“The Newscast” and “The Flapping Tape” by Harold Hoefle appeared in Issue 45 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear a little more about this pair of poems.
“The Newcast” was inspired by my ongoing feeling about the hourly news: how it constantly gives us Big Drama – war, murder, natural disasters – or the words of some famous person (usually a politician; I’m avoiding a certain name). I wanted to write a poem about the seemingly small things that happen within an hour; watching a woman pet her phone in a pool hall – that was my inspiration. And the other poem: “The Flapping Tape”: I was trying to move the poem from the near, horizontal, and small (an infant on the sidewalk) to the distant, vertical, and also tiny: stars in the sky. In between these antipodes, I tried to sketch out suburban impressions, with an unexpected text crashing into the speaker’s moment of looking around. Thus, like an unexpected sight – a girl walking on her hands – technology also brings the unexpected into our lives.
What was the most difficult part of writing this set?
Flow, line-breaks, and some kind of cohering atmosphere and motif: I’d call these my usual difficulties. I often worry about a poem sounding random.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I’ll be bad and recommend two: one I just read: Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This). Also, Alexander MacLeod’s short-story collection, Animal Person.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Rebecca Solnit! I would tell her how much I love her books – especially Wanderlust – and I’d ask how her style evolved: her sui generis mix of confession, intellectual investigation of (especially gendered) power; her political and environmental critique; her literary criticism. I would want to know how she spends her days; how she contrives new writing projects; who and what inspires her.
What are you working on now? What’s next? I’m doing final revisions on my second collection of poems, The Feast of Algae, and hope to submit it to publishers within the week. After that…hmmm. More poems, for sure, and perhaps a leap into a different genre. I’ve about 200 notepads to review; apart from shopping lists, there might be some material in there.
Our thanks to Harold for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “The Newscast” and “The Flapping Tape” here.
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