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Origin Stories
But the narrative of a person’s history is never quite so tidy as we might like. It’s impossible to trace things cleanly back to a single bolt of lightning that changed the course of our own human drama once we admit all the forces and decisions coalescing around us, “knowing how way leads on to way,” as Frost reminds us. Maybe that’s why I think it’s so important to reflect on our own beginnings as writers, to remember as much as we can of our origin stories, recognize and distill those residual energies so that we can keep learning from them.
In Origin Stories , originally published in the literary journal Passages North , Nate Pritts writes about his own beginnings as a poet and writer, his steps and missteps. In the process, he discovers how poetry can help us all find "a sensitivity to, and appreciation for, [our] own the surroundings and the emotions, the locations and the associations."
Nate Pritts is the author of seven books of poetry - most recently Post Human (2016) which Publishers Weekly says "leads readers through a poetic dystopia that reveals the fragility of the human relationship with technology. Weaving his poems together as a meditative critique of technology and its numbing effect on the everyday, Pritts asks readers to imagine other possibilities amid 'this daily flood/ of ephemera, this electronic life.'" He lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
In Origin Stories , originally published in the literary journal Passages North , Nate Pritts writes about his own beginnings as a poet and writer, his steps and missteps. In the process, he discovers how poetry can help us all find "a sensitivity to, and appreciation for, [our] own the surroundings and the emotions, the locations and the associations."
Nate Pritts is the author of seven books of poetry - most recently Post Human (2016) which Publishers Weekly says "leads readers through a poetic dystopia that reveals the fragility of the human relationship with technology. Weaving his poems together as a meditative critique of technology and its numbing effect on the everyday, Pritts asks readers to imagine other possibilities amid 'this daily flood/ of ephemera, this electronic life.'" He lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
8 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 22, 2016
About the author
Nate Pritts
36 books73 followersNate Pritts is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Post Human (2016) and Decoherence (2017). Publishers Weekly described his fifth book, Sweet Nothing (2011), as “both baroque and irreverent, banal and romantic, his poems […] arrive at a place of vulnerability and sincerity.” POETRY Magazine called his The Wonderfull Yeare (2009), “rich, vivid, intimate, & somewhat troubled” while The Rumpus called Big Bright Sun (2010) “a textual record of mistakes made and insights gleaned…[in] a voice that knows its part in self-destruction.”
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 19, 2018
Please note, Goodreads only lists a Kindle edition of this volume, but I received it in a printed and bound edition.
This brief, petite, and attractively-printed essay was an unexpected add-on to my Goodreads Giveaway win of Decoherence, Nate Pritts' 2017 poetry collection.
Origin Stories is actually just the one origin story – his own – but serves as a broader lens by which to consider how it is that poets actually become poets in the first place (in Nate's case, pretty much by accident), and how much they change and evolve on the way to finding their own voice. Nate had actually started out as an undergraduate with the intention of becoming a prose writer, and his facility for it makes me hope that he might someday, like other poets before him, write a novel. But here, his elegant, evocative, and compelling tale of his accidental entry into poetry, and how the mistakes, though valuable, that he made along the way, made him both the poet and the person he is today. I appreciate that Nate wanted to keep it tight and concise, but I would have been very interested to hear the long version of his story!
It was great to have Origin Stories to read alongside Nate's current work, as it cast light, in his own words, on how he grew and matured as a poet, ultimately finding the confidence to write what he knew, rather than what he thought was expected of him. Recommended for all readers of Nate's work or poetry generally, and especially for those considering the academic and professional pursuit of poetics.
This brief, petite, and attractively-printed essay was an unexpected add-on to my Goodreads Giveaway win of Decoherence, Nate Pritts' 2017 poetry collection.
Origin Stories is actually just the one origin story – his own – but serves as a broader lens by which to consider how it is that poets actually become poets in the first place (in Nate's case, pretty much by accident), and how much they change and evolve on the way to finding their own voice. Nate had actually started out as an undergraduate with the intention of becoming a prose writer, and his facility for it makes me hope that he might someday, like other poets before him, write a novel. But here, his elegant, evocative, and compelling tale of his accidental entry into poetry, and how the mistakes, though valuable, that he made along the way, made him both the poet and the person he is today. I appreciate that Nate wanted to keep it tight and concise, but I would have been very interested to hear the long version of his story!
It was great to have Origin Stories to read alongside Nate's current work, as it cast light, in his own words, on how he grew and matured as a poet, ultimately finding the confidence to write what he knew, rather than what he thought was expected of him. Recommended for all readers of Nate's work or poetry generally, and especially for those considering the academic and professional pursuit of poetics.
Displaying 1 of 1 review