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Chinese Fire
My good friend Joe Nigg, wrote an extraordinary 2016 book, The Phoenix: An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast. It includes a chapter on “Poetic Fire,” which itself includes a poem of mine—rooted in the phoenix image—called “Revenant.” Now, between Joe’s inclusion of “Revenant” and the book’s appearance in print, I revised the poem, making several minor and a few substantial changes. In particular, the arc of the second version became … well, darker … and it was that second, darker version that subsequently appeared in my collection The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015.Read More