Inspiration can come in many different shapes – poet Jay Deshpande shows and tells everything that was behind the writing of his latest book, including René Magritte’s paintings, merciless edits – and a woodchuck
By Jay Deshpande for Topography of a Novel by Blunderbuss Magazine, part of the Guardian Books Network
Every book has its own texture, materiality, and topography. This is not only metaphorical; the process of creating literature produces all sorts of flotsam–notes, sketches, research, drafts–and sifting through this detritus can provide insight both into the architecture of a work and into the practice of writing. Blunderbuss is excited to run this series, in which we ask writers to select and assemble the artifacts of a book in a way that they find meaningful and revealing. In this installment, Jay Deshpande discusses how Magritte, a woodchuck (!), and merciless edits contributed to the writing of Love the Stranger, published by YesYes Books.
The poems in Love the Stranger interrogate love and its elusiveness by invoking the erotic and the mysterious, the banal and the strange; Chet Baker, Jack Palance, Kim Kardashian, a golden beast lying in wait behind you. Out of his “intensifying linguistic gift,” Deshpande has written “a book of great beauty and of terrible suspicion regarding that beauty” (Josh Bell). Perhaps, Deshpande suggests, real intimacy, like a curving line of the Fontana di Trevi, is always moving away from us – but these poems will stay with you.
ON VOLUPTUOUSNESS AT LA FONTANA DI TREVI
Some part of everything
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