Author Notes: Nathan Slinker

Nathan Slinker: knows next to nothing about quilts.Nathan Slinker, winner of the Second Annual Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for poetry, talks about his winning poem, “New Pastoral,” published in Puritan XXIII. 

A Wounded Quilt

“New Pastoral” came together the way I imagine a quilt might (though I know next to nothing about the art of quilt-making). I don’t mean that it’s made up of rags of language, but rather that when I sat down to write I would pick up and work with (or against) what was on the page already—sometimes directly continuing a thought or pattern, sometimes trying to bring difference and contrast; and this process continued, off and on, in fits of creation and revision, for the past couple of years.That fragmented method of composition is partly responsible for the poem being in sections, but more importantly, I think it allowed me to move language in disparate ways within the poem (and within sections) while still maintaining a cohesive feel in the whole piece.Though I grew up in a gorgeous, rural valley in Oregon, about 350 miles east of the city of Portland, my adult life has taken place away from this childhood landscape. I’ve lived mostly in larger cities of the American West and always with a view of how destructive most contemporary human activities are on the “natural” world. Landscapes of bucolic fields have frequently been compared to quilts. And while this may be an adequate simile for the writing of the poem, I think the content of “New Pastoral” is interested in replacing the comfort of those quilts with wounds and, only sometimes, bandages.I was also influenced, in terms of style, by Sigur Rós’s 1999 album Ágætis Byrjun. The lyrics are mostly Icelandic (and sometimes gibberish), and therefore meaningless to me. But the vocals, often full of unearthly beauty, are still central to the emotional fabric of the album and that beauty will often come over or against or through waves of distortion, feedback, crashing guitars. I listen to Sigur Rós a lot while writing, and just as “New Pastoral” feels like the heart and dig site of my recent poetry, Ágætis Byrjun has been an album that I return to again and again to be terrified, astonished.Nathan Slinker’s other poems have recently appeared in, or are forthcoming from, The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, and Hinchas de Poesia. He was chosen by Orion editor Jennifer Sahn as a 2013 Fishtrap Fellow. Nathan lives in Tempe, Arizona and is an M.F.A. candidate at Arizona State University.