Kevin Varrone : part five

Why is poetry important?

Because it’s never really been important and yet it has always been there, in all cultures and at all times. It’s something we always seem to believe we can live without yet we never live without it. 

Kevin Varrone : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Fighting against the ingrained urge to be logical/make sense. By this I don’t mean to imply that poems are illogical––rather, that poetry has its own kinds of logic, and they aren’t the kinds that we tend to use to be on time to work or get everything on our list when we go to the grocery store. I spend so much time doing these pragmatic kinds of things, thinking in those ways, trying to proceed reasonably through the world that it’s a real challenge for me to let other things happen––especially in writing, because language, as we tend to use it, is very much a logic-based make-sense kind of tool.

Kevin Varrone : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I feel that poetry has a kind of permission to be inarticulate––to stammer compellingly through all the things we see and hear and feel and experience that are beyond the capacities of lucid speech and articulation. I don’t know if other written art forms have that kind of permission. 

Kevin Varrone : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I never feel like a poem is finished. I’ve been a nightmare for anyone who has ever published my poems, I’m sure, because I always want to keep tinkering. There are just so many possibilities within every sentence it’s hard––impossible––for me to imagine not at least having a go at as many of them as I can.

Kevin Varrone : part one

Kevin Varrone’s chapbook, How to Count to Ten, was recently published by above/ground press. He live outside Philadelphia.

What are you working on?

I’m currently RE-working on something I have been writing for a few years now. It’s a book-length sequence of poems about the alphabet called The Collected Letters. It began when my 3 kids, who are each 2 years apart, were at various stages of language acquisition and I started (re) paying attention to words and letters and even the component graphic elements of letters, (sort of) as if I was encountering them for the first time (again?). I’ve been at these poems for a number of years now, trying to figure out what I’d like them to do and then trying to get them to do it.