The poems, “Re: Company Meetings,” “It’ll Be Great,” “Making Money in Today’s Market,” and “Rucksack” by Brad Rose appeared in Issue 33 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this set of poetry.
Three of these pieces, “Making Money in Today’s Market,” “It’ll be Great, and “Re: Company Meetings,” are fairly experimental for me. In “Making Money…” I wanted to incorporate as much techno-business talk as I could, in order to satirize the jargon of the technology industry. Despite the speaker’s profuse use of technological doubletalk, ultimately “Making Money…” ends with a reference to the speaker’s reliance on one of the world’s oldest, least glamorous, technologies: money. In “It’ll be Great,” I wanted to see if I could write a monologue in which the subject/topic was entirely obscure, but the speaker, nonetheless, assures the reader that the subject is desirable and commendable. “Re: Company Meetings,” is my attempt to satirize the frequently awful social world of the office workplace. In retrospect, these three poems embody my not very concealed disdain for the darker aspects of the contemporary world of work.
What was the most difficult part in writing this set?
One difficulty (and pleasure) I frequently encounter when writing poems like these, is that I don’t start with a particular subject or topic in mind. I begin writing a poem—usually a persona poem— and the subject or perspective progressively emerges from the process of writing. There is, at least initially, a necessary discomfort in not knowing what the poem will be about, but that discomfort is also accompanied by the growing exhileration of discovering something entirely unplanned for. I take comfort in a comment by Russell Edson, “I write as a reader; not knowing what the author will say next…In the first place, I write to be entertained. Which means surprised. A good many poets write out of what they call “experience.” This seems deadened. For me, the poem itself, the act of writing it, is the experience, not all the crap behind it. To quote Robert Bly, ‘In art, I want to see the ‘unknown’ looking at me.’ I want this too, particularly in my own work.” Additionally, Derek Walcott said, “If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.”
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton’s Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2020) is useful to prose poetry writers. I love the late Alan Ziegler’s book, Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays and Other Short Forms, (Persea, 2014). Although published more than a decade ago, I much admire David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems (Scribner Poetry. 2003)
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I have a few questions I’d like to ask of the late John Ashbery, but alas.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’ve just completed a new collection of 100 prose poems titled, No. Wait. I Can Explain. The poems “Re: Company Meetings,” “Making Money in Today’s Market,” “It’ll be Great,” and “Rucksack” will appear in this collection.
Our thanks to Brad for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this work. Read “Re: Company Meetings,” “It’ll Be Great,” “Making Money in Today’s Market,” and “Rucksack” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/poetry-by-brad-rose.
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Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lives in Boston. He is the author of three collections of poetry and flash fiction, Pink X-Ray (Big Table Publishing, 2015), de/tonations, (Nixes Mate Press, 2020), and Momentary Turbulence (Cervena Barva Press, 2020). WordinEdgeWise, from Cervena Barva Press, is forthcoming in 2021. Six times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and three times nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology, Brad’s poetry and fiction have appeared in, The Los Angeles Times, The American Journal of Poetry, New York Quarterly, Clockhouse, Cloudbank, Lunch Ticket, Hunger Mountain, Sequestrum, Folio, 45th Parallel, The Baltimore Review, Steam Ticket, Into the Void, Right Hand Pointing,Blink Ink, and other publications. His story “Desert Motel,” appears in Best Microfiction, 2019. He is also the author of six poetry chapbooks, including the recently released Collateral, all of which are published by Right Hand Pointing. His website is: www.bradrosepoetry.com Selected readings can be heard at http://bradrosepoetry.com/audio-readings/ A complete list of publications is available at: http://bradrosepoetry.com/2019/03/a-list-of-publications/