Today I have a poem in Portrait of New England, a small literary journal that specializes in materials from my home region. You can read my "Visions of Nemo" in Volume 2 here.
Funny story about this poem: Guillermo del Toro ruined the original version.
I wrote the poem way back in February 2013, following an epic snowstorm – Winter Storm Nemo, from which the poem draws its name. I was enchanted by the way the heavy snow buried everything, erasing size and shape under glistening, uniform whiteness. Naturally, I was inspired to write about it.
I was particularly struck by the fact that water was responsible for the change in the landscape – how this substance, normally shapeless and translucent, had smothered everything into a similar degree of shapelessness. Therefore, I wrote these lines:
...All contours take
The shape of water...
I was pretty proud of it! Seemed like the kind of phrase that would stick in a reader's mind.
Well.
I tried to place the poem for years, tweaking this, modifying that. Then, come 2017, what happens?
Guillermo del Toro releases a beloved blockbuster whose title is THOSE EXACT WORDS.
So into hibernation went my little poem, because there was no way I could send it anywhere with the words Mr. del Toro had swiped from me. Those words would read like a pointless allusion to his film. Nobody would believe I'd wrote them first.
Eventually, though, I managed a workaround. The new lines turned out well enough – the core idea is still in place, albeit with words that are less arresting than I'd like. But the poem is finally out there in the wild... And now, so too is my ridiculous private feud with an infinitely better artist!
