James Davis May: “I’ve always liked Czeslaw Milosz’s claim that ‘the purpose of poetry is to remind us/ how difficult it is to remain just one person.’ I’ll modify that quote, though, slightly: The purpose of poetry is, sometimes, to remind us how difficult it is to be a person. That is, by testifying what it’s like to be a person, poetry defends (both justifies and protects) that flimsy—some say mythical—thing the self.”
James Davis May: “It’s the 75th anniversary of It’s a Wonderful Life‘s wider release. This year was my first time watching the film since recovering from a major depressive episode, and I was struck by how George Bailey’s near-suicide scene depicts despair.” (web)
James Davis May: “When I played hockey as a kid, my friends and I would sometimes announce that we were certain NHL greats before scrimmaging. ‘I’m Lemieux,’ someone would say, and someone would shout, ‘I call Robitaille,’ and another would shout, ‘Coffey!’ Of course, we knew we weren’t actually these players; the thinking was, I guess, that we were somehow calling on their spirits to help us. Then as we played, we would mimic those players, trying to shoot, stickhandle, and skate in their style. My theory is that poets do something similar, that almost every poem has a hero/heroine poet behind it, a Dante guiding us through the process. It’s pretty clear my hero for this poem is David Kirby, whose braided poems just stun me. Inevitably, when I finish a Kirby poem—a poem like, say, ‘More than This,’ which appeared in this magazine, I ask myself, ‘How does he do that?’ I explored that question by writing this poem, and it’s worth noting that after finishing the first draft I stood up and threw my back out.” (web)
James Davis May: “Having had several friends die from cancer, I’m increasingly uneasy with the predominant metaphor we use to discuss disease, whether cancer or some other illness: that the experience is some sort of war between the patient and the diagnosis. In this poem, that unease mixes with both grief and existential angst to form something like a secular crisis of faith (faith in nature and faith in humanity), and I’m still not sure whether the gesture at the end, that bowl of milk, is a feeble or convincing answer to that crisis—maybe both …” (web)
James Davis May: “Warne, North Carolina, where I saw the sign mentioned in the epigraph for the poem, is about six miles from Young Harris, Georgia, where my wife, daughter, and I moved last year. Though we’re happy in Young Harris now, our move was a difficult one, as all moves are, and I remember questioning a lot of things, including, as the poem suggests, the nature of reality.” (web)