I’m covered.
by Todd Boss, poet
Here’s the cover of my second poetry collection, PITCH, due out in February 2012 from W. W. Norton & Company.
It was a shock to see it, at first. PITCH is a collection of poems that spiral from a specific event: the time that my father lost the family piano off the back of his pickup truck when I was 12. The accident took place at the very rural, heavily forested corner of County Highway NL and State Highway 27, just east of Fall Creek, Wisconsin.
But this piano, in this picture? This here’s a city piano. I doubt it’s ever seen a field or woods.
This piano didn’t fall from anywhere. It was placed on this sidewalk, carefully, by piano movers. A moving van is idling just beyond the frame.
This piano is not an upright, like the one that landed in snowbank and brambles that night. It’s a grand.
Don’t get me wrong: I love this cover for lots of reasons… I love its sinuous shapes and colors. I love how exposed the piano’s strings are. I love how the building behind seems to curve away in a haze.
It’s really hard to have someone affix a cover to your work.
Let me know what you think.
I think it is sexy, which suits your work. And though it might be nice to have the more congruous country piano in brambles, this image adds a nice friction to the auto-biographical, a nod toward the lens of the speaker, that your work is, after all, art.
Your poems are well wrought, tight as a piano placed carefully on its side and, you, the poet are both the movers and moving truck just out of the frame.
Can’t wait for the book.
I love the cover. When I read the title poem and got that second sense of the word, I loved it even more. And if the story behind the poem is even halfway true I’ll never look at a grand piano the same way again.
Beth, it’s almost entirely halfway true! The piano did go overboard, and was salvaged by passersby, and was unharmed, and I play it to this day. But I was twelve, and my memory of the event supplies its share of fictions. For example, I believe I concocted the snowbank over years of recounting the story to disbelieving listeners; how else could the piano have survived the drop? But my parents assure me it was not winter, there was no ice, it wasn’t even nighttime, we hadn’t been going too fast, there was no cursing, we never owned a Ford, the list goes on. Details, details! It’s a good thing I’m not a historian!