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Chad Norman

       Featured Poem of the month​

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Found

 

Two snowflakes can be the same, my student argued

in her English Composition essay.

 

It snows so much where I am from

I had to stop searching.

 

As when a father, after decades, gives up on a kidnapped daughter,

because suddenly he understands—He needs her to be dead.

 

There’s always something lost in the laughter

of a single blackbird, its talons tight around a branch.

 

Everything is missing. House keys, money,

smiles, minutes, patience. I remember

 

how my shrink would shake his head,

stare straight at me, and sigh.

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Domenic Scopa is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee

and the 2014 recipient of the Robert K. Johnson Poetry Prize

and Garvin Tate Merit Scholarship. His poetry and translations

have been featured in many publications.

....and now...

...from the mind of...

the Mad Poet 

poetry magazine, editor, Anthony Uplandpoet Watkins, Anthony Watkins

Chad Norman is a touring poet, an ambassador for, and a supporter of poetry in his home region of Nova Scotia, Canada. He is currently on tour as a cultural representative of Canadian Poetry in Scotland.

The Interview with Chad Norman

BTS: I noted somewhere you mentioned that as a teenager you sold your guitar because you decided to focus on lyric writing. That brings two questions to mind:

Do you find a very close connection between poetry and lyrics? or conversely, what do you see as the difference? and secondly, did you ever wonder if you should have stuck with the guitar? I mean, there are a million kids who take up the guitar, but hundreds of them end up making a decent career of it, while only about a dozen people make a living with poetry.

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CN: No, I don’t find a very close connection between poetry and lyrics, mainly because at this point after so many years of writing poetry I know the music or melody or rhythms seem to be in the words, phrases, sentences already, by that I mean I don’t require any outer music, like a band or instrument, to inspire or bring about the words. I believe, for me, that is the difference between poetry and lyric writing. When I was a teenager that was what I hung around, band members or players who were mastering a single or several instruments, however once I started attempts at lyrics I began to hear just the musicality in the vowels and consonants, and how beautiful that sounded. So I sold both my guitars, stopped hanging with the band members, and began what has become 18 titles of poetry, 35 years of touring the books and publishing individual poems in all kinds of publications around the world. Even today I still hear them begin inside me, far away from any page. In fact, just the other night while working at the plant, a poem I felt inside me for months finally came together, and I had to stop and give it life on the page. As for making a living with poetry, hasn’t happened, but poetry has certainly made a wealthy life for me.

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