Anyone who knows me knows I dedicate at least part of each day to thinking my own thoughts. I like to walk while I think. I’m thinking while I walk about the echoes of Socrates in Plato’s Cave. A yellow road sign says Fog Area, but there is no fog. Trees have begun to put out leaves. Half-hidden among the new leaves is a redwing blackbird, a small, dark shape with audacious jewellike markings. The bird keeps silent and still. It’s the stillness of a Zen monk in meditation, it’s the silence of a puzzlingly beautiful line of untranslatable poetry.
Fog Area
Howie Good
3 Questions for Howie
What was your process for creating this work?
I wish I could say these prose poems came to me in a flash of inspiration, but I can't. The pieces were hammered together one nail at a time. That is typically how my writing goes – slowly and only with considerable effort.
What is the significance of the form/genre you chose for this work?
Prose poetry occupies a liminal space between prose and poetry, which means it is unbound by prescriptive definitions of either. Consequently, every prose poem is an experiment, a kind of dare, a challenge to see new things or see old things in new ways.
What is the significance of this work to you?
These poems arose out of a sense of alienation, the feeling that there are experiences that we can't ever fully comprehend or communicate to others.
Howie Good is the author most recently of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest and scheduled for publication in summer 2022.