Re-

Kristi Maxwell

An author’s statement

The impulse to write the poems in Re- was a desire to think about relationships— if connections between words would reveal something about connections between people or beings. Re- began as a practice in listening and looking—attempting to be responsive to what connections words called forth and how these connections could motivate a narrative (disjointed as it may be) about a generic “she” and “he.” Because of this, the poems afforded me a lot of surprise, and I was utterly absorbed in the writing process in the way one can become absorbed in various television series, so anxious to see what comes next that one will watch five episodes in a row—the continuousness of the writing of these poems, which I feel very fortunate to have had, allowed them to cohere and maintain a consistent energy, I hope, in a way they might have not if I had had to return to them intermittently.

I’m interested in the resemblance between “generic” and “generative,” along with the “gene” in them that recalls patterns. Patterns organize these poems. A variation of a line from the first poem in first section corresponds to a line in the first poem of the second section, variations of a line from the first poem in the first section and the first poem in the second section correspond to lines in the first poem of the third section, and so on; they share something, but not everything—a certain difference is maintained. The recycling here is a figure for reinvigoration, especially in terms of the reinvigoration relationships demand for maintenance—and each poem cycle suggests a figurative season that creates the atmosphere for the relationship between the “she” and “he.”

I wrote these poems in 2005–2006 in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to Cincinnati to begin work toward a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature. I was thinking a lot about relentlessness in poetry and teaching a class about it at Casa Libre en la Solana in the spring of 2006. If I recall correctly, I had just read Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text for the first time and was reading Marianne Moore’s letters and poems—so reading for texture, especially richness or lusciousness of texture, was at the forefront of my thoughts and obviously affected my writing practices. My choice of “lusciousness” reminds me I was reading Lane Dunlop’s translation of Francis Ponge’s Soap for the first time during this period, too. The act of reading was definitely part of the process of writing—I was reading the words that emerged as I went along as much as writing them to see how they asked to be unpacked and what word-parts could be dispersed to form new words. I hope readers connect with these poems—that they find a part in them.