RS: Your poetry reading was a real highlight of the Holiday Spectacular last month. Your poems feel very assured and have a great deal of forward momentum. Is that something you've worked on in your poetry? How do you think your work has changed and evolved over the years?
BL: Momentum, well momentum in sound is maybe not new, but there's probably a newer sense of hopping in and out of moments that happens in the poems I've written lately. The question makes me wonder about what effect listening to instrumental music while writing, and changes to that music, have had on my momentum and transitioning between thoughts/images. For my last project, one mostly about fatherhood and Nikola Tesla, I listened to a lot of Sigur Ros, and now with these new poems I'm listening to a lot of Keith Jarrett, maybe trying to steal some of his spontaneity and ability to be totally in the moment. I'd say my writing has of late evolved in small ways, less narrative, more in and out of several moments, less pretty, less concerned with answers and more with questions. What I hope I'm not losing is a sense of warmth, of sermon over sonnet, but the project's still in motion.
What can people expect from your reading on Saturday?
You'll see a man in need of a hair cut. Maybe something about fathering, something about Tesla, and one or two poems from my new project that I want to try out the sound of.
What can Brandon Lewis fans look forward to in 2015?
I'll be trying to come to a close with that new thing I just mentioned. I'm taking Michel de Montaigne's 105 essais and stealing their titles and using his form of embedding obscure quotes. It's been fun so far--we'll see how close to 105 I can get.
