Monday, July 23, 2018

Maryann Corbett

Maryann Corbett spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes at the Minnesota Legislature. She is the author of four books of poems and three chapbooks; her most recent book is Street View, which was a finalist for the 2016 Able Muse Book Prize. Her work has appeared in many journals, such as 32 Poems, Ecotone, Literary Imagination, Rattle, and Southwest Review, and in a variety of anthologies like Imago Dei and Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters. She is a past winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and a past finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. One of her poems will be included in Best American Poetry 2018.


FINDING THE LEGO

You find it when you’re tearing up your life,
trying to make some sense of the old messes,
moving dressers, peering under beds.
Almost lost in cat hair and in cobwebs,
in dust you vaguely know was once your skin,
it shows up, isolated, fragmentary.
A tidy little solid. Tractable.
Knobbed to be fitted in a lock-step pattern
with others. Plastic: red or blue or yellow.
Out of the dark, undamaged, there it is,
as bright and primary colored and foursquare
as the family with two parents and two children
who moved in twenty years ago in a dream.
It makes no allowances, concedes no failures,
admits no knowledge of a little girl
who glared through tears, rubbing her slapped cheek.
Rigidity is its essential trait.
Likely as not, you leave it where it was.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I needed my records to figure this out, because the poem is among my earliest. I came back to writing poetry, after some thirty years away from it, in late 2005 and started workshopping poems on discussion boards in 2006. I do recall that this poem was workshopped. My submission records say I first sent the poem out in late 2007, so its first drafts must have happened within that range.

At that time, a great many of my poems had to do with mothering, mostly because I was then the mother of college students and making the shift to mothering adults. The trigger experience of finding an old, stray Lego happened many, many times.

How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

There were several changes during workshopping—probably in more than one online workshop, because during those years I was active in several at once. I recall the changes as small and having to do with smoother meter. I don’t remember making changes between magazine submissions. When I included the poem in my second book, which came out in 2013, I made another change during the proof stage; what had been “looking under beds” in the poem’s magazine publication became “peering under beds” for the book.

Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

I do believe one is “hotter” some days than others, better attuned to really good choices. There’s something about intensity of emotional involvement that turns up the heat. The memories involved in this one had that effect. That may be why this poem felt “received”—that is to say,  close to finished after relatively few tweaks.

How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

I write a great deal of blank verse, and during those years I would often begin by turning on the iambic pentameter spigot and letting it run. I allowed the memories and associations to be what they were. My iambics are often very loose in the first instance; they admit a great many substitutions. Revision quite often involves taking a hot iron to the wrinkles, and it did in this case.

Was there anything unusual about the way in which you wrote this poem?

At the time I wrote this, I was using my usual methods: letting the poem happen as it would and then subjecting it to critique.

Since then, some things have changed about the way I work: I hope that I’m now demanding enough to see on my own the flaws that workshopping helps one see. (But see my answer to the question about how long I let poems sit. Mea culpa.)

Another difference is that I worry more now about how a poem will come across in a reading. If I had worried about that in those days, the poem might never have been written. As it is, I don’t believe I’ve ever read it to an audience.

How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print?

Quite a while, according to my submission records! It went to nine magazines over the course of three years before it was finally accepted by Think Journal in 2010. Then it was included, with one revision, in the final manuscript of my book Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, which appeared in 2013, and poems from that book were chosen for American Life in Poetry.

How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

I have to admit that my worst poetic habit is not letting poems “steep” long enough. Fairly often I revise while a poem is still in submission, or after it’s come back, or after it’s appeared and I want to include it in a book.

I push myself to submit poems at regular intervals, a practice I regularly think I should change because it rushes the process
-->but I haven’t yet changed it, in twelve years of submitting.
Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?


This poem is cagey about fact. While it doesn’t deliberately fictionalize, it leaves the story vague and general. The vagueness allows people to see story elements that were not in my own mind when I was writing. I was asked once whether the poem was written out of the memory of the child or of the parent. I declined to answer, in part because I would rather not remember and in part because I think the poem is richer, and meaningful to more readers, if not nailed down.

Is this a narrative poem?

I would call it a lyric poem based on a recurring narrative that many readers will relate to.

Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

In those years I was first coming into contact with the poetry of Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Rhina Espaillat, Timothy Murphy, and Maz Griffiths, to name just a few. I was also reading the poetry that other participants posted on Eratosphere, The Gazebo, The Waters, and some other boards now long gone.

Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

I think a poet always hopes for a reader who sees the world the way the poet sees it, so that the words chosen make an immediate connection. Apart from that, different poems need readers in different groups. Nearly all the time, my ideal reader needs at least to expect meter and to recogize it even when it isn’t ribbon-smooth. Often, too, my ideal reader needs to have an attitude to rhyme that’s like the one expressed in A. E. Stallings’s “Presto Manifesto!” At the time when this poem was written, my ideal reader would probably have been a parent. Not always, but rather often lately, my ideal reader is a believer of some kind, or at least knowledgeable about “churchy” matters and matters of the spirit.

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

Yes, a fair number of people saw it, and a handful of people commented. Although I don’t workshop now, I owe a great deal to the group of poets who posted at Eratosphere in the late 2000s and who in some cases still post there.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’m not sure it is. I was going to say that it’s more guarded and less revealed—much of what I write is quasi-confessional—but I haven’t taken a close look at twelve years' worth of poems. It may be a bit choppier—written more in fragments and less in sentences, which adds to its hesitant quality.

What is American about this poem?

Apart from being metrical (which is still not typical for an American poet), just about everything: the assumptions about family structure, family homes, and families’ private truths. And even though the Lego brand is manufactured by a Danish company, is there any better symbol of an American childhood?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I believe it’s finished, but perhaps I only believe that because its current form is rather prominently fixed online. In the unlikely event that I publish a selected some day, I may yet think about it again!

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Austin Allen

Austin Allen’s first poetry collection, Pleasures of the Game (Waywiser Press, 2016), was awarded the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, The Missouri Review, The Sewanee Review, 32 Poems, and Verse Daily. He is a doctoral student in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.









MARIS*
*Roger Maris, American baseball player, famous for breaking Babe Ruth’s single-season record of 60 home runs in 1961. Because Maris had a longer season than Ruth in which to accumulate his total, his feat generated fierce controversy, and one sportswriter suggested that an asterisk accompany his name in the record books. The commissioner of baseball agreed, but the mark was never added.

Asterisk, dark kiss, sign you were born under,
little appendix twinging in your gut,
making its clever point, its “Well yes but…”
Has someone carved it on your grave, I wonder?

It multiplies, becomes a flurry of flakes,
hardens to hail and pelts you as you run,
head lowered, one blast shy of sixty-one.
Litters its thistles, drives spikes through your spikes.

*
Babe Ruth ate the past. Which would have been
the present, back then. That huge son of a bitch
gobbled and guzzled, smoked and sinned so much,
what’s left for you? The wine is drained, the women

know the score. Father of modern sport
and giant baby, hopeless little shit
sent to reform school, where he learned to hit,
and grin, and trot around the bases toward—

*
Rip the game stitch from stitch, green blade from blade.
Spill all the ball’s yarn brains, the whole white mile
spooled to the core. You’re starting to taste bile—
retch and spit up your black tobacco cud,

spit seeds, spit bubblegum, spit it: one spiked
windpipe obstruction like a Cracker Jack toy
lodged back there, somehow, since you were a boy…
You don’t remember childhood much. You liked

baseball, liked summertime. Each place you lived
seemed colder than the last. Old tribal nations
under the fields, train platforms without stations.
Some years your parents quarreled and you moved.

You’re not star-crossed; you don’t believe in streaks;
statistically, things happen. Still, the team’s
away games always give you hard-luck dreams:
Ruth’s twenties roar, the cagefaced umpire blocks

your way, you can’t reach—even to start from—home—
somehow the fix is in—each word you shout
at those fat folded arms is asterisked out…
The grass mends. The crowd goes tame. The seams resume.

*
Although it comes late, you hit that final blast.
The asterisk needs an asterisk of its own.
Above your Little League diamond, diamonds shone
unqualified....The record for time past

is broken, is broken. The child defeats the father,
memorabilia gathers on the shelf,
but time had more time to surpass itself,
so I’m not buying any of it, either.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote the poem in 2011 and included it in my first book, Pleasures of the Game. I’d been fascinated by the Roger Maris story since childhood and had wanted to write about him for years. The asterisk beside his name in the record books is just an urban legend, but it spoke to something real: a lingering perception that he’d fallen short of Babe Ruth, that his record technically didn’t count. He knew many fans felt this way and was shaken by the controversy.

I think most of us can relate to the fear of the asterisk, which goes something like this:
YOU HAVE ACHIEVED INCREDIBLE SUCCESS*
*just kidding
How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

The poem had a number of false starts. The earliest draft I can find is from March 2011, and the first one that resembles the finished poem is from October 2011. Then came a number of edits before I sent it out to journals. Two years later, I made another substantial change before my book came out: I tweaked the narrative framing so that the poem addresses Maris as “you,” from the perspective of an unnamed “I,” rather than speaking as Maris.

I did this after a friend suggested I’d made Maris sound too poet-like. Although I was never aiming for a literal imitation of his voice, I found the critique helpful, and I think the final version is better for the change.

Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

Sometimes a poem will come together quickly, but not often. I sweated this one out. On the other hand, glancing at these old drafts, I see I made a sudden burst of progress around 10/30/11, so inspiration (whatever it is) played a part.

How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

One conscious choice was the use of slant or imperfect rhymes: “flakes / spikes,” etc. These seemed appropriate for a poem that’s all about “close, but not quite.” They’re also sprinkled irregularly throughout the poem—I was trying to keep myself as well as the reader off balance.

Was there anything unusual about the way in which you wrote this poem?

These days it’s rare for me to revise a poem drastically several times over. I plan and prepare more, so that I have a better idea of what I want to do by the time I start writing. I still work slowly, but more of that time goes into fiddling with details.

How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print?

About a year. It got picked up by Iron Horse Literary Review in 2012 and became one of my first journal publications.

How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

It varies quite a bit. Sometimes I send things out too soon. Everything about the current market encourages that impulse—you have to fight it. Better to let the poem breathe for a while.

Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?


“Maris” deals with well-known, real-life events, but still takes plenty of creative license. I was going more for psychological than biographical truth. I don’t know, for example, whether he actually resented Babe Ruth, a man he never met. But doesn’t it seem plausible?

Is this a narrative poem?

A fractured one, yes.

Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

I forget who I was reading at the time, but Frost, Auden, and Marianne Moore all explored connections between games and writing (including, in Moore’s case, baseball and writing). Their influence shaped Pleasures of the Game in general and might have crept into “Maris.”

Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

I tend to agree with Auden’s couplet: “Art, if it doesn’t start there, at least ends / In an attempt to entertain our friends.”

I also write with live performance in mind. At poetry readings there are always a few audience members who’ve been roped into attending and are skeptical of poetry. I try to write poems that will win them over.

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

My MFA classmates saw a draft version of “Maris.” Outside of workshops, I generally show poem drafts to three or four friends. One friend has been my default first reader for about ten years now; we share and comment regularly on each other’s work. We don’t always take each other’s advice, but I never publish anything without getting her opinion first. (See Auden couplet above.)

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Structurally, it’s a little odder than most of my poems. It feels unsettled to me, unstable in its mix of fact and fantasy, and I hope it feels that way to the reader, too.

What is American about this poem?

Besides the baseball stuff? The neurotic attitude toward success.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.*