Just One Thing with Quinn Franzen

Quinn Franzen’s poem “Guava Jelly” begins with pain and ends with one spoonful of guava jelly. Here, he shares just one thing about the piece:

This poem began as an excruciatingly sustained observation of a cattle egret. It was flying directly out to sea against high winds and not getting anywhere. I didn’t bother looking up why an egret might do that — my ignorance was just lighting up the image. What the hell’s the plan here? Why would a land bird leave its comfortable life sitting on cows? Why would it abandon its cattle? It wasn’t a good poem, but the sense of purgatory and stasis in the final version has its roots in that initial image. 

I think, too, there’s weirdly a debt to Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet which I was obsessed with throughout my early 20s. I don’t think people consider him a capital-p Poet, but I’ve always admired how simple and lithe his voice is. I wanted to try moving through a spiritual question like Gibran would, but without any divine assumptions or aid. How would I, a person about as spiritually-equipped as a brillo pad, approach the question of suffering? This is what poetry helps me do on a daily basis.