Fugue 42 - Spring 2012 (No. 42)

collected. So the linkages are also imposed. Identifying them becomes a process of sifting through imposed and unintended coincidences, and how can one know the difference?

On the other hand, you could say that poetry, like therapy, illuminates one’s obsessions. I tried to boil mine down a few years ago, and they ended up as an “artistic statement,” which, as it turns out, is the kind of statement that isn’t much good for writing, but turns out to be valuable on resumes, in grant proposals, and in literary journal interviews. The statement runs like this: My farm roots introduced me early to the heartbreak of husbandry.

My poetry is musical and accessible. I explore the noxious nature of persistent love, the fickle character of a creator God, the artistry of nature’s disorder, the otherness of others, and the great nondenominational church of the past.

LP How and when do you choose whether or not a poem should contain sections? Is this decision frequently made in the revision process?

TB For me, I tend to create sectioned poems when individual sections can’t very well stand alone. Many of my poems end up as little more than fragments, so that in order to make them worth reading I have to combine them with other fragments. I’ve very rarely set out to write a sectioned poem from the outset, and one of these was “Overtures on an Overturned Piano,” an opening sequence in PITCH, and that’s because I wanted it to work as a suite of musical moments, interludes, movements. It took me about three years to settle “Overtures” into the sections that finally made the cut, however. It was kind of excruciating. Not sure why.

I’ve just finished a new work in sections, “Fragments for the 35W Bridge,” which contains thirty-five 35-word poems. That 48 | LAURA PIZZO