The Shape of Atsuro Riley.
My fingers stumbled upon Atsuro Riley in a summer issue of Poetry magazine.
Sticking to the mantra that "you are what you read" in terms of the creative writing process, I’ve been spending the past several months poring over e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and most recently Atsuro Riley. I won’t get into a spiel about what writing should or shouldn’t be as a craft, but I find Riley’s work visually exciting—that in the midst of deciphering the language, the way your eyes play across the lines add another interactive dimension that injects more real time energy into the poem.
Mostly it comes to the line dranw in the sand by more stringent readers and writers of form versus lack thereof. But instead of compartmentalizing styles, hopefully Riley’s poems can continue to inspire poets away from the schools of "-isms" that plague artists: cubism, impressionism, igotomuseumstobetrendyism.
Come on, lack of form is a form in itself, right? If poetry is to continue to change and challenge us through language, then let visual layout and content be part of that expression.
There are so many more poems written on bedsheets to be discovered a la Dickenson as long as we stop being so paranoid about discriminating whose bed it is that we read from.
Eat the pillow on the mint and as The Streets would say, "Let’s push things forward."
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