Anique Sara Taylor's chapbook Civil Twilight is Winner of the 2022 Blue Light Poetry Prize. As the sun sinks 6 ̊ below the horizon at dawn or dusk, it's 5:30am/pm someplace in the world. In thirty shimmering poems (30 words/5 lines each), Civil Twilight probes borders of risk across a landscape of thunderstorms, quill-shaped mist, falcons that soar, the hope of regeneration, a compass to the center. Tightly hewn poems ring with rhythm and sound, follow ghosts who relentlessly weave through a journey of grief toward ecstasy.
Experience each poem, woven [with] great intimacy and rare musicality... Read all 30 poems aloud in sequence and feel yourself transformed. ––Sharon Israel, Host of Planet Poet, Words in Space Radio Show and Podcast
—Sean Nevin, Author of Oblivio Gate
The Living Thing About a Book Project
How a Form Can Grow
The constraints that created the form for my book Civil Twilight unfolded slowly. I was writing a full-length non-fiction book involving a daily walk into town, the river, grocery store, lottery tickets, the passing of seasons and time of day. Exploring, I discovered three designations of twilight. Civil twilight is when the sun is below the horizon and it’s neither light nor dark. My father had died while swimming in a Caribbean bay at twilight. He’d been a maritime lawyer. 5/30 was a marker number for someone who was dear to me.
I’d been writing long poems with extended lines. In researching, I became curious to see whether I could create a golden nugget, as if distilling a long phrase into a compressed section. Would that work? A vision began to grow from these walks, of a 30-page chapbook. 30 poems. 5 lines / 30 words each. My father’s ghost would weave through it, along with reverberations of difficult issues I was dealing with. Without naming them, I could use nature metaphors to reflect something truer.
I collected these nuggets until there were enough to choose from, to fashion an arc for a book. It happened in an instant. It happened across days, across months and years. As some books do.
Excerpts From Civil Twilight:
~
Sycamore’s unearthly branches penetrate
haze, peeling back nerves of velvet mountains
~
How calendars can entangle us so gradually.
~
Swollen pop of hollow reed, blushing
bones brake naked through bedrock crust
~
The Gift of a Long Book Project
I love to see something grow—-a garden, blog, relationship, career. Almost anything that can be embraced with a long view of making it my own. What I can tend, move forward into growth, despite high waves, speed bumps, business, illness, break-ups.
How a Project Can Start
After months of morning writing practice, I began to notice unexpected ideas that would shine and flicker in sideways without warning. A quick thought, a tiny stinging thing, a foggy promise, then they would vanish. What if I could catch them, write them down, collect them. Would anything grow?
Some projects flare out of nowhere, like a Roman candle across the sky in a single swoop. Others seep in quietly as I go about my life. Some develop studiously from notes and research I’m wading through. I try to collect all of them in folders.
Seasons of a Book
An idea often begins pristine, perfectly newborn. Whether a complete project or individual part, this time it’s perfect, it will soar problem free. I ride this glorious inspiration that keeps going until I’ve gone past myself, entering a waking dream-space.
What Was I Thinking?
The next day, back on Earth again, I’m wandering around, lost in an empty field. Although this may feel the most daunting, here’s where the envelope opens. Where curiosity welcomes in possibility, where the work is. Love of words, story, craft, sound. The process of following interest toward fascination.
Writing Practice
Is there a place in our heart/mind/gut that can signal that something is working? More importantly, is there a warning that something is not working? I try to copy the tools of a detective, a drummer, a saint. Working gradually, patiently, I examine and re-arrange. I try to trust in fierce judgement without being afraid of letting words cut deep. Include confusion, doubt, details of both hesitancy and glory, until something even higher and deeper than self enters and uncovers what is most true.
Rewrite
After writing hot, deep, inside the work, I return again. Now I’m all editor, all sceptic. I cycle around it, cold. Return to what’s inside the envelope. What still holds.
Like a process of building with modeling clay, I add, subtract, move, mold. Trying to turn non-magic into magic; as if letting go of what I’d held onto so tightly, could allow the work to shape into what it always needed to be. I smooth it until I can understand the arc that carries it through.
Word Replacement
I love to shop for words most needed for color/imagery/meaning. What’s fresh that’s never been heard before. What opens up into a newer truth or drops a perfect word into a line. I shop the smorgasbord of internet word collections. There are enough online now to bring any project alive. Then tweak and re-tweak again.
Excerpts From Longer Poems:
From my book: Where Space Bends, Finishing Line Press:
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Somewhere a phone rings as if time
had suspended us in a perfect circle
~
Gunmetal sky, dark matter begins
to form in elongated wisps.
~
Even shade-soaked impatiens unhook their double
wings as if only they could awaken their dead
~
I will my hinged heart to creak open. Rubble
from generations spills across the soft skin of earth.
~
Half alone, I weave a cocoon of my hair, bloodroot
mixed with bitter melon seed, the house of skin we wear.
~
The Book Project
If you let the long relationship of making a book weave through the days of your work over time, let it nourish and sustain you like a best friend. Some parts may come easily. If other stages are more challenging, I hope you will get support, learn to hone new tools. Become fascinated. Be brave enough to write as if this were where you’d always wanted to be. Trust in the magic enough to let life open in ways you’d never expected. Go so deep inside writing that it could make your words come alive, for a distant waiting stranger.
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