Dennis James Sweeney
Autumn House Press
(Rising Writer Prize)
A heart is too found to run through.
Arrive—
The blizzard mourns fully and gently over you.
—from “75°30’S 107°0’W”
HOW IT BEGAN: What I love about writing poetry is that I never set off to do anything. The process of was more like this: These moments of icy, white language arose; I followed them and explored that language space; suddenly, immersed in the cold Antarctic expanse, an ambient relationship occurred between the poems; I understood them as, potentially, “a book”; I ignored this thought for as long as possible so that I could continue to encounter the poems in a less intentional, spontaneous way; finally my own plans and ideas got the better of me, and the drafting process petered out. Only then did I allow myself to suspect that I had something. So in a way I set off to write the book only after I had already written it.
