Sample poems from 'The Instructions'
by Adam Wilson
This is a book about the last few years when I moved from Toronto to San Francisco to do an MFA in poetry. I studied creative writing 2010 to 2012 under Derek Walcott and in Kaveh Akbar's informal Zoom writing class, The Break.
My goal as a writer is to produce poems only I could write, which is also a way I gauge poems by other writers. Could anyone else write a poem like 'Moon River' by Lucie Brock-Broido? No. So that became the goal. (One of the only villanelles I've shared with other people was inspired by 'Moon River.')
The poems are very responsive to finding myself living in the western half of San Francisco, only a few blocks away from Golden Gate Park and Baker Beach. Some of the angst and isolation comes from having friends die suddenly, particularly when it had been on my mind to rekindle communications; the weekend we give up an hour of daylight was the same weekend I watched a friend's funeral on Zoom.
Most of the poems in the book are long. My "epics" reach five pages, and average three pages. Although I intersperse the book with short, short poems. The longer poems could be said to be constructed from smaller, mingled poems which support each other but may work independently. Mostly I use longer poems to explore parabolas and trajectories where the reader uses their own awareness to follow the line of best fit. The short poems are wind-up music boxes, where they tend to focus on creating a feeling you can come back to over and over.
While most of my poems are not subject to constraints or formal goals I do try to make little "games" for myself. Using "blue" in each middle line; the change of tense in the last stanza.