How a Poem Happens

Gibbons Ruark

2012-01-28T17:34:00.004-05:00

Gibbons Ruark has published his poems widely for over forty years. Among his eight collections are Keeping Company (1983), Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems (1999) and Staying Blue, a 2008 chapbook. The recipient of many awards, including three NEA Poetry Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and the 1984 Saxifrage Prize for Keeping Company, he was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, and grew up in various Methodist parsonages in the eastern part of the state. Educated at the Universities of North Carolina and Massachusetts, he taught English largely at the University of Delaware until his retirement in 2005. He lives with his wife Kay in Raleigh.

SESSION BEGINNING IN SUNLIGHT

The day’s too warm for the tart smoke of a turf fire,
Though dust motes in the sunlight are a kind of smoke,
The brass is polished, the stained-glass panels make
A gossipy row of snugs along the bar.
A shadowy hand. The fluent stick on the taut
Rim of the bodhran summons a ramrod dancer.
Suddenly deft fingers flying on the slender
Whistle. Tin. The tenor banjo’s picking out of thought,
The gaiety of flutes evaporates our cares.
One fiddle. Two. Something come apart is mending.
Heat lightning. Night coming on. Soon there will be stars
And strangely in the dark the lark ascending.
Here’s a health to these harmonious Irregulars:
Let this reel unwind the music’s only ending.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The truth is that this poem has been quietly germinating since the fall of 1981, when I heard my first session of traditional Irish music in Galway City. I’ve alluded briefly to such sessions in several poems over the years, but didn’t get around to facing one head-on until the summer of 2006, after I’d been listening in on Sunday sessions in The Hibernian in downtown Raleigh for about a year. But it was that great session in Cullen’s bar in Galway that got the inner clock ticking.

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

Oddly enough, this poem started for me as an effort to use the “haiku” stanza that Richard Wilbur has used so beautifully in a number of poems, beginning I believe with “Thyme Flowering Among the Rocks,” but after several false starts at that I gave up and fell back on the pentameter and eventually the sonnet. One of my musician friends said that he loves the way the poem “becomes” a sonnet. I hope he’s right. In any case, I believe that I have learned that anything shorter than the tetrameter line doesn’t lend itself happily to my voice. There were three or four days between the first version and the first “final” version, after which I moved from the notebook to the keyboard. But I always make a few more changes after that, and evidence of those last revisions dissolves into ether. For example, I don’t find the line “The gaiety of flutes evaporates our cares” anywhere but in the final typed text.

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

There was some sweat but no tears. Luck is the main kind of inspiration I believe in, but I always have to qualify that with a remark by Jack Nicklaus: “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”

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

The answer to the first question: By means of work and luck. To the second: Yes.

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

I suppose I finished it a good bit faster than is normal for me. Maybe that’s because it had been lying in wait so many years, and maybe I just absorbed something of the tempo of those Irish sessions.

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

Thanks to Rod Smith at Shenandoah, a little less than a year.

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 usually send poems out not long after I feel they are finished. It can take various lengths of time for that feeling to take hold.

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

I have frequently objected to the fairly common view that fiction writers are inventive, whereas poets simply tell the truth. In fact, I objected so often in the hearing of my older daughter that she gave me a T-shirt emblazoned with the words I MAKE STUFF UP. I believe that shaping one’s materials into something like a sonnet is itself a form of invention, so a “made thing,” as Leon Stokesbury calls his fine anthology, is a kind of fiction even if every word of it is fact. When X. J. Kennedy saw this poem in print, he said “Do Irish larks indeed fly by night? Bejaysus, what’s got into them?” I replied that I guessed the larks were an auditory hallucination induced by the music. But given the magical and painful distinction Shakespeare draws between the lark and the nightingale in Romeo and Juliet, my nocturnal larks might be a little hard to credit.

Is this a narrative poem?

Since the sun goes down between the beginning and the end, there is a narrative element, but I’d have to say it’s mainly a lyric poem.

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

I never read other poets while working on a poem, and in fact have often found prose to be more influential on me than poetry. Though Pound is not one of my touchstones, I love his remark that poetry ought to be at least as well written as prose.

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

The vast majority of my poems are addressed to specific people, but this one is an exception to that rule, so I might say it is addressed to anyone who wants to listen to the music with me, and it is of course for harmonious Irregulars everywhere.

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?

I don’t show unfinished work to anyone, and I show finished work only to my wife before sending it off. On one or two occasions I haven’t even done that if the poem was one for her which I wanted to be a surprise.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’ll leave that for others to say.

What is American about this poem?

Strictly speaking, the poem is set in America, but it invokes Ireland, so one could call it Irish-American.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.

Joseph Millar

2012-01-15T17:41:00.005-05:00

Joseph Millar's first collection, Overtime (2001) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University and spent twenty-five years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His work has won a fellowship for the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize. In 1997, he gave up his job as telephone installation foreman to try his hand at teaching. A new chapbook, Bestiary, is now available from Red Dragonfly Press, and a third collection, Blue Rust, will be published by Carnegie-Mellon in 2012. Millar is now core faculty at Pacific University's Low Residency MFA Program and lives in Raleigh, NC with his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux.

AMERICAN WEDDING

The yarmulke hides the bald spot on my goyische skull
as I watch my new son-in-law's size 13
stomp down on the linen-swathed wineglass.
My daughter looks radiant, no other word
for it, gowned in white satin the color of light.
We're surrounded by Jews dressed in black
like the sea, like the streets of Manhattan,
whose young men will soon bear me up
on a chair, a floating throne
over the circle clapping and singing.
I've eaten roast duck at the rehearsal dinner,
listened to the cantor's plangent tones,
stood by while the two signed the ornate
ketubah, gold-leafed promise
unschooled like a map of the world.

My small wan gaggle of distant family
clumps together next to the aisle,
divorced, remarried adopted, nervous:
our dead father's third wife coughing behind
my stepchildren, ex-wife, half brothers, motley,
ragged, one nephew wearing a baseball cap.

When the groom lifts the veil from her
delicate temples, I'm thinking someone
should warn them: a future of funerals, car
payments, taxes, kids throwing up in the night.
It's a job you mostly won't know how to do,
your naked arm deep in a jammed kitchen sink,
burnt rinds of eggplant crazily adrift.

Your children will lift their small faces
toward you and give you reason to weep,
and if you manage to stay together
there will be nights you lie down
like strangers back to back
falling away from each other in sleep.

Above us the moon looks speckled, torn,
fluttering over the courtyard and I'm dazed by the perfume rising up
from this fleshy rose pinned to my worsted lapel.
I'm swallowing down the thick nuptial wine,
getting reading to dance all night.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

It started after we got back home from New Orleans where the wedding took place. I was having a spell of sadness, a kind of dazed aftermath. I knew my daughter was kind of going away forever.

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

It went through quite a few. These narratives usually require a lot of cutting and some pasting. I had the basic scaffolding, and then I kept remembering things (the jammed kitchen sink) and fitting them in there. Maybe ten months or fifteen. Sometimes I have to keep walking around for a while when I think a poem's finished and then I will find it is not. Sometimes when I can't get an ending, I need to be alive for a little longer, to wait and be patient.

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 in inspiration and surely there must have been some of that, but the way most of this poem came was through the various avenues of memory: the Jewish wedding customs—the shattered glass, the Ketubah, the hoisted chair—they were obvious poetry. So the writing seemed like mostly conscious labor, but I had so much feeling about this, I was able to jump around fairly well.

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

Just the usual techniques of free-verse narrative. I tried to compress the syntax, make sure each line had something in it, tried to speak clearly and not overdo it...

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

It didn't appear until my second book, Fortune, came out in ‘07, maybe three years.

It was accepted by Paterson Review but I don't think they ever printed it because I failed to send them a computer disc of it, which they'd requested.

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 usually let them sit for a while. No rules but usually.

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

This poem is pretty much true to the facts. I think the spirit of a poem's truth is more important than its factual truth, but in this case the facts seemed enough.

Is this a narrative poem?

Oh yes.

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

Probably my usual influences: Sharon Olds, James Wright, Philip Levine, Nina Simone, Neil Young.

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

Usually a true friend, but sometimes an enemy or someone I don't like.

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 wife, the poet Dorianne Laux, sees all my work before I send it anywhere.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It's not that different.

What is American about this poem?

There are a few American threads running through it. The Jewish ceremony, its old-world solidarity, the speaker's sense of estrangement, his own "recombined" family riddled with death and divorce. Also, a kind of celebration of the Other and the idea that marriage is probably somewhat the same for everybody.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?
I think it's finished.

Jesse Ball

2012-01-04T17:58:00.004-05:00

Jesse Ball is a fabulist of the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. His many prizewinning works run through the fields of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and art. Most recently he is the author of The Curfew (novel) and The Village on Horseback (omnibus). He teaches lucid dreaming and general practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

LESTER, BURMA

For J.Z.

Lester and Burma were speaking gaily. He had encountered her in the hallway. Hello, he said, you certainly are a sight for sore eyes. They proceeded to a room adjoining that hall, where a large window opened onto the street. I would like to have you for supper, said Burma, and took off her dress.

I am appalled, said the doorman to the coachman, and the coachman to the gardener, at the way the young lady dosports herself. You would think she had been brought up better than that.

Burma was wearing no underwear, and her slender body looked very nice on Lester's sofa. He said so. Thank you, said Burma. I swim each day, and use fine oils. Of course you do, said Lester.

What will happen, said Lester's father to Lester's mother, when that boy gets to the big city? Who will he fall in with? Will he return in ten years' time and shower us with gifts and rememberance? Or will he, said Lester's father to Lester's sickly uncle, die from the plague like all his cousins? Perhaps he will take to the sea and become a privateer, with a letter of marque. I would like that, said the uncle. I would like that also, said Lester's father.

A cloud of bees overtook the window and screened the room for a minute. Do you think they'll harm us? asked Lester. Why, no, said Burma, they're just curious. Aren't you ever curious? Yes, quite, said Lester, laying his hand upon her thigh.

The beekeeper paused by his hives. A cloud of bees is missing, he said, to no one in particular. I hpe the little creatures aren't up to any mischief. I hope they return by dark so I can tuck them in their little beds and read them fairy tales.

At any rate, said Lester, we might at least have a look in the bedroom and see what's going on in there. Yes, said Burma, we might at least do that. Just to know for sure. The bedroom door closed softly behind them.

And when the bees returned to their hive, the beekeeper was there with glad tears and an admonishing word. He read them a story from a fine book he'd just bought, in which a boy and girl go to bed together with no other reason than that it is nice to be in bed with a boy and it is nice to be in bed with a girl and it is nice to wake up midway through a life in early evening to the buzzing of bees in an adjoining room.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

In the spring of two thousand and three. In a basement room with a glimmer of light through some sort of absurd duct poking up onto 125th street in Manhattan. I was attending graduate school at Columbia at that time.

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

None.

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

The mind runs on particular courses. Should such a course be presentable, perhaps it is a poem.

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

Delight. All labor, all love in useless, ample delight.

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

I did more of this sort of thing before March Book, and more after. Prose that isn't anything, that doesn't believe it has to be anything. It is an arrow approaching its target on foot, unannounced.

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

I believe the book appeared a year later, from Grove Press.

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 most often write in volumes, so it is a matter of the publisher's will to action.

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

Poetry is non-fiction. Poems are battle-reports fresh from the field. You must wipe the blood off them to read the hastily written words. Also, poems are inventions, having nothing to do with anything. They are like the kisses girls give to imaginary crocodiles, if such crocodiles, if such girls exist.

Is this a narrative poem?

Some would say so. But not very much happens. Do things need to happen?

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

Well, then I was mad about Proust.

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

That person who is always walking back and forth to the mailbox to see if the mail has arrived.

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?

Once things are done, I tend to show my wife. But in two thousand and three, I hadn't heard of her yet.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It ends happily.

What is American about this poem?

It continues the continent's true heritage: that arrival must extinguish something. Somewhere another poem has been snuffed out. No, I suppose, I don't find that I am particularly American. Do you have to be, just because you were born here? I like the American transcendentalist tradition. I like free thought. I like Paul Morphy and Henri Darger. That's my America.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Abandoned into print.

Corrinne Clegg Hales

2011-12-21T17:23:00.004-05:00

Corrinne Clegg Hales is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently To Make it Right, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize for 2010 (Spring 2011, Autumn House Press). Her previous books are Seperate Escapes, winner of the Richard Snyder Poetry Prize (Ashland Poetry Press) and Underground (Ahsahta Press). She has also published two chapbooks: Out of This Place (March Street Press) and January Fire (Devil's Millhopper Press), and her poems have appeared in Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Notre Dame Review and many other journals. 　Awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Devil's Millhopper Chapbook Prize and the River Styx Poetry Prize. She currently teaches in the MFA Program at California State University, Fresno.

YOUNG NUBIAN WOMAN

It is a matter of persuading them to pose,
which they fear doing . . . .
—Pierre Trémaux, 1850s
Her bare feet flat
on stone pavement, she faces
the camera almost naked.
She must be very young,
no hips, no waist, breasts
barely budding on her chest.
This is probably Egypt,
the exhibit note says, and the girl
was brought here as a slave
from central Africa.
She is caught again
at this moment on salted paper
which will give her eternal life
in European galleries
and art books, and keep her
at this age—safe as she will ever be.
It’s a kind of seduction, really,
convincing the girl that she won’t be
hurt, that she might even like it,
and placing her body just how
he wants it, gently, even tenderly,
and then asking her to be
completely still. Don’t move.
This is how I want you
to stay forever. Please
don’t move a hair. I wonder
why she complies, what she’s
thinking, and I wonder what
the photographer wants me
to see in this girl. I think
of that other photo, a hundred years
later, of a girl about this age
running, screaming, her body
on fire, down a war-pitted road
halfway around the world,
and the four seconds of film
from another war, taken
of a young mother on Saipan
who looked at a camera mounted
on a rifle stock and believed
the photographer aimed to kill her,
or worse, and in fact, he catches her
running toward the cliff
and keeps filming as she throws
her two babies and then
her own panic-driven body
into the sea, and the camera
pans down to the corpse
of a child being battered
in the water and rocks
like dirty laundry. And my own
daughter’s slim body at eleven
or twelve, how we wanted
to believe her life
was on the verge of becoming
her own—but I’m looking now
at this African girl, dark hair
chopped into straight lines
framing her face. She stares
into the future, one hand splayed
against the ancient rock wall
behind her. She stiffens,
bracing herself for the long
exposure, and her shadow,
that deformed echo,
slides down the wall.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

My husband and I went to the Getty Museum in 2001 to see an exhibit of early travel photography, and this poem began with a photograph I saw there. Pierre Trémaux was a French architect and early photographer who took many photographs, mostly of buildings, all over the world in the mid 19th century, but the pictures I found most compelling were those that he took of people--especially women. He took another more famous photograph of a kneeling woman also called "Young Nubian Woman," but the one I wrote about is a young girl standing against a wall. It’s also referred to as "Fille du Dar-four." At that time, of course, photography required an exposure of several minutes, during which the subject was obliged to remain completely motionless, and the exhibit note at the Getty contained a quote by Trémaux about his experience taking pictures of the people he encountered in his travels:

"Photographing [native] people represents great difficulties, because unlike
drawing, [photography] cannot be performed discretely. It is a matter of
persuading them to pose, which they fear doing . . . ."
I’d always been fascinated with the history of photography, and I’d recently been exploring the idea of the camera used as an implement of power--and this photograph, along with Trémaux’s comment, provoked some very complicated questions about class and cultural privilege and power.

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

Probably twenty or thirty revisions. I had trouble with it—and I tried to give up on it several times, but it just kept eating at me until I finished it. It probably took six months to write.

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

Well, I feel like "inspiration," at least for me, generally follows a lot of hard work. I wrote this poem during a period when I was obsessed with the uses of photography—reading a lot about it and looking at lots of examples. I was trying to write about what has become the art of photojournalism. I was particularly looking at war photography, and I was taking a lot of photos myself. I was trying to figure out in what ways the advent of photography might have altered our perception, might have expanded and/or limited our understanding of the world we live in. So you might say I was ready to encounter this photograph. I had done lots of pre-work. But the poem still took several months to write.

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

Well, I stayed too focused on the specific photo for a long time. I kept trying to make it all about that one girl. It wasn’t working, so I put it away and worked on other things for a while. One day, I was watching a documentary about the filmmakers who traveled with the troops during WWII. One of them told the story of watching women and children jump from the cliffs at Saipan while he was filming them, and the documentary included the actual clip. I knew instantly that belonged in this poem. And then the rest of it came pretty quickly—the strange connection with war photos seemed to be what it needed.

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

About a year. Arts & Letters published it in 2002.

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. If I’m pretty sure about it, I will send it right out. But if I have qualms, I wait for a week or two. The older I get, the less interested I am in letting them "sit" for a while. They really don’t get better with age--and I just get older while I wait. So, I tend to do my best and trust it (which doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes revise after I’ve sent something out in the mail—or even after a poem’s been published).

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

Well, obviously I knew very little about the girl in the photo, so I imagine her situation. I really don’t worry too much about negotiating that line—in any poem. There actually is such a photo; I actually do have a daughter. I start with that, but I believe that the most complex and profound truths are usually arrived at when we allow our imaginations to interact with factual truths. I also believe that facts can lie. So—many of my poems are fictional at least in part. Poetry is not autobiography, not journalism, not textbook history. I understand poetry as an imaginative art, and at this point in my life, I value the power of the imagination as much--or more--than I value any set of facts.

Is this a narrative poem?

No. I’d say it’s more like a meditation or an observational poem.

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

I remember that I was reading a lot of Susan Sontag and Wright Morris and others on the art of photography, and I was immersing myself in depression era and WWII era photography. I don’t remember what poets I was reading at the time, but I’m sure Muriel Rukeyser was in my head.

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

No. I just hope for a curious reader who has an open mind and an open heart.

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?

Oh yes. I have a few trusted readers who usually read my drafts. One of my best readers is my husband John Hales who is a creative nonfiction writer and an excellent poetry reader. He will tell me when the thing isn’t ready yet—where the problems are.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I guess it’s less apparently personal than many of my poems. I do have a tendency to write a first-person situational poem that has the feel of memoir or personal disclosure. This one doesn’t really go there except for the brief mention of a daughter.

What is American about this poem?

I’m not sure, other than it was written by an American, but I do I believe that problems of cultural dominance and appropriation are questions that many American writers struggle with.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Oh I don’t know. I’d say it was finished, but even now I see little things I’d like to change.

John Drury

2011-12-10T17:26:00.007-05:00

John Drury is the author of The Refugee Camp, which Turning Point Books published in October 2011. His other poetry collections include The Disappearing Town and Burning the Aspern Papers, both from Miami University Press. He has also written Creating Poetry and The Poetry Dictionary, both from Writer’s Digest Books. His poems have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Antioch Review, Southern Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Paris Review, which awarded him the Bernard F. Conners Prize. He teaches at the University of Cincinnati.

from THE REFUGEE CAMP

2.
Each morning I trudge uphill
to the refugee camp where I work.
Aliens huddle by the vestibule
while officials brush past,
muttering a password
to the guard at a glassed-in booth
who buzzes them—and me—
through the heavy door.
Turned back, the refugees grumble and curse,
kick cinders in the parking lot.

Everyone says they carry knives,
hands jammed in pockets,
their faces half scraped, half stubble,
women left behind
in cramped flats or muddy villages.
They stare at our questionnaires
and leave too many blanks.
I learn Do you know nothing, sir?
and See you later, mister
in languages I will never begin to fathom.

37.
In the graveyard where Dürer is buried,
the tombstones rise from the ground
like stone couches—positioned
so that boars couldn’t dig up the bodies.

Shuffling through dossiers, what
am I digging for? Border guards
mapping their barrackseasuring compounds
and barbed wire, naming each dog in the kennel?

Thinly disguised in mufti, I try
to act natural, always forgetting to air out
my herringbone suit. Our chief tells a courier
"He’s a good boy, but green."

I joined to learn German,
which I still haven’t mastered,
mumbling and sputtering
and smiling as I listen, as if I understood.

At the corner, an American tank clanks by,
jeeps blare and peel off
with a shriek of tires: an occupation
I’m part of, but don’t belong to.

40.
One day we process
a Bulgarian. Another name
to enter in the green ledger:
"No knowledgability, not
a prospective source."
Later in the week, someone knifes him
to death in his dormitory bunk.
I walk through the high-ceilinged
hallway, almost choking
on a bucket’s disinfectant,
and pick up the dossier on his case.
It doesn’t touch me
in the least. I wonder
when I last cried, and remember:
when a bus I was on
didn’t stop, and I called out,
and two girls sitting by the exit
laughed at my accent,
and the cut of my jacket,
and the redness darkening my face.

48.
On a holiday I walk uphill
toward the refugee camp, the Lager,
strolling by the garden plots alongside the path.
As I near the summit, three children
leap from their bikes
jeering lager! lager! lager! lager!
in machine gun bursts, dancing
around me in a circle
and chanting their insult:
I belong in the camp, among those who don’t belong.

I should tell them
there’s a music for the lost, a song
that cannot be stifled, celebrating those who are.
It sounds like jangling, scraping,
a hacksaw through metal. But still
it’s a song, and its dissonance is lovely.
It belies the second-hand clothing
and the stubbly beards and the stumbling.
Through the jeers, the noise of machinery, the silence,
an anthem makes itself heard.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

During my last semester in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in Spring 1980, I submitted a one-page poem called "Nuremberg" for discussion. It was heavy on culture, beginning with "I first saw Wagner’s opera / when I lived there" and ending with a reference to the sculptor Adam Kraft. I was a teaching fellow, and my office was located near the shelves where worksheets were placed for distribution. I remember hearing two of my fellow poets, whose voices I could recognize, picking up their copies and browsing through the drafts. One of them, Maria Flook, noticed the title of my poem and grumbled, "Just like him to write about something important!" Her companion, who apparently knew my office was around the corner, tried to shush her, but she was always forthright in expressing her opinions, and I’m glad she was, because it turned out to be especially useful criticism for me to hear. I realized that I wasn’t talking about why I was living in Nuremberg and that I needed to establish my credentials so I didn’t come off as a cultural tourist. I had spent a year and a half in Zirndorf, a suburb of Nuremberg, living in the attic of a rooming house and working undercover in an American liaison office of the West German Refugee Center, but at this point the poem had nothing to do with my personal life as a low-level spy for Military Intelligence. Thanks to Maria’s overheard comment, I realized that I had to write about the refugees and my relationship to them. But I still wanted to write about the city, where I spent a lot of my free time, as well as its medieval walls and towers, half-timbered houses, churches, museums, brothels, concert halls, shops, restaurants, and history. I didn’t want to dump the reference to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; I actually wanted to spend more time spinning out variations on that musical theme, which I took personally, since it was about a guild of poets. I needed more room beyond a single page, so gradually (since it takes time for me to absorb criticism) I started thinking about expanding the poem into a sequence. I put "Nuremberg" at the end of my MA thesis with the idea that it would suggest the direction in which I might be heading.

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

It would be hard to count the number of revisions, since I soon started adding sections and shuffling the order and didn’t finish the sequence until almost twenty-five years later. So I was generating and revising individual pieces and also moving them around, sort of like a film editor splicing snippets into a montage. I made lists of things I wanted to write about, but sections cropped up willy-nilly, not according to any plan other than a desire to include as much as I could, to be maximal rather than minimal.

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

Yes, I like being ambushed by memory and imagination, and I do what I can to be vulnerable to those surprise attacks. But I also did a good deal of research. I read several books about the history of Nuremberg, and those sources are listed in the book’s extensive section of notes. I kept a journal while I was living in Zirndorf from December 1971 through May 1973, but there were way too many gaps that I needed to fill. Some of the things I remembered most vividly I did not record in my journal. After graduation, I didn’t have a job, so in September I jumped at an opportunity to teach at University of Maryland campuses on military bases in Europe. On a weekend while I was teaching at Ramstein Air Force Base in Kaiserslautern, I made a trip to Nuremberg so I could take notes and revisit the refugee camp in Zirndorf. Several years later, after my first year of teaching at the University of Cincinnati, I received a Taft Travel Grant and returned to the city. I heard that one member of the selection committee was skeptical about my project, saying "It sounds like he wants a grant so he can stroll around!" And that’s exactly what I wanted—and what poetic research often entails—a chance to make observations and see what emerges. Of course, I also did some fact-checking, but some of my questions were admittedly peculiar. I remember going up to an "Information" desk and asking, in German, "Are there swans in the area?" In a draft of one section, I had used an image of swans gliding on a lake near the Nazi Party’s rally grounds, but I wasn’t sure they could be found there. The clerk gave me an astonished look and said, "Living?"

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

After my trip to Nuremberg in November 1980, I started adding sections, jotting down some on the pages of pocket notebooks, some on lined yellow paper, one on a napkin from Dunkin’ Donuts, and others in the margins of typed drafts, letting the material accumulate. My practice has always been to compose poems in longhand and then type them up. As for technique, I was "playing it by ear." I wanted to make the facts lyrical.

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

My working method was like constructing a jigsaw puzzle the wrong way—cutting odd-shaped pieces and struggling to make them fit into a coherent whole—and then making new pieces that required an even bigger whole. It was also analogous to the method of sewing together a patchwork quilt, which involves selecting the right scraps, for variety’s sake and harmony, in the first place.

The excerpts here all concern refugees, and I’d like to talk about how I drafted and revised those passages in particular. Section 2 began as penned additions to a typed copy of "Nuremberg." I wrote a line establishing what I was doing there ("I worked in the refugee camp in a suburb") and added lines about how "Aliens huddled outside." I numbered each of the two sections I had in progress. At that point, I had written about ten lines of the new section, but it’s hard to tell exactly how many, because it was all messy, with slash marks inserted where breaks should go. Later I added the italicized translations of phrases I had learned in Hungarian and Polish. Section 37 began on a lined sheet where I was working on the bagpipe section (which became number 10). I skipped down a couple of lines and started writing about Albrecht Dürer’s tombstone. I don’t know if I meant it as a continuation or a jump, but the material that went into different sections often came up in adjacent bursts, fragments I had to sift through and separate. Originally, section 37 was simply an unbroken block of lines. I typed up the first nine and dropped the rest. Then I added new lines in pen, along with an arrow and a bracket to show where different parts should go. On the same sheet, there’s also an x-ed out passage that I deleted and a circled passage with the note, "New section?" Originally, section 40 began with a passage about cutting myself shaving: "Dabs of a styptic pencil on my chin / are all I can show / for grief." But after eight rhetorical, overblown lines, I came up with the simple, direct "One day a Bulgarian / was processed through our office." Section 48 combined two separate sections, one beginning "On a holiday, on a whim, / I trudged uphill to the center" and the other beginning "There’s a song / that cannot be smothered."

I should mention that I also jettisoned a number of possible sections, such as one about crumpling newspapers in a fireplace back in the States while thinking about Wagner’s opera, and I rejected a lot of passages that contained extraneous details or windy philosophizing. Before I figured out where new sections belonged, I labeled them "*" or "#." The construction was modular and the overall arrangement improvised, based on contrasts and a sense of the flow.

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

Carolyn Forché accepted a thirty-part version of the sequence for an American Writers Abroad issue of Open Places that she guest-edited in Winter 1986/87. The magazine is now defunct, but it came out of Stephens College in Missouri and was edited by Eleanor Bender. I should mention that Leslie Adrienne Miller was the reader who liked "The Refugee Camp" enough to send it on to the guest editor. As it turned out, the sequence wasn’t finished, and I went on to add eighteen more sections. My first impulse was to write a companion sequence of prose poems, called "The Golden Funnel," but eventually I realized that it would seem anticlimactic to give the reader another sequence on the same subject. I had to integrate all of the sections, both verse and prose. A merger was required. That actually upset the main formal principle of the free-verse: each section contained twenty lines that were arranged in couplets, quatrains, five-line stanzas, ten-line stanzas, or a twenty-line block. I’m obsessive-compulsive, so I made sure that the sequence contained an equal number of sections in the different stanzaic arrangements. Adding an equal number of prose poems didn’t really disrupt the numerological scheme. If anything, I figured that prose poems would emphasize the variety. In the finished sequence, I made sure that no adjacent sections were in the same "form." I did break up some of the original prose poems into verse, but I can no longer tell which ones, so I guess the transformations were successful. There is, in fact, a little bit of meter and rhyme in the sequence. One of the sections I count as "prose" actually mixes in some verse (as in several poems by Yehuda Amichai), and those stanzas are in song form, with each fourth line serving as a refrain. The section (number 6) was originally published as "Interrupted Song." A number of the other prose sections also appeared in periodicals under individual titles. The most recent section, number 36 (which begins "Note how a man walks carefully"), came to me originally as an entirely separate poem, but I saw how it fit in with the rest, so I cut it down to twenty lines and found a place for it. The sequence reached more or less its final form in about 2004, when Richard Howard chose it for the Paris Review Prize and it was supposed to be published, along with a long-lined coda called "Crossing the Border," by Zoo Press.

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 get so excited that I send new poems out almost immediately. I don’t like letting them sit. That’s obviously going to be premature in many cases, but I feel it’s also part of my long-term revision process. When poems come back, I take a hard look. Sometimes I’ll send them right back out again, but many times I put them back in the shop and pull them apart. Rejection might as well be helpful instead of merely hurtful.

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

The sequence is based on personal stories that are mostly true. The facts about the city of Nuremberg, the town of Zirndorf, the West German Refugee Center, and the music drama of Wagner are accurate, but I do give myself a lot of leeway and liberty. Some of the poems are dream sequences (sections 29, 31, and 36), many elaborate on Nuremberg history (such as section 10, which is about the story behind the statue of a bagpiper), one is an imagined interrogation in which a refugee does most of the talking (section 16), and some are out of proper time sequence. The episode in the last section, for example, actually happened when I returned to Zirndorf in 1980 to conduct some research. It seemed like the perfect way to end the sequence, so I felt justified in including it, even though the actual experience occurred beyond the time-frame of my work at the refugee camp. My journal notes, however, differ from what I finally used:

2 boys rode directly at me on their bikes, making machine gun noises &
taunting me "Lager! Lager! Lager!" as if I lived in the refugee camp.

The "2 boys" became "three children" because I wanted more of a gang circling me but also wanted to emphasize how young they were, how some might be boys and some girls. I originally had three "Lagers" but it sounded wrong, not enough like machine-gun fire, so on a later draft I penned in an extra "Lager." I was actually thinking of how, in "I Can See for Miles," the Who sing an extra "miles and" before the end, one more repetition than the listener would expect. I thought it would sound better for a song whose "dissonance is lovely."

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, it’s a fractured narrative.

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

At Iowa, in a seminar on long poems, we had read W.D. Snodgrass’s "Heart’s Needle" and I was thinking about how Snodgrass put personal matters in a historical context, his divorce against the backdrop of the Korean War. I admired how he gave each section its own stanzaic form, and although I didn’t emulate his use of meter and rhyme, I did make a point of varying the free-verse stanzas in the sections of my sequence. I was thinking of Robert Lowell’s sequences too, from "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" and "Life Studies" to History and The Dolphin. I was also conscious of Yehuda Amichai’s blending of the personal and the public. The first draft of section 40 (which then, in a much shorter sequence, was number 10) originally had an epigraph by Amichai: "When did I last weep?" from his poem "To Summon Witnesses." In the sequence itself, I mention Pound’s Cantos, and I was thinking of that mixed bag as well, partly as a cautionary tale so I didn’t strain to make it too "important."

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

Each poem feels like a message in a bottle that may, with luck, find a sympathetic reader. I’m curious about other people’s experiences myself, so I try to do what I can to make what I’m saying, observing, and recounting interesting and compelling.

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?

When the germ of the sequence appeared on the worksheet at Iowa, my classmates gave me some helpful suggestions. A couple of my fellow poets thought the poem should "start later," but they disagreed about where to begin. I deleted some of the opening material, moved some down, and put the thirteenth line at the top. But then I inserted two new lines above that as a kind of establishing shot, "In the ruined city / of toymakers and singing guilds," and continued, "they were so fanatical…" Some people wanted me to "compress this catalogue," but I went the other way and expanded the poem.

I have belonged to several poetry groups through the years, but it seemed like too much material to foist on my friends for one of our get-togethers, and I didn’t want to break up the developing sequence into fragments when I had other new drafts to share, so I worked pretty much in private. Later on, when I was writing a poem that eventually became the final piece of the proverbial puzzle and fit into place as section 36, my friend Pat Mora helped me cut it down to the 20-line standard.

As I look through a spiral notebook in which I kept a record of my submissions, I notice that soon after my graduation from Iowa I sent the one-page poem, "Nuremberg," to Richard Howard, who was then editing Shenandoah. He rejected it, although he did accept a poem called "Publication of the Bride Sheets" at the same time. Several years later, I sent him a twenty-page version for Shenandoah, and his rejection letter gave me the best advice I ever received about the sequence:

Of course it is not magazine verse at all, and can only be dealt with as a
whole, not pieced apart and published in fragments. And it gets better as it
goes on, much better—the first half, really, is too direct, too immediate, and
offers too little resistance (poetically, even prosodically) to the intensity of
your message. The second half seems more varied and "right" in its verbal cast, but the total effect is a little like the sound of one hand beating the shit out of the reader. Can’t you vary the pieces a little more, so that some might be
seen as lyrical and celebratory, thereby casting the others into an even
stronger mode? As it is, the achievement of each section is too much like that of each other section, in its intention, in its meaning. Perhaps the ironies are too heavily underlined, and perhaps, too, one needs a stronger sense of the
place—its geography, geology, some of which you brush by far too readily—it
seems to me there’s lots more in here than you have "extracted," but of course it is very impressive too: I should like to see what will become of it if you brood over it more…

I did brood over it more, and tried to vary the sections more, and allowed myself to be more celebratory. Richard Howard’s comments made me more dissatisfied with the poem and yet more encouraged too. When I finally started submitting the completed book manuscript to contests, he was the judge who chose it. But the press went out of business in a fiasco that was the subject of a Poets & Writers article, "The Collapse of Neil Azevedo’s Zoo," so I had to start submitting it all over again, and it took several years for it to get accepted a second time.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s much longer, of course, but the main difference is that I kept on adding to it even after it was published in a magazine.

What is American about this poem?

It’s the Henry James theme of the American ingénue in Europe. And I was reading James while I was living there, so the influence is conscious.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It was released, like a motion picture. The sequence is now entirely on its own, but the material still has a claim on me, and I’m currently revising a memoir, The Bad Soldier, that explores those experiences in narrative prose that it is not so fractured.

Denise Duhamel

2011-12-03T15:03:00.005-05:00

Denise Duhamel is the author, most recently, of Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005) and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001). A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.

NO HOME-WRECKER

When I was twenty, I kissed a man
much older than I was. My drunk hand found
a strange indent and lump of flesh
on the back of his waist, an extra little potbelly.
I quickly moved my fingers away and grabbed
onto his shoulder instead. After the kiss,
the man immediately told me he was married. For years
my memory had it that I slapped him and left the party,
a friend's cramped Beacon Hill apartment.
But now I think what happened
is that he began to cry, just slightly, so that at first
I thought his wet eyes had something to do with an allergy.
Then he said he really loved his wife and needed
air. We took baby steps, holding hands,
through the slippery cobblestone streets,
snow settling on my eyelashes, in his beard.
We slipped into a diner where our coats and scarves
dripped puddles onto the floor.
He told me a long story about married life--
her chemotherapy, how he'd just lost his job.
I sobered up and looked at my plate of pale scrambled eggs,
what I imagined cancer looked like,
what I imagined fat looked like under the skin.
I poked my fork around, curious
to see that spare tire, that love handle of his.
He kept blowing his nose, his cheeks fat and pink
like the soles of a newborn's feet.
The rest of him looked lean in his wooly sweater,
then he seemed to shrink even smaller
as he put back on his oversized overcoat to walk me home.
I felt rejected when he left me at my door
and disappeared into a flurry, thanking me for listening.
The story I told my friends who were at the party
was that OK, he was kind of cute, but I was
no home-wrecker. The story I told myself
was that I'd have never done anything like that--
his wife had cancer for god's sake.
Now that I look back, the man was probably only
in his late thirties, about the age I am now.
He had no money so I wound up covering our diner check,
emptying the last of my change on the table for too small a tip.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in 1998 and, if I remember correctly, the genesis of it was started in free writing, something I’m very fond of doing.

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

I don’t save all my drafts, though I know I should. I remember at some point the poem was longer and more talky and embellished. At one point it may have even been a prose poem. Maybe this poem developed over a couple of months.

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 in inspiration and the muse. But I also believe you have to meet her halfway, show up everyday whether she shows up or not. As a writer, you (I mean, I suppose, I) have to be there to receive her whims. I write a lot of pages that never wind up in poems. When I reread my free writing, often a draft of a poem is there proceeded and followed by gibberish or cliché or nonsense. Then I excavate the draft and begin revising. I don’t believe in sweat and tears associated with writing because I love writing so much. I think of it as high-octane play and fun.

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

The poem arrived with some line breaks—but with a lot of chat that had to go. I tried the poem in prose, but I thought the first line played well against the title, reversing the title if you will, so I settled on lines. Other than that I didn’t try anything too clever with the line breaks…I think at some point I had "We slipped" moved up to end line sixteen to get in sin and sex and innuendo, but then thought better of it. Instead I phrased the lines by breath and hesitation. I wasn’t writing very much formal poetry at the time, but there are internal rhymes throughout.

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

About two to three years. I just checked my notes and it was rejected four times before it was accepted to Harvard Review.

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 usually like to wait a couple of months between when I think a poem is finished before I send it out. Sometimes there is something glaringly wrong or embarrassing in a poem that I don’t catch in the flurry and joy of writing it.

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

This poem is about memory and faulty memory and the stories we tell ourselves until we can face our truths.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes.

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

In 1998 I was probably constantly reading Ai and Sharon Olds.

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

Yes, a friend of mine. We don’t share our poems anymore, but we did for years and I always think of her after I write a poem and imagine her reading it.

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, I would have shown this poem to my friend at the time. We used to let each other read all our poems before sending them out in the world. We didn’t really even critique so much as to affirm to each other that we’d written what we’d written.

What is American about this poem?

The setting, the diner, the disclosure.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I say finished.

Stuart Dischell

2011-11-27T16:42:00.003-05:00

Stuart Dischell is the author of four books of poetry: Backwards Days (Penguin, 2007), Dig Safe (Penguin, 2003), Evenings & Avenues (Penguin, 1996), and Good Hope Road, a National Poetry Series Selection (Viking, 1993). His poems have appeared widely in periodicals, including The Atlantic, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, and Slate and in anthologies such as Hammer and Blaze, The Pushcart Prize: the Best of the Small Presses, Good Poems, and Essential Pleasures. He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the North Carolina Arts Council. He teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

DAYS OF ME

When people say they miss me,
I think how much I miss me too,
Me, the old me, the great me,
Lover of three women in one day,
Modest me, the best me, friend
To waiters and bartenders, hearty
Laugher and name rememberer,
Proud me, handsome and hirsute
In soccer shoes and shorts
On the ball fields behind MIT,
Strong me in a weightbelt at the gym,
Mutual sweat dripper in and out
Of the sauna, furtive observer
Of the coeducated and scantily clad,
Speedy me, cyclist of rivers,
Goose and peregrine falcon
Counter, all season venturer,
Chatterer-up of corner cops,
Groundskeepers, mothers with strollers,
Outwitter of panhandlers and bill
Collectors, avoider of levies, excises,
Me in a taxi in the rain,
Pressing my luck all the way home.

That's me at the dice table, baby,
Betting come, little Joe, and yo,
Blowing the coals, laying thunder,
My foot on top a fifty dollar chip
Some drunk spilled on the floor,
Dishonest me, evener of scores,
Eager accepter of the extra change,
Hotel towel pilferer, coffee spoon
Lifter, fervent retailer of others'
Humor, blackhearted gossiper,
Poisoner at the well, dweller
In unsavory detail, delighted sayer
Of the vulgar, off course belier
Of the true me, empiric builder
Newly haircutted, stickerer-up
For pals, jam unpriser, medic
To the self-inflicted, attorney
To the self-indicted, petty accountant
And keeper of the double books,
Great divider of the universe
And all its forms of existence
Into its relationship to me,
Fellow trembler to the future,
Thin air gawker, apprehender
Of the frameless door.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

"Days of Me" was written in 1996. It was provoked by a telephone interchange with David Rivard several years, after I moved from Boston to Greensboro. David had said, "We miss you here" and I responded "I miss me too." Some months later, that banter came back to me, so I began a draft with it, and I was lucky and the poem just took off from there.

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

This one did not go through many revisions. When I wrote it, I wrote it all the way through to the ending. I remember encouraging myself not to stop. The revisions were minimal: punctuation, syntax.

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

You prepare yourself by "laboring" as Yeats remarked. When you labor well, you are in good shape for when a poem comes to you. If you are out of shape and have not done your laboring, you can easily lose the poem.

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

The poem is comprised of forty-eight lines. The first stanza is twenty-three and the second twenty-five. I stuck with the line length as I had originally composed it.

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

I was still working on a typewriter and I remember having to use a second sheet of paper.

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

It appeared about a year later in Slate on November 6, 1997.

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 depends on the poem. Ideally, it sits until its characteristics become more evident. Sometimes, though, I just have to get the poem out of the house for awhile.

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

I might get in too much trouble in regard to this one.

Is this a narrative poem?

Nope. A lyric. Its movement in large part is incremental.

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

Nicanor Parra.

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

Sometimes it’s someone I am in love with. Other times it’s Donald Justice and Jon Anderson, my dead teachers.

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?

Steven Cramer, Stephen Dobyns, Marie Howe, Thomas Lux, Robert Pinsky, Tony Hoagland, David Rivard, Alan Shapiro, and Tom Sleigh have suffered through my drafts over the years. I’m not sure which ones saw "Days of Me" in manuscript.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’m not sure it does.

What is American about this poem?

Its details and use of enumeration.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.

Sarah Arvio

2011-11-15T13:31:00.007-05:00

Sarah Arvio, a poet and translator, has lived in Mexico, Paris, Caracas, Rome and New York. Her first two books, Sono: cantos and Visits from the Seventh (Knopf 2002 and 2006), won her the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. A third book, Night Thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis, is forthcoming from Knopf in January 2013. Poems have been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and many other journals; several have been set to music. New works include translations of poems by Antonella Anedda in Chicago Review’s special Italian issue and in the forthcoming FSG Book of 20th Century Italian Poetry. For many years a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she has also recently taught poetry at Princeton.

ANIMAL

I am very nervous in myself I
was always nervous as an animal
angling for its home and then homing in

toward a home but never finding it I
was that sort of lost animal although
animals are rarely lost we are lost

as they are not we are the burrowers
in our own dark mud when oh the light and
so on not to be dark or obtuse when

the light is wonderful this wonder that
we should be so dark and lost and the world
was designed to be a home for us or

were we merely its bad accident oh
this we came to its great beauty to mar
and obscure or this we came randomly

without meaning or message brought along
by hunger viciousness oh the beauty
that we never saw or that the vicious

never saw but speaking of myself I
tried to live in beauty but found it hard
even harrowing we are made to drive

at joy but not to strike and when we strike
we miss I am nervous as I said I
wanted all I struck at it and didn’t

hit or battered wildly and got a hit
only enough to make me hit again
lost hunter sad animal homing so

Author Statement:

I swear by inspiration, and my poems have often come to me in a breath. "Animal" was both "received" and the result of tears—but not sweat. I wrote it in a moment of pain and anger, suddenly, around midnight one night, in about ten minutes.

After the first sweep of writing, I wrote some notes in the margin and then changed the lines as follows:

tried to live beautifully but found it hard [change "beautifully" to "in beauty"]

hit or battered wildly and got a strike [change "strike" to "hit"]
only enough to make me strike again [change "strike" to "hit"]
lost hunter sad animal stricken soul [change "stricken to "homing"]

About two weeks later I typed the poem again, changing

was so designed to be a home for us or
were we merely its bad accident oh (sic)

to:

was designed to be a home for us or
were we merely its bad accident oh

Then it was done.

I feel that I run a risk by confessing that I write poems this way: someone might answer: well, you should have tried harder. For years I worked on poems endlessly, the same ones over and over. The Lowell/Bishop mode was an ideal—sensible, classical. But my labored-over poems did not come to life. One day I heard some words and began writing fast as though I were taking dictation: there was a poem. Since then, I’ve worked this way, concentrated on not trying.

Sometimes I’ve been too rushed to pick up a pen when I’ve heard lines on their way, and regretted the loss endlessly afterward.

Sometimes months or even years go by and I’ve written nothing. Then I’ll have a splurge. Or sometimes I try and try anyway, and nothing comes of it.

Like most of my poems, "Animal" is written in ten-syllable lines. Long ago, I taught myself to hear lines of ten, avoiding the regular beat of pentameter—and my poems fall into that shape—a sound shape. I’ve noticed that the stress often falls on the first and last syllables of the line. And sometimes the stress seems to be caused by the line break, as in "its bad accident oh."

"Animal" was part of a splurge of poems I wrote in the winter of ‘08, among them "Small War," "Shrew," "Gosling," "Rat Idyll," "Neck" and "Sage."

I’ve shared my poems over the years with friends who are poets; these I showed only to editors. I sent them out right away, and two were taken for publication. Several months later, I saw a notice about the Boston Review annual poetry contest, which was offering $1500. I had never before entered such a contest but—short on cash—I decided to try it. I sent five poems; they were published later that year.

The judge, John Koethe, wrote a short introduction. In it, he said my poems are not autobiographical. This delighted and liberated me but isn’t true: every word I write is autobiographical, meaning that the feelings, images, stories and words come from my own experience—which includes what I know of the culture.

Writing "Animal," I was upset about the complicated destructiveness of people; I was wondering how we could be so different from the animals, so different from the marvelous natural world. But this is a sort of Rilkean myth: the real truth is that animals are as vicious and warlike and desperate as humans and we have no way of knowing how complex their thoughts are; we don’t know what they think or do not think as they run up a tree or lope across a field—despite scientific efforts to determine that.

But one thing is true: animals live in harmony with the environment, generally not destroying it, whereas most extant human cultures are wreaking havoc on the natural world, the habitat of animals. The poem is about longing for a home and wrecking our home.

I think I mean this both environmentally and psychologically: how many of us have self-destructive and life-destructive tendencies, wrecking the comforts of the home of the self and the comforts of the home. What drives us? Hunger, viciousness? I notice I didn’t say "desire": and yet, hunger is a kind of desire.

I’m baffled by the difficult complexity of the mind—or the soul—not sure what to call this—as a condition of life.

Evoking the beauty of the world, I lament that living here, in the world, and in beauty, has been hard. Then the poem turns away from beauty toward joy—which are equivalents, beauty in the seen world being what joy is in the world of the heart.

And then I return to that sense of myself as a lost sad animal searching for a home—though of course I have already negated that animals are lost. So that seems to be the circle or paradox of the poem.

I want people to read my poems—people who are readers, even people who are not necessarily readers of poetry— to read them and feel moved. Since I want to feel moved when I read a poem, this is what I hope for in my readers: a kind of inner shapeshifting.

Yes, American—this poem and "Wood" may be the most American poems I’ve written. American in that they make no allusions or references to other cultures—except that the language carries references—words carry their origins.

I came to live in Maryland not long before I wrote "Animal," after many years in New York and Europe. I’m near the creeks of the Chesapeake, and surrounded by woods and fields and animals: just yesterday I saw a red-tailed fox crossing a field.

The poem is not written in American plain speech. Despite the spoken-word spontaneity, there are many Latinate words—animal, nervous, design, obtuse, randomly, viciousness, beauty, message—suggesting that the poem is conceptual—as well as being concretely heartbroken.
Animal is from anima, meaning breath, soul. The poem is about that. It is about me—my breath—my presence as an animal on this earth.

It strikes me that the poem is breathless, barely giving you a pause to take a breath.
The poem might be called a lament—with lyrical and narrative elements. Music and talking or telling. Talking in a musical way? A lament is also a monologue.

The narrative is spare, a few remarks about my sense of my self in the world. I am nervous and looking for a home; I am a lost animal; animals are not lost, we are lost. The world is wonderful, why do we destroy it, what drives us to destroy it? I tried to live in beauty and joy but found it hard; I am a lost animal looking for a home.

Since it is so spare, the emphasis falls on the lyrical aspects.
I’m analyzing my poem as though I were a newcomer to it; these are not thoughts I have as I write.

How does this poem differ from others of mine?

It feels rougher and more abandoned—in the sense of uninhibited. I may be using this word because I glimpse the word "abandoned," with its other and wholly different meaning, in the next question.

I do abandon poems, but those are usually not the ones I publish. Every now and then I come across an abandoned poem in my files and rescue it.

Leslie Harrison

2011-11-03T19:26:00.004-04:00

Leslie Harrison's first book, Displacement, won the Bakeless Prize in poetry in 2008 and was published in 2009 by Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She is a 2011 recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was the Roth Resident in Poetry at Bucknell University in 2010. She has poems published recently or forthcoming from West Branch, Memorious, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, FIELD, Antioch Review and elsewhere. She lives in a tiny house in a tiny town in rural western Massachusetts.

THE DAY BEAUTY DIVORCED MEANING

Their friends looked shocked—said not
possible, said how sad. The trees carried on
with their treeish lives—stately except when
they shed their silly dandruff of birds. And
the ocean did what oceans mostly do—
suspended almost everything, dropped one
small ship, or two. The day beauty divorced
meaning, someone picked a flower, a fight,
a flight. Someone got on a boat.
A closet lost its suitcases. Someone
was snowed in, someone else on. The sun
went down and all it was, was night.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

My notes say I started this poem in 2004. I began drafting it while living in Irvine, CA. Most of my poems seem to start in some strange matrix of interests and obsessions, and this one was no different.

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

Though poems often start with an idea or a few lines scrawled in a journal, I move them pretty quickly to the computer. I'm a much faster typist than I am when I'm writing by hand, and some poems come very quickly. Even on the keyboard I struggle to get it all down before it fades away. My pattern, once it is on the computer, is to write until I stall, then re-read, and then want to change something. I select all, copy, and paste above the (now) previous version, make the change and go on from there. This happens sometimes dozens of times in the space of a single working session.

I work on it like that until it feels like I have something. Then I'll let it sit, and come back to the document a number of times until the poem on the page comes as close as I can get it.

I workshopped this poem at Irvine, but it seemed mostly done at that point, with four revisions in the file. I remember one more round of revision before I sent it out for publication, so probably a year or so elapsed between the first "public" draft and the "finished" poem.

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 in inspiration. I have had the experience of sitting down at the computer and walking away some time later and not knowing how much time has elapsed or even where/when I was. And then I read what I wrote and it seems like it didn't even come from me, like I'm reading something someone else wrote, something I don't even understand. My friends and I have joked for years that when I write something in this kind of thrall, I usually have to flee the scene—literally leave the room (and sometimes the house) because this process, this happening, is both magical and frightening.

This poem began in that kind of moment—I looked back at the original file and the bones of the published poem are there from the very first draft on the computer.

But always both before and beyond the inspiration is the craft, the practice. And I did revise, as I do most of the poems I write.

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

During the revision process, I remember thinking that it seemed to want to be a sonnet, and trying to inch it in that direction. I also remember that there were a ton of slant and straight rhymes, and wanting to make them fall at the ends of lines and in regular (sort of) patterns. But in the end, I had the courage to let the poem be what it wanted to be—something not quite anything other than itself. When Eavan Boland wrote the preface to Displacement, I was shocked that she saw the old sonnet bones in the poem. Delighted, but weirdly discomfited, as if I'd been caught in revealing clothing in public.

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

This poem was part of a packet I sent to POOL. It is memorable because it was one of the very rare instances in which the first journal to get the poem accepted it. It appeared in 2006, so I would say at most a few months elapsed between when it was finished and when it was accepted.
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 no rules. Some poems I'm more sure of than others—more sure they've reached their final form, more sure that an editor might look kindly upon them, more sure they might survive on their own in the vasty world. These get sent out whenever I get a submission together. Other poems I've never sent out, or have waited years to send.

Which is not to say anything leaps from the laptop to the submission pile. I am, maybe, the world's worst submitter. On average, I manage one or two submissions a year, and some years, not a single poem goes out the door. When you understand that most submissions end in failure, in disappointment, you begin to develop an aversion reaction to actually doing submissions. And when you regularly work 2-5 jobs, the precious poetry time is more often taken up with writing itself rather than with the business of writing.

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

This poem seems to work the way a lot of my poems do—as a kind of fiction masquerading as fact. Fiction dressed up as fact for the costume ball with its sequined mask and slinky dress, so it can sneak in the door and dance with all the true things poems always wants to dance with. But isn't this what metaphor is, in a way, fiction masquerading as fact seducing truth?

Is this a narrative poem?

I guess if you mean does it tell a "real world" story in some kind of order then, umm, nope. I'm never sure what is meant by "narrative" though, and I think all my poems are narrative, and in this case, the book as a whole is also a narrative. It has always been my hope that one of the things poetry does well is find new ways of arriving at and traveling through narrative. I love poems that pretend they are not narratives and when you get to the end you realize you have, in fact, been told a story.

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

Oh, this is going to be a long answer. I think I said earlier that poems often form in a mash-up of whatever the current obsessions are. I know I was reading Heidegger, specifically his Poetry, Language, Thought, which talks a lot about beauty and truth. And I was also reading a copy of the journal Gulf Coast, in which, in an essay, someone linked the ideas of beauty and meaning. Usually we see beauty and truth together, courtesy of both Keats and Heidegger, but I remember thinking, "huh," about the pairing of beauty and meaning. That pairing interested me a lot.

This is what I loved best about grad school. People would constantly recommend reading, and I had the time and the access to a great library, so I would get and read pretty much whatever anyone suggested. I'd be reading several books at once, and so much swirls round in the foggy nebula when that happens. I think I was also reading some theory book about representation that Jim McMichael recommended, probably either The Nature of Representation, or maybe Rural Scenes and National Representation.

How those pieces accumulated or are present in the poem is a trickier question. I think I wanted to write some theoretical or at least thoughtful philosophical poem about beauty and meaning, and, well, this poem happened.

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

In the past I would have said I write for the absent beloved, and he was my ideal reader—generous and inclined to warmly receive, but with mad skills of his own, so able to point out flaws and areas of concern. But there is no longer any such person (that was another country/ and besides...). Now I think I write poems as little messages folded into boat-like shapes, tossed off sinking ships meant to come as treasure and comfort to distant shores. Now my poems are tiny ambassadors, love letters in the sense of Frost's lover's quarrel with the world. And it is into the world I send them, but not, I think, for the world I write them.

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?

There used to be a group of people with whom I shared work, and in this case, it was shared with my workshop at Irvine, as well as a couple of other trusted readers, but lately I do not share poems in that way. It seems that if, as I did, you go through a creative writing program, you are taught to write your first book. We have mentors, and classmates and friends and we are all learning and reading at a furious rate and we are all being taught because we don't know much. We learn a little bit about the tiny engines that are poems, and we begin to write poems. But after the first book, for me, it has felt like I had to start all over again and teach myself how to write, which is to say I had to teach myself how to write my poems. And that is something you can get a little help with, but mostly you're on your own.

I still count on friends and mentors to talk about poetry and recommend books, and when they do see a draft and have input, I find it useful, but that is more rare now, as it feels like I'm on my own path and most of my friends are on their own journeys too. My pattern for the last couple of years is to put a draft up on my blog, which is by invitation only, and leave it up for a day or so. I think that serves one of the key functions of trusted readers—it moves the poem somehow from its interior space of creation a little into the public and that adds just enough distance to let me see it a bit more clinically and clearly.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

There is something gently tongue-in-cheek about this poem, which is highly unusual for me. By which I mean I was writing this poem after a real-world divorce, and the opening lines of the poem come directly from that experience. I've always found this poem hilarious because of that little private joke. I don't think I've done anything similar before or since.

What is American about this poem?

Well, everything I suppose. I've lived abroad a couple of times, but I have mostly lived here, and my education is/was here and the contemporary poetry I read is predominantly American, so it seems very American to me. But that is not to say it is only American. I hope.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. Until it isn't.

I have this fantasy of someday taking a bunch of old poems from a bunch of previous books (that is my favorite part, the part where I have a bunch of previous books), and rewriting them all for a "new" book. I also have this fantasy of finding one poem and rewriting and including it in all subsequent books. I love the idea of poems evolving as the craft evolves, as I get better at it, as my preoccupations change—poems as mutable objects.

Ellen Bass

2011-10-08T17:30:00.003-04:00

Ellen Bass's poetry includes The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press) which was named a Notable Book of 2007 by the San Francisco Chronicle and Mules of Love (BOA, 2002) which won the Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the groundbreaking No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973). Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Progressive, The Kenyon Review and many other journals. Among her awards for poetry are a Pushcart Prize, the Elliston Book Award, The Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod/Hardman, the Larry Levis Prize from The Missouri Review, and the New Letters Prize. Her nonfiction books include Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth and Their Allies (HarperCollins, 1996), I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1983) and The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988, 2008). She teaches in the low-residency MFA writing program at Pacific University.

WHEN THE YOUNG GENETICIST WAS ASKED, "AREN’T YOU WORRIED ABOUT THE IMPLICATIONS OF YOUR WORK?" WITH A TOSS OF HER SUN-STREAKED HAIR, SHE DECLARED, "NO, NOT AT ALL. I CAN’T WAIT TO FUCK A CLONE."
　
Oh flawed species,
who has fashioned spears from saplings,
notched points of flint, sliced
the coral flesh of the salmon,
pounded tapa from the inner bark of the mulberry.

With heavy brains balanced
on slender stalks of spine, we have gazed
through ground glass, listening
for the music still humming
from the violent birth of the universe.

Deeply imperfect species, soaring
into the noon sky like a silver god, bursting
the four-chambered hearts, the humble intestines,
of people we've never shared a cup of tea with, breath
of steam rising between us.

Wondrous species riddled with greed,
steeped in cruelty, still stitching
one life to another with bone needle.
After all these voyages around the sun
we continue to lie down together, swim

in the small oceans of each other's irises,
mothers drunk on the fragrance
of one damp scalp. Strangers break down
the doors of fiery buildings for each other,
siphon blood from their own swollen veins.

Meanwhile, flounder genes have been slipped
into strawberries to keep them from freezing,
a bit of jellyfish glows in rabbits in the dark.
Now we are poised to alter our children.
First, to cure.

Then a fine glass needle to inject
a helix of intelligence. A purified sequence
of perfect pitch. Double-stranded necklace
of permanent beauty. Or maybe just
eliminate sadness.

You get the embryo out
where you can work on it,
make some copies,
tease apart the cells, flick a gene
on or off like a light switch,
pack it all up into an emptied-out egg case.

Life stretches back in a single
history for three and a half billion years,
and change has been glacial.
Hubris, an individual sin, a king's downfall.
Death wiped up the stage after each tragedy.

My heart breaks—can I say this?
Am I an archaic cliché to be broken
open with grief? Who will mourn
Homo sapiens? I can hardly
comprehend the loss of animals I've never seen—

silver trout, leopard frog, Pyrenean ibex—
each flame extinguished darkening the earth.
Now this terribly human species—did we ever imagine?
Can you bear it? Doesn't it
make you crazy? Doesn't it?

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

My partner, Janet, who is an entomologist, came home from work one day and said, "I have one for you." And she told me what she'd heard in the hall, which is the title of the poem.

I was about to go to Maui to teach a writing workshop and I decided to concentrate on the poem there. It was strange to be in such a beautiful place and holed up in my room researching genetic engineering, but I was obsessed.

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

Many revisions, but over a very short time. The bulk of the work was done intensely in that first week.

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 in inspiration and am grateful for it whenever it comes. This poem was absolutely received. I never would have written it without that young woman making her bold comment and Janet bringing it home to me. But it was also a product of sweat and tears. In this case the sweat and tears were due to the subject, as well as the craft. I'd been concerned about these issues before, but delving into them and grappling with the implications in a poem was difficult.

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

The form is loose and I didn't consciously use any distinct techniques except for the title which is modeled on those long Chinese titles that Billy Collins writes about in "Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sun Dynasty I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles."

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

Shortly after I wrote the poem, The Kenyon Review had a call for submissions on genetic engineering and I sent it to them and they published it.

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?

This varies very much from poem to poem. If I feel a poem's finished, I might send it off within weeks, but others take years before they go out. And many never get to see the world.

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

The science is all fact. The opinions and feelings are mine. There's no fiction in here.

Is this a narrative poem?

Not in the conventional sense. It's an outcry. But of course there is the narrative of human history.

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

I don't picture a particular audience or reader, but I want my poems to speak clearly to people. I admire poets who are able to write about complex things without being obscure or unintelligible.

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?

I shared this poem first with my students at the workshop. Then I sent it to my dear friend, Dorianne Laux, who has been my mentor and most trusted reader. I'm fortunate to also have a small group of poets with whom I can regularly share work.

And of course I showed the poem to Janet when I got home and we wound up having a big fight! She innocently wondered whether there might not also be good that came from genetic engineering and I was so overwrought I just cracked. Janet is, though, a sharp reader and helpfully tough on my poems.

What is American about this poem?

Well, I grew up in the 50's watching TV with DuPont's ads, "Better living through chemistry."

Dan Beachy-Quick

2011-09-19T17:21:00.003-04:00

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of five books of poem, most recently Circle’s Apprentice (Tupelo Press, 2011). He also wrote a collection of inter-linked essays on Moby-Dick, A Whaler’s Dictionary. He teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Colorado State University.

POEM

The minute gears mutely whir. To put your ear
Against it is to put your ear inside it.
It does not tick. It isn’t a heart.
It has no pulse. It isn’t a clock or a wrist.
Scrutiny can coax no secret from it.
There is no hearse with one flat tire
In endless circuit, headlights dispersed
In fog like sunset behind a veil.
A paving stone extends a grave through iron
Gate to a door at home. To knock
Your hand against it puts your hand inside it,
As in a cloud at night the pale moon
Gathers itself outside itself its own light
And glows dimly behind the dust that outshines it.
It has no heat. It isn’t the sun.
It isn’t uncertain. It does not think
About the sun or the distant balls of dirt
And ice that circle closer to the star
With each circuit done. Comet tails
Darkly flowing back as the horse leaps
Forward, straining against the catafalque
All November, predict disaster as grammar
Predicts breath, the need to breathe, or the mind
Must rest. It is its own edgeless disaster.
It is there as if it were not there. Vague
Repetitions haunt the circumference.
To walk out the door is to place your foot
On a stone worn away by another’s foot.
Rumor has it that the sun sends heat in form
Of sight. Watch the ice as it melts
For proof: water pools, darkens on a stone,
Becomes as a shadow on a stone,
A horse’s hoof as it rises off a stone,
Except it rises forever, and the shadow is gone.
Such processes turn the minute gears.
It is not a note in the margin. The margin is
Covered with snow. When the winter fog
Disperses a black horse stands on ice
And cannot move. It is as if a breathless song
Hovered like a veil in the air. The black
Horse’s breath spirals upward like smoke.
Pyre-smoke like a thumbprint as a cloud.
Similes sing mutely in it, likening the unlike.
Mourners name the peace they find and walk
Away. To step into it is to find it missing.
The footprints are before you as you go.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem a number of years ago, four or even five. It started—as is somewhat typical with me—while I was reading another book, thinking about it, trying to understand it. I was reading Levinas at the time, and though I could not find the passage now, found in his work the image of the footprints being ahead of one as one walks. The paradox of the image both fascinated me and in some ways terrified me. It seemed to speak to the difficulty of poetry—both the reading and writing of it, that it alters, even reverses, our normal order of things. We’ve been already where we’re going. Past and future seem to flip their relationship, and in the poem we walk forward into the past.

The poem also feels to me a place whose actuality is never wholly actual, exists by not wholly existing. To read is to enter into such difficulties. This poem is in many ways a poem about the nature of a poem, a sort of meditation that tries to resist that language of similarity, and through similarity, image. It is a poem that tries to take itself apart, part by part, even as it constructs itself to do so.

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

I don’t revise in any normal sense of the word—if there is a normal sense. I write line by line, day by day, often only two or three lines a day. I wait as patiently as I can to see how a next line might unfold inevitably from those previous—to let the poem in some sense dictate itself, and so escape from the easier limits of my own intentions. What revision occurs happens in these small ways, in the lines, a change of a word, often the smallest words, articles and such. The poem took a few months to write, as they tend to.

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

Yes. Wholly. I might, though, question the discrepancy between that which is "received" and "sweat and tears." They aren’t in my experience mutually exclusive. Far from it. Inspiration is exactly where work begins.

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

I had no formal mode in mind. The poem, because in part of its thinking "mechanically," thinking in terms of gears, mimics that motion with its own peculiar spiraling, and a type of image very obviously pulled from the teeth or cog of another image previously established. But I also wanted to press as hard as I could on the artifice of simile, of showing the imperfection in laying claim to similarity, and to show that in all such claims there lurks the dissimilar, threatening the very construction that makes it able to be apprehended. I suppose I felt very interested in the faultiness of figurative language . . . to find somehow greater necessity in imperfection than in its opposite.

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

I don’t recall. I don’t think all that long. It was first published in Zach Barocas’s wonderful online forum The Cultural Society. It’s only now appearing in a book, Circle’s Apprentice, published in May of 2011.

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 don’t have any set rules, nor even a philosophy. If someone is kind enough to ask me for a poem, I try to give them what I can. Mostly that means waiting. I try to know that a poem is done, of course. That, I think, is easier said than done.

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

I suppose, with this poem in particular, it tries to open up any notion of fact and show in it certain inconsistencies. It is a poem that doubts certainty, that tries to show that arriving at certainty isn’t the best work a poem can do. But to undermine the fact in such a way isn’t to subscribe to fiction. It’s simply to suggest that the actuality of world and self cannot be defined by the facts that seem to make-up that existence. The fact is a form of certainty often reliant on forms of denial, and one of the things I love about poetry (or love about the poetry I love) is that it complicates the facts with the vagaries of experience and thought.

Is this a narrative poem?

I’d say yes. In many ways, I don’t see how a poem cannot be narrative. It adheres to some logic it discovers in itself, proceeds from one line to another, and that is a narrative, even if it ends up not being linear, or plotted, or significant of any of the ways we normally hear that word.

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

Yes. As I mentioned above, the whole poem arose out of reading Levinas. But reading it again, and thinking about it, I think Keats is there, too.

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

No. I find myself distrustful of imagining an audience. The only audience I know is the poem itself, and its relation to those writers who influenced it. That’s not an audience that receives the poem in any explicable, normal way. That anyone reads my poems at all still comes as a genuine surprise to me. A gift. But like any gift that is truly so, it’s not one I plan on.

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?

As I do with most poems, and I’m sure I did with this one, I show my wife, Kristy, and send it to my dear friends Sally Keith and Srikanth Reddy.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’m not sure it does, save that it is a different poem. I think my newest work is at some remove from this poem, but for a number of years, this poem has been part of a large thinking connecting all the poems together. Maybe one facet of what I hope is a multi-faceted effort.

What is American about this poem?

Perhaps only that it has been written by me, who is American, and who takes Thoreau’s sense that an American writer must test another’s ideas against his own pulse. This poem is for me just such a test, to see if I can think for myself as another has thought.

Jeredith Merrin

2011-09-11T17:25:00.003-04:00

Jeredith Merrin is the author of two collections of poems, Bat Ode (2001) and Shift (1996), both from The University of Chicago Press as part of its Phoenix Poets Series, as well as a book of criticism, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and the Uses of Tradition (Rutgers, 1990). Her essays on and reviews of poets have appeared in The Southern Review and elsewhere, while her poems can be found in The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Ms. , The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals. Two books are in progress: a new poetry collection, Mon Age, and a collection of essays on poets and poetry, Of Two Minds.
　

FAMILY REUNION

The divorced mother and her divorcing
daughter. The about-to-be ex-son-in-law
and the ex-husband's adopted son.
The divorcing daughter's child, who is

the step-nephew of the ex-husband's
adopted son. Everyone cordial:
the ex-husband's second wife
friendly to the first wife, warm

to the divorcing daughter's child's
great-grandmother, who was herself
long ago divorced. Everyone
grown used to the idea of divorce.

Almost everyone has separated
from the landscape of a childhood.
Collections of people in cities
are divorced from clean air and stars.

Toddlers in day care are parted
from working parents, schoolchildren
from the assumption of unbloodied
daylong safety. Old people die apart

from all they've gathered over time,
and in strange beds. Adults
grow estranged from a God
evidently divorced from History;

most are cut off from their own
histories, each of which waits
like a child left at day care.
What if you turned back for a moment

and put your arms around yours?
Yes, you might be late for work;
no, your history doesn't smell sweet
like a toddler's head. But look

at those small round wrists,
that short-legged, comical walk.
Caress your history--who else will?
Promise to come back later.

Pay attention when it asks you
simple questions: Where are we going?
Is it scary? What happened? Can
I have more now? Who is that?

Author Statement:

I am writing this in my stripped-bare office, having worked all afternoon in grubby jeans, preparing for retirement next month after twenty-four years of teaching English (writing and literature) at this institution. I have loved my students and will miss them dearly. Leontyne Price in the background, about to be buried alive (Aida). Thought I would set the scene for you!

Well, this poem was in fact written after a family reunion. It struck me that others might identify with the situation in which I found myself--the modern family. Just as I have a lousy sense of physical direction, I've always been at a loss to keep straight anything but the most immediate of family connections. It was therefore a kick to write something like "the step-nephew of the ex-husband's / adopted son."

Then what happened was that the idea of divorce, and all that repetition of the word "divorce," just carried me away to analogous situations. I did not know where I was going. If you know exactly where you are going you are bored, and probably also boring.

When I wrote the poem, my grandson (now heading for college and 6'5") was very small--not far from being a toddler. I'm sure that delicious relationship prompted the depiction of personal history as a small child whose head smells sweet. I have to say that one of the best things (I think) about the poem is the accurate physicality of the comparison when the poem gets to a toddler's "small round wrists"--and that phrase I owe to my partner, Diane Furtney (also a published poet, and my best critic).

My step-father was trained as a rabbi, and I have one or two other poems that end up (for better or worse) with a touch of what you might call the "self-sermon." You asked how this poem differs from others I've written, and that's one way: the majority don't possess this jauntily sermonic bent. I think it's more didactic, then, and in a way more socially effusive than my more meditative work. But the self-admonition to "pay attention" underlies everything I've done (prose and poems alike), as does, I think I'd have to say, interpersonal affection.

You asked about form. The lines in the four-line stanzas are roughly four-beat. The shorter line lent me some apt enjambments: "separated," "parted," "apart."

Oh. And the questions at the end were expressions stolen from my (now 6'5", then quite short) grandson. So I owe a lot of this item to Sam.

Ronald Wallace

2011-08-30T17:45:00.002-04:00

Ronald Wallace is the author of twelve books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, including, most recently, Long for this World: New and Selected Poems and For a Limited Time Only, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He co-directs the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and serves as Poetry Editor for the University of Wisconsin Press Poetry Series (Brittingham and Felix Pollak prizes). He is married, with two grown daughters and four grandchildren.
　

THE FACTS OF LIFE

She wonders how people get babies.
Suddenly vague and distracted,
we talk about "making love."
She’s six and unsatisfied, finds
our limp answers unpersuasive.
Embarrassed, we stiffen, and try again,
this time exposing the stark naked words:
penis, vagina, sperm, womb and egg.
She thinks we’re pulling her leg.
We decide that it’s time
to get passionate and insist.
But she’s angry, disgusted.
Why do we always make fun of her?
Why do we lie?
We sigh, try cabbages, storks.
She smiles. That’s more like it.
We talk on into the night, trying
magic seeds, good fairies, God . . .

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

When my daughter was six years old (she’s now thirty-nine and has a daughter of her own), sitting in the back seat of our VW Squareback as we pulled into our driveway one evening, she asked the inevitable question, "where do babies come from?" My wife had just been reading an article in a popular magazine addressing that very question, and arguing that, when your child brought it up, you should give them all the glorious details. We did. As it turned out, that wasn’t what she wanted to hear, and the poem was the result.

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

If by "revision" you mean every slight change of syntax or punctuation mark, maybe a dozen. If you mean more substantial revision—lines, line breaks, word choices, tone, structure, etc.—very few. It’s very close to the original draft, which is not necessarily typical of my writing practice.

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

I hate it when poets say that a poem "wrote itself." Or when fiction writers insist that they just sit back and let their characters take over. It makes writing into a mystical activity, reserved for the mythical writers who work themselves up into some kind of trance state and just let the spirit flow through them, and it seems to me to discourage new writers from even trying to write. For most of us, writing is hard work and requires a lifetime of determination and practice and trial and error. That said (he admits sheepishly), "The Facts of Life" did seem to write itself. It’s a wonderful feeling when that happens, but I know how much work it takes to get oneself to the point that one can experience this kind of creative surge. I could say that the poem took less than an hour to write, or I could (more honestly) respond that it took years of reading and writing and living and struggling, followed by an hour of drafting and a few more of minor revision.

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

The poems in my first book, Plums, Stones, Kisses & Hooks, were largely lyrical and "serious" in tone, focusing the things of this world with an emphasis on the sensory and musical. For my second book, I consciously attempted more humor, having, for years, appreciated the distinctive humor of American poetry, from Whitman and Dickinson through Frost, Stevens, and Berryman, and on to Wagoner, Kumin, and Collins. I wasn’t necessarily trying to be funny; I was just trying to be more open to the essential humor of things. The use of sexual double entendre, of internal rhyme, of shifting dactylic and anapestic meters, contributed to that end, and though I didn’t consciously impose those comic devices on the poem, they naturally flowed from the tone of the speaker, and the light-hearted subject matter. The exact rhyme of "egg" and "leg" halfway through the poem always draws gratifying laughter from an audience when read aloud. My scholarly research on American Humor provided a (somewhat unconscious at the time) underpinning for the poem.

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

Not really, though the poems in my first book were written almost entirely on three-by-five note cards (a carry-over from my PhD years), and I had switched to yellow legal pads for the poems in my second book, in an effort to expand their freedom and length. I continue to write on legal pads today, not entering anything into the computer until it is pretty close to being finished.

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

The poem was written in 1978 and first published in Poet Lore, one of my favorite magazines, in 1983, the same year that it appeared in my second book, Tunes for Bears to Dance to (University of Pittsburgh Press).

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 no rules about submissions, other than to wait until I think a poem is ready to go out into the world. In some cases this is many years and many revisions later; in many cases, it is never. I used to be more eager to get things into print fast; now I let them simmer much longer, on the whole.

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

I have had a number of impassioned discussions with my poetry colleagues at the University of Wisconsin about whether a poem should be "true" or not. I seem to be the lone voice arguing that, if a poem is not obviously a persona poem, it should reflect, pretty literally, the poet’s own experience. I feel betrayed if a poet claims, for example (as a recent visitor to the Wisconsin campus did), in the undifferentiated first person, to have survived cancer, if, in fact, he or she has not. "The Facts of Life" tries to capture the facts of an experience I really had. My poems are thus quite autobiographical, and I make no apologies for that. Of course, I realize that the "truth" of an experience is colored by the observer, and that to convey that "truth" you must sometimes manipulate (or even invent) "facts." My head says you can say anything you want to in a poem; my heart says you can’t. So, generally, you can be pretty sure that if I say something happened to me in a poem, it happened to me in real life.

Is this a narrative poem?

Well, almost all mainstream poems these days are lyric poems, often with narrative elements. I guess mine is one of those.

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

Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, John Berryman, David Wagoner, Maxine Kumin, Carl Dennis, Ted Kooser, Billy Collins, the list goes on and on. I was reading everybody I could, going through the University of Wisconsin library’s massive poetry collection a book at a time, and reading everything in Poetry and Poetry Northwest.

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

I think my audience is poetry itself. I try to get into a dialogue with the poem: "Look here, poem, what I can do!" To which the poem answers, "Oh, yeah, well watch this!" Or maybe I’m my own ideal audience, or my audience is those poets whose work I admire. Ideally, I’d love for my poems to be enjoyed by anyone who reads. But I don’t really think about audience at all while I’m writing. Instead, I try to make something beautiful, to capture the freshness and vividness of life, to be perfectly articulate, to confer a kind of immortality on my experience.

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?

I almost never show unfinished work to anyone. That said, my wife is a good reader of poetry, and she has occasionally let me know that a particular poem I thought was finished, wasn’t. My editor at the University of Pittsburgh Press, Ed Ochester, has done the same, and has been an absolutely essential reader and supportive critic of my individual poems and my books for thirty years. I am very lucky to have had the relationship with him that I have.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I like to think I write a range of poems, and this lies in that range.

What is American about this poem?

Well, that’s hard to say, since I value world poets (Neruda, Vallejo, Transtromer, Holub, Popa, Szymborska, many others) and try not to limit myself to any one kind of work. Perhaps the humor is "American?" Perhaps the tendency to use the plain style, everyday speech? Perhaps not?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I often quote this Valery statement to my students, usually when they won’t let a poem go, and risk tinkering it out of existence. And it’s certainly often true in relationship to my work. But some poems actually do seem perfect (and thus "finished") to me (much of Frost and Dickinson come immediately to mind) and, though this may be ridiculously vain and self-satisfied, I remain delighted with this particular poem of mine, and feel that the finish has not worn off with time.

Marilyn Nelson

2011-08-19T17:43:00.004-04:00

Marilyn Nelson's collections of poetry include: The Homeplace (1990), The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem (2004), A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005), and The Cachoiera Tales and Other Poems (2005). Her most recent books are picture-books: Beautiful Ballerina (2010) and Snook Alone (2011). Nelson was Poet Laureate of Connecticut in 2001-2006. Other honors include three honorary doctorates, two Pushcart prizes, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Storrs from 1978 to 2002, and professor of English at the University of Delaware from 2002 to 2004. From 2004 - 2010 she was founder/director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a writers' colony. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Connecticut.

MINOR MIRACLE

Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood
memory. I was cycling with a male friend,
through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way
stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again,
a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign,
hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels.
My partner called, "Hey, that was a 4-way stop!"
The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe
under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled,
"You fucking niggers!" And sped off.
My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads.
We remounted our bikes and headed out of town.
We were pedaling through a clear blue afternoon
between two fields of almost-ripened wheat
bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace
when we heard an unmuffled motor, a honk-honking.
We stopped, closed ranks, made fists.
It was the same truck. It pulled over.
A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid out:
greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos, probably
a Marine Corps boot-camp footlockerful
of martial arts techniques.

"What did you say back there!" he shouted.
My friend said, "I said it was a 4-way stop.
You went through it."
"And what did I say?" the white guy asked.
"You said: 'You fucking niggers.'"
The afternoon froze.

"Well," said the white guy,
shoving his hands into his pockets
and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his boot,
"I just want to say I'm sorry."
He climbed back into his truck
and drove away.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I told the anecdote as part of a conversation over lunch with some of my colleagues in the English Department at the U of CT. I’d told it several times before, as part of my repertoire of personal anecdotes. Some of my colleagues asked, after laughing, whether I had ever written the story down. They insisted I should write it; that it was "a poem." I wrote it that evening, essentially as I had told it. That’s why the first lines provide a seque from the conversation that brought the incident to my mind.

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

I wrote it very quickly, not my normal painstaking multi-revision process. The story was part of my repertoire of funny stories, so I just wrote it as I had been telling it.

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 in inspiration. I do not feel this particular poem is the product of inspiration.
Or perhaps I could say this poem was 100% "received."

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

I employed very little conscious "artistry" in the writing of this poem. Frankly, it feels to me more like prose broken up to look like a free verse poem than it feels like an actual poem. Though of course I employed my best ability to write well.

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

See above. My poems, even free-verse poems, are usually quite a bit more consciously "shaped" than this one is. In this one, all I’m doing is telling the story pretty much as it happened. I did change the situation slightly – in actuality, the other cyclist was my former husband, who is a blond German.

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

I think I only included it in my "new and selected" poems, so it was not published immediately.

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 used to be eager to see my poems published in journals; I needed that sense of verification. Now I seldom send to journals, partly because most of my poems are written as parts of long narrative projects, most of which are already under contract to be published as young adult books, and publishing too many poems in "adult" journals would disqualify the books for some important young adult book awards.

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

As I said above, I did change the story slightly, to imply that both of the cyclists are black. That makes it a better story. I also refrain from giving the information that this happened in a small town in Minnesota: most people seem to assume it’s in the South. But my two "changes" are entirely unspoken and implied. All of the details are described as I remember them.

Is this a narrative poem?

Of course!

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

I don’t remember. I think I wrote it when I was well on my way to being a committed
formalist poet. I doubt that any poet I was then reading influenced this poem.

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

Perhaps.

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?

There were no multiple drafts of this poem. There have been individuals with whom I’ve shared early drafts of poems. For a while, my second former husband. For a while, my friend Marilyn Hacker. My friend Pamela Espeland. Various other friends. Sometimes my editors.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I find it relatively shapeless and lacking music.

Gary L. McDowell

2011-08-14T17:28:00.004-04:00

Gary L. McDowell is the author of American Amen (Dream Horse Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 Orphic Prize in Poetry. He's also the author of two chapbooks, They Speak of Fruit (Cooper Dillon, 2009) and The Blueprint (Pudding House, 2005) and co-editor, with F. Daniel Rzicznek, of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press, 2010). His poems and essays have appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, Laurel Review, Mid-American Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, Third Coast, Quarterly West, and Verse Daily. Having recently finished a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Contemporary Poetry at Western Michigan University, he is the new Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Belmont University in Nashville, TN, where he lives with his wife and two young kids.

SNORKELING

The distant thunder keeps beat
with the steel drummers on shore.
We push away and The Snorkeler eases
into the bay. Above us, gulls glide
westward ignoring the scraps of teriyaki
left by children, the spools of fried breads
and candied plums that litter the docks.
I taste salt with every breath.
Waves break against the hull, the soft
spray whisked back into our faces.
Dad holds onto the rail as the boat dips
and pushes, flails and falls.
I want to tame the water,
reweave the breakers into something smooth,
skin of a snare drum, tight and melodic.
Dad’s legs, so thin and weak,
shake every time we hollow, bottom-out
in the wake of a wave. He’s dying.
But we’re going deeper into the thunder until the drums
drown-out and the hairs on my arms stand.
We float toward the coral, the sharp,
ragged edges of fish bones and fossilized
lobsters, to where the gulls
can’t feed, too far from shore,
so instead they keen and whine.
The ocean is too cold, the lightning
will not strike us, but the boat is turning
back. Dad’s gaunt hips and swollen middle
set against the steel blue storm
remind me that we’re all flesh,
all boom, and I want to push him in
hard and unashamed.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

"Snorkeling" was composed during the first year of my MFA program at Bowling Green State University in late 2005. It was one of the first poems, of any merit anyway, that I wrote with some idea that fathers/fatherhood would be a major and obsessive theme in my work. The poem derives its narrative and emotional impetus from autobiography. When I was fourteen my family took a cruise to the Bahamas. During this time, my step-father, Jim, was very sick, but the doctors had not yet discovered the cause: a malignant tumor on his brain stem. He battled stomach discomfort, vertigo, dizziness, bouts of uncontrollable "lefties" where he'd be unable to walk without veering oddly to his left, and other such neurological symptoms. But the doctors never did an MRI of his brain. The oddest thing. It was only after we returned from the trip that an MRI was done and a diagnosis was made.

Anyway, the poem started as an attempt to write about that trip, about how after days of waiting for him to feel well enough (oddly, he was feeling well when we left for the trip, which is why we ended up going to begin with) to take me scuba diving, something we'd been planning for months, we finally got on the water only to have the diving postponed because of a nasty storm. All of the loaded metaphors and images at my disposal—the boat, the storm, the as-of-yet undiscovered cancer, etc—made this poem an inevitability, I guess.

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

This poem went through four distinct drafts over about a three month period. I'd say that the meat of the poem was present from the very beginning, but the ending took a lot of fine-tuning. Oddly enough, I don't think I ever actually workshopped this poem at BGSU, but I did take it to my mentor's office every week for what seemed like an eternity. Larissa Szporluk, my teacher at BGSU, kept pushing me to be "honest," "tell the truth," "be angry, it's okay." I think I was initially afraid to enter the emotional territory of this poem; it was hurtful, it was scary, and it was hard to write about. But during the writing of this poem, I learned that those characteristics are exactly what would help me write the most important poems. Now I covet those feelings, work hard to find them in my subject matter, and work even harder to make sure the reader can feel them as well.

I wanted the poem to end when the speaker jumps in the water to escape the emotional turmoil of dealing with a dying parent, but it just kept sounding so damn sentimental, so damn gimmicky. I showed draft after draft of possible endings to Larissa over those months, but nothing ever seemed to work. Finally, one day we were talking about something else entirely (my memory's shaky here, but I think we were talking about Larry Levis' "Linnets") when I interrupted her and blurted out: "I push him in! I push him in!" I rushed back to my apartment and wrote the exact version you see above.

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

I definitely believe in inspiration. As I mentioned above, the ending for this poem just "popped" into my head, but it was only after a lot of that sweat and tears that the inspiration struck. So though I believe in inspiration, I certainly don't settle for it, wait for it, expect it.

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

I remember deciding early on that the poem would be a single stanza, but I don't remember consciously employing any other conscious ready-made techniques to the writing of "Snorkeling." I will say that I remember having a really hard time lineating the poem at first. I just couldn't find a natural rhythm, a comfortable gait, but it worked itself out as the poem went those initial drafts.

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

The poem appeared on No Tell Motel, the internet lit journal, on June 14, 2006. No Tell Motel is a great venue: they publish a new poem every weekday and each poet selected gets their own week. It's a great way to really get a good taste of each poet. Anyway, the poem appeared about six months after I finished it.

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 only sat on "Snorkeling" for a few days, really. Once I got those final lines squared away, I felt pretty good about sending it into the world, and since it was the last of a series of five "body" poems I was working on, I got them over to No Tell Motel right away. Usually I don't sit on a poem very long once I feel good about it, but so many times I tinker with drafts while the poems are out to magazines. I think I just like having a horse in the race, as they say.

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

Much of this poem's tension comes from this very negotiation. The factual and fictional elements of the poem are quite blended: Bahamas (true), dad (false: it's step-dad), The Snorkeler (false: I don't remember the boat having a name), the birds (true), the steel drums (true), etc. I felt very strongly about wanting to create an atmosphere, a tone, a setting in this poem, and so I turned to the power of the detail. Sometimes I read the poem now and wonder if it's not overdone.

I didn't set out to tell only the truth, per se, but I definitely wanted the reader to feel that the narrative of the poem was factual, was "based on real events." That said, I'm a staunch believer in Richard Hugo's dictum that "truth must conform to music." I didn't want to write a made-for-TV movie though, and so I remember hoping that the emotional center of the poem would feel natural and not sentimental or melodramatic. The negotiation between fact and fiction was certainly on my mind while working on this poem . . . while working on any poem.

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

I remember I was reading a lot of different things. I became, that first year of my MFA, a voracious, unsatisfiable, obsessive reader, something I try to maintain these days, too, of course. I distinctly remember going through a Larry Levis, James Wright, and William Matthews phase during that time, but I also remember a separate thread of Rosmarie Waldrop, Leslie Scalapino, and Lyn Hejinian (My Life, specifically) happening simultaneously. I was also drunk on Faulkner's prose and Bernard Cooper's memoirs at the time. Surely all of those writers converged into some kind of monstrous influence, but as to just how, it's hard to say.

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

I'd like to think that my ideal reader is any reader brave and confident enough to pick up a book of contemporary poetry. I know the conversation's taking place in blogs, lit journals, and classrooms all over the country, but I do wonder also about the fate of poetry in the American reading public's lives.

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?

At the time I wrote this poem I was in the MFA program at Bowling Green State University, so my classmates—outside of workshop—and instructors there saw various version of this poem, and as I mentioned before Larissa Szporluk was a huge help with it as well.

My most trusted readers now-a-days are different than they were then, as a lot of my MFA classmates have moved into other fields. Today I definitely have a group of incredibly gracious, talented, kick-ass poet-friends who read my work regularly: Keith Montesano, Traci Brimhall, Chad Sweeney, F. Daniel Rzicznek, etc. I'm lucky in this way.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

"Snorkeling" isn't too different from many of the poems in American Amen. There's an aspect of autobiography to it, and it focuses pretty heavily on the natural world even as it deals with interior obsessions, but formally the poem is one of the few left-flush, one-stanzed poems in the collection. I tend to utilize white-space a bit more.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

In so much that, as Valery says, any poem can be finished, I'd say that this one was merely abandoned successfully.

Nicole Cooley

2011-08-11T17:50:00.003-04:00

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and now lives outside of New York City. She is the author most recently of two collections of poems, Breach (LSU Press 2010) and Milk Dress (Alice James Books 2010). She has also published two other collections of poems and a novel. She has received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poet, and Callaloo, among other journals. She directs the new MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College-City University of New York where she is a professor of English.

I’M STARTING TO SPEAK THE LANGUAGE

of disaster, he says and we keep driving through Mississippi,
Highway 90, Hurricane Alley, on our way to New Orleans,
while Johnny Cash sings, Go on, I’ve had enough.
Dump my blues down in the Gulf.
And he says, that one’s blue-roofed, that one’s gone,
and we stop to see an address on a tabletop leaned
against a tree, a FEMA number spray-painted on wood.
There’s no house. Private Property. Keep Out. Do Not Demo.
We are here together on a tour of the Gone: three porch steps
For Sale By Owner, a beached trolley at the edge
of the road like a huge stunned animal -- Tour Historic Biloxi!—
Gulfport Economy Inn. IHOP. Jefferson Davis’s Beauvoir House.
All that’s left of an address he calls the new lexicon,
the spray-painted X, the house marked O,
Dog Found. Stone foundation threaded with weeds
that are no language. Still, you can tell
where a house once stood, he says, by the clearing.
A front gate is For Sale by Owner. All that’s left
of an address. Missing a whole story.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem was written in the early fall of 2006. It was sparked by a drive on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that I took with my husband and two young daughters that August.

We drove from Florida to New Orleans, where I grew up, on Highway 90, now called "Hurricane Alley" for the devastation wrought there by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, on August 29, 2005. We were headed to New Orleans for the first anniversary of Katrina.

Because I grew up in New Orleans and because my parents still live there--and remained there during the hurricane--I had witnessed the destruction of New Orleans and its outlying parishes. I thought that what I saw in New Orleans when I came back two months after the storm was the worst thing I'd ever seen in my life.

Then we drove through Mississippi. I sat in the car, writing down everything I saw: the ruined towns, the missing houses, the stunted trees. I didn't know what I would do with the images but I had to record them.

Then in the fall of 2006 I started writing my book of poems Breach about the hurricane. This poem is part of that project.

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

Many versions, many revisions. To be honest, the first draft of anything I write is terrible. I'm not saying it to be self-deprecating. It is true. Above my desk I have a quote from Marvin Bell, something he said to me in grad school: "If you have writers block, lower your standards." Since he said that, I've never had writers' block. I tell myself, I can always write a bad poem.

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

I don't believe in inspiration. (I love telling my students that--everyone is always shocked.) If I sat down and wrote a poem only when I felt like writing a poem or when I felt inspired, I would have written maybe one poem in my life.

What I believe is that to keep yourself writing, to fully live a writing life, you have to do whatever it takes to keep the engine running, so to speak. For me, that means: writing when my students write in class, writing on the subway, assigning myself writing exercises, forcing myself to sit at my desk and write.

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

With this poem, I did, in two respects. First, the poem was greatly influenced by the conversation my husband and I were having in the car as we drove. He observed how disaster generates a new language--the X and O written by the National Guard on the flooded houses to show whether or not bodies were found, the signs "Do Not Trespass" in front of a missing house. We talked about how the signs do and don't tell the story. They bear witness and yet there is so much unsaid. I wanted that to be part of the poem not just thematically but formally: to use a fragmented structure in a tight, dense poem.

Secondly, I wanted the title to elide into the first line, for similar reasons. After I began to see what the poem was about (after a bunch of truly awful drafts--I was not thinking of any of this initially) I wanted to convey a sense of the reader having no way out, of being trapped in this new language.

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

It followed my usual process: bad early drafts, excitement at seeing what the poem was truly about, as the poem emerged, lots of revision.

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

It appeared in The Paterson Literary Review and in my book a few years later.

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?

My practice varies but never do I write something and immediately submit it. I don't trust my judgement. I either love or hate my work when I first write it, and I don't trust either reaction.

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

That is interesting. The poem comes out of fact--the facts of Katrina and what it did to the Gulf Coast and the devastation of communities and lives. And I also think to write about Katrina you must be faithful to the facts of the historical event. It would be irresponsible to write about the event without knowing all the facts--doing the research, knowing the communities, talking to people who survived the storm and the flood.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, though I wanted the narrative to be chopped and fragmentary but, still, because the poem describes a drive, moving through time and space, there is an underlying narrative impulse.

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

I was reading two of my favorite poets, Muriel Rukeyser and CD Wright. Both write a poetry that is so engaged with the world, sometimes termed documentary, always questioning official histories, and always changing the way I think about language and what the category of "poetic" can mean.

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

Anyone! I'm thrilled when people who do not usually pick up a poetry book read my work. Last year, I was fortunate to have my books taught in several non-English classes at different universities--Global Affairs, an interdisciplinary seminar on the oil spill, and a class on the archive--and it was wonderful.

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. My husband (not a poet--he works in human rights and genocide studies and is an academic), my sister (not a poet, works in theater), my dad (Peter Cooley--a poet and a merciless critic of my work! as I am of his), and my dear poet friends Julia Kasdorf and Kimiko Hahn.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It is a lot shorter than most of my poems. (In early bad drafts it was very long.) I work very hard at not repeating myself. I don't want to write the same poem over and over for my whole writing life.

What is American about this poem?

I think it's American because it focuses on one of the great American tragedies of the century: the way we treated the people of the Gulf Coast and their communities when Hurricane Katrina hit. Our country's non-response. The people's horror that they had been essentially abandoned and forgotten. And I worry our country is now forgetting this too, not even six years after it happened.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I would say finished because it is published, but the situation it is about continues--the ruined Gulf Coast--and I keep writing about that.

David Hernandez

2011-08-07T16:55:00.003-04:00

David Hernandez is the recipient of a 2011 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. His recent collection, Hoodwinked (Sarabande Books, 2011), won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize. His other collections include Always Danger (SIU Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, and A House Waiting for Music (Tupelo Press). His poems have appeared in FIELD, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Missouri Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and Poetry Daily. He is also the author of two YA novels, No More Us for You and Suckerpunch, both published by HarperCollins. David lives in Long Beach and is married to writer Lisa Glatt.
　

TROMPE L’OEIL

What’s left of his silver hair he wants
cut so his wife would stop calling him
Mr. Cumulus. He tells his hairstylist
how short with a forefinger and thumb
centimeters apart as if showing her
an invisible pill, one of the dozen he takes
daily to keep the channels of his heart
unclogged, the blood thin, joints
without fire, the great icebergs of ache
from colliding into his body.
She turns for her scissors and turns
again to see his head shuddering
like a dandelion in an earthquake,
the cape Velcroed to his neck going up
down up down above his crotch.
She’s thinking what you’re thinking.
He’s thinking, I should clean my glasses
with a handkerchief instead.
In the mirror he squints at her reflection,
pink cloud of face, orange haze
of flowerpot she raises like a trophy
before shattering it against his head.
True story, unless the hairstylist
who told the hairstylist who told
the hairstylist who’s now clipping my hair
lied. Or the hairstylist twice removed
loves embellishment. This is how
every story telephoned from person
to person becomes after each telling
distorted, the way these parallel
barbershop mirrors repeat themselves
to make an endless green tunnel
I can see myself walking through.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I keep a log of every poem I’ve written, so I can tell you definitively that I worked on this poem from May 17th-19th of 2004. And I’m pretty sure I started this poem shortly after getting my haircut and hearing the story that the poem dramatizes.

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

I’m constantly revising as I write, rewriting what was already rewritten, and tinkering with line breaks and punctuation marks until my vision blurs, so it’s hard to say how many revisions this particular poem went through. Fifty drafts is about my average.

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

I think inspiration is given too much credit. It can only do so much—never any of the heavy lifting that’s required when crafting a poem. Inspiration is a lazy architect who gives you a blueprint with only the front door drawn, then snoozes on a hammock while you build the entire house.

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 depends on the poem. Sometimes I’ll let it sit on my hard drive for a few weeks, then look at it again with a fresh pair of eyes. I’ll inevitably make more changes before submitting it to a magazine. Occasionally I’ll send it off a day or two after it was written it, but I understand that impulse has more to do with wanting to get published and less with wanting to write well.

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

There’s a presumption that a poem is more meaningful if the poet describes an experience exactly as it happened, and if he were to fiddle with the facts, then the poem is somehow inauthentic. As if simply sticking to the facts will prevent one from sounding disingenuous. I’m more concerned that the poem sounds emotionally true, which is to say I haven’t answered your question yet. In short: I didn’t allow factual events to meddle with the writing process of "Trompe L’Oeil." But I did get a haircut.

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

I don’t remember who I was reading May of last year, let alone May of 2004. However, I can tell you my two biggest influences: Charles Simic (especially his early poems) and FIELD magazine.

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

That would make me nervous. Like having someone standing behind me while I write, staring at the monitor. I have about seventy-three other things in mind when I write. How are the line breaks working? The verb choices? Tone? The character of the speaker? What’ll I have for lunch? When are the Wrens going to put out another album? My mind wanders.

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?

I showed Lisa, my wife. She’s the only one I share working drafts with.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s the only one with muttonchops.

What is American about this poem?

There’s something very American about hairstylists swapping stories. Also, Velcro makes an appearance—a company whose headquarters are located in Manchester, NH.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

"Finished."
　
　

Mathias Svalina

2011-07-26T19:23:00.003-04:00

Mathias Svalina is the author of one book of poems, Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), one forthcoming book of prose, I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur (Mudluscious Press) & numerous chapbooks. With Zachary Schomburg he co-edits Octopus Magazine & Octopus Books.

WINTER STARS

I’ve been through this

before in my imagination,
since you were never predicted
to live this long.

The ambulance.

The hospital.
The white cotton gloves
left on top of the coffin.

Now

that it’s the body twisting
itself to death
rather than simply
turning off
as the doctors
predicted,
all of my prepared
expressions are useless.

I’m left

like the amateurs,
wondering what
makes the trains sound
so beautiful
in the distance
in the twilight.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in 2009. I think I was at The Tea Lounge in Brooklyn, because I wrote a lot of the manuscript that it comes from at that place. The manuscript is a record of my reactions to my father’s cancer and his impending death.

The title of the poem is a reference to a Larry Levis poem, of course. It is a poem about his dad. As for the content of my poem, my dad had a congenital heart defect and throughout the years we always assumed he would die as a result of this. When he was diagnosed with terminal cancer it seemed odd and surprising that this ailment he’d been born with, that we’d always assumed would be the death of him had been displaced by cancer.

There are few things less surprising than the fact that the people we love die and yet it doesn’t keep us from having the reactions that we do. The poem is trying to get in that space somewhere, a poem about my dad’s death and a poem about the presumptions and cliché pretensions we have about epochal emotion-points in our lives.

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

While I’d hesitate to tell this to a creative writing student, this poem was probably written in about five minutes and I think I have changed maybe a handful of words since then. I’ve changed a few pieces of punctuation and one or two words since the version that is on Blackbird, which is slightly different than the one above. So while the final tinkering might have taken a few years (and it might not be over) the essential poem was written in minutes.

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

I believe that inspiration is ubiquitous and therefore unimportant to my writing. All one has to do is see a tree and then see something else and one has inspiration. Any juxtaposition is inspiration. Though, as I said above, this poem came quickly to me. If that is inspiration then I believe in that, but I think I’m begging the question there.

I have a harder time with the second part of the second question. Part of the phenomenology of being a poet at this point in the art’s history is that one enacts a belief that one's time is better spent writing a poem than reacting meaningfully against the horrors of human oppression. Which I think is wrong. I don’t think this poem had a lot of struggle to it, or whatever "sweat and tears" means in relation to writing poetry. In my opinion, writing poetry is fundamentally not work and never struggle. When I hear people claim that they struggle over poetry, that poetry is "work" it sounds like the language of a piggy bank to me.

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

I wanted this poem to be plainspoken and directly connected to my real life, which is something I don’t do normally. I wanted it to sound like a poem written by someone who loves William Stafford. Any revisions I have made have been to try and make it more plain and clear.

I wanted it to be in a rhetoric of "honesty," which doesn’t really have anything to do with "honesty" in the sense of telling the truth, but more like "honesty" in the sense of paving the streets when they need to be paved.

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

I think it had been about two years. I wrote the whole manuscript in 2008 and 2009. Then my dad died and I did not look at the manuscript for a while. I sent one batch of poems from it out before he died, and this was to Blackbird. They were the first journal to publish poems from that manuscript.

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 think this one "sat" for about a year. In general my practice varies. Often when I think something is "done" I usually go ahead and send it out. Sometimes it gets taken immediately, sometimes it sits around, sometimes I give up on the poem or forget about it.

But I write a lot of stuff. Some of it I send out rapidly, some of it, conversely to what I said above, I hold back. As I mentioned before, since this manuscript was emotionally important to me and written in a way that I typically don’t have much interest in, my reaction to it was different. I think I’ve only sent out maybe three batches of poem from this one.

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

This poem is as close as I can get to factual in a poem, which is not very factual. My view of reading literature doesn’t allow much space for facts. Literature doesn’t have a truth value. Which is essential to its uses and failures. I don’t think anyone who reads this poem would know anything substantial or true about me, but they might know something about the poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

Nope, just a little meditative piece.

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

I was reading a lot of Jay Wright and Boccacio when I wrote this, as far as I remember, in addition to the thousands of poems and hundreds of books one is constantly in the process of reading or coming to an understanding of at any moment when you’re a poet. I think I was modeling the approach to information in this manuscript on Wright. This poem is a direct response to a kind of thinking about how a writer goes through commonplace steps of their lives, as evidenced by Levis’s poem about his father and any number of other typical white guys writing about their dads. So Levis is, as he so often is, an influence.

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

Usually I write imagining how my friend Zach or my girlfriend Julia would react. But with this manuscript I think I was writing to someone who wouldn’t be interested in most of my poems.

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?

I showed this manuscript to my friend GC. I think he was the only one I showed this poem to. I regularly share work with a variety of friends. Their reactions are interesting and instructive, but ultimately, their reactions are usually less important than reading the poems out loud to myself and trying to gauge my ear’s reaction.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Most of my poems are either in an absurdist style or a tersely imagistic style. This one is closer to the latter, but attempting a more direct clarity of emotional intent, a more closed control of the meaning-making. It’s also about Mathias John Svalina, which my poems usually are not.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It was finished. I had a specific, though limited, goal for it and I think I accomplished it so I considered it done.

Keith Taylor

2011-07-21T17:28:00.003-04:00

Keith Taylor’s most recent collection of poems is If the World Becomes So Bright (Wayne State University Press, 2009). A longish chapbook of short poems, Marginalia for a Natural History, will be published by Black Lawrence Press around the end of 2011. He has published some eleven other volumes of edited books, translations, poems and stories. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for the Arts. He coordinates the undergraduate program in creative writing at the University of Michigan, works as the Poetry Editor of Michigan Quarterly Review, and directs the Bear River Writers’ Conference.
　

THE DAY AFTER AN ICE STORM

When it dawns crystalline, blue,
the air sparkling with prisms
reflected off oak and spruce,
off every twig, branch, or limb,
even off trees cascading
over fences, trees uprooted
by the splendor of ice—
the day lifts us, takes us out-
side ourselves, outside the news
of a nurse driving back home
last night, at the blackest hour
of the ice storm, when I was
watching electrical arcs
illuminating the yard.
I heard trees break apart
and was thrilled with fear. She stopped
to help at an accident—
it looked far worse than it was—
and a young man, twenty-three,
leaving work in his truck,
spun out on the ice killing
the nurse, who, in a brief moment
of faith, might have imagined
today dawning crystalline,
brittle, gloriously cold.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem started in the moment, in the tragic irony. I forget which year it was (probably sometime in the late '80s or early '90s), but we had a tremendous ice storm, a beautiful ice storm, frightening and wonderful. Even as it was happening, I knew my response was aesthetic. I was thrilled. And then, the very next day, we heard the reports of the nurse dying as she tried to help someone. The contrast in the emotions that were present in our town on that night seemed important, somehow. It still does.

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

Hard to say. I know this poem was around twenty years or so before I published it. A dozen revisions? Twenty?

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

Yes, I believe in inspiration, although I think there is probably a very mundane, even materialist explanation for it. This poem was received and revised. I think they all are.

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

Once I had the rush of the first long sentence easily contrasted with the short second sentence, I must have gone back to count syllables. Although inconsistent now, there is still the strong skeleton of the seven syllable line in the poem. Like many poets I will often try an early version of a poem, particularly one that at first seems dominated by prose rhythms, in syllabics. The counting forces us to look for new words to fill the syllable count and often presents us with new and interesting diction and enjambment. Once the poem has mellowed a bit, I occasionally don’t feel as committed to the arbitrary count and can go back and revise with the usual considerations of free verse. This poem, however, carries the clear imprint of the count.

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

Perhaps the length of time the poem stayed on my work table is unique. Usually I will give up on a poem after a while. This one stuck.

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

I am going to guess that this poem was around from ten to twenty years before it appeared in 2009 in my collection If the World Becomes So Bright. I always liked the poem, but never could find a magazine that wanted to publish it. Finally it appeared in the 2008 Bear River Review, which is a small journal some of my colleagues put together to help promote the writing done at The Bear River Writers’ Conference. Now I direct that, so I can’t really claim that as a publication.

Since the book has come out, it is a poem that several people have commented on positively, and I find that gratifying. I was also pleased that it was the poem picked for this web site. Odd how that happens, isn’t it? I couldn’t find anyone to like it for a couple of decades and now it seems to have found its audience.

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?

The practice varies from poem to poem. Sometimes I’ll send a poem out, then get it back, and let it sit for a long time, years and years, before I try again. That often teaches me something about the poem, and it’s usually a lesson worth learning.

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

This is a narrative poem that recounts an incident that really happened, although I know little more about it than what appeared in the papers. I have recognized the possibility that the victim of the crash might have the same response to the wonders of the storm that the speaker has—even while she is acting bravely and in a way that distinguishes her from the speaker of the poem.

The facts of the matter get more complicated though. Months after the accident I discovered that the young man in the truck was actually drunk, driving on an expired license, and that he went to jail for a very long time for causing the death of this woman. I had imagined that he too was a kind of victim of the weather, of these forces that were so much larger than any individual. I may have been very wrong about that.

So the poem has a basis in fact that gets changed for the purposes of the poem. I hope that results in a poem that provides imaginative and emotional engagement with the world but that does not violate the importance of the fact behind it.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes. There’s a story to this one.

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

I would like to think that there is an obvious imprint of James Wright on the poem—somewhere in its studied simplicity, in its acceptance of the beauty amid the horrors that surround us.

But, formally, I learned that syllable counting from a very different poet. Kenneth Rexroth often counted syllables to control his narratives, to give himself a kind of distance. And, yes, he often used seven syllable lines. An odd number because it kept him, I’m guessing, from falling into any easy iambic rhythms. And a short line because it creates a great contrast with complicated syntax of the longer sentence. It’s formally quite simple, yet allows for an interesting register of tone and emotion, particularly in a narrative.

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

What was it James Wright said? "I’m looking for a few intelligent readers of good will," or something like that? Me, too!

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?

For a decade I had a strong and committed writing group of four writers. We met every other weekend and worked quite rigorously on each other’s work. I finally dropped out of the group because I wanted to force myself to find a bigger audience than that group of readers.
For a couple of decades, the wonderful poet Marc J. Sheehan helped me organize books and revise poems. He did a fabulous job. But I had to pull back a bit from Marc’s help so I could be sure of finding my own poems rather than his. For the last decade or so, I have depended on editors who have helped the process along. For my last book, Annie Martin of Wayne State University Press did a fabulous job of editorial input.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

The first person has become more muted in my poems recently. Now I realize the first person is pretty quiet in this poem. It may be important only as some kind of Emersonian observer, so perhaps this poem was a harbinger of work to come. Maybe that’s why I always liked it.

What is American about this poem?

An odd question for me, since—legally—I am not an American. I’m a Canadian, although I have lived most of my adult life in the States and most of my influences are American. But, yes, this feels like an American poem. There’s something in the direct narrative and the simplicity of the diction that seem to me to grow from a particularly American place. Even though there is ice in the poem, it doesn’t sound Canadian. I don’t think Americans hear this distinction much, but I’m pretty sure Canadians do. A student asked me a similar question recently and I responded "I’m a Canadian citizen and an American writer." After I thought about that for a while, I realized that it was exactly the kind of statement that would just piss off everyone, even though it might be true.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

So far this poem has been abandoned into its finished state. I might go back and make it more finished . . .

Melissa Range

2011-07-18T18:48:00.004-04:00

Melissa Range’s first book of poems, Horse and Rider, won the 2010 Walt McDonald Prize in Poetry and was published by Texas Tech University Press. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a "Discovery"/The Nation prize, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and VCCA. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, The Hudson Review, Image, New England Review, The Paris Review, and others. Originally from East Tennessee, she is currently pursuing her PhD in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri.

ACHILLES WALKS THE BEACHES

The Iliad, 24.1-16
These mornings, while my men sprawl beneath dead
stars, their dreams unarmed, I trawl gray sand and sky
for my tall boy. I stalk the stark sea, the black sails—

in the dark, I shadow Dawn, lest she bloody the beach
with light before I can find and touch the grain, the drop,
the ground where your glory resides. Patroclus,

surely your brawling heart bides somewhere near my hands:
in the shoreline gored by spears, knives, my pacing tread;
in the waves that slowly lap the ships to threads;

in the salt the moon washes back to Thessaly.
Fair Thessaly—a realm palled and failed
as the love shades bear for the living,

love which has no rest, no home, no gain.
Thessaly without you, Patroclus, lies slain,
its cliffs mauled by the assailing blue. It is no more

noble than this galled plain, which Helios gilds
so that men believe they fight for gold,
not land that they will never own. Poor Ilium—

when set beside your bright hair, my warrior,
how dull it seems; how dim its king’s howls,
its white walls, its bereaving fires.

And yet in this dark, when only kites and jackals
share my untired watch, I could almost pity it;
while the living and the light both cleave

to sleep, I could almost rest
my mouth against the city’s eaves
in hopes of touching you within one stone.

One stone, and I could turn away—alone,
awake, I crawl the sands, and I nearly believe.
But I do not steal to the city. Nor do I slumber.

I shine my greaves. I mend my helmet’s strap.
I watch flies plunder bowls of wine
I can’t remember pouring. I watch them drown.

And before Dawn skewers everything with light,
I plead the Muses for one grace:
that blood not be the only song that’s sung of you.

But Patroclus, my dagger and my harp—
the laughing gods bark and spar,
the pantheon warring in my throat

so that I cannot cry aught but battle;
though the shields of all Troy’s armies shatter
behind my eyes, only Pallas Athena is kind.

Now behold the thundering Achilles:
I am a captured ship, a sundered citadel,
a lioness whose pride is torn apart.

Before my men awake and see me here,
before day drives a shaft again into my eye,
I do for you what I know, and what I can.

I whet my spear. I clean my sword.
I pace and curse the Dawn, and Priam’s land.
Patroclus, my pyre, my boy,

these are the labors of Achilles the grand—
I walk the shore. I fit my blade into my hand.
I take the reins. I sweep a sweet prince through the sand.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem was written in the summer of 2004. Although I had been living in Atlanta for five years, I still had (illegal) Tennessee plates and a Tennessee license. My Tennessee license was about to expire, so I decided to stop being so trifling and become a law-abiding Hotlantan, which meant that I had to stand in line at the infamously grimy and always entertaining Moreland Avenue DMV (since closed down, alas) for a couple of hours to get a Georgia license. I took Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Iliad with me to read while I waited, which was a good idea, because I stood in line that first day for nearly three hours. When I got up to the front of the line, the no-nonsense lady behind the counter informed me that I had not brought enough forms of proper identification--so I had to come back the next day. Over two days, I plowed my way through a lot of the poem, which I hadn't read in about eight years. I'd always found the bond between Achilles and Patroclus the heart of the poem. I guess after two days at the DMV, I was feeling loopy enough to try my hand at my own interpretation. (I hadn't read Christopher Logue's War Music in 2004. I'm not sure I would've tried my own version if I had!) My version focuses on how Achilles expresses his grief. I was interested in the idea of a man who would rather write a song or a poem about the loss of someone he loved but who can't--his power is in his strength, speed, and violence, as he himself acknowledges in this poem. Ritual does not help him grieve, either. So he has to grieve the only way he can, which is by killing Hector.

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

I wish I could remember! But if it's the same as most of my other poems, I revise each line so much as I'm writing it before moving on to the next one that it's hard to tell how many "drafts" I go through; I suppose it depends on how one defines a "draft." A lot of times, the poem's working itself out in my head or on scraps of paper or in my journal for weeks or months (or even years in some cases) before I actually sit down to write a full draft. Once I do settle down to write, a draft might take me a week to write, or it might take a few hours. I don't save each tiny change as a separate draft (I hate lots of cluttery documents, and my cantankerous old laptop would prefer I keep her cleaned up, as well). Because of this practice, I am usually (and somewhat blissfully) unaware of how many drafts I do of most of my poems.

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

I definitely believe in inspiration--there's no question about that. I believe in the Muse. I believe in the white heat of the process where I don't consciously know what I'm doing--where something else is in charge. I also believe in toil--making deliberate choices, consciously crafting the poem--and there's no question about that, either; because I often write in traditional forms, I'm always aware that what I'm doing is (pleasurable) work.

At least one phrase of the poem was "received" in a very literal way--the lines "the shields of all Troy's armies shatter / behind my eyes" were adapted from something my friend Dominick had said that summer. I can't quite recall the exact context--I believe he was talking about how people's eyes look when they're in pain, as if glass is shattering behind them. I'm pretty sure we weren't sitting around talking about shields--though you never do know.

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

It seemed to tend toward tercets from the first couple of stanzas, so I just went with it. Mostly I was proceeding according to internal rhyme and slant rhyme--"trawl," "sprawl," "brawling," "palled," "galled," "mauled," etc., though those rhymes give way to other sounds about 2/3 through the poem. There's no structure to the rhyming--just intermittent chimin' (my debt to Hopkins is always apparent, I reckon). I typically construct poems by ear, so this practice isn't unique to "Achilles." I did feel strongly that I didn't want a received form or an end-rhyming form for "Achilles"--I wanted his speech to be looser and longer than the more strict forms I often write in would have allowed. Though there's still a lot of music in Achilles's speech, that's simply because the musicality of words is the element of language I never can resist.

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

This poem wasn't published until my book was, in 2010, so the interim was close to six years.

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've sent poems out after five years and others after a few months--just depends on how I feel about them (and how lazy or proactive I'm feeling about sending things out; it's usually the former, alas, for I am a very haphazard submitter).

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

Not really, but I do think that ideally, when I write a poem, I would want Emily Dickinson to read the poem and not hate it.

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?

I'm pretty free and easy about showing people drafts--I'm not very private about my work. Who sees drafts of poems depends upon whom I'm hanging out with at any given time. I don't have a regular group I show work to, but I do have a great poet-friend I've known for nearly twenty years; we've been regular readers for each other since college, so I'm sure she saw this poem. My boyfriend, who's a wonderful poet, is a great reader and editor for me now, but we didn't know each other back when I was writing this poem.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It's longer than most of my poems, and somewhat looser with respect to its form. It's also something of a love poem, which I don't tend to write very often.

What is American about this poem?

I've never thought of this as a particularly "American" poem, I guess because it's set in a mythological time and place. I think the knee-jerk emotional and violent reaction of Achilles--the bottomless grief that moves him to immediate and bloody retaliation--might be seen as "American" by some, particularly post-September 11th, but I think the desire for revenge after a great loss is not confined to one set of borders. It's a dark human feeling that seems to me universal. And obviously, grief is universal.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Like most of my poems, this one was abandoned.

Dave Lucas

2011-07-15T17:08:00.006-04:00

Dave Lucas was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and is the author of Weather (VQR, 2011). He is the recipient of a Henry Hoyns Fellowship from the University of Virginia and a "Discovery"/The Nation Prize, and his poems have appeared in many journals including The Paris Review, Poetry, and Slate. He lives in Cleveland and Ann Arbor, where he is a PhD candidate in English language and literature at the University of Michigan.
　

SUBURBAN PASTORAL

Twilight folds over houses on our street;
its hazy gold is gilding our front lawns,
delineating asphalt and concrete
driveways with shadows. Evening is coming on,
quietly, like a second drink, the beers
men hold while rising from their plastic chairs
to stand above their sprinklers, and approve.

Soon the fireflies will rise in lucent droves—
for now, however, everything seems content
to settle into archetypal grooves:
the toddler’s portraits chalked out on cement,
mothers in windows, finishing the dishes.
Chuck Connelly’s cigarette has burned to ashes;
he talks politics to Roger in the drive.

"It’s all someone can do just to survive,"
he says, and nods—both nod—and pops another
beer from the cooler. "No rain. Would you believe—"
says Chuck, checking the paper for the weather.
At least a man can keep his yard in shape.
Somewhere beyond this plotted cityscape
their sons drive back and forth in borrowed cars:

how small their city seems now, and how far
away they feel from last year, when they rode
their bikes to other neighborhoods, to score
a smoke or cop a feel in some girl’s bed.
They tune the radio to this summer’s song
and cruise into the yet-to-exhale lung
of August night. Nothing to do but this.

These are the times they’d never dream they’ll miss—
the hour spent chasing a party long burned out,
graphic imagined intercourse with Denise.
This is all they can even think about,
and thankfully, since what good would it do
to choke on madeleines of temps perdu
when so much time is set aside for that?

Not that their fathers weaken with regret
as nighttime settles in—no, their wives
are on the phone, the cooler has Labatt
to spare; at ten the Giants play the Braves.
There may be something to romanticize
about their own first cars, the truths and lies
they told their friends about some summer fling,

but what good is it now, when anything
recalled is two parts true and one part false?
When no one can remember just who sang
that song that everybody loved? What else?
It doesn’t come to mind. The sprinkler spits
in metronome; they’re out of cigarettes.
Roger folds up his chair, calls it a day.

The stars come out in cosmic disarray,
and windows flash with television blues.
The husbands come to bed, nothing to say
but ’night. Two hours late—with some excuse—
their sons come home, too full of songs and girls
to notice dew perfect its muted pearls
or countless crickets singing for a mate.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This is one of the earliest poems to survive for my first book. I wrote it as a graduate student at the University of Virginia, in the fall of 2003, when I was twenty-three. The poem started with an image of a yard sprinkler ticking "like summer’s metronome," an image that did not survive for the final draft but which certainly provided a main theme for the eventual poem.

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

I wrote the poem over the course of a month or so, and since I tend to revise as I go, I don’t remember how many revisions I went through. I do remember spending too much time staring at the half-written poem in a notebook, wondering what was coming next. I spent as much time waiting as I did revising.

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

Writers’ processes are mysterious, I think, even to the most self-aware among them. When I couldn’t find the right line, I felt utterly present—sweaty and teary—in the poem’s composition. When the right line came, I felt like I had had nothing to do with it. Maybe science will one day demonstrate exactly where in the brain inspiration happens, what electromagnetic or biochemical stimulation activates the muse. But then, I take science on faith too.

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

As far as I know, it’s a nonce form, and one that grew out of necessity. I wrote myself into a "Venus and Adonis" stanza and then sensed that something else needed to happen. The last unrhymed line of each stanza became a strategy of variation but also a logic of transition from one stanza to the next. By the time I reached the end of the poem, it seemed right to close with an apparently unrhymed line that still recalls its opening rhymes.

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

I finished it in the fall of 2003 and it appeared in print, in Poetry, in August 2004.

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 depends on the poem. My satisfaction with a poem depreciates like a new car driven off the lot, and this only increases once a poem is accepted for publication somewhere. Horace says to put a poem away for nine years before publishing it. I admire his patience.

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

I don’t necessarily see fact and fiction as two opposites through which one needs to steer a steady course. At their etymological roots, both words refer to something made, and of course the root of poetry does too, so I’m content with that. At the risk of being obtuse, however, I will say that the poem attempts to breathe some life back into the clichés of suburbia—events that one imagines or remembers happening even if they are not happening currently—and that I’m pounding on those clichés in the hope that they’ll start breathing on their own again.

Is this a narrative poem?

I don’t know. Categories such as "narrative"—or its workshop antithesis, "lyric"—have never held much water for me. Any poem that’s ever moved me enough to read it more than once demonstrates elements of both narrative and lyricism. So yes, it’s a narrative poem, but it’s also a lyric poem that wants to be an epic.

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

I was reading The Poems of W. B. Yeats and experiencing one of the great revelations of my reading life. I don’t know that the poem betrays that influence, given its subject matter, but reading Yeats certainly stoked some ambition in the younger writer I was. I was also attracted to the rather mystical portrayal of suburbia in Mark Strand’s "The Continuous Life."

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

In my grandest delusions, readers skeptical of poetry find themselves converted, and the living and dead poets and friends I love nod in approval.

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 then-girlfriend had to put up with so many announcements of new lines and laments for the abandonment of others that I am both grateful and mystified she ever agreed to marry me. She remains the first, last and best reader of my poems.

When I eventually shared the poem in Charles Wright’s workshop, I remember it being well received and thoughtfully, helpfully critiqued—Charles was particularly kind to it, which was a great encouragement—but it was not met with the full Roman triumph I had been expecting.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

At the time I wrote the poem it was quite similar indeed to other poems of mine. In the eight years since, though, I’ve moved away from this poetry of the suburbs and toward a vatic, incantatory voice more applicable to the sort of industrial mythmaking that occupies me now. I’m sure this shift in my thinking parallels a literal move from the suburbs to the city of Cleveland as well.

What is American about this poem?

This is tricky. The poem attempts, as I mention above, to animate some of the clichés of American suburbia, of teenagers in suburbia, and in particular of male teenagers in suburbia. But too often those clichés are labeled "American" to the exclusion of other American experiences. The word "American" means too many things to too many people—and it should—for me to feel justified in claiming it for this poem.

I do think (or hope) that the poem exhibits a spirit of both expansiveness and lonesomeness, which I have found to be true of my experience of the American landscape, and the suburbs are no exception.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished, then abandoned.

Steve Kistulentz

2011-07-08T15:14:00.003-04:00

Steve Kistulentz's first book of poems The Luckless Age was selected by Nick Flynn as the winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award and was published by Red Hen Press this February. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The Antioch Review, Barn Owl Review, Black Warrior Review, Caesura, New England Review, New Letters, Quarterly West and many others. Individual poems have also won recognition from such noted poets as former Poet Laureate of the United States Mark Strand, who selected "The David Lee Roth Fuck Poem…" for the 2008 edition of the Best New Poets anthology, and by Mark Doty, who included the John Mackay Shaw award-winning poem "Bargain" in the ninth volume of its Helen Burns Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. He currently is an assistant professor of English at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, where he teaches courses in creative writing, literature, and popular culture.

FIXING

What I did
I did in the dark,
nightclub bathroom door
held shut by my bulk,
a 20-dollar descent
into the uproar
of mad stupidity.
At least I used
a fresh needle,
and before I went
sick, drew the plunger
back, pressed it down
four times, filling
and emptying, and
filling again with blood.
I used a needle
only once, the night
before I married.
That ought to be enough
to convince anyone
in omens. Let’s resist
moralizing here, just
say it was wrong,
meaning incorrect,
a subtle offense.
They call it fixing;
you do it because
you are broken;
and you hope
it will help,
and still later
you talk about it, this
one thing no one saw.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Despite the relative darkness of the subject, this poem came from wordplay. I was thinking about the slang that surrounds heroin, a subject the book returns to in the poem "Wild Gift." At a friend’s funeral, I’d overheard someone say, "I didn’t know he was back on the horse," and I’d obsessed over that phrase for maybe three months, knowing that in conversation, the speaker had meant exactly this: despite pretentions to the contrary, our dead friend had never really kicked drugs. But even in that phrase, there is this hint of hope, this peculiarly American urge to confront and defeat failure.

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

The version in the book is probably draft three. The first two contained slightly longer lines, and a joke: "A subtle offense/ like men wearing black socks/ with sandals at the shore." I’m grateful for whatever voice told me to cut that. It might have worked in some version of the poem itself, but that moment of levity was contrary to the movement of the whole first section of the book.

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

Barbara Hamby pointed me to an answer that Picasso gave. "Inspiration exists, but it must find us working." When I am not working on any particular project, I find myself combing through favorite books, my journals and notebooks, magazines, anything, just looking for words that trigger some secret association. The myth of inspiration causes otherwise ordinary people to believe that they too can write a novel or a collection of poems, if they only had the time. Which of course they can; it’s the great and saving illusion of democracy and graduate school. And while I do not necessarily want to be the voice that extinguishes someone’s faith, I think it is important to demystify process. I don’t get inspired; I work. When I write, what I am putting on paper is the sum total of all the reading, thinking, ruminating and previous writing that I’ve ever attempted. Said another way, I find my inspiration in the act of working. It may not produce results today, but it lays a foundation for tomorrow’s work.

How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique? Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

I remember going through a phase where I was reading poets who were mostly absorbed in their own reporting of these little domestic scenes; I’d been deep in to C.K. Williams at the time. I envied the scope of those long lines but mostly I envied the kind of voice that could say to the reader something like, "The only time I ever fell in love with someone else’s wife…" I had to learn how to be that fearless, and though I might seem comfortable with the public aspects of the writing life, it’s an acquired skill. To me, it’s a shame that Williams often channels that ambition into poems about infidelity and the bourgeois limits of conventional morality. So perhaps Williams was an influence in that I was responding negatively to the people who populate his poems and their relative affluence in the world. "Fixing" is like the antimatter to the poems in a book like Flesh and Blood.

A number of poems in The Luckless Age were also written as part of my effort to be aware of the speed of sound; I’d been playing bass for a friend who is a wonderful singer-songwriter, and he would record these elaborate demos using an old Boss Dr. Rhythm drum machine. At rehearsal, he could tell the rest of us that the click track was, for example, set at 108 beats per minute, which is a pretty moderate tempo for rock and roll. I pretty much always wanted the songs to go faster. Those clipped lines are my effort to distinguish "Fixing" as a much more visceral jab than the rather panoramic lyric narratives that precede it in the book.

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

C. Dale Young took this poem for the New England Review and it appeared in the Spring 2003 issue, so it was probably about a year old by the time it came out.

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?

Generally it’s a poem-by-poem decision. I don’t always know when I have succeeded, but I am acutely aware of when I have failed. I have a few trusted readers, and we tend more towards trading larger blocks of poems, a cycle or a whole manuscript. But my relationship with those people is such that we tend to only raise our voices if something is seriously awry. If the poem in question feels particularly risky to me, I might wait a tad longer to send it out.

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

Are you asking why the Library of Congress categorizes poetry as a distinctly non-fiction endeavor? That’s always been a great mystery to me. I am by no means a genre loyalist, and I like to push the limits of what we think of as discrete categories. In this particular poem, the owner of the first-person voice is almost inconsequential. I’m much more interested in a sense of emotional authenticity than I am in whether or not something is literally true. Of all the poems in the book, "Fixing" is the one that people most often assume springs from some sort of impulse to practice a type of documentary or post-confessional poetics. And perhaps it does, but the poet isn’t necessarily the subject of that documentary. Interestingly, in the few poems in my book that do spring from a documentary impulse, I do not feel any obligation at all to the literal truth. My obligation is to a sense of unflinching honesty that convinces the reader to make the investment in the book. Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote that criticism’s goal was to complete the text, but since I am a writer first and scholar second, I have an extraordinarily ambivalent relationship to the practice of biographical literary criticism. To me, trying to map the actual life of an author or a poet on to a text not only defeats the purpose of reading, but it’s a perverse and lazy way to approach a text. Biography informs the text, but it doesn’t complete it.

Is this a narrative poem?

Perhaps. If it is, it contains narrative only in the sense that it is an extended synecdoche and the reader is invited to complete the narrative. Though I return to the subject matter later in the book in a poem called "Wild Gift," and that poem is more a traditional narrative. The original title of "Wild Gift" was "Fixing (Reprise)" but I already had a poem in the book called "Luckless Age (Slight Return)" so I thought maybe I was better off limiting myself to one inside reference to 1960s classic albums per book.

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

Again, the answer varies. When I was eighteen, I had this horrific summer job raising money for progressive political organizations. One night after work, a few of us went out for beers in the Georgetown section of DC, and my boss, his name was Pete, said to me on the walk home, "You know, no one ever knocks on your door at three in the morning with a twelve-pack once you’re married and 26." And he said it with the most complete air of defeat I’d ever heard. Many years later, as a grad student at Iowa, those 3 a.m. visits and phone calls were a part of the landscape. After one particularly brutal workshop, a guy named Thomas Derr came up to me and quoted a sentence from one of my stories back at me. And he said, "Anybody who can write a sentence like that is going to go a long way." Of course, there might have been beer involved in this discussion, but I took it to mean this: if one person can read this and want to share it with someone in the middle of the night, then maybe I’ve done my job. Also, if you are knocking on the door at 3 a.m., you damn well better not come empty handed.

What is American about this poem?

It’s pretty much all-American I think, with all the contradictions that implies. For all of the contemporary discussions about what America is and isn’t, I think it’s important to remember that we are a nation built on a foundation of shame. When John Winthrop gave his sermon to the members of the Massachusetts Bay company, he wasn’t speaking to victims of persecution or even idealists who saw themselves as the foundation of the American project. Rather, the Puritans were people who believed that the Church of England and the Crown were possessed of a decaying moral authority that would soon be insufficient to govern. Even at the remove of four centuries, we are still shackled to that shrill Puritan voice in our national dialogue. The voice that tells this poem struggles with his own shame, but in his heart, he knows everyone else has such secrets, too.

Alexandra Teague

2011-07-02T11:28:00.003-04:00

Alexandra Teague’s first book, Mortal Geography (Persea 2010), won the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2011 California Book Award. Her poetry has also appeared in Best American Poetry 2009, Best New Poets 2008, and many journals. She was a 2006-08 Stegner Fellow and the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. After years in the Bay Area, she will begin in the Fall as Assistant Professor of Poetry at The University of Idaho.

ADJECTIVES OF ORDER

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering

streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard,
she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade

is essential to bread. He copied this down, but
he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before
older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern

downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern.
When he first arrived, he did not know enough English
to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part

of Lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic
leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color.
Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding

and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal.
After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years
of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

A colleague at City College of San Francisco had told me this story about one of her students, and it really resonated with me; I was working on a series of grammar poems, and I hadn't yet written anything about this kind of situation (which is fairly common): a teacher and student trying to navigate difficult emotions and history, while simultaneously navigating the challenges of language acquisition itself. So I wanted to write about the story, but I waited about a year before I tried. I actually began with the current opening line, which was my entry into the story: the thing that I knew most clearly about it.

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

The poem went through about three main drafts, though I also revise a lot line-by-line as I'm going. I wrote a draft, but the pieces weren't quite fitting, and I realized, after setting the poem aside overnight, that I didn't know enough about the fall of Saigon to really imagine the student's physical experience. So I did a little research and added some of the images in the first few lines, and also spent more time with a grammar book finding specific usage samples. Then I workshopped that draft in Eavan Boland's Stegner workshop a week or so later and got feedback--including some wonderful suggestions about cuts and ways to get more energy between the sentences and lines, and a few parts that I should invert or otherwise alter. I also received a few suggestions that I didn't take: such as cutting the teacher out of the poem entirely! I think I did the main revisions within a week or so of receiving feedback, which is pretty quick by my revision standards, but I was lucky that the critique had helped me to clearly re-see the poem.

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

I think my poems (or at least the ones that end up somewhere) are always a combination of "received" surprises, and sweat and tears. And also, as I said above, sometimes good advice from others. I think that people often think about inspiration occurring at the start of the poetic process—with some brilliant idea for a poem. But I feel as if the words and images and thoughts in the poem inspire me as I get into the poem: that they lead me places I wouldn't have expected. That's a lot of the joy of writing for me, really. And, of course, in order to have those moments that feel as if I'm being led, I have to try a lot of things and have them not work, and generally muck around in the language and emotions and ideas for a long time.

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

Based on the feedback in the Stegner workshop, I consciously jarred some of the pieces against one another more and made a few parts more elliptical. I can't remember what I originally wrote, but I know that "He wanted to know why the order could not be altered" was a streamlining.

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

No, the drafting process I described above is fairly typical. Some poems arrive faster than others, or begin with a line that I have in mind or have read somewhere, but others, like "Adjectives" come from a story that has stayed on my mind and that I'm exploring by writing about it.

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

The poem was accepted by "Slate" maybe about six months after I wrote it.

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?

Sometimes a poem feels ready enough to send out within a few days of finishing the final draft; sometimes I wait for a year or more. In this case, the poem felt ready pretty quickly.

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

Well, the basic story about the student is true. And the examples of teaching grammar are from real grammar books and my own experience as a grammar and composition teacher. But the exact conversation between those two parts is invented; I wasn't really there when my colleague was teaching this particular student, so I had to imagine and distill the interaction.

Is this a narrative poem?

Definitely, though it's also a poem about the slipperiness of language, which in some way works against straight narrative.

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

I don't remember specifically; I was reading pretty voraciously throughout the Stegner workshop, but I'd be wary to point to a particular influence on this particular piece. It's definitely been shaped by Eavan Boland's critique, as I said above, so maybe I should list her.

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

I don't have a specific audience in mind, but I do think (particularly in later drafting) about the voices of peers and teachers—what they would be likely to ask me, or not let me get away with (because it's good to have people stop us from getting away with things that we really suspect we shouldn't be getting away with—easy lines, weak descriptions or structure, etc.). And I really listen to my poems as I write them; I write a lot by ear in terms of rhythms and what sounds true to me. And I ideally try to write poems that I could read aloud to smart, emotionally-engaged listeners, and have them feel a connection.

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, as I said, I workshopped it with the wonderful Stegner fellows; I still get together with some of the former fellows every few months to critique poems. And I show my work to my partner, the songwriter Dylan Champagne, who is also a wonderful critic.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This poem's biggest distinction is probably in the attention it's received. It's the poem I'm most often asked about, or asked to read—the one that the most people seem to connect with. This means a lot to me since it's a story that matters to me as a person, and as a teacher and writer who is really interested in language's capacities and limitations. In some ways, I'm still surprised that this poem speaks to the experience effectively—since it's not my personal experience, and I certainly worried about its accuracy and about representing a Vietnamese man who had gone through these experiences that are so far removed from my own (though emotionally resonate for me, both as someone who is concerned about war and violence, and as someone with several close friends who are Vietnamese and whose families went through the war).

What is American about this poem?

This poem seems very American to me in its story: a teacher who is a native speaker of English working with an immigrant student who is struggling with the language and with expressing really powerful experiences that the teacher only knows about through history books. The community college system in this country is fairly unique in the range of ages and backgrounds that its students have, which allows this sort of intersection of languages and cultures.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This particular poem feels more finished; actually, most of my poems that I send out or otherwise show to people feel fairly finished, though there's a fine line. There's always another way the poem could have been written. And sometimes I think for years that a poem is finished, only to revise it later. Or I think it's "abandoned," only to later decide that it was really finished.

Mark Turpin

2011-06-22T11:32:00.005-04:00

Mark Turpin's first full-length collection, Hammer, published by Sarabande Books, won the Ploughshares' Zacharis First Book Award in 2004. In 1997 he received a Whiting award. His poems have appeared in the The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and Slate among others; they have been read on the PBS News Hour (for Labor Day) and by Garrison Keillor for The Writer's Almanac. His work appears in many anthologies, and is also embedded in a Berkeley sidewalk as part of the Addison Street Anthology, selected by Bob Hass. He is the son of a Presbyterian minister. He received a Masters in Poetry from Boston University at age forty seven, otherwise, he has spent thirty years working construction and building houses. He lives and works in Berkeley, California.

THE MAN WHO BUILT THIS HOUSE

First realize he didn’t build it for himself,
and that changes a man, and the way he thinks
about building a house. There is joy but
it’s a colder type—he’d as easily joy in
tearing it down, as we have done, down
to the bare frame, loaded boxes of lath
and plaster, stirring a dust unstirred since
well, we know the date: Thursday, June 19, 1930.
Date on the newspaper stuffed between
the doorbell battery and the box it lodged in.
Not so long ago, seventy years, historical
only to a Californian. The headline: "Admiral Byrd
Given Welcome In N.Y." "Rear Admiral
Richard E. Byrd, conqueror of the South Pole."
Safe to say, the man who built this house
is gone or nearly gone by now-and we think
of the houses we have built, and the strangers
who will certainly, eventually come to change
or tear them down—that further event that
needs to happen. And there is a foulness
to this dust, dust locked in walls till
we arrived to release it to the world again.
So, maybe, all is as it should be. Still, the man
himself haunts me. I noticed it—especially
after my apprentice saw fit to criticize his work,
this neat but spindly frame of rough 2x4’s—
2x4’s for the walls, the rafters, even for the ceiling joists
(that he tied to the ridge to keep the ceiling from sagging)
that functioned adequately all these years
till we knocked it loose. And so, for reasons
my apprentice wouldn’t understand, I admit
a liking, yes, for him and for this sketch
of a house, the lightness of his eye, as if
there might be something else to think about:
a sister taken sick, or maybe just a book or
a newspaper with a coffee and a smoke, as if
to say to the world: This is all you take from me.
Of course, having lived here a month already,
I know better—accustomed now to the
hieroglyphs of his keel marks, his red crayon
with an arrow denoting the sole plate of a wall,
imaginary, invisible lines that he
unknowing, passes on to me, numbers and lines
radiating from the corners and the eaves
—where the bird nests hide inside the vents—
all lining up, falling plumb, coming square and true
for me, and all his offhand easiness just a guise
for a mind too quick ever to be satisfied
—just moving quickly through the motions.
And, now, what he has to show for it, hauled away
in boxes and bags, and me about to alter
what's left—not like Byrd’s Pole, fixed
forever. The pure radiating lines forever
flowing and unalterable—lines of mind only,
without a house attached. And yet, even a South Pole
doesn’t seem much of an accomplishment to us—
to have merely found another place on Earth.
There is a special pity that we reserve
for the dead, trapped in their newspapers’
images of time, wearing what they wore,
doing what they did. I feel as much for this man here,
and for the force it took to pull a chalked string
off the floor, let it snap, and, make a wall.
Something apart from something else,
not forever but for a little while.
He must have felt it too, a man like him,
else why leave the newspaper for us?

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

It was one of the last poems to go into Hammer, published in 2003. Around that time, my work required me to demolish a very small, flimsy house. There was an offhand sketchiness to the workmanship as if the builder might have been a very good carpenter but very casual about this particular project. Anyway, he built the house, he was dead, and here I was, many years later, alive, tearing it down.

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

It was fast for me, about two months. Average is six months, one poem at a time, and hundreds, even thousands of changes, most small, some large. I print things out often, and it’s not uncommon for me to have a couple of reams of paper in a poem folder.

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

I expect sweat and tears, yes. False starts, yes. Changing horses midstream, yes. I expect the triumphant deletion of passages painstakingly erected over months like a card houses in wind tunnels, yes. I expect the regretted bad language in response to the opinions of those nearest and dearest to my heart. Recantings. Reversals. Yes, yes, yes.

I can’t write without some sense of mission, imagined or not. I never sit down just to see what happens under my pen. If I only have a subject, I prepare for a long struggle, although the moment my mind catches on something: a hook, a title, a rhythm, inspiration can begin to trickle. With a couple of solid stanzas, I’ll hang on for years.

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

The only question I have while writing is: does this sound right? If time goes by and it still doesn’t sound right, then I resort to conscious technique. My famous mentor was known for saying, "Consciousness is not a bad thing." And I want to believe it.

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

Two years.

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?

Although I understand its important function, I don’t often send poems into the world.

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

Would "Ode to a Nightingale" be a better poem if Keats had invented his encounter with the nightingale?

Is this a narrative poem?

I think it would be called a meditative-descriptive poem--but with narrative elements like 99% of the poems anyone reads more than once.

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

Jonson, Hardy, Whitman, Frost, Williams, Bishop.

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

I like the idea of a general audience. For reasons obscured by history, Shakespeare didn’t sneer at this audience.

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?

The fewer opinions and more time I have, the easier it is to know what I think myself.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It doesn’t.

What is American about this poem?

I once got drunk with Phil Levine.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Poems I abandon are most often not very good.
　
　

David Young

2011-06-08T18:02:00.006-04:00

David Young taught for many years at Oberlin College and still helps run Oberlin College Press, which publishes poetry titles and the twice-yearly journal FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. He has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Field of Light and Shadow: Selected and New Poems (Knopf, 2010), and is also active as a translator of poetry, having worked on Rilke, Celan, Petrarch, Montale, and the classical Chinese poets, especially Du Fu.
　

REASONS FOR LIVING

There aren’t that many, surely.
A tiny, crumpled list
you keep in purse or wallet.

Meanwhile, though,
think of your life as a bulky
present you were given
sometime around your first birthday.

You spend your years unwrapping it, perhaps.

Or you finish unwrapping, discover it’s a kit,
and spend your years assembling it.

The directions, if that is what they are,
are too confusing, with lots of gaps,
and there are way too many parts.

What you finally manage to put together
may or may not be what the kit intended,
but it’s yours, like a pet you never planned to own;
even if you run out of reasons to live,
it expects your care and maintenance.
　

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this a couple of years back. I suppose it started when I was thinking about depression and suicide among some of my friends. I haven't personally experienced those extremes (though I think we all know something of what depression feels like), but I am drawn to consideration of them because, among other things, they afflict so many poets.

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

Sorry, but I work a lot on the computer now, which means I don’t keep drafts or dates.

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

I don't write poems unless inspiration strikes. That would be manufacturing, which is fine for some people but just doesn’t fit my paradigm for poetry. I have to wait for poems to happen to me.

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

All I really did was use the line and stanza as a way of scoring the poem for the voice (my voice, but also, of course, the voice in the reader’s head).

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

A couple of years, I guess, until the book came out. I am lazy about periodical publication and only respond to requests any more. I don’t regard that as exemplary; it’s just a fact.

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?

When you’ve been at it for around fifty years, you kind of know whether a poem is a ‘keeper’ fairly soon. But it’s nice to have a reader or two to validate. My Knopf editor, Deborah Garrison, has a very good eye and ear.

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

I don't think that would be of interest in this case.

Is this a narrative poem?

Nope.

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

Actually, it’s a book I’ve read since writing it that seems most germane to me: Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, which I’m reading right now, speaks to the issues that the poem grapples with. Our will to live, as he points out, comes mostly from below the conscious mind, from the cellular level on up, which means that questioning life and survival is a kind of incidental result, a byproduct of the fact that brains eventually produced what we now call consciousness. It’s a small part of the picture, in other words, though a crucial one, of course, for the consciousness. Here’s a passage that seems relevant to me:

"We commonly fall into the trap of regarding our big brains and complex conscious minds as the originators of the attitudes, intentions, and strategies behind our sophisticated life management. Why should we not? That is a reasonable and parsimonious way of conceiving of such processes, when we view it from the top of the pyramid and from present circumstances. The reality, however, is that the conscious mind has merely made the basic life-management know-how, well, knowable" (35-6).

I like the perspective that offers because it helps me see why I turned to the somewhat childish cultural stock of similes (the list, the birthday present, the kit, the pet) that inform the poem. We don’t have a deep understanding of our reasons for living because that depth is not really available to us, despite our illusion that it is.

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

No, not really.

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, I try my poems out on friends: Charles Wright, Stuart Friebert, David Walker, my daughter Margaret, Franz Wright, et alia.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Well, just generally, I think my work has gotten simpler and more direct over the years. That might be a byproduct of working so much on Chinese poets like Du Fu and Du Mu. I admire the simplicity they achieve, their intimacy with the reader. Of course this poem doesn’t feel Chinese, but one might say that Chinese poetic values lie behind it.

What is American about this poem?

Well, everything, really. The subject and the very colloquial handling of it.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

That’s probably not for me to say!

Beth Bachmann

2011-06-04T15:41:00.007-04:00

Beth Bachmann's first book, Temper, was selected by Lynn Emanuel as winner of the AWP Award Series 2008 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and won the 2010 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares and Tin House, among other journals. She holds graduate degrees from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and Concordia University in Montreal and teaches at Vanderbilt University. Beth’s new poems recently won the Poetry Society of America’s 2011 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress.

HEAVEN

Some would call this heaven – a teenage girl half-naked
in the grass. For all I know, they might be right.

The lighting is soft, mid-morning, hazy enough to blur
the details, so we can fill them in any way we like.

Say, a brunette, barely legal, hidden.
From here, it looks like she’s speechless.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

It must have been composed in 2005. It started with the first line.

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

"Heaven" underwent one revision; about a year later, I changed the final word from "sleeping" to "speechless." It’s a small sonic leap but "speechless" is more untranslatable and more dangerous.

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

I like Siegfried Sassoon’s advice to Wilfred Owen, "Sweat your guts out." In any good sweat, face your door to the fire.

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

The couplets here are imposed. I like the order of the couplet, the tension. Also, here, they’re close-cropped like photographs, a way of controlling the gaze. And, end-stopped, gesturing toward the silence of the last word. There’s also a doubling of hyphens, a doubling of vision, an open-ended dash.

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

It appeared in American Poetry Review Mar/Apr 2008, so about three years.

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 tend to let things sit a long time, a year or more.

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

I’d say this one’s mostly fact. It begins with a premise and then explores that premise. Then again, it’s about heaven – is there a greater imaginative space?

Is this a narrative poem?

No.

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

I am my own ideal reader. Use the enemy.

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?

Currently, I have one friend, a poet whose work and sensitivities I admire. We swap. I’m very private.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This poem seems more alike my others than different. About the same amount of nudity, light, violence and turning over. Same eye, ear and throat. Different body.

What is American about this poem?

Its references to Christianity and violent crime.

W. Perry Epes

2011-05-18T13:59:00.003-04:00

W. Perry Epes was born in Alexandria, Virginia, and graduated from the Episcopal High School. He received degrees in English from the universities of Virginia and Chicago and an MFA in Poetry from George Mason University. He has taught in boarding schools for many years and coordinates the Jacklyn Potter Young Poets Competition for The Word Works. His poems have appeared in Phoebe, Negative Capability, GW Forum, and Innisfree. His first book of poems, Nothing Happened, was published in 2010 by The Word Works, Washington, DC, in the Hilary Tham Capital Collection.

AMERICANS HIT THE BEACHES

(in loco parentis, on the Greek isle of Hydra)

This was the day I finally told the Stanley twins apart.
We filed off the cruise boat, fanned out through town,
fending off vendors and guide books, aiming straight as possible
for beaches beyond the basin of the harbor.
Two days of old rock piles in Athens and Mycenae,
and now it’s all isles and sun; no more need for awe
at spears and shields and helmets
hammered out upon a time, or buckled on
with no thought that we would travel in coaches
to jog through the museums in shorts and Nikes.
Time now for stripping down to bathing suits,
being ourselves and looking each other over,
filling the lungs with open air, and shouting them empty—
our own music at outdoor dancing on the sand.
No such beach—where a sign in pidgin
said “This is the place swimming,” only a moderate cliff
and piles of surf-lashed rocks. A dip in the sea
meant backing gingerly down one ladder
till one of the Stanleys climbed the cliff unnoticed, and jumped.
We gasped at the plunge and splash, held breaths till the head bobbed,
and cheered. The other Stanley matches the feat exactly,
then all the boys, and even one of the girls. Stakes mounting—
Stanleys add twists and gainers, others jump in tandem.
A crowd of tourists gathers, the real draw being
the chance to see a body brained on the rocks.
I ask one Stanley to cool it. He asks for just one more.
I leap on this concession. “All right, but nothing fancy.
Just jump, and wrap it up.” But why one more?
As they climb again, I chew me out, rehearsing
the orders I should have given. Their every step
is a station of the cross I have to bear.
You could say they never were meant to live—
conception “complete surprise”; three pounds each at birth;
incubated brawn, motherlove hovering for years.
And I, in loco, know nothing of hatching youth
but cracking shells on rocks, like gulls with oysters.

They’re up, radiant in height. What’s left but prayer?
the last resort of Dads. They jump,
arms locked and all for one, with nothing fancy—
John on the left, and Wade on the right. My burden
melts to a thick joy you could cut with a knife
for sharing round. Even before the double splash
I believe in their last jump: one more just for me
so I can learn to bears these pangs
for the length of each plunge in the wine-dark sea.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

“Americans Hit the Beaches” was composed in the summer of 1981, about two weeks after the incident which it depicts. My wife and I were helping chaperone a student trip to Europe. After working our way across Greece and Italy from mid-June, we arrived in southern France by early July and were faced next with a fourteen-hour drive one day to the Loire Valley in three vans on the autoroute. My wife drove one of the vans and was terrified of having such immediate responsibility for the lives of seven of the students; I followed her in another van and used my turn signals to make space for her in the passing lanes, keeping an eye out in my rear view mirror for those charging overtakers at 160 kph in Citroens and Mercedes who loom up before you know it and flash by like an impatient wind. During one of those passings I flashed back to my own in loco parentis anxiety over the boys’ cliff jumping on the Greek isle of Hydra, and the first line about telling the Stanley twins apart came to me unbidden.

I worked on the poem the next couple of nights, and then finished it on the road to Chartres (a bit like Wordsworth composing “Tintern Abbey” while he walked back to Bristol). That night, in the shadow of the cathedral, I showed the first draft to my wife, who sobbed with gratitude—my naming the fear imposed by our responsibilities served to brace her for the next day’s ordeal in Paris traffic (she later wrote a powerful prose memoir of the trip called “Fear Itself”).

Just last fall, I read the poem aloud to my eleventh-grade class after one of the students had asked about the photograph in my classroom of a Stanley twin doing a gainer from the cliff (I was fortunate to get permission to use the picture for the cover of my book, Nothing Happened). It turned out that not just one, but two of the girls in the class have aunts who were students on that very same trip!

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

Not many. Other poems of mine have required infinite revision, but this one moved from first to final draft in three days of intense work around sightseeing and driving. In the years since, I have made a few minor revisions—tightening of phrase, clarification of metaphor.

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

I believe in inspiration succeeded by perspiration, just as Julian of Norwich spent thirty years interpreting her visions. My first line arrived like a vision, but then the rest of the lines needed to be hammered out to embody it. The composition process involved saying the lines over and over as I was driving or walking to and from great tourist sites. While repeating my internal recitation I would back and fill until the cadence sounded right, and then write it all down at night. That required some sweat but not too many tears or agonies of the blank page (which I’ve certainly experienced with other poems). I think again of Wordsworth, walking it out after re-experiencing the landscape around Tintern Abbey. By the end, the lines were virtually fixed in memory.

Finishing the poem was a great relief after sustained effort, not so much in triumph as in gratitude for a great gift of inspiration to which I had responded with due diligence instead of ignoring it as we so often do in the aftermath of intense experiences, or letting it lie around in our imaginations while we procrastinate over our good intentions of writing it all down to preserve it.

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

Once I had received the first line—“This was the day I finally told the Stanley twins apart”— I scanned its metrics as loosely iambic after an initial trochaic foot. I then tried to maintain the conversational movement, similar to that of blank verse but with one or two extra feet per line. At times it felt almost like the old “fourteeners” in which broadside ballads used to be printed—compressing the four-line stanzas of 4-beat/3-beat, 4-beat/3-beat lines into long couplets with 7-beat lines that sprawled almost to the margin—though only a few of my lines are as long as fourteen syllables (after the first one). As the speaker’s relation of the events rolls on, lines that are end-stopped tend to feel like a teacher’s or dad’s pronouncements, but the extra length of the lines seems to add a little reflection, as if we had to venture, from this experience, beyond mere certainty into radical questioning of our custodial skills.

But the greatest opportunity for energy and discovery comes with enjambement, when the sense spilling over the line end creates a propulsive movement in tension with a slight pause of suspense. Wordsworth is absolutely brilliant at this sort of thing; in “There Was a Boy,” after the owls have momentarily ceased their “jocund din” in response to his “mimic hootings,” the Boy of Winander feels a gentle shock of mild surprise “in that silence, while he hung/ Listening,” and the voice of mountain torrents and all the solemn imagery of nature would enter unawares into his mind and heart. There is nothing so remarkable in “Americans Hit the Beaches,” but the most frequently quoted lines do balance on suspended moments of possible double meaning created by enjambement: “My burden/ melts to a thick joy you could cut with a knife/ for sharing ‘round.”

This interplay of suspense and relief that nothing bad actually happened undergirds one of the implied themes of my book. So often, when kids are asked what happened, they’ll shrug and say, “Oh, nothing.” It’s as if they are under an imperative not to look back on those formative experiences that might well have killed them, but forward to the next adventure. As we live on, we go on blithely through more such experiences and then, when we come to shepherd others, we discover with a shock of surprise that becoming a “grown-up” seems mostly to be a lucky survival of this gauntlet, gaining strength (we hope) from what hasn’t succeeded yet in breaking us. Sooner or later something will happen to break us, and then we will look back and see how much already has happened in those moments of suspension.

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

About three months after I finished writing the poem, it appeared in the school newspaper at Woodberry Forest, on a full page like a broadside or poster with the text embedded in an extraordinary photograph by Steven White, another student on the trip, of Wade Stanley leaping from the cliff, in the mid-flip of a gainer, his outstretched fingers touching the sun. The picture provided an allusion to Icarus without the poem’s having to say a word, which might have sounded too admonitory. Steven very kindly gave me an enlarged color copy, which I have hung in my classroom ever since, and even more kindly granted me permission to use the picture on the cover of Nothing Happened.

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?

My practice varies with every poem; with some it has been longer than the proverbial nine years. Some I have tinkered with after they were published, so in general letting a poem “sit” for awhile is the better policy for me.

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

This is a fascinating question which really gets to the heart of what I’m trying to do in poetry. Virtually all of my poems draw from experienced fact, and they strike some readers as surprisingly, indeed vulnerably autobiographical. And yet what fiction makes of the facts is what the poems are really about. None of the students were particularly aware at the time of my indecision and self-critique as a chaperone. At dinner that night in Athens, Wade told me that his hand brushed the cliff face as he was coming down out of his last gainer. But his telling me that nothing happened was not just bravado; it was said in a tone of bemusement, a kind of awed realization of how fortunate all the students had been. And that was the better part of a wisdom he would carry into his next adventures. When I gave copies of the poem to him and his brother (and to his parents), the boys could learn something about caring for themselves with due regard for the way others cared about them. That was not something we ever had or even could have had a direct conversation about. Such are the lessons that fiction and poetry can teach—always telling them slant, of course.

Is this a narrative poem?

Another essential question. This poem is not exactly a completed narrative, but more a “spot of time” in the sense of Wordsworth’s term for those moments of experience (mostly in nature, but also in the midst of social interaction) when the movement of the universe is suspended, like the “stationary blast of waterfalls” in Simplon Pass, and we see into the heart of things. I have written a few truly narrative poems which seek to resolve a conflict between different characters’ points of view, but this one is more lyrical in the sense of raising and ultimately cherishing the questions that a single point of view may be left with.

Perhaps lyrical essentially means bemused. Of course great narrative can and must be richly ambiguous; I’m not suggesting a didactic view of narrative, simply conclusive or even complacent in its lessons, as a straw man to shed light on poetry by contrast. But a lyric poem is something like a soliloquy in the midst of the action, a still point in the turning world.

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

Certainly Wordsworth—I’d been teaching him regularly for ten years. But my manner of writing at that time was also part of a larger movement away from tight formal concerns (the result of an early infatuation with Yeats) toward a more direct response to immediate experience, with looser, unrhymed lines and a more realistic, even frank conversational tone. It was almost like moving from something liturgical to something more secular, though I retained a sort of liturgical concern for rhythm.

During this time Galway Kinnell’s Fergus poems hit me hard, and I really admired William Matthews’ nuanced accessibility. Baron Wormser’s blunt, precise eloquence conveyed a clear assurance I aspired toward, Sharon Olds’ honesty was breathtaking—oh, and Seamus Heaney, and a hundred others. And Henry Taylor’s reminders of form beautifully wrought with frankness.

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

I’ll answer this one in an oblique way. My mind is habitually allusive, and one friend joked that a reader has to know as much as I do in order to understand one of my poems. It would be a genuine bind if the audience I aimed for could only be just like me! I was attempting to escape this difficulty with the more accessible style of “Americans Hit the Beaches.”

So I’ve concluded that my ideal reader is someone a lot smarter than I am, someone able to use allusive detail, not getting bogged down in it but seeing through and beyond it. In this matter, Peter Klappert, my mentor at George Mason University, taught me a lot about what to leave out.

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?

This poem was mostly finished even before being written down, so it was close to a final draft that I first showed to my wife. And it has escaped major restructuring in subsequent workshop sessions.

But usually I will show earlier drafts and make substantive revisions in response to trusted readers’ suggestions. For many years I have benefited from the support and inspiration of fellow George Mason MFA alumni Naomi Thiers, Jane Schapiro, Jonathan Vaile, Romola D, and Elisabeth Murawski. More recently, local poets Judith Freeman and Katherine Smith of the Potomac Review have joined our writing group.

Also my editors at Word Works—Karren Alenier, Miles David Moore, and Nancy White—gave the manuscript of Nothing Happened the sort of close, informed, supportive scrutiny I had received from Peter Klappert and Susan Tichy at George Mason.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This poem is perhaps my most direct response to and rendering of experience. It rings true immediately, I think, as well as upon further reflection, and that is why it is a favorite with my readers.

What is American about this poem?

This poem captures a boisterous aspect of American innocence and its impact, both positive and negative, on the outside world. The energy and optimism are appealing, yet violence—the threat of seeing a body brained on the rocks, and the morbid draw of that danger—is never quite out of sight. It is as if we Americans, acting as though we were eternally young, are constantly having to learn about consequence.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Though this poem arrived in a more finished state than most of mine, it was abandoned in the sense that I did not seek to answer all the questions raised. The poem knew better than to try.

Dana Gioia

2011-05-11T13:06:00.007-04:00

Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed poet and critic. He is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, and three collections of criticism, most notably Can Poetry Matter? (1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. A best-selling literary anthologist, Gioia has edited or co-edited over two dozen collections of poetry, fiction, and drama. He has also written two opera libretti and has collaborated with composers in genres ranging from classical to jazz and rock. For six years (2003-2009) he served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts where he gained strong bipartisan support for the previously imperiled agency and helped launch the largest literary programs in federal history, including The Big Read, Poetry Out Loud, and Shakespeare in American Communities. He was twice unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate. For two years he directed the arts and culture programs for the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C. and Colorado. He is currently the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California. A new collection of poetry, Pity the Beautiful, is forthcoming this Spring from Graywolf Press.

THE ANGEL WITH THE BROKEN WING

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,
The one large statue in this quiet room.
The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut
Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.

The docents praise my elegant design
Above the chatter of the gallery.
Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—
The perfect emblem of futility.

Mendoza carved me for a country church.
(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)
I stood beside a gilded altar where
The hopeless offered God their misery.

I heard their women whispering at my feet—
Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.
Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,
And I became the hunger that they fed.

I broke my left wing in the Revolution
(Even a saint can savor irony)
When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.
They hit me once—almost apologetically.

For even the godless feel something in a church,
A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?
A trembling unaccounted by their laws,
An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.

There are so many things I must tell God!
The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high.
But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,
A crippled saint against a painted sky.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem started, like most of my poems, with a first line and some sense of the character speaking. It came to me in an airport. I jotted down the opening line with a few notes. A busy airport was not a place where I could do much more than that.

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

I don't have the drafts here in Washington, but I'd guess it went through about fifty or sixty drafts--not necessarily drafts of the whole poem but of various lines and stanzas. Probably a year passed between jotting down the first line and actually having the time to work on the poem seriously.

I finished the poem in one extended period of work, which is unusual for me. (My daily life tends to be full of obligations and interruptions, and at this point I was Chairman of the NEA working six days a week.) I started drafting the poem on Waldron Island and finished it after two weeks of work. I had sequestered myself alone on this beautiful but remote place, which had neither electricity nor phone service, to escape my public life. I needed real silence and solitude to write in a life that was otherwise quite destructive for a poet.

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

Of course, I believe in inspiration. That's what makes poetry so difficult. You can't will a good poem into existence. The basic idea either comes or not. But then a different sort of work begins in trying to realize the idea in words. Inspiration is powerful, but it is also vague and elusive. A great inspiration can turn into a lousy poem. Mediocre poets have inspiration, too, but they lack the skill and fortitude to embody it compellingly in language. It is interesting to see Yeats' first drafts. They mostly aren't very impressive. But the final versions are, of course, amazing. Part of his genius was in shaping the initial impulse into something unforgettable.

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

I wanted the poem to sing, so I knew almost at once it would rhyme. Everything else came later as I started working on it. Yes, I "consciously employed principles of technique." If you use a major form like rhymed pentameter quatrains, you'd better know what you're doing. But I didn't impose the form on the poem. I listened to the poem as it emerged and gave it the form it wanted. That's what critics don't understand about form. It has to be inherent in the material. The poet only does what the poem itself suggests.

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

Actually, there was. Much of the poem was composed aloud without being written down. On Waldron I could walk for miles without meeting anyone. I would work on lines and stanzas by reciting them to myself. I might go through two or three dozen different versions of a line or stanza before I jotted anything down. As I did this over a period of days, the poem gradually emerged in its present shape. Then I began reworking the draft on paper. That is one reason why the poem's sound has such physicality. I could feel in my tongue and mouth when I finally had a line exactly right.

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

Five years. When I wrote it, I was Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and I decided it was inappropriate for me to publish. I didn't want to complicate the agency's already problematic position, so I put aside my personal career for the duration of my public service.

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 no set rules, but it's always wise to let a poem sit. I usually let them sit for a couple of years. Sometimes I will make small changes in the interim. If a poem is any good, it can wait to be published.

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

I almost never write strictly autobiographical poems. I usually create a fictional voice or character to speak the poem, even if this is not obvious to the casual reader. My poems are personal but not autobiographical, and that gives me a certain imaginative freedom and objectivity I would lack if I were writing confessional verse. It's hard to be entirely truthful about yourself. It's easier to be truthful in fiction. And poems should be truthful.

Is this a narrative poem?

It is a lyric poem with a loosely narrative structure. It is a lyric poem because it mostly explores a single escalating mood. But even in a lyric poem, there needs to be some narrative arrangement of the material. The order of the images is almost as important as the images themselves.

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

I had probably just read the newspaper. After all, I was waiting in an airport lounge. So there was no literary source for the poem. But I had just been in Santa Fe where I had attended Spanish Market where the santeros ("saint-makers," as these traditional Southwestern woodcarvers and artists are called) were selling their wooden statues of religious figures. I had been haunted by these statues since I first saw them in New Mexico, and I had just bought one, a statue of the archangel Raphael by a young santero named Jacob Martinez.

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

Yes, the alert, the curious, and the creative. Most of these folks no longer read poetry, but that doesn't matter. The poems will be there if they need them. And oddly enough, over the years, they often find them.

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?

Since I wrote "Angel" when I was on Waldron Island, which is really very isolated, no one saw it until it was done. I could have shown it to the composer Morten Lauridsen, whom I saw each evening, but I didn't know him well at that point, so I felt a bit shy about reading a poem in progress to him. And he and I were usually busy talking about other things. Generally, I don't show a poem to anyone until it seems pretty much done. Then I can benefit from their comments without losing the poem's individuality.

Curiously, when the proofs arrived from Poetry, I worried about one word. In line fifteen should "shadow" be singular or plural? I happened to be at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and Tobias Wolff sat down at the picnic table where I was working. I read the poem to him, and we decided it should stay singular. A silly story to tell, but I share it to say that in a poem every word matters.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It took me into a subject--both in general and specific terms--that I had never explored before. It also achieved a certain tough, formal music that was a little different from any previous poem I'd written. Most interesting for me was that it went into my own Mexican roots. My mother was Mexican-American, and I was raised in a Mexican neighborhood. I had mostly written about that indirectly in the past. This allowed me to explore that part of my background more overtly as well as the deeply Latin Catholic milieu in which I had been raised.

What is American about this poem?

The subject, the author, and the treatment are all American. Perhaps what makes it most American is that the statue itself is a Mexican immigrant of sorts--an artifact brought from his native village to be displayed in an American museum. It is also a religious poem. That's very American, at least in a contrarian sort of way. No one in England or Europe writes religious poetry nowadays.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

When I had finished the poem, I thought that it still needed another stanza, though I wasn't sure what it would say. But once I read the poem to a friend, I realized that it ended exactly where it should. It had finished itself without telling me. I had been so preoccupied with the details that I didn't notice until I heard it with someone else in the room.

Melissa Stein

2011-05-05T13:06:00.003-04:00

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collection Rough Honey, winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Best New Poets 2009, New England Review, North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and her work has won several awards. She is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.

WHITEWATER

kayak flipped us and the current
dragged us through its rocks, arms sealed
at our sides, it was a blast, meeting it all cranium-first,
like academics, frothfoamgrit and the taste,
what was it, asphyxiation, psychedelic Escher
in blackwhite cubes, tableau enormous, picnic
tablecloth but undulating, spiked into color—crimson, canary—
until that last blow, ledge flat against
my mouth-hole, my whole body
condensed to one blinding exclamation point,
white protrusion of bone—white petals and light,
pearl-solid, luminous, all fourth-of-July and scattered,
pipe bombs bottle rockets Christmas crackers, oh,
what a party, annihilation, till the blue blue blue
palm sweeping my forehead, the hair from my forehead
and the ache of return, to the tenderness
of paint sable-brushed against silk, powdered
throat of the foxglove, flushed curve spiraling
into a conch, velvet crowning the doe’s nose,
arms embracing the cello’s hips, shoulders,
and what shudders from them, coaxed
or forced, distracted out of, with that bloodwhite flap
blinking at me from your cheek
and something in the eyes, maybe trout or bass or salmon
thrashing upstream, yellowglimmer and sickened,
we’re not going to make it, we’ll make it, we’re stranded,
washed up on this hurricane shore, held together
by blood sticks and mud, oh paper, oh desks, oh treatises,
we weren’t immune, on those banks, sky flat as anything,
a willowlike spider tree bending over us,
I focused on its branches, on the branches
of the branches, how comical that word twig,
surrounded by thousands of jokes as blood darkened
the silt like a cave painting

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Though I can’t say this for all of my poems, I know exactly when and how: it began on 9/11/2004 in the first days of a residency at Ragdale in Lake Forest, Illinois. At residencies I usually set myself the task of writing something every day as soon as I wake up—often a freewrite and a poem of some sort, which might be based on an exercise. Sometimes a “real” poem comes of this, sometimes not.

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

“Whitewater” was couched in a freewrite of single-spaced prose. Along the way, I found myself inserting slash marks that indicated line breaks. I did this for only a few lines so I wouldn’t lose momentum, but it told me something. Later I chopped off the opening and closing parts of the freewrite, and there was the poem. I thought of leaving it as a prose poem, but also experimented with line breaks. I have a file marked 11/14/2004 in which the poem is broken into lines and is close to final form. It also had its title by then. I tinkered with it for a while longer then started submitting it to journals the following April.

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

I would say that this particular poem was mostly received. Besides adding the line breaks, which I did fairly intuitively, I changed surprisingly little from the initial draft—it was one of those rare poems that is just sort of given to you. I cut and changed and added a few words here and there, but didn’t move anything around. One of the biggest decisions was whether to cut the very last line of the poem, which eventually I did.

As for inspiration… over the years enough lines and poems have been given to me out of seemingly nowhere—and writing them down has felt in a way like channeling—that I’d have to say yes, I do believe in inspiration. But I believe that inspiration is a result of the mind and imagination humming along subliminally, and it involves a certain kind of preparation, readiness, and receptivity. Including reading. And time and space. (When I’m overworked and overcommitted, I’m not often visited by brilliant lines I feel I have to set down before they’re irrevocably lost.)

It’s wonderful when inspiration takes care of itself, but so often it’s the hard work of revision that really makes a poem sing.

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

I suppose the only conscious technique I used was introducing the line breaks. I really liked the idea of “Whitewater” as a prose poem but ultimately decided it felt impenetrable that way, couldn’t breathe. The breaks allowed tension to build and release and build again.

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

The poem was accepted by Nimrod in June 2006, about a year after I began sending it out. It appeared in the Spring 2007 issue.

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. If I feel certain that a poem is strong, I’ll send it off to journals as soon as it’s finished. But often I’ll wait several months, or longer, to get perspective. Because I frequently get behind on submissions, even finished poems sometimes wait a while to be sent out.

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

Much of my work is fictional, so it was interesting that you asked me to write about this poem in particular because it does have a story behind it, an incredibly sad one.

I’m a freelance book editor, and in 2001–2002 I worked with a rather extraordinary woman named Barbara Cushman Rowell on her first book, a memoir called Flying South (Ten Speed Press). The book told of how learning to fly and the attendant adventures (including flying her single-engine plane to Patagonia) empowered Rowell to emerge from the shadow of her husband, the renowned nature photographer Galen Rowell. This was one of those luxurious editing projects of the sort there is rarely time or budget for these days: we worked together closely for a year and a half, and I got to watch Rowell grow exponentially as a writer. She saw writing the book as another way to come into her own.

One chapter of Flying South describes a whitewater rafting accident while crossing a Class V rapid on the Bio Bio River in Chile. Rowell and her husband (and others) were seriously injured, and Rowell’s depiction is vivid and grisly. I can’t remember how long it was since I had last read that chapter—most likely the two years since it was published, as until now I haven’t been able to bring myself to open the book—but clearly the story stuck with me, as the poem is told from her perspective. Many of the elements of the poem’s action—the head-first plunge, the ledge, the froth and foam, the blow to the mouth, the protrusion of bone from her arm, the bloodwhite flap—are directly from her story, though rearranged a bit. The rest is imagined.

Rowell and her husband recovered from the accident; both needed many stitches and Rowell, extensive oral surgery. The tragic part of the story is that both died in a charter plane crash very close to home a couple months before Flying South’s release date. In order to become a pilot, Rowell had to cope with her persistent fear of flying and accept the possibility that she might die in the air. I wonder if it ever occurred to her that she might die at the hands of another pilot. It’s hard to think of a more horrible irony than the fate of these two chronically adventurous people, who risked their lives time and time again in remote corners of the world. I’ve never really gotten over the fact that Rowell never got to hold in her hands the book that she felt was going to change her life.

Years later, I do still feel some discomfort surrounding this poem—something akin to viewing a beautiful photograph of a disaster. I wonder what Barbara Rowell would have thought of it, and whether I would have had the same impulse to write it had she and her husband made it home safely from that final flight.

Is this a narrative poem?

It does relate an event that unfolds in time. It’s more narrative than much of my work, but also has strong lyric elements. I’ve always been interested in weaving together lyric and narrative threads.

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

I don’t remember… Some perennial influences are Gerard Manley Hopkins, Linda Bierds, early Louise Glück, Sylvia Plath, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Doty, Robert Hass, and Gerald Stern.

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

Can’t say I do. Anyone who enjoys my work and gets something out of it is ideal!

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?

I meet with a local poetry group every month to share work—an invaluable resource for providing both feedback and a sense of community. If I remember correctly, the group advised me to dispense with the last line of “Whitewater” (thank goodness).

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

As I mentioned above, not much of my work correlates so closely to real events. Also, the poem consists more or less of just one sentence. I do write lots of persona poems, though.

What is American about this poem?

Well, I could probably come up with an explanation involving the long literary and historical tradition of human vs. wilderness, but truthfully, I’m not sure I see anything particularly American about it besides its writer.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. I don’t think many of my abandoned poems make it into print.

T. R. Hummer

2011-05-02T12:55:00.007-04:00

T. R. Hummer is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, including The Infinity Sessions (LSU, 2005) and The Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic (University of Georgia Press, 2006). Formerly Editor in Chief of Quarterly West, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Georgia Review, he is professor of creative writing/English at Arizona State University. Hummer is also an accomplished saxophonist.

GREEK

Hard now to remember those winters, snow scabbing the stones
Outside Gettysburg ten years after the names sank in with the carcasses.
What did I know about the unities? It was freezing, we had nothing,
We’d eaten the mules, the wheatfields were scattered with salt.
I hunched in the seminary balancing the leatherbound Euclid
Against the Homer my father had scribbled his name in once, a boy
Like me, still ignorant and alive. Outside, Pennsylvania was a hellish
Polygon of ice. The opposite sides and angles of a parallelogram
Are equal to one another, and the diagonal bisects it; that is, divides it
Into two equal parts. I imagined him repeating these things
Twenty-five years ago in a body smaller than mine.
I imagined him in the ground, the ground bisected, two worlds
Divided, the line drawn between him and me.
Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another.
I would take up the ministry that laid him down. I would speak the Word
That choked him. His body after ten years under was less than mine,
A volume of icy grit surrounding a Minié ball. We were learning. I knew
History was doing the same things others had done, being born,
Sweating, fighting, saying axioms by rote. I drew the geometry
Of fields in early spring, dead men at the plows,
Forty acres of ground chiseled and harrowed, laid out naked in the sun.
I know now they died of everything you can think of: Evisceration, shock,
Peritonitis, gangrene, malnutrition, incompetence, deceit,
Every possible loss. Then, I knew only what we copied
From the poet and translated: The spear in his heart
Was stuck fast, but the heart was panting still and beating
To shake the butt end of the spear. In the freezing house, my mother
Was sewing trousers, running her ruined fingers over the parallel lines of a bolt
Of corduroy, burning her hands on linen, stitching, shivering,
A conventional emblem of loss. If equals be taken from equals,
The remainders are equal. How could she weave him back? She had no loom.
She made uniforms for soldiers. They taught us to say these things:
My father in the underworld is bloodless, wanting nothing.
What is a nation to him? What is a son? There are rivers, stinking fires,
Ghostly pain like the pressure of starlight, emptiness, illusion,
There are six hundred thousand souls repeating their indifference every second
In the Hades of the Brothers’ War. He is a citizen of that polis now,
And I hate him in the language of the dead I am still learning slowly
For the sake of his memory, sign by inevitable sign.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem is from Walt Whitman in Hell, which was published in 1996, but took a long time to write. “Greek” was among the first poems composed for the book (it was, in fact, for awhile the provisional title poem), so I’m guessing I wrote it in 1988. I believe I still lived in Gambier, Ohio, and was editing The Kenyon Review, when it was written. In terms of a proximate cause, I had recently acquired from my late grandmother’s “library” (she owned maybe 50 books) a leather-bound geometry textbook that had been my great-grandfather’s; I was struck by the fact that it was nothing more and nothing less than Euclid’s Elements. There were no concessions made for young minds, no pedagogical material, no answers in the back of the book. It was straight Euclid. I should also add that I knew my great-grandfather, T.W. Jackson; he was born in 1860 (he remembered the Civil War; his father died in a prison camp) and died in 1957, when I was seven years old. The material for the poem, then, was at hand—though my great-great-grandfather fought on the Southern, not the Northern, side. During that phase of my writing I was pushing myself beyond “personal” material, toward what I was then thinking of as “altered centers of consciousness” for poems. I had come to the conclusion that much of the sentience of my own poems—and the poems of many of my contemporaries—was as traditional, and as inherited, as fixed forms like the sonnet. I wanted to get outside what I had assumed was “original” and “my own material,” and found that for me this feat took quite a lot of work, discipline, and thought. All the poems in Walt Whitman in Hell are the result of that particular impulse, and “Greek” is an early example.

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

It’s difficult for me to remember exactly, but I know that the writing at that particular time was very laborious for me, almost to the point of self-injury, as if I was insisting on doing so much heavy lifting that I was in danger of incurring a spiritual hernia. It was a bit like learning geometry straight out of Euclid—especially if the Euclid were still in ancient Greek. I remember laboring over this poem, and several others simultaneously, for about six months: how many drafts, I cannot say. Many. Part of the work I was doing was convincing myself that the voice was authoritative—for me if for no one else. I was busy convincing myself that the “project” I had undertaken was worth doing, that it wasn’t a dead end—and that, on the other end, I was capable of doing what I envisioned. A lot of imaginative weightlifting ensued.

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

This cluster of questions strikes several nerves for me. I do my best, for instance, not to “believe in” anything at all, though of course I fail. I am by conviction and constitution what I think of as a radical agnostic, by which I simply mean that I’m convinced that “belief” is poisonous. To be convinced is another matter entirely. That said, I am convinced that almost everything a poet does is “received”—whether from poetry itself, or from life, or both; whether muses or gods breathe poems into us remains unproven, but it’s possible. In writing Walt Whitman in Hell, I was on the front lines of a personal war with cultural reception: I did not want to accept anything the tradition of poetry, or my own life, offered me simply on faith. On the other hand, I did not (and do not) want to throw out the poetry with the bathwater. I “received” the book of Euclid from my family (and in another way I received it from western culture, and from Euclid himself); I “received” stories about the Civil War from my great grandfather. I “received” Homer from my education. I “received” a truckload of ideas about poetry from an abundance of sources. What was to be done with all that? I had “received” so much that I was in danger at that point of being crushed by it. In intervening years I have learned how to be ever more conscious of the negotiations of cultural reception and their translation into poetry, and to deal with it with ever-increasing magnitudes of negative capability. At the time I was working on “Greek,” and the other poems that were written around the same time, I was cutting new paths through the underbrush for myself with the exceedingly dull machete of my mind. It was sweaty, bloody work.

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

In hindsight, everything is technique. In the moment, everything is panic and reaction. Does a tennis star employ “technique” to hit an especially difficult shot? Of course she does; but the subjective experience is of nerves and reaction, not the conscious application of what has been consciously learned. I wanted an austere voice that could match the frozen plains of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in winter. I wanted a voice out of Hades (not the Christian Hell, the Greek Hades). I was already playing around with the idea that the altered centers of consciousness of the poems I was writing had their sources in the dead—the kinds of voices Odysseus accesses by letting the shades in the underworld drink from his bowl of goat’s blood. I spent years and years absorbing the western (and some non-western) prosodic tradition; when I was in graduate school, I trained myself to carry on conversations in iambic pentameter. When I was writing the poem—when I write poems generally—I do not think about any of that unless the poem particularly demands it; I trust my ear, which is both trained and primal.

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

A couple of years.

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. Now—because of digital submission—I tend to submit poems more quickly than I used to; but I am also, for better or worse, more sure of myself than I used to be. Early on in the process of writing Walt Whitman in Hell, I sat on poems for quite a long time, unsure of them.

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

In a strict sense, this poem contains not a single “fact”—nothing that could be journalistically or scientifically verified. In a different sense, it depends entirely on facticity, defined in the usual sense as “the state of being factual.” I don’t think there’s any poetic contradiction between these two statements, or anything unusual about being able to say such things about a poem. How many “facts” are there in Browning’s “My Last Duchess”? Yet the poem depends on its ability to cast a spell of facticity upon the reader. Art traffics in this kind of magic constantly: the movies, photography, painting. Only instrumental music is entirely free of the demands of the fact. And as we know, all art aspires to the condition of music. The narrative/dramatic facets of a poem purvey the “facts” in the poem; the lyric/rhetorical facets want to transcend fact. The tension between the two can be the driving engine of a certain kind of poem—the kind that “Greek” is.

Is this a narrative poem?

Aha. No. And yes. The poem has narrative facets. But it does not so much tell a story as refer the reader to one—or several. If a reader comes to this poem with no knowledge of the War Between the States, I wager that much is lost. “Greek” riffs on the master narrative of American history the way John Coltrane riffs on the melody of “Lush Life,” when he plays that gorgeous tune in his utterly individual way. But the poem is no more a strict narrative than Coltrane’s “Lush Life” is strictly melodic.

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

The most immediate influence, probably, is The Iliad, in Richmond Lattimore’s translation, which I fell in love with decades ago. I was also reading Walcott (of “The Schooner Flight,” middle Walcott), Adrienne Rich, and Robert Penn Warren, a poet on whose middle and late work I sharpened my eyeteeth for years. I had also just begun serious delving into Czeslaw Milosz about the same time. I had read at Milosz off and on, spottily; a couple of conversations with Robert Hass convinced me to pay very serious attention there. And I was also beginning to assay Yannis Ritsos, a poet from whom I was to learn some pretty important lessons.

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

I could write a book on this subject. My sense of audience is deeply internalized, but that does not mean that I write for myself; I don’t. The art of writing activates the writer’s primal connection to the species. Part of me reads over my writing shoulder from that point of view, saying things like Can we eat it? Does this crap matter? Another part stands back and speaks Miloszian: What good is a poetry that does not change nations? For me the fundamental issue is this: how does an individual in his or her little body communicate with the leviathan of the body politic? How does one cell in the elbow communicate, through the brain, with the entire body? Poetry participates in the “biology” of the culture, the anatomy of the body politic. Beyond this point, things become deeply complicated.

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?

Not so much any more. I used to. David Baker in particular used to see everything I wrote, when I wrote it, and vice versa. He would have been the first reader of “Greek,” and he would have given me detailed feedback and advice; he’s an excellent and generous reader. Now, though, I want to finish the book before I or anyone evaluates what I’m up to; I don’t want to be interfered with, so to speak. I send the poems to magazines, of course; that’s different. And I send the ms to my editor. But all the people I’ve worked with closely in the past (in workshops and elsewhere) and all the poets I love are installed in my mental software, and advise me constantly.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I rarely commit this kind of historical set piece. This work represents a phase (nearly twenty-five years ago!) in my thinking about what I called above “altered centers of consciousness.” I still work that way, but I have learned more subtle means of alteration.

What is American about this poem?

Its subject, its language, its soul. Other than that, it is entirely a Greek poem.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both. I abandon poems always, but only when they are finished: by which I mean, when all the questions I had about them in the beginning are answered, or more precisely, exhausted.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman

2011-04-27T12:54:00.002-04:00

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Sightseer, winner of the 2010 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. She was the 2004-05 Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and is the recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board Individual Artist Fellowship. Cynthia received her MFA from George Mason University. Her work has appeared in Pleiades, Mid-American Review, Fence, Best New Poets 2005, and Crab Orchard Review. Cynthia has taught creative writing and composition at George Mason University, the University of Wisconsin, and Edgewood College. She works at an electrical engineering firm in Madison, WI, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

A LABOR OF MOLES

At first sight of the World’s Light, it commonly
Yells and Shrieks fearfully; and seeking for a lurking
Hole, runs up and down like a little Daemon,
which indeed I took it for.
– John Maubray, MD, 1724

On one such occasion I chanced to deliver a woman of a mole
as herein I describe this true and certain happening. The woman
was of the country. I entered from the gate where bees leapt forth
from the carcass of a small animal. And at the door a spoiled
mound of hay where countless squealing vermin bred, I saw
their naked tails swiveling about. And inside her chambers
the woman crouched upon a sour heap of rags. The fetus
inside her thrashed about so that I saw from cross the room
her belly boiling. She was hard to still I begged her push.
I readied my hand. And now I must report upon the midwife
who was taken of her post beside the open stove
which presently was coughing up a raucous spitting smoke.
And all the while the clouds were hurtling past the sun
so what I saw a moment in light the next was fraught with
shadow. A donkey brayed in the yard, whence upon a stillness
settled in the woman’s belly and she looked to me with opened
lips as if to ask a question but the answer came too quick
the hairy beast shot forth from her legs, such speed
that in its flight it struck my knee and bowled me to the floor
I can attest I felt its pointed snout. I saw its stubby tail its claws
clacked along the floor it spun about I can attest. The woman
shut her legs and drew her toes from off the floor
as if to keep the loathsome thing from touching her. And
again I must report upon the midwife who presently was
calmly stepping forth and bending to the ground
as if to shoo a chicken from the roost she clapped her hands
upon the Daemon and it wriggled there its paddle paws
flapping at the smoke through which she waved it I suppose
to douse its wickedness and then she tossed it in the stove
and shut the door. Indeed the Hand of God
thus spake. The smell of burning pelt flushed the air.
And thrice we knew the fire was requisite.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem was written in February of 2009 in the midst of a flurry of research and writing on the subject of birth and medicine which culminated in a manuscript called Paper Doll Fetus.

I uncovered a scholarly article about the early eighteenth century physician John Maubray and his insistence that he had delivered a Dutch woman (and indeed later many women) of a mole-like animal while traveling aboard a ship. According to him, the animal had a “hooked snout, fiery sparkling eyes,” and ran about the cabin while others on board tried to catch it. The occurrence among these “sea-faring, and meaner sort of people” was so common that it was almost expected, and women who attended these births were often prepared with a fire to dispose of the creature.

I had been keeping a list of about a hundred ideas for the manuscript, and they couldn’t all become poems, but I couldn’t stumble upon this kind of information and ignore it.

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

Probably a week of intense drafting followed by several months of tweaking. I tend to revise as I write, so that by the time I have something that resembles a poem, it is already very close to its final form. The first things I put down on the page were a picture of a mole, notes from my research, a list of words I liked, the epigraph, and a title. Then, I started playing with the language until images arose and the people in the poem began moving about. I usually type each sentence several different ways in a list, rearranging the order of the phrases and clauses, before I commit to it. I never trust my original syntax, and trying the sentence in different ways helps me listen for the rhythm of the poem that wants to come out.

I don’t think I knew when I started writing that John Maubray would be speaking the poem, but perhaps because I had been reading his original work published in the early 1700s, a kind of formal and vaguely antiquated voice arose which was sort of my own twenty-first century reinvention. Once I heard him, the poem moved swiftly from there.

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

I believe in inspiration, but I do not believe that inspiration writes the poem. And I don’t believe that you have to wait for inspiration, either; you can go out and get it, whether that means living your life better attuned to receiving it or hunting it down deliberately through research.

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

The voice determined a lot of things about the poem – the musicality and diction of how the story was told, how the speaker transitioned from the woman to the midwife and back, and the length of the line. I was also conscious of running thoughts together without proper punctuation in some places, which I felt intensified the tension and urgency of the event.

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

Two years. About a year after the poem was finished, it was accepted – along with five other poems from the series – as part of an “Intro Feature” in Pleiades. The issue was published a year later (February, 2011).

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 no rules about how long a poem must sit. I never send poems out right away, partly due to my distrust of a new poem but mostly due to my deplorable submission habits.

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

I had been looking at several original physicians’ texts from the 15-1700s which each contained accounts of “monstrous” or unnatural births, and I noticed that the most unbelievable events were always relayed with strongly insistent language, such as “this true and certain happening,” or, in Maubray’s case, “in order to convince others of this admirable Truth.” There is something distrustful in those excessive declarations.

Physicians were still periodically subject to the guile of superstition, as was the rest of the population at the time. I can understand that they might have believed a story told them by others, but what is the excuse for diagnosing the birth of a mole firsthand? Didn’t Maubray know better? Or, was he lying? At the time, his claim was hotly contested, spawning the publication of a rebuke by another surgeon, and the whole controversy may have increased book sales. If that’s the Truth, I’m disappointed. Not that I want to believe that a woman could birth a mole, but I want to believe that somehow a collection of mysterious circumstances had aligned such that Maubray could have believed it.

In the poem, I simply let the (albeit suspicious) claim of “Truth” speak for itself and allow the speaker to bear witness to a specific event. It’s up to the reader to decide whether it is true, but certainly the idea that it may be true is more captivating than the lie.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes.

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

If I were reading poetry at the time, my memory of it is not tied to this poem. Of course I am influenced by other poets, but what I remember most is the language of the sources I was encountering during my research.

I was reading, or trying to read, John Maubray’s “The Female Physician” which, in the version I had access to, is essentially a photocopy of the London publication from 1724 – unbearably tiny, wobbly type with strange capitalizations, italicizations, and rarely a distinguishing feature between the letter “s” and the letter “f.” The article that started the whole thing was A.W. Bates’ “The sooterkin dissected: the theoretical basis of animal births to human mothers in early modern Europe,” which inspired at least two poems.

I was also heavily informed by my reading for the rest of the manuscript, which included numerous articles and books, as well as online forays into anything related to something I might include in a poem, such as a mole. This includes a bunch of useless fascinating junk, such as the fact that moles can exert a digging force of thirty-two times their body weight.

I always feel that there is more than just one poem to be written, that just one poem is insufficient. I don’t think I could have written this poem successfully if I weren’t in the midst of writing all the other poems, too. There was so much pre-writing going on that by the time I actually sat down, I was bringing a world of characters and images and stories to the table. Being so fully absorbed in a topic allowed the poems to flow more freely and be, even in their earliest forms, more fully realized.

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

I don’t write for a particular reader in the sense that I would change what I’m writing to fit the needs of an imagined readership. I want my poems to be both accessible and surprising, so I think they would find a good home with a reader who values user-friendliness, so to speak, but is also willing to work just a little. Also, since my projects tend to vary stylistically, I imagine that each manuscript would find a different ideal reader.

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?

At the time, I had two poetry groups who met regularly every three or four weeks. I shared this poem with one group shortly after it was drafted, and I shared it with the other group as part of the completed manuscript. Having those two sets of trusted readers was invigorating, albeit a little exhausting. During the four years I met with both groups, I was fiercely productive.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Every new project I begin has its own set of governing traits or obsessions, so this poem has a lot in common with the other poems in Paper Doll Fetus, but that collection differs a great deal from my first book, Sightseer, and from my other projects.

I suppose this poem would be categorized as a persona poem, and although there are other persona poems in this manuscript, it is not a technique I normally gravitate toward. I sometimes find that persona poems can detract from the cohesiveness of a collection. However, they can be a driving force when many voices speak collectively toward the overall message of the manuscript.

What is American about this poem?

Given that the speaker is a re-imagined John Maubray, who was a Scottish physician working in London, I’m not sure I can claim much American-ness here. Perhaps the presence of God. Perhaps the voyeurism.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Somehow it seems less worthy to say a poem is finished, as if there were a failing on the part of the poet to continue to see all the endless possibilities of language. But ultimately we have to say that we made our choices. This poem is finished.

James Richardson

2011-04-22T11:28:00.006-04:00

James Richardson's most recent books are By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms, which was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award, Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award, and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (2001). His work appears in The New Yorker, Slate, Paris Review, Yale Review, Great American Prose Poems, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, The Pushcart Prize and five recent volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University.

IN SHAKESPEARE

In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect. Others confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
when they panic and can’t feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, to die—yes, finally—in glad pain.

You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy.
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice. Your children are lost,
they come back, you don’t remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life. O god, it’s all so realistic
I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.

Such a relief to burst from the theater
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who’s who and what’s what,
and command with Metrocards our destinations.

Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Maybe it really started in 1970, when I started reading Shakespeare seriously and saw my first Royal Shakespeare Company production – Judi Dench as Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, which figures prominently in the second stanza. Certainly by then I was already getting the poem’s main idea, that the most fantastic moments in literature are often realer than mere realism. But more practically, I see that the poem’s first line and the seed of the Lear part (“old men throw everything away”) appear in a 2003 notebook.

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

I probably chanced upon that brief 2003 note a million times, occasionally adding further thoughts, before I first really worked on the poem seriously during 2006. It was published in The New Yorker in 2007 but I tinkered with it through 2010 when it was included in my book By the Numbers.

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

If “inspiration” just means “something out of our conscious control,” then everything we say is inspired – we speak easily, but the process of assembling even the simplest sentence goes on out of sight. We have no idea how we do it. Which in a way collapses the difference between lines “given” and lines that are “willed” or “worked.” I.e., even when you write a line during a period of hard, hard work—where did it come from?

But with poems, there are times hard work will help, and times it won’t at all, or when it will hurt. Even if I know in advance where a poem is going to go (and actually I’d rather not know) I can’t just make it happen through will and work. There are moods and times when it will “come” and you have to wait for them (though there are ways to encourage them). If you force the poem, you wreck it. Actually, I don’t like the feeling of hammering at a poem. I like to let the lapse of time do most of the writing, to get it to the point where working on it is a pleasure rather than a boredom and an agony.

All this seems to me part of the normal mystery of the mind – I don’t imagine it as having anything to do with a Muse or any other kind of divinity.

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

As above, I’d quibble with the everyday distinction between “consciously” and “unconsciously.” But “technique” in the sense that dancing or graceful movement or good singing come out of technique? Certainly. And the things I fuss with longest and think it’s most important to get right might be called “technical,” essentially matters of movement—rhythm and the hesitations and runs, hangs and falls of syntax.

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

Maybe six months.

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?

Usually at least a few months, often much longer. And of course the poem has often, as with this one, been around in one form or another for years.

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

It doesn’t seem to me there’s anything factual in the poem, except the facts of the plays (and I might have even made up one or two of them). Though maybe the whole poem is about the relation between fact and fiction, our real lives and the imaginary worlds we read about. I.e. Shakespeare’s “statue in a dress” scene is about the way relationships alternately cool and warm, the appearance and disappearance of children is something all parents know about, and we often “wake up” and think something like “What have I been doing for the last sixteen years???” Of course I have felt these things in my life, but there’s nothing specifically autobiographical in the poem, nothing that couldn’t have happened to almost anyone.

Is this a narrative poem?

Don’t think so. I disapprove of narrative in my poems, thinking it a great temptation to slackness and self-indulgence. Though other poets are allowed to use it! But I often write poems, like this one, that are about other narratives.

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

I usually read dozens of poets at a time, so that’s hard to say. Of course it’s about Shakespeare, but I wasn’t reading him at the time, except maybe sonnets (which I teach) and of course it doesn’t sound anything like him.

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

In a way I must, since I have a real horror of talking too much, of being pedantic or insisting on the obvious, and just generally of boring people. But the person who’s judging that is Me the Reader, who is pretty much simultaneous with (or just a little later than) Me the Writer. I think if you think too much about audience you get too inhibited in some ways (Saying the Correct Thing) and too uninhibited in others (Preachy and Rhetorical).

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?

Only my wife, who is a great reader, a Poetry Person and a Professor of English.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I think I write too many kinds of poems to know what my Standard Poem is, and therefore to say how this one varies from the standard. A lot of my other work is either more purely lyrical (less discursive) or purely aphoristic.

What is American about this poem?

I don’t think of myself as anything but American. I’m not worldly or cosmopolitan—e.g., I wouldn’t even know how to want to be European, or anything else, much less be it. So the poem must be American. Is it “typically American,” whatever that is? I don’t know, but I suspect I wouldn’t want it to be.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Abandoned. I mean, I like it pretty much, but there are still things about it I’m not satisfied with. They seem little, individually, but after a while you realize that to fix them you’d have to change everything and you just can’t. Or rather, you can do that only by going on to the next poem.

Stephanie Brown

2011-04-18T12:44:00.003-04:00

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) and Allegory of the Supermarket (University of Georgia Press, 1999). She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in Poetry in 2001 and the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Poetry at the Breadloaf Writers' Conference in 2009. She has taught creative writing at University of California, Irvine and at the University of Redlands but has primarily made her living as a librarian and library manager. Her poems have been selected for four editions of the annual anthology, The Best American Poetry (Scribner's) and her poetry and essays have been anthologized in American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon, 2000), Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner's, 2003), The Grand Permission: New Writing about Motherhood and Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2003) and others. Her work has also been published in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Slope, Pool, ZYZZYVA, LIT, and others. She was a curator for the Casa Romantica Reading Series for poets and fiction writers in San Clemente, California from 2004-2010 and is currently the book review editor for the electronic journal, Connotation Press and poetry editor for the website Zócalo Public Square.

THE SATANIST NEXT DOOR

What is that? Is that a kid? Is that Tom?

No, it’s her.

Eew, I think that’s a whip.
No, it’s a hand coming down hard.
No, listen, there’s like a wind-sound to it.

I need to go to the bathroom.

That one was fake.

Are you still awake?

She probably has to do that to get him to finish.
Listen: he sounds like an angel.
No one has ten orgasms in twenty minutes.
I can’t tell.
Oh yeah, a lot of those were fake.
They’re up all night doing meth and they have to have sex all the time.

Should we do it now?
Did that make you horny?
No, but we are awake. In fact, it’s creepy to hear people.
She’s a moaner.

It’s getting light out.
Close the windows.
The seals are barking. I like that sound.
Can you hear the parrots?
Oh, yeah.
They live across the street in the canyon.
I think I smell that chemical smell.

Close the windows.
Do you think they ever put spells on us?
Whatever you think is happening, it’s not happening.
It’s all a lie.
Um hmm.

It sort of scares me.
Freedom of religion.
Yeah, you’re right.
And we have the Jehovah’s Witnesses on the other side. It balances things.
I’m going to put a holy card of St. Michael on the fence between us.
God will protect us.

Turn on your side.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem started as the title. I liked it and I carried it around with me for months before I ever got the poem, which I received one morning, writing down a conversation. It started with the first line as it reads now. I have found that there are two ways that I write poems: about one percent of the time I have a title and the poem comes later, unbidden and mostly finished. The second, 99-percent-of-the-time type grows out of lines and is completed with much revision. This poem is one of the one-percenters.

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

Aside from some tinkering, the first draft was the final draft. I think title-driven poems gestate differently—arriving whole and feeling received, ready to go. I usually revise extensively, sometimes for years—at least, this is the way I think that I write most poems, though when I went back recently and looked at longhand drafts in a notebook, I was surprised at how close to the finished product many of them were.

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

I believe in inspiration. I think it comes to me all the time, sometimes in cycles—a lot for a while, not a lot for a while. I think you have to listen for it. Most completed poems are built from sweat and tears, though. This is a received poem. One is not a better way of writing than the other, but for me the received type is rare. Maybe rereading is a kind of revision: I reread a poem many times and may or may not change little things. I always play around with line lengths, look for stronger words, and play with punctuation. Sometimes I read and do nothing to it. Sometimes I keep only one line of a poem and rebuild from there. I get rid of everything that is problematic, makes me feel frustrated, or leads me to a dead end. Sometimes I think that you can go in the wrong direction from where an inspired, unbidden line meant you to go. If I reread and feel that way, I get rid of that stuff and let the line take me someplace else.

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

Since it began as dialogue, I wanted to make sure that the poem was written completely in dialogue. For instance, I note time passing by having the speakers note that it’s getting light out rather than having that described. I could have stepped out of the dialogue at that point but decided not to. I don’t think I’ve ever written a poem that’s completely in dialogue before this one, but it felt right to leave it that way.

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

I think it was pretty soon. I thought it was pretty good, and sent it out in a group to APR soon after writing it. It was published in APR in 2005.

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?

This varies by poem. Sometimes I can feel that something is ready right away. In general they sit for a long time. I enjoy the tinkering process quite a bit; revision is a joy to me. The first draft is the hard part—to stop and listen to a line and take the time to write it down. First drafts often come at inconvenient times. I often don’t want to write them, don’t write them, forget them, and that’s a disappointment for me. Very consistently I’ve found that what I think is good or bad while writing a first draft is neither. A few years ago I found a folder of poems that I had written in my 20’s. I found a few that I thought were very good. I should have revised these but I had not. Instead I pursued the wrong poems, ones that I had loved in the first drafts, and I rewrote and rewrote but always reached dead ends. The good ones were written in a voice that’s not mine anymore, so it is too late to use them now. That experience led me to sit with first drafts for a long time before revising—but not too long. If I have an emotional reaction to something that I’ve written, if I cry and feel purged, I almost always find that this is not a good poem. Ones that I dismiss often turn out to be the poem to pursue. I think it’s good to really examine what you have written before you bother revising it. Some of it is just bad, and that’s fine. It’s private. Poems to be published have to have a public persona: technical savvy and avoidance of bathos. Even things that I have published that are very confessional, they are still nothing that I am embarrassed about. I am embarrassed by some things I’ve written in journals. They are not meant for the world.

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

This poem was inspired by true events. Like most of my poems, the negotiation was found in revision. Once I know what a poem is “about,” I rewrite to heighten that. For instance, you really can hear the sounds of wild parrots and seals from my bedroom. It is near a canyon. I would have taken out those details if they served no purpose to the narrative. In this poem, they were counterpoint sounds to the sounds of the couple next door. The poem asks: why is one a better sound than the other? Are all of them part of a sexual, sensual world?

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, I think it is driven by the narrative.

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

I know that when I wrote this I was re-visiting William Carlos Williams, and I see an indirect influence. He sometimes uses dialogue and conversation in his poems, and he often writes in a minimalist style about daily life, though they were never just about daily life. I really admire his work, and how sly it is—the settings and places seem mundane, even banal, yet they are masterful takes on the human condition. Williams is wise.

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

My ideal reader has a sense of humor and a sense of the absurd, engages his or her full emotions in life, and has read widely and well. This person has been symbolized by different real people throughout my writing life, and I often will write for a specific person.

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?

I keep all drafts to myself. I let my husband read some of my finished poems. One time he told me that something made him think of Madeline Kahn in Young Frankenstein—and it was not intentional. Woops! I show them to him before I send to editors, to see if there are any gaffes like that, and to see if it affects him as a reader. I don’t exchange poems with friends, though I did for a while after graduate school. I don’t have a writers’ group. I was talking to a friend recently about that, and he was surprised that I didn’t show my manuscripts to friends, and I was surprised that he did. I always long to hang out and talk to poets about writing and life and books and ideas—this inspires me to write, and feels great.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don’t usually write in dialogue. Soon after, I wrote another that was mostly dialogue, called “You Ger Comfortable and Relax.” It was more clearly influenced by Williams.

What is American about this poem?

I love this question! The characters live in a house set between households of Satanists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. That setting is very American! America is eclectic, even wacky-weird, and I think this poem embraces that. The people in the poem resolve their unease by reminding themselves that in the US we have freedom of religion. We are not a theocracy. If the speakers had lived in the American colonies and been so inclined to, they could have had their neighbors arrested for witchcraft. Moreover, there are theocracies on the planet today. It is American to resist living in one.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It was finished. I almost never feel that they are abandoned, though sometimes that’s the appropriate way to finish—stop trying, like the poem for what it is, and let it go.

Michael Dumanis

2011-04-13T12:59:00.003-04:00

Michael Dumanis is the author of My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, as well as the co-editor of Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006). He is Assistant Professor of English at Cleveland State University, and serves as the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.

TRAVEL ADVISORY

Do not endeavor
to snapshot the locals.

Do not trust anything
that could snap shut.

Try to pass quickly
through slipshod locales.

Do not give alms.
Make no eye contact.

Do not confuse
yourself with your reflection,

this span of ruins with a system,
this inn with a place to come back to.

Rein in the impulse to build
a new city from these scattered twigs.

Do not poke around in the abandoned
houses of the damaged village.

Do not get curious
about shiny metal in the grass.

Do not plant kisses
on the blind accordionist.

Leave the mermaid alone,
it is not meant to be.

You will cause offense.
You will not hear the knob turn.

You will wake to find stones in your mouth
and a lake in each eye.

Do not ring the concierge.
Do not search for the consulate.

Regard every centimeter
of ground as suspicious.

Trains are essentially useless.
The timetable lies.

Each day you are bound
to lose something.

Each day you are bound
to lose something.

Do not meander too far
from a given road's shoulder.

Owning a car does not give
you the clearance to drive.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

In one sitting, in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the Fall of 2000, with a recent Lonely Planet Tourbook to Bosnia Herzegovina in my lap, and Leonard Cohen singing “Everybody Knows” in the background. The year before, I had been a Fulbright Fellow in Bulgaria, and had wanted to travel by train to the countries of the former Yugoslavia, including Bosnia. This is just a few years after the Bosnian War, not long after the American airtstrikes on Serbia, and in the midst of the refugee crisis in Kosovo. I did not go to Bosnia, but I did buy a tour book published at the end of the war. I remember opening straight to the “Travel Advisory” section. There were many things you were not supposed to do as a tourist in wartime. In assembling the poem, I imported a few of those travel advisories from the Lonely Planet, then added a few of my own.

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

I have a somewhat unorthodox approach to revision. I chisel one line (or in this poem’s case, one couplet) at a time, until it feels right, and don’t go on to the next line (or couplet) until it does. Every line is then sonically and rhythmically/metrically triggered by the lines preceding it. So I am basically revising as I am writing the first draft, and the poem structurally doesn’t invite much revision after the first draft has been completed. I may change a word here or there, but my first drafts are ultimately quite similar to my final ones. The first draft of “Travel Advisory” had only two differences from the last. The phrase “abandoned houses of the damaged village” had originally been “damaged houses of the abandoned village,” a direct lift from the Lonely Planet. Also, the phrase, “Each day you are bound to lose something” may have originally appeared only once. I think I chose to repeat the phrase a week later.

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

Well ten percent of this poem was received, that is, triggered by, my encounter with the Lonely Planet tourbook. Some rhythmic osmosis may have transpired from the conscious decision to play Leonard Cohen in the background while writing it. The rest of it is sweat-and-tears, though in my case, the sweat-and-tears occasional tend to resemble more a manic, caffeinated frenzy, some pacing, and a lot of talking to oneself in a loud whisper.

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

I wrote the first two couplets first. They set the rhythm for the other couplets. I was, at the time, heavily experimenting with creating tension through how I chose to enjamb the first lines of closed couplets. The poem immediately seemed to want to enter a couplet form. As elsewhere in my work, words I used would trigger other words, so that “snapshot” in line two would morph into “snap shut” in line four and then into “slipshod” in line six, et cetera.

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

It originally appeared in the now-defunct journal Chelsea in Fall 2002, two years after I wrote it.

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?

In writing my first book, I would send my poems off as soon as they felt individually finished. In assembling a second manuscript, I have been less eager to send off the poems too fast, and have been happy to let them accumulate for a while first, so I can see how they engage in dialogue with one another instead of getting distracted by some kind of madcap rush to get them out into the world.

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

I don’t know the difference between fact and fiction. I believe in emotional honesty. I meant everything I said after I said it. I am not trying to tell anyone some kind of story. I am trying to induce an emotional state in somebody else. How does a painting or a symphony negotiate between fact and fiction? The mermaid is as factual as the word “slipshod” or as the uselessness of some trains.

Is this a narrative poem?

No. I don’t know what narrative poems are, either. Or yes. It has, after all, like narrative, a beginning, a middle, and an end.

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

Besides travel guides, I was probably reading a lot of Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, Michael Palmer, James Tate, Heather McHugh, Carolyn Forche, Lucie Brock-Broido, Donald Justice, and Mark Strand. I had also, around that time, fallen in love with two first books by then-emerging poets, and was spending lots of time with them—Some Ether by Nick Flynn, and And Her Soul Out of Nothing by Olena Kalytiak Davis.

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

Yes.

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. I met them over time in Houston and Iowa City and New York. I call them on the phone and bother them.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I rarely use text from other sources in my writing, so in that way, this poem is a bit of an exception.

What is American about this poem?

You know, I never know what that means, and then I feel stupid because I feel like I am supposed to know what that means, but I don’t. I was once asked to write a piece called “What Is American About American Poetry” for a poetry website, and I couldn’t do it. I tried, but I failed. I feel like the question is complicated for me, as a bilingual poet born abroad, in the former Soviet Union, who feels like what is being asked is, “What is American about you, Michael Dumanis? And answer quick, before we deport you to a poetry gulag.” I also know that that is not what is being asked, that it’s really a way for American writers (of which I am one) to assert and define and celebrate their American-ness, but I also feel the question is somehow exclusionary, as though a poem written by an American could somehow be an unAmerican poem.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.

Gray Jacobik

2011-04-08T14:29:00.003-04:00

Gray Jacobik, a professor emeritus, is a poet, mentor, and painter who lives in Deep River, Connecticut. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, American Poetry Now, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Poets Guide to the Birds and Poetry from Paradise Valley. Among other honors, she has received The Yeats Prize, The Emily Dickinson Prize, an NEA Fellowship, and served as the Frost Place Poet-in-Residence. Her book, The Double Task (University of Massachusetts Press) received The Juniper Prize and was nominated for The James Laughlin Award and The Poet’s Prize. The Surface of Last Scattering, published by Texas Review Press, was selected by X. J. Kennedy as the winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Brave Disguises (University of Pittsburgh Press) received the AWP Poetry Series Award. Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse is newly published by CavanKerry Press. Gray invites anyone interested in learning more about her work, upcoming readings, essays, paintings, or in linking to her blog at the Michigan Quarterly Review’s website, Come A Little Bit Closer Now Baby (dedicated to the art of close reading), to visit her website.

THE EX

In the placable air of long dissolved discord, we wait
with our daughter, days overdue, our single shared
goodness. She carries our first grandchild.

I saw him last at her wedding––before that, as rarely
as faint decency required. We’ve led vastly different
lives. He’s not unkind, only holds a dizzying number

of opinions. Like bombarding mosquitoes they fly in
and out of range. Across my face I draw a tight mask
of passive acquiescence. The skeleton underneath

threatens to grin, but he’s the one who’s dying—
of AIDS and its complications—the effeminate,
virginal boy I married when I was twenty-two.

Can anything be said to those we betrayed and
abandoned? Neither of us knew ourselves; each
feared we’d be destroyed by the other’s needs.

That fear seems exorbitant from here, and pointless,
yet I remember staggering about for weeks feeling
as though a beast were daily ripping the sternum

out of my chest. We shred our nerves against the grate
of one another’s youthful insecurities. Weak, slight,
vulnerable, only his voice is unchanged—

I must have loved its sound once! Maybe, strangely,
in the unreckonable realm of human life—our daughter’s
and her child’s—whoever we marry is ours forever.

And in some sense he is mine, and I almost want him––
but only out of pity, or forgotten guilt. All the dross
that had to go was long since skimmed off. Here

we are, his once-wife, my once-husband, the child
we made who is with child, this summer evening’s
sterling light and the mystery of how each moment

goes on and on and holds us present until the last.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in late July 2002 while I was poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. The occasion the poem describes, my former husband and I waiting with my daughter over a period of several days prior to her giving birth to our first grandchild, occurred six weeks earlier, mid-June 2002.

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

I don't remember precisely. I was free to write all day and my best guess is that I worked on it for several hours one day and then revisited the poem, making minor revisions over a period of days.

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

I don't believe in inspiration as traditionally conceived: that is, as having something to do with a god blowing an inspiriting breath into the lungs of a poet, or a visitation by a muse. I agree with critics, such as Harold Bloom, who says that "poems beget poems." I read a lot of poems, read, study, analyze, teach, think about, write out in long hand, and thus I am inspired through the cultural mechanism of writing and reading: inspired by literature.

However, I want to add that I went back and looked at my journal entry of June 11, 2002; five days before my grandson was born, written while my ex-husband and I were visiting our daughter. Referring to him, I wrote that "his voice hasn't changed low these thirty-six years since I first met him. Neither of us is in anyway the same person we were in 1966 . . . I can hardly remember who I was then . . . " Then, referring to my daughter, I wrote that she "thanked me for being gracious this morning toward her father. What else would I do? In fact, I hadn't tried at all to be gracious."

So while I hadn't had my journal entry in mind when I sat down to write this poem, I believe that having put on paper some of my thoughts of the moment, the kernel of the poem began to form in my subconscious mind. Here I am saying that "writing begets writing"--another form of inspiration.

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

Although these lines are longer than those Wallace Stevens uses, I have his tercets in mind quite often, and I can see Stevens' influenced in some of the words and phrases: "placable," "long dissolved discord," "unreckonable realm," perhaps even "sterling."

Principles of technique? My technique consists of writing the best sentences I can write, trying to vary type and length of sentences, adding as much rhyme, consonance, alliteration, and assonance as I can without sounding too obviously poetic. Then I spent a lot of time searching for synonyms that might be more interesting, more precise or more musical than my first word choices. I know that I stop myself a few times and ask whether or not I've got something to say; any central idea. The ideological level of poem making is important to me. I don't care for poems that carry only impressions or sensations and little or not thought. I try to make sure there's at least one line that aims at what I like to think of as the intellectual underpinning of the poem. Lastly, after everything else has settled down, I begin shaping the poem into lines and form, although some lines, as lines, form themselves from the beginning. This is a simplification, of course, since thousands of decisions, some conscious, far many more unconscious, are made while writing a poem; at least that's my sense of things.

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

"The Ex" was accepted by Peter Makuck and published in Tar River Poetry about sixteen months after I wrote it. Later it was anthologized in a collection called The Breath of Parted Lips: Poems from The Frost Place, Vol. II. This last is edited by Sydney Lea and published by CavanKerry Press.

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?

As a general trend, the older I've gotten, the longer I've written and published, the greater the length of time I sit on work. I know longer fall in love with my own creations and race off to share them with the world, as I once did -- sometimes mailing off work the very day I wrote it. I have several dozen poems, probably publishable ones, that I've been sitting on for eight years or less. My practice does vary. I try to psych-out the fit between the publication and the poems I'm sending for consideration, but I question my powers of discernment in this regard, and still wonder whether trying to find this fit is a waste if time and energy. I still receive dozens upon dozens of rejection slips.

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

There's not much fiction in this one. It's fairly autobiographical. I do not recall feeling anything like what is expressed in the phrase "I almost want him." I am pretty sure I said that for dramatic effect. I do remember having a long meal in the evening on my daughter's patio, and my ex-husband expressing what struck me as numerous ill-founded opinions. I remember feeling strained into keeping a pleasant expression on my face. I was being duplicitous for the sake of geniality. I remember, as well, how beautiful the California evening light was, and I was overcome with a sense of the mystery of "the present moment," the sense, that I try to capture in the poem of "how each moment/goes on and on and holds us." I have always been captivated by the idea of successive moments of now being all we ever know, or can know, of existence, and yet each moment is so ephemeral, so fleeting. That fascination I take to be the real subject of this poem, along with the idea that occurs earlier that "whoever we marry is ours forever" in "some sense." I am married to my third husband, and when I think about the previous two, I do feel tied to them even though they are complete strangers to me. I suppose because I pledged myself to each in good faith when I married each and I had a child with each. Such things bind us in a metaphysical sense even if nothing else does.

Is this a narrative poem?

I would classifying it as a lyric poem with narrative elements. It is primarily a meditation and thus fits the definition of a lyric fairly closely: a short, personal poem that focuses on a single emotion, and that is primarily meditative or reflective in nature. I'd call the emotion a blend of two: nostalgia and wonder.

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

Well, I've mentioned Stevens, and I can see a touch of Bishop here as well, in, for example, the simile that describes the ex-husband's dizzying opinions as showing up "Like bombarding mosquitoes" that "fly in/and out of range." Bishop may show up in the phrase "as rarely/as faint decency required." Since I wrote this poem in Robert Frost's former home, and while I was re-reading his complete poems, I wouldn't be surprised if Frost, as well, isn't hiding out somewhere in these lines, probably in the tone.

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

No I don't. I feel amazed, and honored, when anyone reads or listens to one of my poems. I'm happy with all comers and write for all comers.

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?

I've belonged to the same poetry group for the last sixteen years; we've been a changing group, as such groups are. The members have vetted all my work, plus a few other friends I meet with less frequently. Often, but not always, my husband is my first reader. He's good at seeing what doesn't need to be there.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don't think "The Ex" differs significantly from the personal lyrics I write. At this stage in my writing life, I'm writing more dramatic and narrative poems than lyrics, and I like to write hybrids that combine two or three modes and that sometimes incorporate fragments I have not composed myself. So of course "The Ex" differs significantly from such poems. Among the lyrics, I write some that are more outward looking, less personal, that take as their subject something in the natural or cultural or historical realm, rather than human interaction, than, let me say, the psychological domain of experience, as "The Ex" does.

What is American about this poem?

I think this poem might have as easily been written by a European or a South or Latin American poet. I do not see anything particularly American about it unless it is the mention of AIDs, although, by now, sadly, AIDs shows up everywhere in the world.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Oh, finished. I declared it finished. I've never found another way to finish a poem.