![]() ![]() In poems, we achieve silence with white space, skipped lines, endings that close but don’t finish. What is unsaid is as important as what is expressed. More important, perhaps, is the influence of subtext and silence. Physical space is prominent in my thinking-even if it is not described, I am always writing with a scene in mind: in a bedroom, a tree, a kitchen table, a garden bench. No question, my poems are influenced by my work in theater. As on stage, characters don’t always answer the questions they’re asked or tell the truth. I think about the theater all the time when I’m writing poetry I imagine moving characters on and off stage-and I use dialogue in the poems to characterize people and suggest action and gesture. Only in the last two years did I understand the voice of the poems not as that of a child but of a woman panning the experience of childhood for the shimmering moments in which a life changes course. With shared myths, overlapping concerns about mother and child, child and mother, and the particular crucible of stepfamily and siblings, all of these poems felt as if they belonged together. It was clear to me early on that I was working toward a collection because so many of the poems began with visual or aural memories from childhood some of the less than idyllic experiences of motherhood the fierce and complicated love between mother and daughter and, although rarely explicit, the scrim of Eastern European Jewry in the background. Over the next two years, I composed the others, revised everything, and assembled and re-assembled the book. ![]() ![]() I wrote about half of the poems between 20. Jayne Benjulian’s poems “Ode to a South Window” and “Vidalia” appeared in AGNI 81.ĪGNI: Can you say a little bit about how your new collection, Five Sextillion Atoms, came together? ![]()
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