So I took myself off a writing schedule and just trusted that the poems would come. As I did this, my artistic concerns changed; I was able to approach all the notes I had taken at and about work and use them, judiciously, for new poems. And although there are plenty of strictly formal poems in Proprietary, I have, I hope, a growing sense of ease and trust in my work; I want to employ devices, such as rhyme, as appropriate, but always in order to move the poem as close as possible to the “lineament or character,” to quote Wallace Stevens, of the thing described.
ES: A poem like “Fashion” eschews some of your characteristic formalism. “Order,” too, though it recalls the mirrored form of “Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery” from your first book, and “Fantasy Suite” from Straight Razor. Is such a move a result or a root cause of this relaxing of those formal, lyric restrictions?
RM: It turns out the airtight lyric, all association and inference, is not always now the right vehicle for my narrative; I found too much tension to be, at times, armor against feeling. The poem “Order” is a form, sure—a line-based palindrome, as a reviewer once called it—but the poem, in its mirroring, undoes itself (I hope) carefully, gently, the speaker admitting about his father, “we almost laughed / but not for years.” And “Fashion” is a sort-of-list of grievances against ex’s; I wanted the almost rhyming, almost playful accrual of damning details—damning for the complicit speaker, too—as clear as possible in meaning, but the ensuing pain suggestive, like bitters swirled in a glass.
ES: Undoing, undermining, take down—if the book has a thesis, is this dismantling (of a self, of a city, of a language) it?
How my heart sings 