Damian Caudill’s Comments
For me, everything I write, poetry or fiction, depends on being able to glean a distinct voice from a place completely outside of my own personal experience and timeline. Then, when I have something I don’t know anything about, I try to seduce it. By seduce I don’t mean to work up the voice, transform it, or make it into something particularly artful or riddled with epiphanies. Instead, I’m simply looking for a sense of something conversational and talky that I can get into without elevating or diluting the language much. I’m a fan of the jumbled up sort of storytelling that’s sometimes off balance, that sometimes forgets exactly what comes next.
What interests me most is the imprecise process of falling into a narrative, of sorting things out in the hopes of finding a solid shape. The rambling, the stuffiness, the talkiness of trying to work through different characters in the short spurt of a poem is really appealing to me as a writer. The voices crunch and mumble, skip around, and occasionally get off track … And if you pointed out any of those things to the people involved they wouldn’t have the slightest idea what you were talking about. Oblivious. I like that.
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