Wyatt Townley speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “Instructions for the Endgame,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Townley talks about experiencing poetry in all parts of her life—in dance and yoga, in astronomy and physics, and in nature. She also discusses her time as Poet Laureate of Kansas, the pleasure of revising poems, and what it’s like seeing her work performed as an opera.
To see the unseeable, measure
its shadow. It takes eight telescopes
on six mountains and
four continents
ten days.
Review by MEG KEARNEY
Book by WYATT TOWNLEY (SFASU Press 2019)
What does it mean to “rewrite the body?” To dive deeply and lose ourselves in Wyatt Townley’s fourth book of poems, we must think of “body” as physical human frame; body as door, as house; body as a lifetime’s work, needing to be revised, re-visioned, reclaimed. Rewriting is a daily task, a practice, and the body—the poem/house—source of both refuge and danger, of “both / basement and / torna- / do/,” is also a source of connection with the world.
The forecast was wrong.
The bald guy smiling
but wrong. The blonde
with swinging hair
wrong. Their software,
their reading of currents. Rain,
they said, rain for days.
New poems by Cortney Lamar Charleston, Leslie McGrath, Marc Vincenz, Wyatt Townley, and Loren Goodman.
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