Scenes from the Bone Shop

Series of essays on poems and poets, many published previously in Nine Mile Magazine. 


From the introduction: 

…What could have been is not vapor; it exists alongside what has finally been made real by the poet. Poems are created from multiple worlds, multiple possibilities, until what remains after the additions and erasures, is the only one that could possibly have been created by that poet at this time. There is no room in the present for another. Much of the exploration in the essays that follow is dedicated to tracing these alternate worlds: the creation of “The boys of summer” from a few lines in a somewhat uncharacteristically dull Auden poem, Yeats developing draft by draft his “The Second Coming” from his mystic studies and a fight with his longtime unconsummated love Maude Gonne, Crane sifting through Melville for a few words in “Repose of Rivers.” Also included are readings of some poems—Marvin Bell’s Dead Man poems, Larry Levis’s “God is Always Seventeen,” and Caroline Forche’s “Angel of History,” always with an eye to what they might have been or what reality forced them to be.