Ken Poyner’s Comments

I seldom write anything that would come close to love poetry, though a few from this pack in FRiGG get as close to that standard as I dare ever go. It is then odd that I am writing about this work tonight, as I also prepare to take my wife out for our thirty-third anniversary, which falls heavily on today. The piece “Anniversary” becomes here serendipitously more timely than I thought it ever would.

I began writing in my teens rather unexpectedly and have thus been doing this for approximately forty years. For anyone, after a while the original pretensions fall away, leaving new, often more complicated ones. My drive these days is to hunt for human motivations in the tussled scenarios I find and gather. Success is when you see something that would perhaps be everyday ordinary as filled rather with the sodden avatars of a quietly glorious physics. I like the surreal, but more as a circumstance than as a method or a tone of metaphor. The surreal is more common than you think.

The tank of “Democracy” is real, and sat last I knew beside a small road in Pennsylvania. I only hope the journey of the couple depicted in the poem has been real as well.


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FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry | Issue 30 | Fall 2010