift? Going back to those post-bob jazz players, I'm trying to stretch myself: It's important to me that I allow my work to teach me what I intuitively know and don't know.
Of course, those poems have taken longer to write than some of those in my first collection, but the quality control has been good for my art. How do you think teaching at the University of Southern Indiana and serving as poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review has informed your understanding of poetry whether yours, or others'? In a very practical sense, you have to know a subject particularly well in order to teach it well. This renders me as much student as professor when I'm prepping for, say a craft lecture.
Working with the magazine is especially instructive concerning the following: That insignificant slip of paper isn't a rejection of you but rather something about your work that didn't gel with perhaps just a single reader. Write what compels you, revise hard, and live to submit again.
Marcus Wicker
No wonder it was chosen by D. Powell as the winner of The National Poetry Series. It takes readers to the mountain. It connects us all. Indeed, the craft is there. The poems are lyrical and lovely, beautiful in the mouth and in the mind. Maybe the Saddest Thing, Marcus Wicker x by bonepress And I looked around, and so many of the people on the bus had laptops and iPods, but no one helped this woman out.
Wicker signed up for Kass' inaugural Volume Summer Institute that summer, in , and thus began honing his skills and meeting other writers. But while he was a grad student, he met weekly with a classmate in order to push himself to write additional work; and the two poets made a pact to think of their respective theses as a publishable collection.
So I started to really explore the things I was thinking about: His Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship had just concluded, and Wicker was in the process of applying for other funding sources and prizes. And while poets often feel they have to fight to maintain a place in the American cultural landscape, Wicker generally feels positive about the contemporary poetry scene.