The Composer Steps into the Fire

The first poems in The Composer Steps into Fire were drafted while putting the finishing touches on The Human Remains during the fall of 2002. I really had no intentions of writing the follow-up to The Human Remains so quickly but that is how it all went down. I was working on “in the trees,” “kite flying,” and “winter flowers” and they set the collection in motion. I wanted to get my feet wet with that first collection and then see what came of it (creatively speaking) and it seemed like I had opened the flood gates and all these poems just sort of fell out of me like I had paper cuts all over my body and I was bleeding these poems from wounds that just wouldn’t heal.

These poems were not written with a cohesive narrative structure in mind for a finished product but I just happen to get lucky when I was pulling the collection together. With The Human Remains I was all over the place (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing) and the second collection was much more focused in its direction, which I am sure is a byproduct of the time span utilized to compose each book (the first book took approximately four years to write, and the second book was completed in about a year and a half). And, similar to The Human Remains, I wrote about twice the amount of poems during this time than what actually appeared in the book. The internal editor was working over time. One of my axioms is that you must know your work well enough to recognize your stronger pieces in order to cull the weaker material. Overall, the poems are tighter and better crafted.

Of course, one of the major differences between these two books is that The Composer Steps into Fire is accompanied by the artwork of Ms. Nicole Yalowitz. Nicole was wonderful to work with on this project. I gave her a copy of the manuscript and told her to just draw what she saw. Since I tend to be an image-driven poet then I thought this should be an interesting experiment and I think it turned out pretty well. The inspiration to intersperse art throughout a poetry collection came from Roger Mitchell’s first two books: Letters from Siberia and Moving. Moving is one of my absolute favorite collections of poetry and Roger was working with an excellent artist. The stark drawings throughout the collection accentuated the poems and the effect of opening a book of poetry and having art jump out at you was striking.

I am very proud of this finished product. I had a singular vision for this book and I think I achieved most of what I was out to accomplish. Every poem that is in the book belongs in the book and I think each one holds its own – and this alone is quite a feat because I am the first person to chime in with criticism when it comes to my work.

In the end I wanted this book to burn. I thought the first collection was encased in a thin layer of blood stained ice that held the reader at arm’s length, and this alienation was intentional. I wanted the second book to have more balance between ice and flames but then, of course, I wanted the flames to engulf everyone in the end.

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