Robert Farnsworth

Robert Farnsworth’s poetry has appeared in magazines all over the U.S., in Canada and the UK. He has published three collections, two with Wesleyan University Press: Three or Four Hills and A Cloud (1982) and Honest Water (1989), and most recently, Rumored Islands (2010) with Harbor Mountain Press. For seven years he edited poetry for the national quarterly The American Scholar.  His work has won him a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, and a P.E.N. Discovery citation, and for the summer of 2006 he was the poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH. He has for twenty-two years taught writing and literature at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where he lives with his wife and two sons.

VAGRANCY

From an American early autumn evening

flung back into tomorrow’s afternoon,

I sat a while in the car park, smoking

over a map, then for practice drove west

to a neglected town, where transatlantic

flying boats set down seventy years ago,

and on the silent pier beside their museum,

imagined back the long white scuds of their

landings. No one else otherwise like me

would have come here. So now that no one

could take my peculiar solitude from me,

I set out, drawn by the intuition that my

heart would feel welcome on the grounds

of some enduring verse I first read forty

years ago. Intimation, almost invitation —

I felt bound to honor, no, not answer, honor.

Even knowing the big house was a ruin.

Under steep September sky: sea-gray,

lavender, blue, and quartz, I shouldered

a bag, and set off into the Seven Woods

toward the lough, not expecting swans —

all flown, long flown, as that weary spell

of a poem supposed they would be.

But on those woodland paths I made a loop

of several miles, until I’d walked myself

quite out of the life I’d yesterday begun

to shed in the airport lounge. The pleasure

was guilty, but pleasure it was, piercing

as music I wished never to end, a real

dépaysement, an achieved disappearance,

a belonging more profound for its complete

fictitiousness, and I lay down in these

beneath a lime tree in Lady Gregory’s garden,

to sleep a just sleep, as in the cherished

crypt of a page. Invisible, anonymous —

who could I fail now? My sleep was not

my own; who was going to wake me?

Nobody I knew knew where I was, knew

that I was this contented tramp dozing

in September shade in a mildly famous garden.

His hour of sleep would change me,

just enough to make the next weeks happen

not exactly to me, but exactly. I woke

beneath the gaze of six red deer.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Like many of my poems, “Vagrancy” had a long gestation. It began as a few prose journal notes from a trip I made to Ireland in the autumn of 2000. I find more journal notes revisiting/ developing its concept from sometime in 2003. The poem was worked up into its final form across a week or two in the summer of 2006, tweaked from time to time until April of 2007, when I read it and published it on From The Fishouse.

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

After the poem took its essential shape (in four to six stress lines) that summer of 2006, it went through maybe three substantial drafts. The crucial one I find is half typed, the second half hand-written. I suppose there was a handwritten first half (that’s how I usually work things up, by hand, then type, then more handwriting, retype, etc.), but I must have lost it.

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

First, I guess I’d say that for me poems are essentially inquiries, into the nature and inner workings of experience and memory. Patience is my key (or is it my excuse for laziness?)… waiting for the notions (there need to be several) to relate and coalesce around an essential music and strategy, around some compelling image(s) and a definite tone or stance. That relation/coalescence constitutes inspiration for me. Once a draft catches fire this way, it usually happens fairly quickly (a few hours or days). Sweat work is then mostly a matter of adjustments, leaving a draft for a day or a week and returning to look for incipient or unsuspected circuits of energy, and for wasted motion. I keep leaving the “finished” poem, and returning to it for months (sometimes years) for another look, and another, which process seems to make the piece both more strange and more intimate to me. As described above, once begun, the actual drafts of  “Vagrancy” as a poem arrived on the page pretty easily, but then I let it cure a while, and made some small adjustments.   

How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique? Was there anything unusual about the way in which you wrote this poem?

Not really unusual, the process of this poem’s composition. I worry about how narrative-dependent (or to put it less charitably, how anecdotal) my imaginative impulses naturally are. That’s certainly not “what the age demands,” but I have started (late in life) to accept my instincts more graciously. Finding tension, pitch, and seductive detail to make an accessible but still lyrical meditative music preoccupies my compositional process. I knew this poem would measure itself as rough blank verse after I was about five or ten lines in. I always read aloud constantly as I compose, pushing the draft out into silence, readjusting some of what’s already down to better (I hope) propel the piece toward both desired and unsuspected connections, pacings, tones.

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

“Vagrancy” appeared in the From The Fishouse on-line audio archive about eight months after it was finished. One other print editor who’d asked to see some poems had seen it, said he liked it, but hadn’t purchased it, so…  Matt O’Donnell, founder/editor/curator of the archive, lets invited poets choose their own contributions, and since it was new, and I liked the piece, had taken encouragement from the positive reaction of audiences I had read it to, I included it. In general, though, I’d say almost a year or so will usually pass before I send a new poem anywhere. (That wasn’t the case when I was an anxious boy of thirty…)

Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two? Is this a narrative poem? Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

I suppose that nearly every poem I write derives in some significant measure from actual experience, if that is what is meant by “fact.” But I believe every poem is obligated to take responsive, imaginative possession of the fact, and involve the reader in that process memory and imagination and language work upon ordinary experience. “Vagrancy” does work with my own experience very closely— my cherishing of travel as refuge or escape into anonymity and what the poem calls dépaysement, in this case escape into a place that reading Yeats (especially “The Wild Swans at Coole”) had long ago seemed to have given me access/entrée to—Lady Gregory’s estate, now a national park. The thrill of disappearing into a poem I had loved since the age of fourteen, as if into an afterlife, was wonderfully, dissonantly chorded with a sort of grubby, jet-lagged, interloping homelessness, sleeping there under some venerable tree, having sought the swans I knew wouldn’t be there. Certainly Elizabeth Bishop’s “Questions of Travel” must have been a whisk for the mix of the poem’s fascination with the relation of cultural and private imagination, of image and visitation, possession and belonging.   

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

Sure. Alert, curious people who want from their reading both the delight of recognition (imaginative collaboration, really), and of being a bit troubled. People who might be inclined to say to themselves I feel I know what this poem is involving me in, and to pursue (gently and fiercely) the implications of such an intuition. Isn’t that what every poet would wish for?

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?

Nobody else saw this poem in development. I do sometimes pine for trustworthy writer/readers with whom to exchange drafts I feel are solidly enough conceived, but these days I haven’t anyone like that, and I have grown probably too used to solitary work anyway…

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I actually feel this poem is very representative of what I have developed as an essential style, and of the nature of my current imaginative preoccupations.

What is American about this poem?

In the context of the poem’s “genre” (“travel poem…”)—that’s an interesting question! I suppose the poem is predicated on a sort of yearning to be from nowhere, to belong to an imaginary place, to a poem. “Vagrancy” has recently been translated into and published in Polish, so I’m thinking that either makes it symptomatically American, or conversely, sort of a-cultural in its resonance? 

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.  

Wayne Miller

Wayne Miller is the author of three poetry collections: Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006), The Book of Props (Milkweed, 2009), and The City, Our City (Milkweed, 2011), which  was  a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award and the Rilke Prize. He also translated Moikom Zeqo’s I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA, 2007) and co-edited both NewEuropean Poets (Graywolf, 2008 w/Kevin Prufer) and Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th CenturyMaster (Pleiades Unsung, 2011). Wayne lives in Kansas City and teaches at the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades. In 2013, he’ll be the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Nocturne

Tonight all the leaves are paper spoons

in a broth of wind. Last week

they made a darker sky below the sky.

The houses have swallowed their colors,

and each car moves in the blind sack

of its sound like the slipping of water.

Flowing means falling very slowly—

the river passing under the tracks,

the tracks then buried beneath the road.

When a knocking came in the night,

I rose violently toward my reflection

hovering beneath this world. And then

the fluorescent kitchen in the window

like a page I was reading—a face

coming into focus behind it:

my neighbor locked out of his own party,

looking for a phone. I gave him

a beer and the lit pad of numbers

through which he disappeared; I found

I was alone with the voices that bloomed

as he opened the door. It’s time

to slip my body beneath the covers,

let it fall down the increments of shale,

let the wind consume every spoon.

My voice unhinging itself from light,

my voice landing in its cradle—.

How terrifying a payphone is

hanging at the end of its cord.

Which is not to be confused with sleep—

sleep gives the body back its mouth.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The event that triggered the poem happened, I think, in the late fall of 2002, when I was a visiting professor at the University of Central Missouri (then Central Missouri State University), where I still teach. I was living for the year in one of four apartments in an old converted house on Gay Street. All the other tenants were students and, though they were friendly, it was clear that I, as a professor, wasn’t especially welcome at their parties. One neighbor had the bad habit of getting locked out when he went into the back yard for a smoke, and on at least two occasions the party was loud enough no one could hear him banging on the door to get back in. It sounds pretty foreign today (this was less than ten years ago!), but he didn’t have a cell phone. Soon he came up onto the little deck outside my kitchen and rather sheepishly knocked on my window so he could use my phone to call down to his apartment. His guests, I assume, could hear the phone in the kitchen better than they could hear the back door.

I started writing the poem, I believe, one night in the spring of 2003—perhaps after the second of the above occasions. I think I had a first draft in a night or two.

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

I like William Stafford’s idea about this. I’m paraphrasing, but he says something like: a poet is someone who has arrived at a method that allows him to say things he could not have said without that method. My method is nothing like Stafford’s (he wrote a poem every day before getting out of bed—and when a poem didn’t come, he would “lower his standards”), but I do think it’s the consistent work of continually touching back in with the possibility of a poem—and then, once I have a draft, with the poem-in-progress—that allows me to arrive at moments of genuine surprise. Moments, in other words, that feel “received” somehow.

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

I’m an obsessive reviser. Once I have a draft done, I carry the poem around in my back pocket, and when I have a few minutes I unfold it and read it to myself, then perhaps make a change or two (or more). I do this for at least a week, then set the poem aside for a little while. After another couple weeks I come back to it. As I recall, “Nocturne” didn’t change a whole lot between the first draft and the final draft, but I still carried it around and read it over obsessively.

Part of why the poem didn’t go through a lot of changes, I think, is that the stanzaic structure of the poem arrived more or less formally right. Often I find myself altering stanzas systems—regular to irregular, couplets to tercets, etc.—until the poem feels like it’s slipped into place. (I have a number of ideas about different kinds of stanzas and their effects, but that would be too much to go into here.) This poem I started in loose free-verse tercets, and the tercet’s generally off-kilter, syncopated feel turned out to be right for the poem.

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

Only that the first draft was already pretty well along and didn’t require a lot of revision. Many of my poems don’t fully emerge until a tenth or twelfth draft—that’s when I really surprise myself with something or I suddenly find the right formal structure. But this one was pretty well developed in its early stages.

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

I recall tinkering with the poem off and on over the next couple months, but when I look back through my files I don’t seem to have made many substantial changes. (In the system of my computer, substantial changes require a new Word document, and I only have one document for “Nocturne.”) It also looks like the poem got picked up one of the first times I sent it out. This, too, isn’t typical for me—and it especially wasn’t typical when I was a younger writer with few prior publications. Field published the poem in their fall/winter 2004 issue. I should also say that before the poem came out in The Book of Props in 2009, I made one final edit to the second line. It originally said “in a windy broth.” But that doesn’t really make sense if one literalizes “broth,” so I changed to the above, which I think is better—cleaner.

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 what I outline above is typical: I carry a poem around and read it over obsessively, tinkering, revising, etc., until I exhaust myself and put it away for a couple weeks. Then I touch back in with it. If it seems done at that point—when I no longer quite remember the particular details of writing it—I send it out. If the poem requires more revision, I continue revising, then put it away again. Rinse, wash repeat. Sometimes after one of those repetitions I just abandon the poem. Other times, I find it’s done and I put it in the mail. If it comes back rejected, I check back in with it to see if I need to revise further.

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

This particular poem happens to be lifted from my life experience. There are aspects of the apartment house I streamlined in the interest of avoiding unnecessarily clutter, but for the most part the background narrative this poem is “true” to my life. That said, I have other poems that are almost entirely fictional—particularly in my third book, The City, Our City, when I became increasingly interested in monologues. Overall, I’d say I’m not as interested in “truth” as I am in evocative situations—situations, perhaps, that reveals a larger, more complex or paradoxical truth than the limited truth of my own life.

Is this a narrative poem?

It’s a lyric poem, but it has a background narrative.

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 Stevens at the time I wrote “Nocturne.” (Can’t you tell?) And I had just become obsessed with Francois Villon.

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

I tend to imagine a future audience—some person fifty or one hundred years from now who’s literate and has read a decent range of poetry. I’m by no means so confident in my work to be convinced I’ll be read in the future (are any poets so sure of themselves?), but I think it’s important—at least for me—to write with such an audience in mind. I try to remember that an important part of why we read poetry is to connect intimately with a mind that’s not our own—to discover as directly as possible how a mind in a different time or location lived and experienced the world around itself. When I’m thinking about the relative value (or non-value) of a poem of mine, I sometimes consider how well it some aspect our own moment in history—or at least of my tiny slice of 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?

If I’m stuck or unsure or a poem, I share it with Kevin Prufer or Brian Barker—two longtime poet friends whose ideas and work I respect a great deal. I think Kevin saw a late-ish draft of this poem.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

My more recent poems experiment with persona and think more directly about history—how it does and does not hold us as individuals inside it, etc. I began to arrive at that interest a year or two after writing “Nocturne.” Many of my earlier poems were interested in phenomenological questions, just as “Nocturne” is. So perhaps this poem is, for me, a kind of culmination of a particular type?

What is American about this poem?

Well, it’s set in a small town in the American Midwest—not just in America, but in the real Amurcuh. That’s pretty American. (Or, at least, so Sarah Palin told me.) The Stevensian phenomenological descriptions in the first 2/3 of the poem are clearly American-made, though perhaps the aphoristic assertions in the back 1/3 are more European import.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both.

John Hoppenthaler

John Hoppenthaler’s books of poetry are Lives of Water (2003) and Anticipate the Coming Reservoir (2008), both titles from Carnegie Mellon University Press. With Kazim Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays and interviews on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company—Jean Valentine (U Michigan P, 2012). His poetry appears in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Southern Review, among others, and the anthologies A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (U of Akron  P, 2012), Blooming through the Ashes: An International Anthology on Violence and the Human Spirit (Rutgers UP, 2008), September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (Etruscan Press, 2002), and elsewhere. His essays, interviews, and reviews also appear widely.  For the cultural journal Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, he currently edits “A Poetry Congeries” and curates the Guest Poetry Editor Feature. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at East Carolina University.


ICE JESUS

And then there was Bernie Anderson,
who was my lab partner in high school bio.
He hung out with the heavy metal clique,
so when he etched a Manson-inspired cross
into his forehead we didn’t think too much about it.
We kept dissecting worms and frogs and fetal pigs.
He passed me a note once asking if huffing
formaldehyde would get us buzzed.  That winter,
because he wanted a stigmata bad but
couldn’t will himself one, he broke an icicle
from the eave outside his bedroom window,
pounded it clean through his palm with a rubber
hubcap mallet, and sat at his desk while it melted.
Blood and water ran together everywhere.
When they released him from psychiatric care
he was more elusive than ever, hard
to figure but, sure as shit, his right hand showed
the mark and everyone allowed Bernie a certain
eerie credibility.  Later that year he killed himself. 
Somewhere–maybe it was an urban legend,
or one of those stories he loved by Poe or De Maupassant,
but he bought a trunk full of frozen blocks
from the Nyack Ice Company when his parents
left for three weeks in Spain, tied a rope
to the back rim of his basketball hoop, placed
the noose around his neck as he stood barefoot
on the stack, handcuffed himself behind his back,
then strangled as ice dissolved beneath his toes.
Had it rained or if, as he must have planned it,
he wasn’t found until the dark stain dried
on blacktop, it might be mysterious still
how he died with no chair or ladder there,
and I’m sure he wanted that to be a secret.
He’d think his dying a failure.  I wouldn’t bring
this up now except for the fact that last week
I went to a friend’s wedding.  The reception
was at a Holiday Inn in Jersey, and I ditched
into the staging area to bum a choke
from a waiter.  We smoked out on the loading
dock and there, on a sheet of plastic behind
the dumpster, a chef was hacking out an ice
sculpture of Jesus for the First Christian Church
of the Second World Dinner/Prayer Meeting
with a chain saw, a chisel, and a rubber mallet.
It was warm for late October.  Jesus was sweating–
the chef, too, who was cursing and had just
decided to do the fine cosmetic work
in the walk-in freezer or else, he said, “Christ,
Jesus will end up in the storm drain.
It’s a mystery to me,” he muttered as he lit
a Lucky Strike, put out the wooden match
with a sizzle on the side of his creation,
“why anyone would want a melting Jesus
in the middle of their savory quiche tarts
and meatballs, but they’re paying a freakin’ fortune.”
Funny how ice dilutes good bourbon just
enough if you drink it with a little urgency.
Let me buy you another;
could I have a cigarette?  It’s scary
when so much wells up at once.
Got a match?  A lighter?  Drink up already;
I think our next round is on the tender.


When was this poem composed? How did it start? How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

“Ice Jesus” dates back to 1997 or 1998, I think, since my records show that I had sent it to the Paris Review in December of ’98. As I recall, I never did get a response from Paris Review about that submission of poems. In any case, I next sent it out in October of ’99. It was rejected by thirteen journals before it was accepted by the then up-and-comer (now the-up-and-has-come!) Kevin Gonzalez for the short-lived Carnegie Mellon Poetry Journal in 2002, and it was published there in 2004. So, all told, it took at least seven years for it to get into print. During that time, I continued to dabble with the poem. The main problem with it was (perhaps still is) its prosiness. I try and insist that even my longer narrative poems have a musical texture that compliments the story being told; obviously, that’s hard to maintain over the whole of a longer poem, and I’m certain, still, that the poem could be, line by line, better crafted than it is. As I examine each line of the poem, I remain less than thrilled about the individual integrity of too many of them, what each line is doing as a line. I’m pleased to say, though, that this poem has found new life in a wonderful anthology, A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry, edited by Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz (Akron UP, 2012).
       
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 the fact of the matter is that most of what a good writer does transcends that momentary gift of inspiration and has much more to do with the ongoing process of revision, with the “sweat and tears.” This poem was first composed in one of the two basic ways my poems are birthed. That is to say, one way I compose is akin to what I presume a sculptor does in her creative process. First, she goes to a quarry to find a suitable chunk of rock, a hunk of raw material that speaks to her in some way. Then she brings it back to the studio, lifts it up onto the working space and mulls it over for a good, long time before taking up her chisel and hammer. Then she chips away all that is not the artwork. 

In my process, I find a quiet place and, if I’m lucky, the need to write will find me. When it happens, I just transcribe my shifting thoughts onto a sheet of paper. I don’t worry about syntax, line breaks, punctuation, spelling, or making much sense; I try to allow my synapses to fire at will, and I let the threads go where they will. I never know if the poem will be a lyric or a narrative poem. I try not to impose anything upon the muse; I want the muse to do its job, which then allows me to do my own. And my job is to then look long and hard at the raw block of language, try and discern what is and what is not the poem, and then chip away. 

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

Well, as I said earlier, “Ice Jesus” troubles me for its occasional sonic and linear weaknesses. At one point I tried collapsing it into a prose poem—more out of desperation that out of any desire for it to become my first prose poem!—but I was unhappy with the loss of pacing, with the way the poem could no longer unfold line by line. A fair number of the lines are enjambed in ways specifically designed to take advantage of such unfolding; that is, I wish to withhold, for the split second it takes for a reader to move from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, some bit of information that is supplied in the line to come. This pattern of withholding and supplying can be very effective, particularly in a dramatic monologue (which is what “Ice Jesus” is) with elements of a mystery story in its DNA. So, I opted for the return to free verse lineation. I tried to impose a decasyllabic structure on it at some point—and, indeed most of the lines are in the neighborhood of ten to twelve syllables each—but that, too, messed with certain crucial breaks in ways that were not in the poem’s best interests; however, it did help me to rethink certain lines and this made them better than they were before this additional scrutiny.

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 firm rules about it, though I almost always wait at least a year before sending it out. I attempt, at some point during that year, to put it away for at least a month or two before looking at it again. It’s amazing how valuable that practice can be in allowing one to re-see a poem for what it really is, not for what one might be deluded into thinking it is while its seduction still has a hold on the poet. Once in a while, I give in to such seduction—don’t we all?—and send off a poem I am particularly high on before I should. Since I typically send my poems to the high-cotton journals first, I often kick myself when I get the poem back, rejected, because I wonder, “What if I had waited and revised it some more? Would Poetry or Kenyon Review or The New Yorker have taken it then? Sigh.

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

A favorite topic of mine with my students, sure. “Ice Jesus” is fairly typical of my poetry in that it uses one or two details that are “true” from my life and weaves them together with complete fiction. A poem is artifice; as such, I feel no compulsion about having all of a poem’s details (other than historical or scientific facts) being the truth, since small “t” truth is a fluid and uncertain thing, largely dependent upon one’s individual memory and perspective. I’m interested in capital “T” Truth. What’s true about the poem is that I did have a high school classmate who went on to commit suicide, though the manner of his own hanging was in no way, shape or form consistent with the suicide described in the poem. Also true is the fact that, as an MFA student at Virginia Commonwealth University, I worked for a couple of years at a Hyatt Hotel in the Convention Services Department. One day, I did see a chef carve an ice sculpture out on the loading dock with a chain saw, but it wasn’t a sculpture of Jesus, and that dialogue is completely made-up. It’s also true that I have worked, and otherwise have spent a lot of time, in bars, and so I have a fondness for poems that are set in such establishments. But none of those “true” things are enough for a poem which, like any other piece of art, requires some sort of tension or desire or complication. In this case, I created the sort of speaker I might, on a business trip, say, find sitting next to me in the lobby bar of a hotel. The world, on this particular day, at this particular moment, is too much with him, and he’s dead set on telling the one story he knows, the one that seems to crystallize, for him, the whole of his life and what’s become of it.      

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, damn the torpedoes! Specifically, it’s a persona poem, a dramatic monologue. I find the general period disdain for the narrative poem a drag, don’t you? I mean, the poets whose work I love best these days are poets whose work doesn’t relinquish responsibility for the poem’s making to the “reader function,” as many poets of the “experimental lyric” set seem to me to do; that said, I find much to value in poems that tend toward the experimental lyric or the elliptical lyric, but I see no reason why we can’t have both and everything in between. In fact, this is the guiding principle behind what I try and do in my monthly feature at Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Hoppenthaler’s Poetry Congeries. I have no problem at all with placing, in the same issue, work by Rae Armantrout, the Scottish formalist Douglas Dunn and the straight-up narrative poems of Shelby Stephenson. In fact, I find it desirable. Anyway, the poets I admire who often write in a narrative vein are, I think, poets who understand that the contemporary narrative poem works best when it approaches something like a hybrid between lyric impulse and narrative thrust. Larry Levis, James Harms, Laura Kasischke, Yusef Komunyakaa, Kathleen Graber, and on and on. 

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

I can’t remember what I may have been reading then, but Michael Waters was certainly in one ear and Jim Harms was in the other. I relied a lot on these two friends and mentors during the writing of Anticipate the Coming Reservoir. What was great about the arrangement is the fact that these two wonderful poets have aesthetic ideas and impulses that are really quite different and grounded in different generational attitudes. Michael is the stickler for old-school craft. From him, I get the notion that every line, every word, every punctuation mark matters. I often worry each line’s beginning to death, as Michael has preached to me that the preponderance of my lines ought not begin with prepositional phrases, conjunctions, or articles but, rather, with strong verbs or nouns that draw a reader more effectively into the line. I also get the close attention I give to each poem’s musical possibilities from Michael, who is himself a formal poet whose poems are greatly informed by the music each offers a reader’s ear. From Jim I get freedom, the notion that it is certainly possible to overwork a poem. From Jim I learned how to allow a poem’s music and story line to lead me rather than vice versa. The tension of their differing styles and how I reacted to it is inherent in all of the poems in that collection. I guess that “Ice Jesus” is a poem that owes more to Harms than to Waters in more ways than one. Look at how many of the lines begin with prepositional phrases, articles and conjunctions, for example.
         
Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an 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 some point I did, maybe; with most of the poems in my first book, Lives of Water, I probably had the teachers with whom I worked in mind, at least to an extent. They include Dan Masterson, William Heyen, Anthony Piccione, Dave Smith, and Gregory Donovan. With Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, it was Michael and Jim. Not anymore, though; now I just aim to suit myself, and I trust that I am representative of the sort of reader I wish to attract to my work. Intentionally, I’ve not shown most of the poems in my nearly completed third volume, Domestic Garden, to Jim, Michael, or anyone else. I think, at this point, I have to learn to trust my own impulses; that’s the final leap for any artist, to transcend reliance on one’s mentors.   

What is American about this poem?

I think that the speaker of the poem may well embody a kind of period, hmm, ennui isn’t quite right, lassitude? The contemporary American world is too much with the poem’s speaker and, as we all must, he’s doing the best he can to deal with the burden. The poem is set, given the circumstances of its birth, perhaps in the early nineties, so among the stuff that he finds so scary at poem’s end might be things like Tiananmen Square, the Lockerbie tragedy, the failure of Supply-Side economics, recession, etc. Juxtaposed with this is the speaker’s apparent inability to have found a balm for his condition in organized religion, metaphorically suggested by the ironically melting image of Jesus (melting like globally warmed polar ice). The “tender,” in the poem’s last line, is of course, on one level, “God.”

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Abandoned. All my poems are, finally, abandoned.

Neil Carpathios

Neil Carpathios is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Playground of Flesh (Main Street Rag Press), At the Axis of Imponderables (winner of the Quercus Review Press Book Competition), and Beyond the Bones (FutureCycle Press). He also has written several award-winning chapbooks, including God’s Experiment (winner of The Ledge Press chapbook competition) and The Weight of the Heart (winner of the Blue Light Press chapbook competition). His poetry has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Atlanta Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry East, The Sun, Southern Review, and many other journals. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, he teaches and is Coordinator of Creative Writing at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio.


I GO OUT WALKING WITH MY DEAD FRIENDS

Plants in a kitchen window,
Lights on here and there.
Soon the fireflies.
They tell me to stop wasting time
like a talent. They say it is a river
flowing both ways.
Sure, I say, then offer them a puff
of my cigar. They say go inside
and unlock the curved trunk of a body,
someone’s you love. Loosen the rib
straps and slide a hand into the space
where he or she keeps those things
closest to the heart. Watch the face
for signs of wakefulness. Let your
fingertips brush the inner lining.
You don’t want them to know
what you are doing.
Nothing else matters, they say.
But it is too early, no one is asleep,
I tell them. Besides, we hug sometimes,
now and then even notice each other’s eyes.
They get quiet and look down at their feet.
I kick some pebbles. They tsk.
We pass more houses, not talking,
listen to the crickets.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem sometime in 2008. I often take walks and sometimes smoke a cigar while doing so (cigars are one of my passions). I took a dusk walk and noticed all of the houses, including my own, with lights on inside their windows, which naturally gave me a feeling of all the lives under all the roofs going on without me. I got to thinking about how much we actually connect with each other on a deep level while we are on this earth, or how much we don’t connect—how we keep our mysteries locked up inside our bodies while days and nights come and go. And meanwhile, the lives of those we love also come and go, entering and exiting within this flux of knowing and not knowing.

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

If I recall, I probably revised this a few times. I wrote the first draft in one fairly short session and then revisited the poem two or three times, tinkering and adjusting.

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. Like a wild rare bird that defies being caged, inspiration refuses to conveniently arrive for us when we “will” it to do so. In all of its mysterious textures and manifestations, without it we as poets are left with only the ambition to move words around on a page, overly conscious of a finished product we are shooting for. Too often, I “want” to write poems and try to force or induce inspiration to fall into my lap. This poem was definitely “received.” I feel that the best poems arrive in this way, seemingly out of nowhere. I almost felt, bodily, that I was walking and talking with invisible dead people, some of whom I had known and some strangers. Perhaps this sounds goofy, but it is true. I sensed a presence with me on my walk (I often feel this sort of presence in certain states of deep quiet or communion or inward focus). Of course, after this initial receiving of the poem, I revisited the first draft, and then the sweat and tears came into play.

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

Again, I find that my best poem experiences occur when I am attuned, when I am “listening” to something deep inside me. During my walk, I sensed a poem starting to surface and consciously tried to notice and memorize what was happening for later use. After my walk, I mentally and emotionally returned to the experience I had strolling with my dead friends (I did not stop in the street and write the first draft on a note pad). I tried to recapture the somewhat fragmented, quiet and mysterious feelings by using language and craft elements to mimic these sensations. Word choice, line breaks, and all of the other poetic aspects then entered into play.

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

Not really. I usually write poems in a similar fashion. However, as stated, not all of my poems are so clearly “received.” This poem’s first draft was written in one pretty quick sitting—perhaps because it had been experienced in its entirety on my walk.

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

If I recall, I sent the poem out a few months after writing it, and it was taken by a magazine, and later appeared in my book, Beyond the Bones.

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 excited after writing a new poem, and have to fight the urge to send it too soon out into the world to share and hopefully gain some recognition. So, I usually force myself to wait at least a few months—which is good for me because I always find editing/revision concerns when I revisit the poem with fresh eyes.

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

When writing about an experience such as the one described in my poem, I can’t worry about whether a reader will believe the actuality of the event or not. With this poem and with any poem, I try to use language to reach through to an emotional truth. Hopefully, if I have written well enough, the poem will have a certain power that is felt as humanly “true” regardless. Every poem, in my opinion, must hover near this boundary line of real and unreal where an undercurrent of psychic electricity throbs. I often try to achieve a level of magic realism in my poems. There is magic all around us, even in the simplest things. We know the wind exists although we can’t see it.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, I suppose is it, since it attempts to relate an experience that occurred at a certain time and in a certain place, containing a certain chain of events.

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

I have always admired and studied the poetry of Jack Gilbert, who I became friends with and lived with for a brief time many years ago. I am especially moved by how some of his poems render an experience that is difficult to put into words, how he finds ways to convey the unsayable using simple, concrete descriptions and poetics.

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

I do not consciously think of any audience as I write. I try to stay loyal to the sensibilities I respect and admire within myself, shaped from years of reading the poetry of others. I suppose one develops certain self-imposed standards that fit one’s aesthetics and tastes. I guess this all means that I ultimately write for myself, and then hope that others might like some of what I write.

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?

No one saw this poem until it appeared in print, which is usually the case. Now and then I will have a poet friend take a look at a poem—especially when I am getting closer to thinking about putting a poem or poems into a collection.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This poem is similar to other poems, but different to me in that it was so recognizably felt as a tangible experience before becoming a poem—and I should say, a tangible, almost mystical experience. I even remember the specifics surrounding my walk (It was July. I had eaten chicken salad for supper. I was wearing black gym shorts. The cigar I was smoking was a 5 Vegas Classic!).

What is American about this poem?

Other than the fact that the poem was written by an American in America—which is not obviously evident in any specific details of the poem itself—probably nothing.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

The poem ends the way my walk that evening ended—listening to the crickets. So, I suppose it would be what you’d call finished.

Hayden Saunier

Hayden Saunier is the author of the poetry collection Tips for Domestic Travel, published in 2009 by Black Lawrence Press. Her work has appeared widely and her most recent awards include the 2011 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod International Journal and the 2011 Rattle Poetry Prize. Her acting credits include The Sixth Sense, Philadelphia Diary, Hack, the voice of a broken-down stove for Ikea, and dozens of roles in the theatre. Raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, she now lives outside Philadelphia. 

DAY PLAYERS IN THE MAKEUP TRAILER

I’m sitting in between a dead girl and a prostitute.

I play a nurse—no nonsense—powder, touch of lips,

“those test results you wanted just came in” 

then they’ll be done with me. I shake hands 

with the prostitute. The dead girl pulls a curtain 

back, says “what the hell, there’s nudity, so what?” 

She’s eighteen, grey-blue, naked and they’re gluing 

latex lacerations on her neck and shoulders, 

building up contusions, painting gorgeous bruises 

down her arms. She’s never done a film before. 

She tells us that she’s hoping for a line, 

that maybe when they see her they’ll decide 

to let her speak, create a flashback or a dream scene, 

shoot a memory of who she was, alive. 

The prostitute and I say nothing.

We tilt our chins up for the final brush. 

The dead girl’s voice trails off, they blue her lips.

I look reliable, the prostitute looks hard-mouthed,

sad-eyed sexy and the dead girl’s looking dead.

We’re done now, all of us. We’re going on.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize this poem has a series of birthdays, even though it developed directly out of a day when I was playing a nurse in a film. A day player usually performs some necessary piece of plot business (“those test results you wanted just came in”) but rarely sees the entire script or knows the story, so the makeup trailer is an illuminating place to find out what's going on. Next to me on this day was a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl being made up to look beaten and dead. She was so excited to be in a movie and as she chattered on and on that she began to look more and more dead and brutalized. It was weird and sad and hilarious--how her dream-come-true was to pretend to be everyone’s worst nightmare. I jotted down a few notes about it later that evening. That event is one birthday.

I had been thinking about a poem about women in a dressing room since doing a play called Dimly Perceived Threats to the System with a great ensemble of performers and the women were spaced youngest to oldest in the dressing room like one of those charts about the aging of the human body. The physical relationships in shared dressing/makeup areas are fascinating. We are all seated side by side, dressed, undressed, running lines, getting into character, everyone looking intently at themselves through the process of hair and makeup. It’s very intimate and yet most communication occurs through the mirror. I had been mentally working this ground, although unsuccessfully. My ideas were still ideas, very general and, to be frank, a bit grandiose. That's another birthday.

Then, I remember reading Kim Addonizio’s poem “Dead Girls,” and my mind clicking right back to the makeup trailer. “Dead Girls” is a devastatingly smart poem with a clear-eyed, matter of fact tone and journalistic images. Reading it freed me from the “big” ideas of the earlier dressing room poem and I went back to my journal and found the note: “sitting in between a dead girl and a prostitute.” That’s when I sat down to actually write. So, three birthdays over about four years and a beautiful example of how poems beget poems.

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

I found the main framework quickly, based on the tone of the first line and my sense of the poem as an inner monologue. I can be a terrible meddler and I muck things up sometimes if I go at a poem "hammer and tongs" too fast, too soon. I played with it on and off for a day or two and then, once settled, I tweaked and changed and rearranged and made adjustments over several months.

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

Events over a series of years eventually led to this particular poem. I believe connections get made inside the making of a poem that have no explanation. They feel received, but the poem works on itself when the writer is otherwise occupied--call that what you will--and sometimes problems get solved or discoveries are made in a way that seems given. I like the idea of inspiration for its meaning of “breathed in.” Taking in what is around us. Being open to connections of thought and language. That's what I've come to understand about my own "meddling." When I go after the end of the poem too fast, I seem to cut off its air, or push it too far out of its time, and I have to put it away for months or years before I can look at it freshly.

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

Again, it grew from the first line--I always play with line breaks, lengths and language, and work to keep it concise.

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

I don’t think so.

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

About 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?  

It definitely varies but I probably hold poems back too long. Again, I'm an awful tinkerer.

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

The poem has its own life. I can't remember now if there was actually an actress playing a prostitute on set, or if she had just been called to the set as I went to makeup—but she wasn't there as described in the poem. That was my fiction to highlight the roles that women are most often called upon to play: beautiful girls who get brutalized, prostitutes with or without hearts of gold, and asexual caregivers. I mean playing those roles literally, in film and television, although it’s getting better. Most of my poems are triggered from an actual event but they are all fiction by the time I’ve finished them. They become something else.

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?

Clearly, Addonizio’s "Dead Girls," as mentioned above, but I wrote this when working on my M.F.A. so I was reading wildly and widely. Wislawa Szymborska. Basho. Gerald Stern. Your question about inspiration reminds me to revisit Eleanor Wilner’s wonderful poem "The Muse.”

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

Anyone who is willing to step briefly into another world and look around.

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 always share work—I find it incredibly useful to have other, trusted eyes on it.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don't know that it does.

What is American about this poem?

The Hollywood lens through which women are viewed and money is made. Even todays CSIs and the SVUs often feature a beautiful, brutalized girl as the hook.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

As close as I could reasonably get to "finished." (Please see numerous references to tinkering, tweaking and meddling.)