A Mini-Q&A with Muriel Nelson
Muriel’s poem “On Silent Haunches” was recently published on The Dock. Here's a mini Q and A to get you excited.
Read the piece here.
Kyle J. Bassett: The line from Psalm 19:2 seems to be a perfect companion for the way in which you respond/pay homage to Sandburg’s, “Fog”. Did you find any of the rest of the Psalm informing the poem, or did the line just spring out to you organically?
Muriel Nelson: If this poem hangs together on anything other than i sounds, it’s the wish to write with light (natural light, not neon or other man-made lighting). I recently discovered that for me, silence heightens the effects of what I see, so Carl Sandburg’s fog came on little cat feet, along with the peaceful diapered cloud bottoms, shushed wind, and silenced radio. No, I don’t have psalms memorized ready to spring out as needed, but I had been working with Psalm 19 for another poem. Unlike psalms full of cries, shouts, storms, and loud musical instruments, this psalm is quiet after day utters. Most important, it has that amazing turn in verse 4, in which God sets a tabernacle for the sun in the words of day and knowledge of night.
Muriel Nelson’s publications include Part Song, winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize (Bear Star Press), and Most Wanted, winner of the ByLine Chapbook Award (ByLine Press). Nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cortland Review, Four Way Review, Front Porch Journal, Hunger Mountain, Massachusetts Review, National Poetry Review, The New Republic, Northwest Review, Pebble Lake Review, Ploughshares, Prick of the Spindle, Seneca Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Superstition Review, and others, and on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Italian Culture published her critical essay on Eugenio Montale. She holds master's degrees from the University of Illinois School of Music and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Kyle J. Bassett is the Poetry Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review.