Author Notes: Rich Ives

Recent Puritan contributor Rich Ives discusses his poem "A Large Seed from the Old Forest" from Issue XX: Winter 2013.

Quay Bros Face AwayAs the epigraph to the poem suggests, I was reading poetry translations from the Late T’ang period, and it linked nicely with thoughts and visual memories I was having of a Chinese movie about a wooden husband and several mythical/fairytale elements in the short animation films of the Quay Brothers, who recently had an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. I had also been reading aphorisms and fanciful definitions from the Chinese and Ambrose Bierce as well as the modern ones of poet James Richardson.I frequently collect my random thoughts as short lines, statements, phrases, etc. in a notebook and browse through them as I am writing. Often I can find interesting juxtapositions and statements that become metaphorical next to something unexpected. My writing process is sometimes akin to the art of assemblage, and I also make collages and boxes with small dioramas and suggestive arrangements in them. Another source was my tendency to contrary elements in a poem, which combined here with my fascination for old rural wisdom (I grew up in South Dakota).All that having been said, I read the poem again and recognize the tone of the language as the driving force that holds it all together. There is a kind of childish excitement in the old wisdom being discovered in many older Asian poems. The goal is often to bring together disparate elements into a seemingly simple statement that resonates when you contemplate it further. The title is meant to help this quality along.Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he received a nomination for The Best of the Web and two nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days, Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 at http://silencedpress.com.

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