About the Poems - BC
About the Poems
by Bruce Covey I hope more than anything that you found these poems to be entertaining. Personally, I like my poetry to be amusing & full of fun—enchanting little creatures with whom one might secretly wish to go to bed. I wrote the 100-poem sequence Reveal during the calendar year 2004 through the “I’m Feeling Lucky” tool within google.com. Each of these poems revolves around a constellation of keywords; a search on each keyword revealed a website from which I used different methodologies to select a line. “Reveal: Toolbox,” generated its own thematic threads through the subjects introduced by the various sites, while in “Reveal: Monster,” I tried, whenever possible, to find lines that evoked in some way either mythology or mystery or the gothic, without making explicit reference to the keyword’s particular mythological frame. “Nay, Orpheus” arrived somewhat suddenly & unexpectedly, although I spent many weeks on its title, which reflects the poem’s rejection of traditional lyricism and its predominantly female classical characters wedged rather awkwardly into a physical world. “Conditional” also conflates the physical and the abstract, parodying the way we use everyday imagery as a metaphor for a concept, or the way we abstract the concrete to signify or suggest the conceptual. “Lips/Airplane” was inspired by a long-ago flight to Las Vegas. Retrospectively I became intrigued by the humorous way in which the trip suggested several commingling dichotomies: Eros (emotions within a stoic space full of ever-serious businessmen and stewardesses), odds (heads/tails), & vectors (departures/arrivals).