Justin Evans introduces his new poetry collection, All the Brilliant Ideas I’ve Ever Had (Kelsay Books, 2020).
Every few years, if you are lucky, you will do something right. Whenever I look at my newest book, All the Brilliant Ideas I’ve Ever Had, I will think of how I put off publishing it until after I had finished collaborating with my friend, Jeff Newberry. That is not to say I don’t like this book, I do. I am talking about timing. Let me explain.
Anyone who is a writer knows there is a big difference between writing and publishing. A writer can also tell you there is something magical about writing. If you are lucky as I stated above, you will do something right. That was me in 2015. I was set to publish Brilliant Ideas with a press who had published several of my earlier books. Brilliant Ideas was in the background, waiting for the right time to be published when I started writing a manuscript with Jeff. Within a few months I knew that book, Cross Country (WordTech Editions, 2019), not Brilliant Ideas, needed to be my priority. We wrote, edited, submitted, and wrote some more. Our project was such an important thing I wrote my editor and asked him to knock Brilliant Ideas out of the line-up, just for the opportunity for him to read this new manuscript. He agreed and that was the end of Brilliant Ideas. I was lucky.
Fast forward to 2019. The other book was out and I had even traveled to Georgia to accompany my co-author on a mini reading tour. Without a publisher, I went ahead and sent my book to Karen Kelsay. Karen had published two of my other books and I thought if anyone was going to like it, she would. The luck in all of this is that in four years of tinkering, I was able to create a much stronger manuscript. I was able to tinker, edit, shuffle poems in and out, and make the manuscript what it deserved to be.
All of that was to be able to say this: While a great deal of writing is about listening to the Muses regarding what you should write, it is also about where you should be directing your energies. Without listening to the Muse telling me to set aside Brilliant Ideas, I would have never forged one of the most important relationships I will ever have in my life. Not only that, I was able to give the book some time to temper in my mind without the haste I usually feel when writing. My heart and mind were occupied with something else and I could look at the book with clarity. That’s poetry. That is the aim of poetry. That is everything.
The vast majority of the poems in All the Brilliant Ideas I’ve Ever Had come from two earlier chapbooks. The poems are not new and they are not simply the invention over the course of a few years of writing—they span more than a decade. The poems are assembled from a specific voice in my writing. I tend to write in two different tones. The first is grounded in nature, the physical space I inhabit, and familial connections I have come to know in my life. The poems in this book are from the other voice. These poems are political, exercises in satire, and often employ a sense of wordplay. With the former, I tend to write with an entire book in mind, and with these poems I tend to address my contemporary observations. Still, I feel it necessary to write with a manuscript in mind. This accounts for the span of years these poems represent. I literally needed to find the right context to frame the poems.
So my struggle (and I do think that for my creative process to be at its best there needs to be some conflict), was to find the best way to present the poems. I found broad categories to place the poems in, constantly adding and subtracting, editing and rearranging, until I found the narrative arc I wanted my poems to convey. Why a narrative arc? I find the best thing I can do as a poet is to create a story with the parts of the story I want to share with others being represented in the poem. So with this book that has five sections, I created five miniature narrative arcs for myself, and arranged the poems accordingly. This isn’t what all poets should do. It’s just what I do. The result was a book of poems that I am very proud of in both content and timing. It is the right book for me at the right time.
Orientation
Last night I dreamed of Antarctica
its everything overshadowing
my steps, my shivers, no matter how slight.
The air was drier than I expected—
no moist kiss to remind me
where I was.
The sun remained for months
as I thought it would
but it did not speak to me.
Justin Evans was born and raised in Utah. After high school, Justin joined the army, serving in various duty stations and in the First Gulf War. After the military, Justin returned to Utah, where he went to school at what is now UVU and then at Southern Utah University, where he completed his B.S. in History and English. After teaching a semester at UVU, he took a job teaching in rural Nevada, where he has been for the past 21 years with his artist wife and sons. He later completed a M.Ed. from the University of Nevada, Reno in literacy studies. Justin is the author of four chapbooks of poetry and six full length collections.