About Seth Hagen
Seth Hagen grew up in Connecticut and has lived in New Orleans, Singapore, Los Angeles, Houston, New York City, and now Atlanta, where he teaches high school English. Prior to teaching, he was a tax attorney for a number of years in Manhattan. When he is not teaching, he is spending time with his wife and three kids, reading, writing, listening to LPs, cooking, or hiking. The newest hobby for the list is fly fishing, which he is only good at in places where the fish don’t know any better. Seth’s creative work has been featured in Verse Daily, and has appeared in Sugar House Review, trampset, gone lawn, A-minor Magazine, DIAGRAM, unbroken, unlost, right hand pointing, and other journals.
A Profile of the Author
Notes on the “Lacrosse,” “Pas Seul,” and “Silver Trombone”
With each of these, I wanted to work in prose-poem form because, as an in-between thing, a prose poem makes a good home for the in-between. I am hoping the little boxes can hold together what wants to pull away, and I like the way that the prose line can impose a narrative structure on a logic of association. In the land between the lyrical and the mundane, I want mules to run the border of consciousness. I want to find a way to talk about what I don’t want to talk about.
“Silver Trombone”– I can’t recall which piece of this poem came first, but I liked the idea of choosing an object (a silver trombone) and giving it a strong magnetic charge. I kept thinking about this trombone as I would read, as I would be with my aging parents, as I’d go to work and teach my English classes (which happen to be next to where our school band practices), scouting the while for little narrative flights that could fly to or away from the trombone.
“Lacrosse”–This one is a creature stitched out of dead-end poems and lines from my notebook, then reanimated as a prose poem. Maybe that grim metaphor suits the grim subject matter: the gauntlet of male adolescence.
“Pas Seul”–I typically draft very slowly, but this was a rare one where I had a solid draft in an evening. That said, over time, I also replanted and pruned, grafting in lines and images from scraps of other stalled works. The challenge here was how to talk about observing my father’s cognitive decline in a way that didn’t reduce it. As parts of him close down, parts I never knew have opened.
Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.
Last year, two friends of mine in other states talked me into getting a turntable and forming a record club with them. The three of us take turns, and each month, one sends the other two an album on vinyl. The only rule is no obvious classics, and it has been a joy giving and receiving. Swamp Dogg. Howard Tate. Natural Information Society. Cavern of Antimatter. Comradely Objects. Nico Fidenco. Danish String Quartet. Lee Hazlewood. William Onyeabor. Not only am I discovering excellent stuff, but I also like how it makes me listen to music on my own. I dial in with fresher ears and a more focused attention; I listen through ears other than my own. There’s a healthy pressure not to let my friends down.
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I have three kids. I love them all. My middle child, Alice, is 15 and severely cognitively impaired as a result of a rare chromosomal anomaly. She can’t understand most sentences or questions, and she can’t really speak other than make a few vowel sounds. She may sound like she would be hard to parent or care for, but she’s generally not. Alice is a delight and a sort of resident buddha in our house. Unflappably happy. Full of claps and laughs. Oriented around love. She deals with other people’s troubles by finding a quiet spot away from the fray. Alice has rearranged for the better how I see the world, and I don’t think I would have taken the turn in my life to write had Alice not been in it. She calls my attention to what language does–its wonders and limitations. And I think Alice has helped place me where I can see beauty but also the strangeness of the world we have created for ourselves.
