![]() ![]() I like neatness in my poems and in my life. (A very New Mexican way of speaking.) So I’d read the poem aloud into the room and I’d modulate breaks and stanzas based on the way I wanted it to sound out loud: where I wanted it to pause and where I wanted it to halt and where I wanted it off the cuff and where I wanted it to come down hard. I was working toward a particular diction, trying to create a voice: a sort of deadpan quality elevated by moments of lyricism and humor. Is this use of stanzas and white space meant to slow the reading of the poem down or to give these lines more weight than others? How have you determined to break the lines in “Starting Small”? They don’t seem to be operating in any particular rhythmic scheme but are enjambed in a way that moves the reader’s eye quite swiftly down the page.ĬF: The way I used single-lined stanzas and the way I broke the line in “Starting Small” had to do with my focus on the poem’s spoken quality. I imagine they didn’t fit because they were of a much different tone than the rest of the poems here.ĪMK: Many of your poems make use of short, single-line stanzas. There were poems that didn’t fit in this book. As far as this affects the theme or tone of the poems: I wasn’t aiming for it, no, but at the same time that seems a very natural tonal response.ĪMK: Is theme something you thought about as you wrote the poems in Burn Lake or did that enter your mind as you were selecting poems to include and arranging them.ĬF: I’d say that issues of theme didn’t arise until I was trying to get the book published, as I was looking to see how the poems fit together or didn’t. And there is a holiness to it, too, I think, if you’re lucky enough to be inclined to see things as such. There’s a very pure heartbreak in that, and a loneliness, and a cruelty. We see that we belong to the world, rather than the world belonging to us. The time when we begin to see that the world is much larger. Many of the poems in Burn Lake are set in adolescence, at the end of wishful thinking. The child is protected by their imagination from concepts they can’t comprehend. In some of the child development books I’ve been reading, I’ve come across the notion of wishful thinking (Freud called it magical thinking): the time when children project their own internal states onto the world around them. I just read a review of Burn Lake that basically boiled down to: I liked the book, but I wish that gal wasn’t so damn sad. It’s been very interesting to hear this response from readers. Is this something you were aiming for as you composed Burn Lake or something that emerged on its own?Ĭarrie Fountain: Not at all! It wasn’t something I was aiming for. This sensation is in the poems featured here but also permeates the book in an almost thematic fashion. There’s also an almost grand sense of silence and loneliness in your work a sense of being left out in the voice of the speaker even as she’s clearly included in the goings on of her hometown. Edward’s University.Īn Interview with Carrie Fountain by Andrew McFadyen-KetchumĪndrew McFadyen-Ketchum: Many of the poems in your first book, Burn Lake, are about growing up and the cruelty that seems to be a large part of one’s coming of age. Her debut collection of poems, Burn Lake (Penguin Books, 2010), was a winner of a 2009 National Poetry Series Award. She lives in Austin, Texas and teaches at St. She was a fellow at the University of Texas’ Michener Center for Writers. Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, AGNI, and Southwestern American Literature, among others. ![]() Of house paint to find it writhing there,īIO: Carrie Fountain was born and raised in Mesilla, New Mexico. Her heart, her heart: lick of flame, little fish.Ībout those bad years: the metallic smell It would get things so wrong it wouldn't even be funny. It wouldn't know that she was a country, that you'd pledged your allegiance to her. It could learn to tie a knot you would be bound to it. ![]() If Your Mother Was to Tell Your Life Story That would go immediately out of business ![]() Kicking each other, grown tired once again Meaty tongue as if to speak, then fell over Then gaining, tossing everything-every tumbleweedĪnd said, with the satisfaction of someone While my brother and I were waiting in line Switched on its lights and unlocked its doors ![]()
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