About “Always Coming Second”
This is the longest poem I’ve ever written, and it took almost eight months to write, which is interestingly also the longest it’s ever taken me to write a poem. Most of my poetry happens very quickly, without a lot of forethought, so the agonizingly long compositional process with this piece was definitely a challenge. It’s hard to say that my poems are “about” anything, but the people who’ve read this one immediately got that it describes my relationships with musicians. I do find myself using music as a jumping off point for a lot of my writing, but with this poem, there’s a very sustained conversation going on about how music and writing are the same, and how they are inevitably going to be different — and how those differences can impact communication.
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