Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Best New Poets. He is the author of The Imaginary City, recently published in the OW! Arts Chapbook Series, and The Unspoken Jokebook, from Burning River. His verse translation of The Popol Vuh is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.
His poem, "Breath," appeared in Issue Fifty-Two of The Collagist.
Here, Michael Bazzett talks with interviewer, Michele K. Johnson, about genuine surprise, slipperiness, and identity as replication.
Your poem, as you point out within it, follows an unexpected path toward its conclusion. How did you foster this sort of movement within the piece? Is this something you often do when writing?
I didn’t foster it so much as follow it, as I didn’t really generate the movement. The language drove the poem. I was listening, responding to it, sometimes nudging it along a bit, with a stick. The surprise within the poem was genuine.
At one point, you draw the reader’s attention to using the world “building” as different parts of speech. How important is wordplay to the poem and how it was crafted?
I love the malleability of words, how they serve as both containers & approximations, trying to catch fluid meaning or throw a lasso around a cloud. Yet they are so often fluid themselves, given their shaping context – many of my favorite poems capitalize on that dance, and that’s what pulled this poem toward its ending. That slipperiness announced itself as the poem’s true subject.
Can you say a little more about how the ideas of replication and manufacturing fit into the poem?
Lately I’ve kind of been a little obsessed about the notion of identity as an endless series of replication, where we are not ourselves as much as something resembling ourselves, a constant reiteration of who we were yesterday, last year, etc. I think that sort of leaked into the poem, which of course is itself a replication of the path I followed trying to track it down.
What else have you been writing recently?
I just finished a book-length verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh, which will be coming out with Milkweed Editions later this year. I’ve also been a working on poems from a manuscript tentatively titled Self-Portrait as Another Man.
What have you been reading recently?
I’m inhaling The Sixth Extinction, by Eilzabeth Kolbert right now. Mesmerizing, quietly terrifying, yet very stirring to the imagination, which is good, as I think much of our impoverished relationship with the natural world literally stems from an inability to imagine otherwise. Her book makes it imaginable. No coral reefs by the end of this century; I can hold that in my mind. I’ve also been reading Bone Map, by Sara Eliza Johnson, a wonderful collection of poems to place alongside the Kolbert, as it evokes the gristle and visceral loss of that world with such clarity. I’ve just started into Sailing the Forest, by Robin Robertson, who is simply remarkable in his ability to breathe new life into an old word.