THREE POEMS is the brainchild of Max Freeman, a Brooklyn-based poet and filmmaker. Inspired by a film of Frank O’Hara reading “Having a Coke with You,” Max invites poets over to his studio to read three poems. For Poetry Month we matched Max with FSG poet Maureen McLane.
Max writes of working with Maureen:
“She was as charming between takes as she is in these poems. Two of the poems she reads are from her new collection, Mz N: the serial. The first, “Mz N Woman,” is a poem that smashes the trope of love at first sight but gives us something extraordinary in its place. Opening with an unflattering blazon of her “slightly horsefaced” lover at their first meeting, Mz N finds herself struck by sly Love’s arrow only later, when the two are having sex. The second, “Mz N Evil,” raises the dry “problem of evil,” only to plunge immediately into the cruel sticky stuff of adolescence, spiked with memories of a queer misfit. The film ends with “Quiet Car,” a reticent love poem from McLane’s 2014 collection, This Blue. The solitary speaker walks around a thawing late winter landscape while her lover travels toward her on the train’s quiet car.”
Maureen McLane from Three Poems.
Read all of our Poetry Month coverage here
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