Back Draft: Heather Christle
Heather Christle’s poems are so wonderfully playful they can make you forget that they’re tackling the gravest of subjects. With short lines and seemingly simple language, she whisks you into the imagination’s darkest depths.
This poem, from her third collection, What Is Amazing, opens with a familiar scenario: confronting an unwelcome insect. It then leaps toward larger questions of life and death. While the two versions appear in type here, for legibility’s sake, Christle wrote the original draft by hand, as she almost always does. She explained to me that “the keyboard is not a house that [her] poems want to come to,” and that writing should feel like dancing.
– Ben Purkert for Guernica
Guernica: The changes between drafts are so minimal!
I know. There’s a part of me that’s like, “Oh no, I don’t want to talk about revision, because I’m the world’s worst reviser.” But what I do usually, I write a lot. Like a poem every day. I work
