About the Poems - MY
About the Poems
by Mark Yakich These poems are part of a small volume, The Making of Collateral Beauty, that is forthcoming from Tupelo Press this winter, and they are, in fact, doppelgaenger poems to poems in my first book, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross; that is, each poem in the new collection shares a title with a poem in the first collection and tells the alleged story behind the poem. I got this idea after my brother-in-law kept trying to match-up certain characters in the first book to real-life people. "Who's the Invisible Man? Did the Blind Girl really have a seeing-eye pony? I didn't know you knew any blind girls." Etc. His guesses were intriguing enough for me to try to match-up the characters to real individuals. As the greatly underrated Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa once said, "To feign is to know oneself."