Todd Boss

Todd Boss’s best-selling debut poetry collection, Yellowrocket (Norton, 2008) has enjoyed widespread critical acclaim. Todd’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded him its annual Emily Clark Balch Prize in 2009. His work has been syndicated on public radio’s The Splendid Table and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. His MFA is from the University of Alaska-Anchorage. Read (and hear) Todd’s poems at his website by clicking here.


TO BE ALONE AGAIN IN THE THICK SKIN

of this low-slung bungalow house,
August overcast and waning,
windows open to the breathings
of the distant interstate passing,
you and the kids on some errand,
no note on the kitchen counter,
the workday done, my computer
on and waiting, I feel so helpless
against a tide of emotion I can
only identify as a melancholy joy.
When I was a boy come home
from school to the farm alone,
my father working, my mom with
my sister to a lesson or something,
I would pass through all the rooms
in a daze, lingering, gazing in all
the mirrors, lying down on all
the beds, trying myself on for size
in every doorway, every hall. Or
I would wander the farm itself,
the lawns, the lanes, the fields.
There was no highway there to
trouble the sound of being alone.
The only noise was wind if there
was wind, or plane if overhead
a plane. I didn't know it then,
but we lived beneath the pattern
of flights from MSP International
to points northeast and pan-Atlantic,
and though they were so far up in
the air, their thin roar glimmered
in your ears if you strained hard
to hear. It never occurred to me
that one day I'd be tired of flying.
That the thrill of passing again over
my own hometown would finally
be lost on me. Looking back on
that clueless boy, I pity him
for who he became. For isn't there
something lonely about a life
that wasn't in the least foreseen?
I live in someone else's city, in
someone else's house, it seems.
It's as if one day I stumbled into a
giant jumble sale of dreams, and
left with my arms loaded, caring
only that I got some good bargains.
I'm not saying I don't love my life.
Your heart and this city and this house
are the only places I can imagine
belonging. But isn't that just it?
In, through the screens of our lives,
the song of the world outside comes
thronging in all its unexpected
discord. And we call that chaos
home, despite everything we love.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem came all in a rush, maybe four years ago, and ended with the line “I pity him for who he became,” which is a bitter ending, but not entirely earned, to that point. I thought it was done until I became aware of a nagging feeling, whenever I came back to it, that the ending was unsatisfying. It took a long time for me to figure out why.

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

There were probably only two or three drafts of this poem, but they each took a long time in between, if memory serves.

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

This poem wasn’t “received” in the way that many of my poems are. Instead, it came in a gush of frankness that felt refreshing to me at the outset, and I followed that impulse.

The trick was trusting that impulse again when I went to finish the poem, picking it up from where I’d left it and catching that same vibe, like a wave, and riding it out. That’s what took me so long.

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

In order to finish this poem in the way it wanted to be finished, I had to be even more honest about what I’d already been honest about, and then be even more honest about even that. This poem is really a little pile of unlaundered honesties, with a recollection in the middle like an outgrown jacket. It’s hard for me sometimes to look at an honest autobiographical poem and say, “I haven’t been entirely honest about this. What would entire honesty look like?” I think that’s probably more often a memoirist’s dilemma than a poet’s, at least where autobiography is concerned.

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

Nobody published it till it came out in book form. Then it appeared on Poetry Daily, I think, which was a surprise. And now you’re interested in it, which is interesting. I think it’s one of those poems that, if you connect with its sense of displacement, can really touch you. I’m always interested in a poem that can’t make the editorial cut at journals, but for some reason resonates with readers. I could point to a dozen of those in my book, and it’s not for lack of sending them out to likely journals. To me, it points to a populist hole in the periodical literature. Which makes sense, because so many journals are based in academies.

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, of course. I know a poem is good when I want to share it immediately with someone. I want to stop people on the street and say, Hey, you. Listen to this! I like to think I’m getting to the point where I can distinguish that feeling from the mere sense of satisfaction that comes of finishing a poem, any poem; but they’re hard to tell apart. Both are flattering feelings, and I’m susceptible to flattering feelings.

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

Fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes fact. Our autobiographies are just the stories we tell ourselves. You think you know who you are, in a nutshell, but in truth your stories represent about 2% of what you might call your “real autobiography.” I no longer worry much about “fact” … it’s overrated. Our stories are the pier from which we think we’ve seen the ocean.

I’m not writing about myself, even when I write autobiographically; if I’m writing well, I’m writing about something much bigger than that, and using myself merely as the fulcrum for that desire.

Is this a narrative poem?

Sure, it tells the story of someone who has changed … Then it ends in a lyric flourish beginning with “But isn’t that just it?”…

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

I went through a wonderful Tony Hoagland phase, and this strikes me as a chatty perspective piece not unlike his.

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

I write for the displaced agrarian in all of us.

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?

Nope.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s chatty and disclosure-oriented. It’s not what Nate Klug who dismissed me handily in a Poetry review called a “Todd Boss” poem… which is to say it’s not clever, sound-driven, syntactically convoluted, or in any other way overtly inventive. It’s just straight-up. Which is what I love about it. Some poems want that.

What is American about this poem?

I give up. What do I win?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Yes. Aren’t we all?

Jessica Garratt

Jessica Garratt grew up in rural Maryland, and since then has lived in Iowa, Ireland, Austin, New York, and now Missouri, where she is a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri in Columbia. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, and from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her MFA. Jessica's first book, Fire Pond, won the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, selected by poet Medbh McGuckian, and was published by the University of Utah Press in April 2009. Individual poems from the collection have appeared in the North American Review, Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Revew, Crab Orchard Review, The Missouri Review, and in the forthcoming Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets' University and College Prizes, 1999-2008.


PILGRIM

I’ve been attended (in my efforts to fall in love
this month) by the mouse in my apartment, who’s nested
its image everywhere: in a wadded receipt
beneath my bed, in the long-tailed phone charger, dying
beside its socket. It’s hidden in the thistled ditch
my bed becomes when I sit up in the night, possessed
by a dream whose paws are still pressed to the smudged side
of my eyes, searching the sheets for what they see.

“Something ate that poison,” I told you on the phone,
“It’s got to materialize eventually.” “Not necessarily,”
you said; and later, “Don’t be afraid.” Afraid? Is that
what I am? I was surprised. I imagined what would change
if you lived here too—how my private late-night vigils
would un-green, snapped free of their source, collected
for kindling to make a fire in the clearing, and see
if there was enough to talk about (or do) till morning.

With you so far away, and us so new, it’s been hard
to discern the likelihood of love. I’ve culled a nice image
of you as Pilgrim: earnest, straight-necked, boyish
New Englander—and found I was tickled by the thought
of your hard-working love, not yet called to its task—the city
still a wilderness, the hill stifling its light. I can see it
much better during the sprints my vision does
in the unmarked fields between our talks. But,

when you speak, each of your best qualities reveals itself
to be the uncomplicated twin of a subtler brother
you never knew, whose sense of irony, whose mind
like a sweep of moor, and eyes that aren’t always averted
to the sky—never had the chance to rub off
on you. If one such brother had lived, I might tell him
on the phone tonight, how the mouse has finally arrived
dead at the foot of the stairs. How it was midday, not night,

when I found it. How it didn’t seek a shoe or a pillow
or a kitchen drawer to die in, but curled up beside
the front door, as if wanting no more than to leave—
but how really the mouse lay down where it happened to be
when the poison sponged the last fluid from its body.
How its feet are tiny and simple at noon. How
my landlord will come in the morning and sweep
the bare gray fact onto the dustpan’s gray-blue range.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in 2006, soon after moving into a new apartment. On the night I finished moving in, my sister was over and saw a mouse race across the kitchen and into a gap under the kitchen sink. I never saw it myself, but when I mentioned the incident to my landlord, he promptly deposited some little pouches of poison in my apartment. And then for a week or two, I compulsively projected phantom dead mice onto everything small and hidden – everything potentially translatable into mouse and death. I even had a friend come over once and use my broom to push something mouse-ish looking out from under the bed while I stood at a distance on the stairs. That was the ‘wadded receipt’ I mention in the poem.

Meanwhile, a separate part of me was perched above this bout of hyperbole, observing quietly, and noticing some resonance between my dilated, nearly Gothic visions of this tiny, elusive creature, and my sometimes over-grand projections of imaginative but unapt narratives onto romantic situations that cannot sustain them. So there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between the two scenarios in the poem exactly, but I began to play and see how they could enlarge, illuminate, and scuff each other, once I courted this adjacency. I didn’t know how they would come together ultimately, or what the relationship between the threads would mean.

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

Well, from the Word documents dated on my computer surrounding this poem, it looks like the first intense round of drafts (there are six of them I saved) happened between August 29 and September 18. But the ‘final’ one (on September 18) appears to be the draft I turned in to my workshop – and it has a whole extra stanza tacked on to the end that doesn’t exist in the version of “Pilgrim” in my book. I know I tinkered around with it for another month or two after this initial burst. And then again more recently, during the final round of edits on Fire Pond.

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?

Before I turned a draft in to my workshop, I ran it by my friend who, at the time, I showed pretty much every new poem to first. He had trouble with the poem as it stood, because he felt that the poem didn’t provide within its bounds a key to navigate or unlock its own meaning. And I remember having this immediate, sort of rebellious reaction to this idea, like, Really? Is that what I should be doing here? I had felt satisfied, in a way, by the manner in which the different elements in the poem didn’t determine themselves too steadfastly, or map onto a chart of analogies. My friend wanted to know what the mouse was standing in for, whereas I think I was seeing the mouse more as an immanence, radiating in its own right, even as it could cast something new or relevant onto other elements in the poem.

Still, I hadn’t quite clarified all this to myself yet, and I took a stab at providing more closure by writing that extra last stanza, which my friend thought made the poem much better. That’s the version I turned in to workshop. In case it’s interesting to see the different sort of gesture this ending made, here’s that alternate ending to the poem:

“…How
the landlord will come in the morning and sweep. But,
telling all this to you—well, the thought makes me wince.

Perhaps because it’s difficult, as it is, to memorialize
the dismal, ordinary scenes in a life. But when sunk
in the mind of another, such as yours, they shrink even more,
the way a gravestone shrinks from a spring afternoon
that shines its explanations over everything, coming to all
of last year’s conclusions. What about particulars? What about
grit? Even the imagination crawls up from the dungeon
of the body, each stair a fact on its way to myth.”

After some messing with this final stanza for a while, I finally decided to abandon it entirely. It seemed to expand the poem too much, at the same time as it shut down some of its pulse. It was so explain-y, and I wasn’t at all sure that the explanation was actually the conclusion the poem itself seemed to draw or move toward.

This poem, more than most of mine, produced vastly different reactions from people. One reader thought it was a biting and incisive character assassination, whereas someone else thought the mouse really just stood in for the guy in the poem, and saw the speaker as sad and vulnerable. Some looked at me blankly and pityingly when I said I had wanted the poem to be funny. So, in the end, I really just had to stay my own course with this one, and trust my instincts. Which, I guess, is always the case ultimately.

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. Or, maybe what’s more true is that I believe in a state of profound concentration. I think when I’m working on a poem might be the only time I ever entirely concentrate on anything. And in that state, I do feel a sense of ‘tapped-in-ed-ness,’ if that makes sense. The world feels more fluid and connective—itself a kind of unified ecstasy—and I am in it, important to it and also not important at all. I remember asking a friend once, many years ago, what it felt like to be deeply in love (because I was pretty sure I hadn’t been at that point). She said, “It feels like you’re suddenly tapped into the world – like the world is letting you in on this wonderful, mysterious secret.” Pretty wise for a 19 year old, right? In many ways, I feel this is a pretty apt description of the experience of making a poem – especially in the early stages of composition.

And as for sweat and tears – I don’t know. That’s not really how I think about writing poems. The ‘work’ of it – after the initial ‘inspiration’ – is absorbing as well. I’m hungry for the process at that point – to keep helping the poem forward, to keep shaping. I know writers (talented, successful ones) who claim to not really like the process of writing. That sounds like sweat and tears. But that’s not at all how I think about it. And at the same time, I don’t think I’ve ever felt that a poem was simply ‘received.’ It tends to feel more like something in between the aggressively active and the entirely passive.

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

The basic ‘action’ of the poem was pulled from my life. In that sense, many of my poems could be said to begin in ‘fact.’ But I don’t think that means much really. The events in the poem are just the beginning. It’s what happens when consciousness gets to the ‘facts’ and works on them that’s interesting. What begins as experience in the world quickly turns into an imagining of that experience, rather than a recounting of it. What takes over is a curiosity about the nature of that experience, the images that fascinate or suit a certain frame of mind, the ideas that are raised, the psychology that might take hold and cause certain leaps of thought, but also certain actions. The work of the poem is no longer in accurately representing my own state of mind or actions in a particular moment, but in representing a mind, in a more general sense. Dickinson put it well when she wrote: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse -- it does not mean -- me -- but a supposed person.”

Is this a narrative poem?

In a way; but ultimately I always privilege the meditative over the narrative in my poems. If you imagine the narrative as a paved road, threading concretely through a landscape, my poems generally tend to follow the track of the mind of a person walking along it. Or maybe a cloud of map-savvy gnats floating above it with a vaguely forward movement.

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

Well, I remember that I was teaching an American Literature course for the first time. And the beginning drafts of this poem coincided with the beginnings of American literature – Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, the pilgrims, the City on a Hill. It actually happens often enough now, that what I’m teaching at the time enters (or instigates) a poem.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don’t usually write such ‘blocky’ poems. But these dense eight-line stanzas just felt right for this one. I do think, however, that this poem might mark the first in a string of longer, more meditative poems that triangulate disparate subjects and seek to connect them through the writing of the poem. This now feels like my native way of moving through a poem, but it wasn’t always.

What is American about this poem?

A lot, I think. Obviously there’s the pilgrim metaphor, and the early spirit of American idealism (the sacred beacon of a city, hoisted up on a hill). In many ways, I think that the dialectics and Bermuda triangles this poem (loosely, noncommittally) moves between might be said to be American in their concerns (at least historically, and in literature). Is Nature a sacred forest of Platonic forms? An inert gathering of matter and fact? Evidence of the occult (as in very early American literature)? Reflective of the human imagination? I also think that this poem flirts with metaphor without entirely trusting or committing to it. This seems American to me – the move between lofty idealism and gritty pragmatism (in varying degrees of sly and earnest) – between the hankering for a beacon, and an insistence on bare gray facts. I think (in retrospect, of course) that the poem splashes around in these different American underpinnings. “Splashing around” seems American too.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Oh, well, I don’t know… I think being poets means we don’t have to decide on one way of casting this. ‘Finished’ sounds so burly and sealed, ‘abandoned’ too melodramatic, or else falsely modest. Somewhere in between, I suppose. But I do wish I’d found this letter of Dickinson’s (written to Higginson) before “Pilgrim” ended up in my book – I surely would have included the following lines as an epigraph: “Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted.”

Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 1, 1927. He has published several volumes of poetry, including Strong Is Your Hold (Houghton Mifflin, 2006); A New Selected Poems (2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; Imperfect Thirst (1996); When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990); Selected Poems (1980), for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980). Kinnell’s honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Rockefeller Grant, the 1974 Shelley Prize of the Poetry Society of America, and the 1975 Medal of Merit from National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has served as poet-in-residence at numerous colleges and universities, including the University of California at Irvine, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and Brandeis, and divides his time between Vermont and New York City, where he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University.


THE STONE TABLE

Here on the hill behind the house,
we sit with our feet up on the edge
of the eight-by-ten stone slab
that was once the floor of the cow pass
that the cows used, getting from one pasture
to the other without setting a hoof
on the dirt road lying between them.

From here we can see the blackberry thicket,
the maple sapling the moose slashed
with his cutting teeth, turning it
scarlet too early, the bluebird boxes
flown from now, the one tree left
of the ancient orchard popped out
all over with saffron and rosy,
subacid pie apples, smaller crabs grafted
with scions of old varieties, Freedom,
Sops-of-Wine, Wolf River, and trees
we put in ourselves, dotted with red lumps.

We speak in whispers: fifty feet away,
under a red spruce, a yearling bear
lolls on its belly eating clover.
Abruptly it sits up. Did I touch my wine glass
to the table, setting it humming?
The bear peers about with the bleary undressedness
of old people who have mislaid their eyeglasses.
It ups its muzzle and sniffs. It fixes us,
whirls, and plunges into the woods—
a few cracklings and shatterings, and all is still.

As often happens, we find ourselves
thinking similar thoughts, this time of a friend
who lives to the south of that row of peaks
burnt yellow in the sunset. About now,
he will be paying his daily visit to her grave,
reading by heart the words, cut into black granite,
that she had written for him, when they
both thought he would die first:
I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART BUT WHAT
PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU SAFE BESIDE ME.
Or is he back by now, in his half-empty house,
talking in ink to a piece of paper?

I, who so often used to wish to float free
of earth, now with all my being want to stay,
to climb with you on other evenings to this stone,
maybe finding a bear, or a coyote, like
the one who, at dusk, a week ago, passed
in his scissorish gait ten feet from where we sat—
this earth we attach ourselves to so fiercely,
like scions of Sheffield Seek-No-Furthers
grafted for our lifetimes onto paradise root-stock.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This I don’t remember.

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

Countless revisions, over several years.

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

Yes. It was all received, but all soaked in sweat and tears.

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

Six months, with some tweaking in the galleys.

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?

Seeing a poem in galleys hastens finishing it.

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

All of it is fact, with a coating of imagination.

Is this a narrative poem?

I think so.

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

I don’t normally write for a particular 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?

I send most of my poems to trusted friends, before sending them to magazines.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It feels very heavy. It is in bondage to narrative, familiar surfaces, and an expected outcome, a poem composed on earth.

What is American about this poem?

Only that wild animals pop up.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It was finished and then abandoned.

Rick Barot

Rick Barot has published two books with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002) and Want (2008). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including New England Review, The New Republic, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and at Pacific Lutheran University.


READING PLATO

I think about the mornings it saved me
to look at the hearts penknifed on the windows
of the bus, or at the initials scratched

into the plastic partition, in front of which
a cabbie went on about bread his father
would make, so hard you broke teeth on it,

or told one more story about the plumbing
in New Delhi buildings, villages to each floor,
his whole childhood in a building, nothing to

love but how much now he missed it, even
the noises and stinks he missed, the avenue
suddenly clear in front of us, the sky ahead

opaquely clean as a bottle’s bottom, each heart
and name a kind of ditty of hopefulness
because there was one you or another I was

leaving or going to, so many stalls of flowers
and fruit going past, figures earnest with
destination, even the city itself a heart,

so that when sidewalks quaked from trains
underneath, it seemed something to love,
like a harbor boat’s call at dawn or the face

reflected on a coffee machine’s chrome side,
the pencil’s curled shavings a litter
of questions on the floor, the floor’s square

of afternoon light another page I couldn’t know
myself by, as now, when Socrates describes
the lover’s wings spreading through the soul

like flames on a horizon, it isn’t so much light
I think about, but the back’s skin cracking
to let each wing’s nub break through,

the surprise of the first pain and the eventual
lightening, the blood on the feathers drying
as you begin to sense the use for them.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

For over twenty years now I’ve kept a diary, sometimes writing in it every day, and then going for weeks without writing in it at all. One benefit of having a diary is being able to check up on certain things. To answer your question, I found this notation in my diary entry of Friday, January 30, 1998: “Wrote, in a couple of hours yesterday, ‘Reading Phaedrus on a Flight.’ I think it flies, though it could use some tuning up here and there. I showed it to Mike, who liked it. Had coffee with Cate this afternoon. And I’m exhausted, my head in pieces.” On this date I was in my second year as an MFA student at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. The “Mike” and “Cate” mentioned in the entry are Michael Dumanis and Cate Marvin, who were also students there at the time. This is almost ten years ago now.

The germ of the poem was reading Plato’s “Phaedrus” during the flight back home to California in December, for winter break. There was this one passage that I liked, and which gave me the ending of the poem: “For by reason of the stream of beauty entering in through his eyes there comes a warmth, whereby his soul’s plumage is fostered, and with that warmth the roots of the wing are melted, which for long had been so hardened and closed up that nothing could grow; then as the nourishment is poured in, the stump of the wing swells and hastens to grow from the root over the whole substance of the soul, for aforetime the soul was furnished with wings.”

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

As the diary entry says, I wrote the poem in a couple of hours. At that point, I was still writing everything on a typewriter: a beige electric Brother that hummed and clattered when I used it. What I remember of those two hours, from this far distance, is that I would write a stanza or two of the poem, then pace around the apartment for a spell, then go back to the typewriter and write another stanza or so, then do another round of pacing. I have a manila folder with the drafts, and there are in fact only a few drafts. There’s a first draft that has the whole poem pretty much structurally complete. The subsequent drafts play around with stanzas, lineation, and have lots of nitpicky cross-outs. A couple of weeks after I wrote the poem, it was workshopped. That semester, I was in Marvin Bell’s workshop. I remember that the poem fared pretty well—when so many of my other poems, during my time at Iowa, just crashed and burned. The title was deemed too fussy, and so I changed it to the simpler “Reading Plato.”

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,” but not in the struck-by-lightning, perhaps facile connotation that surrounds the word these days. I realize that the etymology of the word comes from a spiritual register: that one is breathed on by a sort of influence, and one is then moved. But I want to imagine that one isn’t given the gift of that breath without having prepared for it, even if inadvertently. In the case of “Reading Plato,” I had been collecting bits and pieces of the poem’s images for months before I wrote the poem, not knowing that I was collecting for any particular poem. That collecting was a kind of preparation. When I read the “Phaedrus,” it gave the things I had gathered a galvanizing coherence. Writing the poem felt like “taking dictation,” but its materials were already near at hand. The “Phaedrus” itself weighs in on this very question of inspiration, as quoted above: “For by reason of the stream of beauty entering in through his eyes there comes a warmth, whereby his soul’s plumage is fostered”...

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

The poem is thirty-three lines long and uses one continuous sentence. That syntactical decision was the organizing principle that I latched onto very early on. I knew I wanted that breathlessness, as a way of underscoring the many shifts that were going to be in the poem. Elongating the syntax was the technical problem that made the poem fun to write. On the other hand, I chose the tercets, also early on, as a way of having order along with the propulsive syntax. I wanted that balance between chaos and order in the poem. I remember trying out couplets and quatrains, but the couplets gave the poem too much air, and the quatrains were too much like bricks. The tercets seemed just the right amount of stable and off-kilter at the same time.

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

Not too long. The poem was first accepted by that terrific magazine, Double Take, but they returned the poem soon after, when the magazine went into a hiatus. The poem was then taken by Black Warrior Review, and was published in a 1999 issue of the magazine.

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

This feels like a trick question to me, because one way of answering your question is to say that the poem is both fact and fiction. The poem as poem seems to me very artificial: the meditative and discursive movement of the poem, and its use of the single sentence, seem to me fictionalizing artifices. Maybe this is just another way of saying that every piece of writing is a sort of fiction. On the other hand, the events and perceptions in the poem are facts, in that I experienced them: I was on a bus with the scratched-up plexi-window, I was in a taxi with an affable Indian cab-driver, I was in love once again and kind of sad about it, I was looking at the pencil shavings on my apartment floor, and I was reading the “Phaedrus.” Maybe another way of answering the question is to say that a poem is a performance of the truth.

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

Once again I can look through my diary, and I’m reminded that during my two years in Iowa all I ever seemed to do was read, and I read everything. That winter and spring I was reading a lot of James Tate, Charles Wright, Carl Phillips, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mark Strand, Brenda Hillman, James Merrill, Timothy Liu, Pablo Neruda, August Kleinzahler. It’s also probably important to mention that every week I was reading poems by an incredible line-up of poets who were students at the workshop at the time: Katy Lederer, Matthea Harvey, Julie Buchsbaum, Tina Celona, Lisa Lubasch, Max Winter, Robyn Schiff, Michael Dumanis, Erica Bernheim, Joanna Klink, Josh Bell.

Two very direct influences on “Reading Plato” were Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” and Dean Young’s “One Story.” I’d loved the Hass poem for as long as I was a poet, and I’d heard him say in an interview that “Meditation at Lagunitas” was his “rage against Plato,” which meant that I had to write my own “rage against Plato” also. I’d seen “One Story” in a magazine, I think it was in “The Threepenny Review,” and I was immediately blown away by it. I had never read anything with that mixture of sorrow and hijinks and associativeness before. It was one of those really rare poems that I felt I had written myself, if only I were a better poet than I was.

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

I often thought of my early poems as offerings to someone, which always made them de facto love poems, whatever kinds of poems they actually were. Then I thought of the poems as things to show to the peers whose opinions I cared about; the poems felt like statements that were meant to be part of a larger conversation about poetry and art. These days I don’t think of a particular reader at all. I’m my own ideal reader, in that I think of my poems now as extensions of my diary: the poems are records of who I am, what I’m thinking of, what I obsess over. All through my writing life there’s been a gradual ratcheting down of ambition, at least as far as audience or readership is concerned. Expecting a reader for your poems is probably a recipe for disappointment, and so I don’t hope for any readers. This doesn’t mean, by the way, that I don’t try to write the best poems I can. I do. I may be my own ideal reader, but I’m not a pushover.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s like some other poems, and very unlike others. By now I have different “genres” within my own poetry, and every poem I write usually fits into one of those genres. I’ve written other poems like “Reading Plato,” poems that are associative, headlong in mood and speed, predicated on forcibly juxtaposing a lot of dissimilar things in a limited space. Then there are poems which are more conventionally narrative, and poems in sequences which try to create a whole through broken parts, and poems which have specific formal strategies as their defining characteristics. In the winter and spring that I wrote “Reading Plato,” I also wrote a prose-poem sequence, a poem about Wittgenstein, and a sequence about different birds. And these poems were all awfully different from each other, thematically and formally.

What is American about this poem?

Probably the headlong quality I mentioned above. It’s hungry. It wants to take everything in. It wants everything in its eyes, even the junk.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Definitely finished.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur, poet and translator, is one of the preeminent men of letters of our time. He has served as poet laureate of the United States, and his many other honors include a National Book Award, two Pulitzer Prizes, and the Bollingen Translation Prize. His most recent book is Collected Poems: 1943 – 2004 (Harcourt, 2004). Wilbur lives in Cummington, Massachusetts, and Key West, Florida.


THE READER

She is going back, these days, to the great stories
That charmed her younger mind. A shaded light
Shines on the nape half-shadowed by her curls,
And a page turns now with a scuffing sound.
Onward they come again, the orphans reaching
For a first handhold in a stony world,
The young provincials who at last look down
On the city’s maze, and will descend into it,
The serious girl, once more, who would live nobly,
The sly one who aspires to marry so,
The young man bent on glory, and that other
Who seeks a burden. Knowing as she does
What will become of them in bloody field
Or Tuscan garden, it may be that at times
She sees their first and final selves at once,
As a god might to whom all time is now.
Or, having lived so much herself, perhaps
She meets them this time with a wiser eye,
Noting that Julien’s calculating head
Is from the first too severed from his heart.
But the true wonder of it is that she,
For all that she may know of consequences,
Still turns enchanted to the next bright page
Like some Natasha in the ballroom door—
Caught in the flow of things wherever bound,
The blind delight of being, ready still
To enter life on life and see them through.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

“The Reader” was composed at some time between 2000 and 2004, and first published in The New Yorker. My late wife was always a great reader and re-reader of classic fiction—not for scholarly purposes, but for the delight of it.

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

Though I do quite a bit of crossing out, and a great deal of hesitating, my poems are commonly written in a single draft, and 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?

Yes, I believe in inspiration. Love and admiration underlay the poem, but what got it going was a sense of how discourse might marshal a number of things: the sight of her, some great themes and persons of the nineteenth century novel, some conjectures as to how it was for her to visit Dorothea or Isabel or Stavrogin yet again.

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

I felt from the beginning that an unrhymed pentameter—having if possible the vigor and variation which I admire in Milton—would be the right form for such discourse.

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?

If a poem has been botched, I throw it out; otherwise I type it out and send it away, hoping for approval.

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

The poem ends by blending my wife’s delight in fiction and her undiminished love of life.

Is this a narrative poem?

No, it’s not a narrative.

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

I think that, after many decades of reading and writing, one has many gratitudes and admirations, but is not likely to succumb to some influence.

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

I think I write for a blend of persons, living and dead, whom I would like to interest and please and move. But those persons don’t constitute an exclusive club. I hope to be accessible and human.

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 was always my first and best judge, but what I showed her—save in the case of translations—was the completed work. Now I do the same with one or two good friends.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Robert Frost, when asked why he wrote poems, used to say (evasively) “to make them all different from each other.” I trust that this poem differs.

What is American about this poem?

American? Well, it makes use of our supremely resourceful language.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.

Idra Novey

Idra Novey's first book of poems The Next Country received the 2007 Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books. Her poems appear in Slate, A Public Space, and The Paris Review. She’s received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her translations include two books of poetry and a novel in prose poems by Uruguayan writer Lascano Tegui forthcoming from Dalkey Archive in 2010. Novey teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia University where she is director of Columbia’s Center for Literary Translation.


TRANS

-late

To speak of origins requires mastery
of the verb to be. I used to be, for example,
a little unwieldy. What an organ,
people said. To play me well
demanded both hands and feet.


-gress

After a time I accepted
certain people were shy about sex
and I was one of them—at least
in English. This poem
may be sponsored
by the Society
of American Linguists.


-mogrify

If I had to be a city, I’d wish it
like Chichén Itzá, with no river
to give me away. And for water,
only the deepest clear pools—
leaping wells to the underworld.


-form

More dreams: an island given to cliffs,
a swift language I can’t comprehend
except in the hush after a monsoon
when all of us appear at once, flushed
and bewildered from too much
of our own company.


-scend

If you’re quiet long enough,
the whole of a life fits in a coconut
and you can whittle out the slivers
of its immaculate inner meat.



When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem started over a milkshake. A friend and I were discussing the possible contents of the milkshakes we were sipping and one of us brought up transaturated fats and why it had the prefix “trans.” My friend said she could see me writing a poem about various words that begin with “trans.” Usually, if someone suggests an idea for a poem, it guarantees the poem will never happen. For some reason, this case was an exception.

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

I worked on “Trans” for about two years before it appeared in a journal and then reworked it again the summer before it went into my first book. I kept coming up with new sections and deleting the ones I’d written before. At the time, I wouldn’t have been able to explain what I was after. In hindsight, I think I was trying to get to poems that really unsettled or embarrassed me no matter how many times I read them. The Chilean poet Nicanor Parra calls his poems anti-poetry. I liked the idea of attempting some kind of trans-poem, but didn’t want to be too intentional about it either.

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

I knew the poem would have sections, but it didn’t occur to me for several drafts to see what would happen if I took “trans” out of the poem and let it become a phantom prefix. As soon as I did, it was clear that was the key to the poem. After that, I just kept experimenting until the sections started to add up to something larger.

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

This poem came out in LIT about two years after I started working on it. I wasn’t sure if the poem was done, but also worried it might be one of those poems I could pick at forever, so I decided to try it out at a reading. You learn so much about a poem when you share it out loud with strangers. If a poem really intrigues people, you can see it immediately in their body language.

When I got to the section about sex and the Society of American Linguists, I sensed a flicker of surprise and unease move through the audience, that rewarding kind of unease that might—for a minute—make you transition from thinking about what you need at the supermarket to whether sex in another language might change you to some degree, or if that’s just pure ridiculousness.

After the reading, the poet who ran the series told me she was working as an editor for LIT and was interested in showing “Trans” to the other editors. The poem came out in their next issue, that spring.

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

I like finding ways to work facts into poems, even if they gradually evolve into fiction. In my early twenties, I thought I was going to be a journalist, but had this problem where I would get caught up in long descriptive scenes my editors would cut to make more room for the facts. I knew the facts were the point of the article, but I couldn’t stand to have those descriptions just vanish, so I turned them into poems.

After that foray in journalism, I’ve continued to be interested in what facts reveal about a place and the people in it, like the fact in “Trans” about Chichén Itzá and how its inhabitants got their water from underground reservoirs. It’s one of the few early cities that wasn’t built along a river, and being in a less obvious location made it less vulnerable to attacks. A number of images in my first book came from facts like this, but as the poems changed, they gave way to fiction. As George Oppen says in his Daybooks, “One does what he is most moved to do.”

Is this a narrative poem?

It’s more of a narrator poem. I’m interested in what the narrator in a poem might be hiding, what weird thing she might be doing with her feet under the table, or when she might lose her composure and drop the sugar bowl in her hand.

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

I was reading and translating the Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros while I was working on the first drafts of this poem. I love how uninhibited his poems are, and right from the beginning. One of his poems starts: “With pieces of Manoel I assemble an astonished being.”


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

I don’t think about audience when I’m first writing a poem. Sometimes in later drafts, or when I’m ready to send a poem out, I try to imagine how it might sound to someone who used to love poetry but hasn’t read it in years. I ask myself where that reader might tune out and what I could do to keep that reader in the poem. I would like to write for that reader, a person who’s open to poetry but hasn’t sat down with a poem in years.

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 are three poets I share poems with fairly regularly. We recognize each other’s tricks immediately, those maneuvers one learns to do well and may do too often, instead of pushing toward something new.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

The poems in my first book move between North and South America, but tend to stick to one hemisphere within a given poem. This poem jumps all over the place. If I was going to call the poem “Trans,” something had to happen I hadn’t tried in other poems.

What is American about this poem?

Its obsession with embarrassment seems American to me. And its fear of giving too much away.

Lawrence Raab

Lawrence Raab was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He received his BA from Middlebury College, and his MA from Syracuse University. He has received the Bess Hokin prize from Poetry magazine, a Junior Fellowship from the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His collection of poems, What We Don’t Know About Each Other, won the National Poetry Series and was a Finalist for the 1993 National Book Award. His sixth volume of poetry, Visible Signs: New & Selected Poems, was published in 2003, and a seventh collection, The History of Forgetting, is just out from Penguin. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College.


WHAT GOD MUST HAVE KNOWN

Pandora was one of many
fallible women set up for a fall,
another Eve who couldn’t
keep her hands to herself. Of course
the gods knew she’d open that box.

They were always having fun,
showing off and screwing around.
Curiosity was the only motivation
they gave her, so she did
what she had to—let the troubles loose.

Hard to imagine Zeus wasn’t pleased
with this little machine of a play.
Or that God hadn’t known
from the beginning that Eve
would eat that apple. Did he really

hope she’d surprise him?—
he who couldn’t help but see
the end of the future.
If only he’d had a few friends
to confide in, joke around with.

But God was always so serious.
No pranks in this story—
just disappointment, then anger.
Of course we would hurt him.
Like every father, he’d shown us how.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

An early version was written at Yaddo in June of 2004. It started—as almost all of my poems start—with the desire to write a poem. The subject follows. When I look back at my notebook I find the line “Can of Worms.” Beneath it: “Pandora’s Box.” And beneath that: a rough handwritten version of the beginning of the poem. I’d been trying to think, in a number of poems, about God. Whether some force or power that might go by that name exists, I don’t know. I neither believe nor disbelieve. I feel not knowing is the appropriate condition.

But I’m very interested in how God is represented, and the stories—particularly the ones I grew up with—in which he appears. How, I’d been wondering, can God be all-knowing and all-powerful, yet still be surprised by the actions of the people he’d created? Wouldn’t he have known that Eve had to eat the apple? Wasn’t that the point of the story? Therefore, his disappointment and fury, and all those punishments by flood and fire, seem more like performance and showing off than genuine outrage. Finally God, especially the Old Testament God, is most interesting when he’s like us, when the story reveals what we made him out of—our own fears and weaknesses, our frustrations and desires.

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

It went through scores of revisions over the course of five years. I thought it would be done, then I’d look at it again and know it wasn’t. The first version was called “Why God Is Always Alone,” and it ended: “All the words he made were grim / and thoughtful. No wonder he was alone. / No wonder we couldn’t make him happy.” I don’t know why I held onto “grim and thoughtful” for more than a draft or two. I remember my friend Stephen Dunn, who was at Yaddo at the same time, and to whom I show all of my work, often at very early stages, pointing out that that phrase was weak, but I held to it for far too long. At some point I had to forbid myself doubling last lines, like these. I’d turn to it all the time to get a poem to end, the way when I first started writing I’d often bring the wind in to end a poem.

Some years later the poem became “What God Must Have Known,” which points more accurately to its subject. I had all kinds of troubles with the ending. Even the one it has now I don’t think Stephen wholly approves of. He didn’t want me to say “like every father.” But my idea was that all fathers unconsciously show their children their weaknesses—how they can be hurt. (I didn’t mean that all fathers abuse their children, though I can see that “shown us how” could suggest physical violence.) And all children, at some point, hurt their fathers. Well, of course we hurt each other. That’s no revelation. That’s what we do because we’re human. The idea was to turn this back on God, who must have known, or should have known better.

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 believe it usually comes to us during the process of making a poem. That is, we generate it through our attentiveness to the act of writing. Sweat and tears create what can be “received.” Hard work creates the possibility of the unforeseen gift. Inspiration is earned, I think, rather than bestowed. If one morning it seems to come to us out of nowhere, then I believe we earned it the day before.

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

It quickly found its way into stanzas, then later into five-line stanzas. Beyond that it was all a matter of phrasing. But isn’t that just about everything? Aren’t structures like rhyme and meter ways of supporting the tones of voices that are the poem? During the process of composition, I try to become aware of the various patterns that are functioning in a poem. Most of my lines are roughly iambic, because American speech is roughly iambic. There are lots of rhymes, but rarely at the ends of lines. Even the most rigorously formal poet cannot plan all of a poem’s effects, but he must be aware of as many patterns as possible. A form tells you where you should look. Free verse means you have to keep looking at everything as you revise.

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

It just appeared in a magazine in 2009, so that’s five years after the first version. A lot of my poems hang around for a long time. A lot keep hanging around, until they’re dismantled and the useful parts recycled. This one fits nicely into my latest book, The History of Forgetting, where there’s a thread of poems that worry about God.

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?

No rules. The poem needs to stand on its own to go out into the world. But the pleasure of finishing a poem—or seemingly finishing one—also results in a certain kind of blindness to its faults. That is, the relationship between writer and poem is too close for a while. You’re in love, you’re in the moment. That’s why we all need to set things aside and come back to them with a colder eye.

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

The poem assumes God is a fiction which is what we’d now all assume of Zeus and Pandora. Things are sometimes mean-spirited among the Greek and Roman gods, but it’s also a bit like a fraternity—lots of parties and pranks, jokes that go wrong, cruelties that really hurt, but still a lot of camaraderie. On the other hand, our god is always alone—no friends, nobody to talk to or commiserate with. He’s the loneliest version of ourselves. Nor does having a son help.

Is this a narrative poem?

I wouldn’t find it useful to call it that, though of course it depends on narratives and plays off of them.

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 then. I always bring a lot of books with me to Yaddo, and I always begin any period that I hope will result in writing just by reading some poems. Throughout my life there have been a variety of poets I’ve counted on to get me started (not so much as influences, though surely many were influential, sometimes too obviously), but just—just!—to move me toward thinking in the kinds of sentences that become those sentences that might become a poem. Certain phrases and gestures and tones will make me think: I’d like to do that. Or: I can do that. Sometimes even: I can do better than that.

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

I believe it was Gertrude Stein who said, “I write for myself, and strangers.” I’ve always liked that. It also nicely suggests a certain division in the process of composition. When you begin you just need to accept things because they occur to you. You trust that what’s bad will be revised out later. But you can’t afford to stop to make value judgments. You need to let any piece of language generate the next piece. Something mediocre, or dull, or stupid, or embarrassing, may lead to something good. But if you stop to edit it out you can get stuck there. If you reject the thought, your imagination may not give you the next, better thought. Beginning is for me a process of accumulation, out of which shapes and structures, tones and voices, emerge.

Later, once the poem has an architecture that makes it feel like a poem, rather than a series of notes, I have to start to consider the reader. And the closer the poem moves toward completion, the more useful it becomes to imagine a reader, so that I can wonder if any moment makes sense, if it does what it has to do, if it works. The pleasure of beginning belongs to the writer. The more finished the poem becomes, the more the fact of the reader—and the reader’s pleasure, and understanding—have to be the poet’s primary concern.

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 have a couple of close poet-friends, most notably Stephen Dunn and Jonathan Aaron, to whom I show my work in progress. In both cases—as well as in the case of my wife, Judy, who is also an excellent reader of my work—our relationships are of such long standing, and our impulses and tastes are so much known to each other, that it’s possible to show work that’s in very early stages. Then I’m not only asking for suggestions about revision, which supposes that there’s something there substantial enough to revise. I’m inviting, indeed welcoming, much larger possibilities that might re-envision the material, press it in some entirely different direction. It’s risky, but it works, at least much more often than not.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I suppose it’s like a lot of my recent poems in taking up as its generating subject something the reader knows—here Pandora, Eve, Zeus, and God, in other poems a movie, a painting, a fairy tale, a certain kind of daily encounter, or sharable feeling—and trying to think interestingly about it.

What is American about this poem?

I’d like to believe that its skepticism might be, but I couldn’t prove it. In terms of language, the colloquial gestures in the poem—“set up for a fall,” “showing off and screwing around,” “couldn’t keep her hands to herself”—are set against, maybe even give me the permission for, a more serious, “eloquent” tone, like “he who couldn’t help but see / the end of the future.” I don’t know if either kind of phrasing is particularly American, but I want the poem to sound like somebody talking—somebody like me—and not a poetical contrivance. I’d like the reader to think: Yes, I’ve heard that, I know how that goes.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

At some point in the process of composition, every poem declares its limitations. This is most often the same point at which the poem establishes its structure, since by allowing for content, structure necessarily begins to display the range of the poem’s thinking. At the beginning, anything was possible. That was the illusion. Once the poem’s necessary limitations become visible, the poet has three choices: to accept them, finishing the poem in the best way possible; to throw the poem away; or to dismantle it and begin again. By publishing “What God Must Have Known” I’ve declared that it’s sufficiently finished to go out into the world without my intervention. At the same time, I’m keenly aware that the poem could have been better, or different—larger, more expansive, riskier, more compelling. Those are my hopes for everything I haven’t yet written, and for a while each new poem will seem to take me there.