Jonathan Hayes on his Poems
Recently, I found myself watching more movies than usual — once a week at the local matinee and an entire movie every night at home. I also found myself writing less, sometimes going several weeks with nothing but a blank page. Then one night the ordinary act of a poem surfaced while watching a movie, generated not only by the movie, but also from what I was doing while watching it, what the cat or wife were doing around me, and/or my random associations and thoughts. It became a sort of unintentional writing prompt. I never knew when the poem would come out from behind the curtain and sometimes it didn’t. The only thing I was sure of was to include the name of the movie along with the immediacy of the word “watching” within the poem. The process became habitual and turned into a series of micro-poems.