Contributor Spotlight: Michael Bazzett

A few thoughts on “Verisimilitude”:

If I could make short films using my mind, I would.

And if we all had USB ports in our temples and could share those images, strung together by white cords, like two kids sharing earbuds on the bus, what then?

Would those images be a semblance of our desires? How terrifying or transcendent might that be? How tender or tyrannical?

Would our primary goal as creators and composers become receiving a knowing glance?

Applause seems an odd response to art. It stirs the air, then same old silence. Yet I love it when people clap at the movies, which can’t hear.

We dream in images for months before we learn to speak, and I often wonder what those dreams might look like, unfettered by the syntax of either language or story-structure.

A lot of my favorite poems share the terrain of inside jokes: i.e. what’s most delicious remains unsaid.

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Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, Best New Poets, and Forklift, Ohio. He is the author of The Imaginary City, published in the OW! Arts Chapbook Series last year, and The Unspoken Jokebook, coming soon from Burning River. His verse translation of the Popol Vuh is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2015. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children. His poem “Verisimilitude” can be found in HFR53.