Brian Turner

And then I realized that Queens of the Stone Age was throwing me off.

That I assumed that because I was listening to that music in my headphones, that that's the rhythm, sort of the pulse in the poem.

But really it was more like wallpaper music to block out the noise of the world around me.

And...

If I sort of rewound myself to years before when I was at Fresno State in California, I was a machinist going to college, and I was in a band, and I was taking a couple of poetry classes, and I heard about this guy Phil Levine.

He had national book awards and became the poet laureate of the United States.

He taught on the campus, and I knew there was some famous poet guy, Phil Levine, but I had never read a single poem by him, didn't know he was...

I just knew he was some famous poet.

And another poet, a colleague of mine, a peer, a student, he stopped me as I was walking across campus when Andres Montoya, who has since passed away, but he handed me a poem of Phil's, which was They Feed Their Lion, which starts...

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, out of black bean and wet slate bread, out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, they lie and grow.

And then if you listen to my poem.

If a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish, the aorta's open valves, the leap thought makes at the synaptic gap.

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave.

So there's definitely a beat pulse that's similar.

Definitely the list, and there's a beat pulse inside it that's not quite exact, but it's pretty close.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so it's definitely the branch growing from the tree, you know, definitely in conversation with this poem.

Well, I mean, it goes right to like Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influences.

I don't really have that anxiety, because I think if I'm,