The 1455 Author Series continued with local poet and literary MVP Dan Brady. As always, it’s wonderful to discuss craft and process in a live setting, and our thanks to the amazing Potter’s House for being such excellent partners! (Find out more about them and their mission, and pick up your copies of Dan’s collection, here.)
Before I met Dan, I knew him, because I’m a fan and follower of the superb lit mag Barrelhouse. In addition to putting his own work into the world, Dan has been the poetry editor for Barrelhouse and, as such, has helped put lots of beautiful words into the world.
The primary topic of our discussion was Dan’s latest collection, Songs in E— (winner of the Barclay Prize for Poetry, published by Trnsfr Books), and it was my pleasure to spend some serious time with his project (and we take a deep dive into the fascinating origin story of this endeavor). I appreciate the way these tautly constructed poems dance and circle around love, faith, and art (and, of course, at any given moment, in any given poem, these all are the same thing). One thing I’ve talked—and thought—a great deal about is the impetus of art, taking something from idea to actual execution. I believe one way we do this is to create problems we need to solve, to place obstacles in our creative path that, by writing the work, we navigate. I also appreciate that while in so many ways, this a poetry book for Poetry Readers (with a capital P and R), it’s super accessible, and it at once embraces the idea that poetry is about love, while turning that whole notion on its head, and it becomes increasingly transparent yet layered. Put another way, these poems can be enjoyed on a first-reading level, but those who have written can recognize what’s happening here.
In addition to talking about his writing, poetry (in general, and why poetry seems to be having a very welcome “moment” right now), we also, inevitably and happily, got around to discussing the importance of literary citizenship and why being a part of this community is a win for individuals and creativity in general. Check out the video, below!
ABOUT THE BOOK
The vagaries of faith and desire are transliterated into the philosophical and revelatory in this playful Winner of the Barclay Prize for Poetry. To create Songs in E————, Dan Brady ran Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and Robert Browning’s “One Word More” through an unreliable internet translator into Portuguese and then back into English. The resulting raw material was reshaped into the two poem sequences that make up this strange and startling collection.
“The poems in Songs in E———— are love missives, meditations on mortality and desire, at once elegiac and playful. Dan Brady writes about love and conscience and forgiveness through the lens of a philosopher and then creates such beauty by turning everything upside down and looking at it again. Section by section, poem by poem, line by line, these poems reimagine and dismantle what it means to love each other in multiple voices. ‘Heartbreak makes adults of us’ Brady writes, and this book is going to grow us all up.”
—W. TODD KANEKO, author of This Is How the Bone Sings
Purchase Songs in E————
at our independent bookselling partner The Potter’s House.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Brady is the author of two poetry collections, Strange Children (2018) and Subtexts(2022), along with two poetry chapbooks. He is the long-time poetry editor of Barrelhouse. Previously, he served as the editor of American Poets, the journal of the Academy of American Poets, and worked in the Literature Division at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he received a Distinguished Service Award for his work on the Big Read, the largest community reading initiative in US history. He lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife and two kids.
Website: danbrady.org
Twitter: @danbrady82
