#daniel moysaenko

Daniel Moysaenko is the author of the recent H_NGM_N chapbook NEW ANIMAL, which you can read and download here.

What is poetry?  Part 2: why do you write it?

Poetry is a concentration of language. Many settle on that definition. Poetry is the poet speaking to him or herself, one philosopher concluded. One school asserted that poetry is a transference of the poet’s energy to the reader. Poetry ends like a rope, one poet ventured. Poetry is the space between a sleepwalker’s outheld arms, another poet claimed. All these definitions seem appropriate to me. I can draw from consensus or criticism. I can reach after poetry as it reaches with the highest degree of language after humanness. And by language I mean song without instrumentation. I mean a yawp or articulation of intelligence, feeling, and cadence. Poetry as such—contemporary poetry—is not the poetic genre. It’s not Sappho’s or Hafiz’s poetry, though they share characteristics. Lumping centuries of art under one umbrella is problematic, it seems. Readers define writing as poetry once it enters the realm of their experience with previously defined poetry. Poetry’s definition, then, favors effect over adherence to compositional rule, the private manifestation of ancient habits. It’s the moment a child puts a plastic shark into his or her mouth to explore it.

I write for no conceivable reason. People may scoff at this, comparing it to absentminded worship of art or mysticism. But despite familial, financial, intellectual, or physiological concerns, I still write poetry. It’s the way my brain operates. So I don’t have a reason or reason not for writing poetry. It’s a way of being.

What makes this a chapbook & not just a pile of poems?

These poems revolve around, not an aesthetic theory or determination, but a naturally acquired syntax, image system, and logic. Many of these poems funnel into a larger collection. By collection I mean (as many early poetry books advertised) a selection of poems on various subjects. But these various subjects arose from considering what it is to be possessed by something. The chapbook might read as a mind’s revolutions, its crests and eddies, which may look like a pile or a trajectory depending on where you stand.

Are there any particular pronounced influences / guiding lights for the poems in this chapbook, or is it just the usual jumble & tangle (also, if so: what IS your usual jumble & tangle)?

There are many influences, so I’m not sure how pronounced they are, or how pronounced I’d want them to be. But I can point to Eastern European verse, prose poems, the French surrealists and symbolists, mid-20th-century United States lyrics, criticism on the English Romantic pastoral, Japanese tanka, and aphorism, as nodes in a constellation of influences on this chapbook.

These are guiding lights that function as a tangle. And I don’t have a usual one. I’ve started writing a new collection with its own set of concerns, its own peculiarities regarding speech pattern, form, and mood. A collection’s paths tilt, working now or later or requiring refashioning as you step back and walk around to determine what needs space or density. The collection, I think, should be a tangle, but in some spots it will be such a thin tangle as to be a line. I’m looking for a variegated terrain within one landscape.

Today! Daniel Moysaenko's poetry chapbook NEW ANIMAL is released into the world. Read and download here, with all our other digital chaps.