Bryan Walpert
Bryan Walpert is the author of three collections of poems, Native Bird (Hoopla series, MÄkaro Press, 2015), A History of Glass, a finalist in the Stephen F. Austin State UP award (SFA Press, 2011), and Etymology (Cinnamon Press, 2009), as well as a book of short stories, Ephraim’s Eyes (Pewter Rose Press, 2010), named a Best Book of 2010, and a scholarly monograph, Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry (Routledge, 2011). His work has won the James Wright Poetry ward from the Mid-American Review and first prize in the NZ Poetry Society International Competition, as well as being shortlisted for key North American awards, including the Montreal Poetry Prize. He is an Associate Professor of creative writing at Massey University.
Walpert comments: ‘In Native Bird, I play with “call” and “song”, the former a proxy for prose, the latter for poetry. So I enjoyed making some of the prose pieces lyrical and some of the verse, as in this poem, discursive. I often tell my students not to stick too closely to the facts when writing poetry, but in this case the poem presents events very much as they happened. Of course, the distinction between art and documentary at the start is an unfair one, and I hope the poem by the end gives the lie to its own premise.’
