“Let’s say I’m trying to write a long poem about rainbow herbicides, the production of Agent Orange in New Jersey, ecological disaster, and a parent having leukemia, and I get stuck. There’s a problem with where to go next in the poem. Or there’s a transition I can’t seem to get right. Instead of looking even more closely at the poetry models that have helped me build the poem, I turn instead to something totally opposite, like a few of Carl Phillips’s small, intense poems about desire. The benefit of this—what I’ll call ‘opposite exposure’—is that it frees my mind from the expected images, rhythms, and transitions I associate with the type of poem I’m making. What Phillips’s poems may show me is a fresh way of thinking about the problem. Maybe I don’t need another big description of landscape, but rather a single, snaky sentence followed by a bold interjection, a clipped image, a landscape distilled into a single object. In a way, this technique is about putting the logic of poetry, which is often the logic of metaphor, to practical use. The unexpected relation between things is as valuable in craft as it is in content. Sometimes I push this to deeply literal ends. If I’m writing about the sea, I’ll read about the desert. If I’m writing a poem to a loved one, I’ll read poems written to enemies. Subjects are like magnets in that they attract types of language. By looking elsewhere, I’m reminded of all the other possible language that’s being left out. My job—our job—is to show their possible connections.”
—William Brewer, author of I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017)