Poetry / Simeon Berry 

From the writer

:: Account ::

I find it iron­ic that I am pas­sion­ate­ly attached to line breaks (as my friend, Sara Wain­scott says, every­one has a the­o­ry about them, and every­one is wrong), yet I have pub­lished two books with the min­i­mum amount of line breaks required to sus­tain human life. Sev­en of my nine man­u­scripts (two pub­lished, three liv­ing, four dead) have start­ed out lin­eat­ed, but my fig­u­ra­tion tends to be so elab­o­rate that any addi­tion­al com­plex­i­ty is counter-pro­duc­tive. Richard Wilbur said that the strength of the genie comes from being in the bot­tle. I am not a For­mal­ist (and every poem I’ve writ­ten in meter has failed, despite tak­ing an under­grad forms work­shop twice), but I am com­ing to the grudg­ing real­iza­tion that I may gen­er­al­ly work best inside the square bot­tle of a para­graph, rather than the deco­rous aer­a­tion of the stan­za. Per­haps this is due to much pre­fer­ring rac­quet­ball over ten­nis. In the for­mer, you get to rebound off walls and cal­cu­late as many baroque angles as you want. The ball even­tu­al­ly comes to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion, because it is cir­cum­scribed, and there’s only so much ener­gy avail­able. Con­verse­ly, in ten­nis, the cos­mic void waits on every side, and the sin­gle vec­tor is unfor­giv­able. As with exis­tence, lim­its help you stay focused on the human.

Sime­on Berry won the Nation­al Poet­ry Series for his first col­lec­tion of poet­ry, Amper­sand Revis­it­ed (Fence Books), and his sec­ond book of poet­ry, Mono­graph (Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia Press). He has been an Asso­ciate Edi­tor for Ploughshares and won a Mass­a­chu­setts Cul­tur­al Coun­cil Indi­vid­ual Artist Grant, and his work has appeared in AGNI, Black War­rior Review, Black­bird, DIAGRAM, The Iowa Review, and many oth­er journals.