Steve Scafidi

Steve Scafidi is the author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (2001) and For Love of Common Words (2006), both from LSU Press. Although sometimes he teaches poetry at Johns Hopkins University, mostly he works as a cabinet maker. He lives with his family in West Virginia.








TO WHOEVER SET MY TRUCK ON FIRE

But let us be friends awhile and understand our differences
are small and that they float like dust in sunny rooms
and let us settle into the good work of being strangers
simply who have something to say in the middle of the night
for you have said something that interests me—something of flames,

footsteps and the hard heavy charge of an engine gunning away
into the June cool of four in the morning here in West Virginia
where last night I woke to the sound of a door slamming,
five or six fading footsteps, and through the window saw
my impossible truck bright orange like a maverick sun and

ran—I did—panicked in my underwear bobbling the dumb
extinguisher too complex it seemed for putting out fires
and so grabbed a skillet and jumped about like one
needing to piss while the faucet like honey issued its slow
sweet water and you I noticed then were watching

from your idling car far enough away I could not make
your plate number but you could see me—half naked
figuring out the puzzle of a fire thirty seconds from
a dream never to be remembered while the local chaos
of a growing fire crackled through the books and boots

burning in my truck, you bastard, you watched as I sprayed
finally the flames with a gardenhose under the moon
and yes I cut what was surely a ridiculous figure there
and worsened it later that morning after the bored police
drove home lazily and I stalked the road in front of my house

with an ax in my hand and walked into the road after
every car to memorize the plates of who might have done this:
LB 7329, NT 7663, and you may have passed by—
I don’t know—you may have passed by as I committed
the innocent numbers of neighbors to memory and maybe

you were miles away and I, like the woodsman of fairy tales,
threatened all with my bright ax shining with the evil
joy of vengeance and mad hunger to bring harm—heavy
harm—to the coward who did this and if I find you,
my friend, I promise you I will lay the sharp blade deep

into your body until the humid grabbing hands of what must be
death have mercy and take you away from the constant
murderous swinging my mind makes my words make
swinging down on your body and may your children
weep a thousand tears at your small and bewildered grave.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem started just after someone set my truck on fire late one night in June of 1999. I hid in the bushes with an axe for three nights waiting for the person to return. He didn’t return and I needed to get on with my life so I started this poem and wrote it rather quickly.

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

After I wrote the first draft I was able to sleep inside my house again and so I pinned the draft to my wall—which was an old practice of mine—and looked at it and tinkered away for a few weeks. The emotion of the poem appears, as is, in my first draft. It was a useful poem to write in that I wanted to murder someone and the poem—and the urge to write one—saved me from stupidity. It may not be a good poem or a poem at all but I am grateful to it. The Southern Review published it in 2000.

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

The blank page is about the only holy place I understand. I think all writing is inspired—even the worst. It has to come from somewhere and I don’t know exactly where any of it comes from. I do know that it appears on the page suddenly and I am astonished at that fact. It is like getting a note written in invisible ink—there is something mysterious and secret about a first draft and all the subsequent drafts just deepen my surprise. I think we study and read and cultivate our instincts as poets but we also live in a state of bewilderment that makes poems possible.

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

I didn’t consciously do anything to write this poem except to make myself as clear as possible. There is no invention here. Everything happened as I say in the poem. It is probably more of a letter than a poem anyway and that is OK with me. A letter has purpose and magic.

How long after you finished this poem did it 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?

I put this poem aside for a couple of years and sent it out when my first book was accepted by LSU Press. I don’t have a lot of time so I’d rather read a poem or write a poem than mail one out. Sometimes I write a thing and get anxious to mail it to a journal but that rarely happens anymore. I let poems sit a long time now. I used to believe that if you did good work as a writer then that work would inevitably find its way in the world. I still have this faith secretly but it is chastened by the forces of luck and caprice and circumstance. The literary world is often stupid but the writing life has genius in it. I’ve published work I’m proud of and I’ve published work I am embarrassed by and it takes me years to know the difference so I’ve decided to be patient.

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

There is no fiction here. In fact what happened next was I drove to work—the truck was burnt but I could still drive it—worked all day, and then ran an errand with a friend. The errand went awry and we found ourselves stranded in Winchester, Virginia standing on a street corner for two hours shouting and laughing at passing cars and when I finally got home near dark I found a huge peacock standing in my yard which I chased up an oak tree where it screamed and hollered all night. All of this is true. This was one of those days that will make you write poems if you hadn’t tried before. I believe in the truth of fiction and most of my poems rely on invention but this poem is plain reporting.

Did you ever find the guy?

If the poem hasn’t found him by now I know it is hunting for him in the empyrean. He might wake from a dream soon and be afraid. It is a hound of hell.

This poem explores a complex range of emotions: paranoia, humility, irony (“my friend”), fear, complaint, murderous rage. Could you briefly address the flexible tone of this poem?

The tone does change dramatically from the first line to the last. The storyteller gets caught up in the emotion of the thing and loses all tact and decorum and drops into violence. It is a picture of someone losing their shit. The joy of this, for me, is that it happens in real time. I think the poem captures a moment of temporary insanity that we are all familiar with but rarely like to acknowledge. It is madness. It intimidates and delights me.

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?

I was reading Robert Fagles’ translation of the Illiad and my copy burned up in the fire. On my bookshelf today I have a scorched copy of an anthology of erotic literature, Twenty Four Centuries of Sensual Writing, edited by Jane Mills, which was also in the truck.

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

I think of the men and women I work with when I write. I think of the poets who are my friends. I think of my family. I imagine my audience consists entirely of people I know. So I am always amazed and delighted to hear from a stranger. I am always astonished to know that the world exists and is larger than my small circle.

What is American about this poem?

I like this question mostly because I don’t know how to answer it. The speaker of this poem is a malevolent, two-faced nut. He is blood thirsty and just about out of control. There is no happy cleansing of the emotion, no calm tsk-tsk-ing of an inner voice, no moral at the end. I love the poems of Ted Hughes, an Englishman, and of Federico Lorca, a Spaniard, and they both wrote poems seeking the duende, or the ur-life of the body. This poem looks for blood which it confuses for justice. I don’t know if any of this is American. According to Achilles and Hamlet and Hollywood and every newspaper published today murderousness is alive and well most anytime and anywhere you turn. Perhaps the sloppiness of the poem is American but that doesn’t seem fair. I’ll take the blame for that.

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

I kept this poem to myself but I do have a group of old friends and new friends whom I rely on for advice. I am supremely grateful to these readers for their insight and encouragement. I usually wait until I have a manuscript of 50 or so poems and then send it to them with a list of questions. They send me work too and it is always a delight and a privilege.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It seems a natural part of what I am interested in as a poet which is power. And helplessness. I am fascinated by what I cannot control or understand and that is most things--I love all the forces of nature that make up an ordinary life. They look like love and rage and death and sex and rivers and whatever happens in the springtime and whatever is going on in the sky. I like my place in all of this—a place transformed by all of these forces, a place of bewilderment. For the last two years I have been writing a biography of Abraham Lincoln in one poem after another. His life seems just such a swirling place. His life, like ours, is informed by circumstance and forces beyond any individual control and yet he navigated them with real cunning and grace. For a while. And then those forces overwhelmed him and he was gone. Isn’t this our fate? And yet, he seems alive and well today in the same way that poems defy impossibility. In poems the dead rise up and walk and our lives sparkle with clarity, even beauty.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

The purpose of that poem was to get me back into the house and to my senses and it worked. So it is finished.

Ron Slate

Ron Slate was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1950. He earned his Masters degree in creative writing from Stanford University in 1973 and did his doctoral work in American literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He started a poetry magazine, The Chowder Review, in 1973 which was published through 1988. In 1978, he left academia and was hired as a corporate speechwriter, beginning his business career in communications and marketing. From 1994-2001 he was vice president of global communications for EMC Corporation. More recently he was chief operating officer of a biotech/life sciences start-up and co-founded a social network for family caregivers. Slate is the author of two collections of poetry: The Great Wave (Houghton Mifflin, 2009) and The Incentive of the Maggot (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), winner of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize. He lives in Milton, Massachusetts.

BELGIUM

Invented by the British to annoy
the French, so said De Gaulle.
The Belgians are rude but live to please,

live by pleasing. Speaking languages.
Renting their houses.
They’re not rude, they just drive that way.

We dress for dinner
but the ambassador dresses down.
The western nations don’t understand each other.

Never to go to war with one another again.
Invented by the western nations
to annoy the Chinese.

Our ambassador dresses down.
It’s his wife’s birthday.
Staff of eight lives to please.

Herbert Hoover saved Belgium in 1915
with seven million tons for eleven million.
Saved Belgium from Germany and England

who misunderstood each other.
Hoover believed in uncommon men.
The ambassador is an uncommon man.

He and others come to Brussels
for reassurance, each voice will be heard,
each nation will achieve the goal

of living off all the other nations.
A relation of men dominating men.
Now it’s your turn, now mine.

The guards take a look under the limo
and wipe for traces of ill intent.
The European conscience is as clean as Antarctica.

Tiny pyramids of chocolate,
a dollop of chocolate inside.
We undress for bed, the ambassador

puts on his tuxedo pants, for fit.
I sign the guest book in the morning:
First it was your time to please.

Next time it’s mine.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote no poetry for almost 20 years until July 2001. “Belgium” was the first poem after that long silence. My wife, my mother-in-law and I took a trip to Europe after I quit my corporate job that June. In Belgium we were the houseguests of the American ambassador to the EU and his wife – friends of our family. He was a Clinton appointee waiting to be replaced. When we returned home, I started writing. The poem is typical of what I produced that summer – glib, jumpy, filled with miscellanea. Animated by the amazement of being able to write at all. Freed somehow to fix on its material in a nervous, insistent way. I started with the De Gaulle bon mot – and then annoyance became the subject and voice of the poem, how global politics is about people annoying and misunderstanding each other.

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

It took almost three years for this poem to settle and tighten up. Generally my work requires much revision, but this poem didn’t see much reconstruction. Mainly tweaking and deletions.

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

Passivity and intentionality, receptivity and broadcast – they seem to happen simultaneously when the going is good. There are lines in the poem that quote others without attribution, so that material is “received” in a way. “They’re not rude, they just drive that way” is the ambassador’s wife’s line (she drove us to Bruges). “Never to go to war with one another again” is the infamous appeasement line by Neville Chamberlain. Poems are slowly contrived, but they ought to seem sudden and even abrupt. Deliberation and delay at the same time. What Elizabeth Bishop called “a perfectly useless concentration.” Because the poet doesn’t know how things will end, his or her ability feels passive before that unpredictable conclusion.

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

I chose to write this poem in tercets in order to heighten the terseness – hoping that the tercets would suggest a straining for order, units of meaning – but also, an experience separated into event and reaction. Many of the threesomes are complete speeches, others resolve soon after. The tone of the poem more or less came naturally – that of a small man judging a very big contentious world. Candid and preposterous.

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?

This poem first appeared in The Incentive of the Maggot. I don’t send much poetry to magazines because I revise a lot and sometimes it takes a long while for the poem’s true agenda to clarify. Or for me to give up on cheap effects or offhand comment and attempt the more difficult thing.

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

Poems are selfish. Concerned only about themselves. They use information and myth, data and fabulism, for their own purposes. Poetry is a murmuring among and despite the facts. Wittgenstein: “Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” “Belgium” is a catalog of facts, ephemeral and historical – not to convey information, but to suggest what a person sounds like when he tries to confront an entire world through an outburst, of language, memory and trivia.

Is this a narrative poem?

Insofar as the poem portrays an event (birthday dinner) and time passes to the following morning, yes, it’s a narrative, or better still, it contains a narrative element.

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

I was then reading Milosz, Kundera and Borges. Probably not influential per se.

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

When I gave my first reading of poems in The Incentive of the Maggot, one of my business colleagues approached me afterwards and said with self-satisfaction, “So that’s what poetry is like.” He got it. So I’d like the poems to work for someone like him. The new work for The Great Wave was written as if spoken to my teacher-friend.

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?

Louise Glück has worked with me since 2003, first on The Incentive of the Maggot, and then on the successive drafts of The Great Wave. Working with her has changed things in profound ways for me. Michael Collier, my editor at Houghton, is an incisive critic and has supported The Great Wave through completion. Floyd Skloot, an old friend and a wonderful poet and essayist, critiques my first drafts.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Its immersion in phenomena and history, the glibness of tone, the scope of its judgments, the peculiar transparency of the speaker – these are features of the first poems I wrote in 2001. Over the past few years the work has become somewhat more reflective in tone, more intentional in selection of its materials, perhaps more spoken.

What is American about this poem?

The American looks out at the world and feels at a certain oceanic remove, just like this speaker. The old histories between France, England and Germany are a nuisance, continually drawing in the Americans. “Belgium” is the American disparaging the power structures of Europe, now based in Brussels (the EU, NATO, etc). George Bush II had never been to Europe before his presidency, and then he went to Brussels. Herbert Hoover, uncommon and misunderstood, is a quintessential American man regarded as a hero by the Belgians.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. When completed, I sent a copy to the then ex-ambassador telling him I had dedicated the poem to him and that it would appear in my first book. He declined the dedication on professional not personal grounds, or so he said.

Michael Ryan

Michael Ryan's Threats Instead of Trees won the 1973 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award; In Winter, for which he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award, was a 1981 National Poetry Series selection; God Hunger won the 1990 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and New and Selected Poems won the 2005 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His other books are an autobiography, a memoir, and a collection of essays about poetry and writing. He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of California, Irvine.


OUTSIDE

The dead thing mashed into the street
the crows are squabbling over isn’t
her, nor are their raucous squawks
the quiet cawing from her throat
those final hours she couldn’t speak.
But the racket irks him.
It seems a cruel intrusion into grief
so mute it will never be expressed
no matter how loud or long the wailing
he might do. Nor could there be a word
that won’t debase it, no matter
how kind or who it comes from.
She knew how much he loved her.
That must be his consolation
when he must talk to buy necessities.
Every place will be a place without her.
What people will see when they see him
pushing a shopping cart or fetching mail
is just a neatly dressed polite old man.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

2002-03. It started with the first sentence breaking over the first five lines: that was the donnee and it didn’t change through revision. It set me into the poem in every way I needed, both dramatically and prosodically.

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

Not as many as most of them, but the poem took eighteen months to come right. The problems were entirely writing problems--how to say what needed to be said and how to exclude what didn’t.

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

The first sentence was given to me: that’s how I experienced it. The brain is a mysterious organ, even to neuroscience.

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

Frost said, “The ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.” I write by ear, as well as with my brain and heart.

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?

It first appeared in the February 9, 2004 issue of The New Yorker. Horace exhorted the poet to keep his poem in his desk until the ninth year, to make sure that he has made it as good as possible: limae labor et mora (“the labor of file and delay”). Only a small portion of what I write can I bear to see in print, but sometimes I have sent poems out too soon and have published a few in magazines that mercifully never made it into a book.

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

I have never met the people in this poem except in this poem.

Was this poem always in the third person? Would you care to address any general advantages of using third-person point of view in a poem?

I love prose fiction and wish I could write it. Narrative casting, the choice of pronouns, is everything (along with everything else being everything. I love Wallace Stevens’ line: “You can do what you want, but everything matters.”) Obviously, you can do things in third-person that you can’t in first- or second-person. And so on, for each of them. The introduction of a new pronoun can be the most dramatic event in a poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

I confess it is, focused on and by a single moment. The way the poem tells its story is another one of Stevens’s everythings. The twin ancient powers are story and song. The proportions vary from poem to poem. I like a lot of both.

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

I don’t remember what I was reading. Emily Dickinson is my favorite poet. Frost is my favorite theoretician. I love his poems, too. And many many other poems, composed in many different languages by poets living and dead. Every time I am moved I am influenced, a word whose Latin root means the flowing of an ethereal fluid or power from the stars which affects a person’s character and actions. Human beings are permeable, fortunately and unfortunately.

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

My audience is the poem itself. I write to the poem. I try to see what it actually says. I also try to listen to its telling me what it wants to be.

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?

Some of the best poets writing in English have been my trusted readers for years. I’m married to one of them and show her everything. “Outside” is a crypto-love poem to her. I hope I never suffer the loss the old man in the poem does. I wouldn’t be neat or polite.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I try to do something new in every poem. I try even harder while being drawn to habitual subjects like how people bear the unbearable. That’s the subject of many Dickinson poems that move me the most. “Outside” is pushed very far from me autobiographically while being very close to me personally. Maybe this reflects the contrast between outside and inside in the poem.

What is American about this poem?

Everything is American about this poem, but not exclusively American, I hope.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I can’t make it any better. Valery’s idea (“A poem is never finished, it is merely abandoned.”) was spoken from and for his time, a time when the independence of art seemed exciting. Language is certainly its own realm, subject to its own rules, but it’s also rooted in communication that refers to the real world of survival, for both the species and the individual. If it were otherwise we wouldn’t have learned to talk. Opacity is easy. And puts me right to sleep. The real mystery is clarity, but it’s only the means not the end, unless it’s spiritual and emotional clarity of the kind Dickinson practiced in and by writing poems. Art for art’s sake would have struck her as a ludicrous, debased idea. For her, the foundation and purpose of art was moral and religious, as it was for every poet of her time except Poe, but unlike the Victorian sages for Dickinson the relationship between art and morality was implicit not explicit, private not social, neither pious nor privileged but enmeshed with gritty, difficult, daily life, and every crack and crease in their connections was open to exploration. I think this is still the great enterprise of poetry, and it will never be finished or abandoned.

Dorianne Laux

Dorianne Laux is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Book of Men (Norton, 2010) and Facts About the Moon (Norton, 2006). She is also the coauthor, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet’s Companion. Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She is a professor of poetry at the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program and lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her husband, the poet Joseph Millar.


FACTS ABOUT THE MOON

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you're like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What's a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don't tell me
what I already know, that it won't happen
for a long time. I don't care. I'm afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don't deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we've done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only child, a mother
who's lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who's murdered and raped, a mother
can't help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can't not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she's only
romanticizing, that she's conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters and then you can't help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem began in the summer of 2004 as I had a dinner table conversation with our friends in Eugene, Oregon, poet Maxine Scates and her husband Bill Cadbury, and my husband, Joseph Millar. We were sitting on a deck overlooking the Willamette River and the full moon was out in all its mid-summer glory. One of us asked, probably me since I know next to nothing, how the solar or lunar system works. I think Bill began to tell us, and he was fine up until it came to how the earth, sun and moon rotate in tandem. The candle was the sun and the sugar bowl was the moon. The sweet and low ramekin was the earth. For planets we had to steal more salt and pepper shakers from neighboring tables. No matter how we twisted and turned them, we just couldn’t quite figure it out. Hardly anything stumps Bill, and so over the next few weeks it became a game, one of us would look something up and then try to explain it to the others. We were not getting very far. No one could really visualize it. Sometime later I happened to be watching The Discovery Channel and there was a special about the moon. It was amazing. Among the many facts I learned that night the one that stuck was the fact that since the expansion of the universe, the moon has been steadily and significantly backing away from the earth, which meant the moon once appeared much larger in the past and would only appear smaller in the future. I couldn’t get over it. I went to bed trying to imagine it and woke up thinking about it. I was obsessed. I even re-watched the movie Joe and the Volcano with Tom Hanks because there’s this scene in it where he’s left everything behind, his job, his country, his life, and is floating in a make-shift raft on the ocean and wakes to the moon rising over the water. He struggles to stand and face it and is dwarfed by it, and says, “Dear God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life. I forgot how big... Thank you for my life.” I also read everything I could get my hands on about the moon. That fascination has been long-lived as I’m still reading about the universe and am just now I’m finishing up Timothy Ferris’ Coming of Age in the Milky Way. The second aspect of the poem is that my extended family was going through a life-crisis, a not uncommon state of affairs for them, so that was in the back of my mind. I was in the process of working to pull away from them. Maybe I became obsessed with the moon as a way to curb my obsession with the latest family crisis. But the tug of the family is tremendous. Even a crazy family can seem better than no family. The poem is two obsessions in collision.

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

I had thought about it so long that when the poem finally came it came out fairly close to finished. But as you can see I worked on it, if abstractly, in my head for months.

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

I was inspired first by the moon, then by the facts, then by the human affairs in relation to the facts, then love vs. the facts. The sweat and tears occured in trying to figure out how the lunar system worked, in trying to imagine how the sky looked to people eons ago, wondering what it was like to be made so small by the moon, how bright it must have been at night, how dark the night sky will be in the future. Which was a fun, curious, childlike kind of thinking, not too much sweat, and few tears, except for thinking about the suffering of my family, and the moon.

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

That the listing of the facts was in some way interesting was my only concern. The form is open and easy, just a voice speaking in a fairly regularly broken line. The leap from the planetary to the personal might have been a technique had I thought of it consciously, but I didn’t. It happened naturally, organically, without my being aware of it until I had finished the poem. I really thought the poem was about the moon, and these two people I had made up, the woman and her boy, strangers to me, but realized then it was my mother and my sister, or my sister and my niece, in disguise.

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?

“Facts about the Moon” first appeared in a journal produced by the Loft Literary Center in Minnesota called Speakeasy. The editor, Bart Schneider, asked me for something and I sent it along. It was a wonderful journal filled with great articles, stories and poems and had a political bent. I’m not sure it still exists. It may have gone the way of a number of fine print journals. The poem was also reprinted in 2005 as a poem of introduction to the Love Light issue of an on-line magazine called The Blue Fifth Review, and can still be found in the archives. I’m grateful to both magazines for giving the poem a chance, and a life.

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

This poem is more of an example of how fact and fact are negotiated. There are the scientific facts recited one by one, and then the fact of human love set against those facts. Human love, especially family love, is complicated, scary, irrational, messy. The moon’s historically romantic symbolism is also set against this more complicated aspect of human ruin, and love: unjustified love, harmful love, a kind of unconditional love or love in spite of the facts.

Is this a narrative poem?

The narrative appears halfway through the poem and so the lyric is set against the wall of science. My hope is that the human narrative gives life to the facts or that the facts give life to the narrative.

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

I do know that I read James Wright’s Above the River around that time, and he’s famous for the leap, so he was probably an influence, and Philip Levine’s uncompromising vision and voice. As I said, it takes a village. I’m grateful for any and all influences.

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

Not beyond a general reader who needs to be clear about what’s going on. I like my poems to be understood by anyone walking down the street, waiting at a bustop, driving a cab, waiting tables or even a mother sitting in a hospital room with a kid who’s O.D’d. Unfortunately, those people read very little poetry. Even so, I write for them.

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

I called Bill Cadbury right after I wrote the poem as it felt like the culmination of all our failed research. He said, “I think you’ve got a winner there”. It felt good. In that sense, the poem was written for Bill who was a linguistics professor for 30 years at the University of Oregon, and our little group of moon-gazing poets. So clearly, I write for him/them too. I showed the poem to my husband when he got home from work and he made some suggestions, then to my writing friends who made a few more. Mostly I share work now with my husband and my friend, poet Ellen Bass. Phil Levine always takes a good look at a book before I publish it. My editor at Norton, Carol Houck Smith, recently died. She edited the book, Facts about the Moon, and was the one to suggest that the poem be the title poem of the book. My friend Maxine Scates found the painting by Magritte, a tree with a moon in its crown. It takes a village.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I think it’s in the range of what I’ve been doing all along. The science is new, but the human side of things—that’s my ultimate interest. Who are we in relation to the world around us. What, here on earth, is the meaning of our lives.

What is American about this poem?

The violence of it. The adolescence-out-of-control of it. The mother alone of it. The fuck up, little shit of it. The family-in-crisis of it. The Philip Levine-ish forget us of it. The guilt and shame and what have we done of it. The in-the-final-hour love of it.

Daisy Fried

Daisy Fried is the author of two books of poems, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh, 2006), a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, and She Didn't Mean to Do It (Pittsburgh, 2000), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, she has also been awarded a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Pushcart Prize, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares and a Pew Fellowship in Poetry. Some of her new work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Nation, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review and The New Republic. She taught creative writing most recently as the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College, and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter.

WHATEVER WORKS

“I never was much good at blow jobs,” she says, driving.
“Couldn’t get the right amount of pressure. Or maybe
it was him. He just didn’t like them. He said so:
‘maybe it’s me,’ he said. After awhile I just
stopped worrying about it, and here we are.” I’m
sitting in the back to keep an eye on her baby.
I nod, thinking what I know, what I don’t know. Old
music. Turn off that old radio music. The
baby’s crying. More night inside the car than out.
The baby’s crying despite she pulled over at the
rest stop to feed it just ten, twenty miles back. I keep
on pushing its rubber nipple at its mouth; it takes
it a moment then goes on crying. Finally,
entering the bridge, she reaches her arm back over
the seat, finds the baby’s mouth with her finger. It
knows her skin by taste. Mouths that finger, sucks it,
chews it, falls asleep. “Whatever works,” she says,
and keeps on driving fast and crooked around that way.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote it before my first book, She Didn't Mean to Do It (where “Whatever Works” appears) was published. So, in the late 90s. A friend of mine had had a baby. She and her husband and tiny baby, and I and my not-yet-husband, went on a daytrip from Philly to Baltimore, which was the early occasion for the poem, though the location other than car and highway and the men were later ejected as extraneous (to the poem, not to life). I was thinking about what seemed to me then the huge difference between her life and mine.

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

I don’t remember. I almost always have pages and pages of drafts before I finish a poem, including both radical revision and comma-fiddling.

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

Work gets you to inspiration. It’s necessary to work regularly whether or not you feel inspired, so you’re ready when inspiration comes. It’s like doing scales on a piano—you have to keep limber for the real music. It feels like magic when something does come out of all that work, but to get there there’s a lot of unmagical, though often pleasurable, slog. (I also believe in not-working. Poets need a lot of time for daydreaming.)

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

This poem started out as a two-page travelogue, including a stop in Havre de Grace (complete with a boring little mini-lyric about a windsock) as well as an account of eating pit steaks at a Go-cart course on some local, non-interstate, route into Baltimore, which might have been fun reading but didn’t achieve poem-ness. I think I had to write through all of that to get to the final image of the mom driving with her finger in the baby’s mouth. I don’t remember whether the first line of the poem was from the travelogue draft, whether I added it after I cut the poem down to its essentials, or whether it came from another (failed) poem altogether

If by “principles of technique” you mean some explicit formal plan, prompt or strategy, no, but I think we absorb technique by reading and writing, so we’re always employing some sort of technique—though we may not realize it.

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

Not sure. Maybe about a year?

How long do you let a poem "sit" before you send it off into the world?

It totally depends. Sometimes I’m sure something is done and send it off immediately. Sometimes it is done, but other times I see what needs to change when it comes back to me again. So sending poems out can be part of a revision process, though I never send a poem out unless I believe at that moment that it really is done. Other times I put something away because I think it’s no good and realize months or years later it is good and send it out. It also depends on practical stuff. Like, do I have enough good poems to make a packet to send? For example, I might finish a poem and feel impatient to send it out, but everything else I have that I’m not embarrassed to show people is already out and then I write nothing but duds for the next four months. Do I send out the one poem? Usually not. So it waits at home till I write some more.

Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

No rules, I just try to do what seems sensible.

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

All of my poems are fiction, regardless of whether what “I” says happened really happened. Ron Silliman wrote at his blog something like that my poems are in the persona of myself. Which seems right, though I had never thought of it that way explicitly before. I am aware that the appearance of autobiography makes people want to know if it’s true. Obviously I’m willing to exploit that desire in my poems. I think I may be more involved than many poets in using fictional techniques—the kinds of things that novel and short-story writers think about. But fact or fiction, telling what happened is not the point of my poems. I use story, and the word “I,” as strategies toward getting the poems to a place of what I hope is interesting uncertainty.

Is this a narrative poem?

Sure. I mean, many many poems are at least a little narrative, including those which go to great lengths to pretend they’re not. But yes, this explicitly says “this happened, then this happened. She said this, I thought this, I did this, she did this.” In a sequence. Which is pretty much what narrative is, isn’t it?

Can you address the difficult balance this poem achieves between humor and poignancy? Was this always a funny poem?

Well, I don’t think this was a poem at all until it got pretty close to the form in which you read it. But yes, it’s hard for me to achieve a sense of reality—emotional reality, journalistic reality—if I don’t have funny and serious together.

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

No, I’m sorry, I don’t remember. I read then and read now a lot of different poetry, old and new.

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

I try to write poems I would like to read.

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 husband reads everything I write (and vice versa; he’s a fiction writer.) He’s brutally honest, and I often sulk afterwards, but it’s incredibly useful. I sometimes show a troublesome poem which I think has something to it to one or another poet-friend, and they’ll often make really helpful comments. I value even (maybe especially) comments I think are off-base, because they help me figure out what I want the poem to do, and sometimes why I did do what I did. Which is helpful for future poems. We’re always working on all the poems we’re going to write, not just the one in front of us.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don’t have a method for writing poetry; I’m not sure I know how to write a poem. It seems like each time I sit down to write I have to figure it out all over again. As to whether that shows in the finished product, I can’t say.

What is American about this poem?

Oh, well, it doesn’t invade other countries on false pretexts or gather capital in the hands of a tiny number of superrich robber barons so it’s probably not very American. Then again, it does enjoy the right to free speech. It appreciates but does not use its right to carry a firearm. Possibly it’s kind of lonely, which might make it American, and it takes place in a car—what could be more American than that?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Same difference. But that’s the point of this question, isn’t it.

Adrian Blevins

Adrian Blevins is the author of the poetry collections Live from the Homesick Jamboree (Wesleyan, 2010) and The Brass Girl Brouhaha (Ausable Press, 2003) which won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, a Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award for The Man Who Went out for Cigarettes, and the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction. Blevins teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

CASE AGAINST APRIL

For a long time I was absolutely idiotic,
by which I mean I lashed and pulsed
like the cosmos of tissue at present on fire
inside the bodies of my students—
it being springtime, it being the season
of being naked under the cherry trees.
I'm not saying dig a hole and fall in it;

I'm not saying buy a cabin and a nanny goat
and walk around re-naming the forget-me-nots
after the lovers who said they'd slay you
and, well, did—for who ever heard
of a plant named Greg? Nevertheless,
sex is laughable; it's ultimately ridiculous;
it's what God invented since he couldn't have

Comedy Central. And still the young people
who aren't pushing their tongues
against the tongues of others
are weeping like babies
being prodded with thermometers
for the lack of good tongues
to lean their own tongues against.

I hear them complaining
about their would-be boyfriends and girlfriends,
and it's like they are all about to die,
like their hearts have spontaneously combusted
and little cell splinters are poking their lungs
and they're losing their balance,
falling like hail

or like meteors with pretty faces,
which is why when I say up, they look down.
And though I'm all for biology,
for the divine plan of multiplication
that calls for the pink of bodies
being bodies with other bodies
in beds and in bushes,

I'm sorry for all the time I wasted
being dramatic over the boys and their mustaches.
Maybe the heart, it gets colder.
But maybe the heart,
it learns a little self-preservation
and pulls the shades down
one window at a time. And it's not dark

in here. Really, there's a kind of light
between the marrow and the bone,
and sweet patches of grass to lie down on,
and muskrats and pied pipers
if that's the way you like to see the world,
if to get your kicks you choose to be delirious.
I mean, if you happen to be romantic

and don't mind splitting apart with longing
like a child in a toy store
with everywhere these primary colors
seeming to want to open what could be mouths
and seeming to want to sing what could be songs
if only you could catch your breath—
if only your heart would just stop seizing.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

“Case against April” was written at least six years ago, when I was teaching at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia and finishing up the manuscript that would become The Brass Girl Brouhaha. I remember overhearing a student say something I promised myself I would never forget. I’ve forgotten it, of course, but the gist was something about how this person whose gender I can’t even remember was going to die if whatever AWOL lover didn’t quit being AWOL. I remember thinking, first, that the sentiment was odd, and, second, that it wasn’t odd, but perfectly natural. That made me question my sanity. Was the student’s suffering odd or not? I think this is the question that generated the poem. Now, people ask me if I was thinking about “The Waste Land.” I really wasn’t—at least not consciously. At least not at first.

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

I can’t remember the number of revisions, but I do have this story to tell to illustrate what I’ll bet happened. I studied poetry writing with the poet Rodney Jones for a tiny bit as an undergraduate, but, for reasons I’ll never understand, switched my allegiances to fiction writing as a sophomore, even going on to graduate school at Hollins University after a baby-having break or two. I wrote a series of horrible stories at Hollins, producing a horrible collection. Then I graduated, and immediately started writing poems again. I called Rodney at some point to tell him of my renewed love of poetry. I remember telling him in an overconfident voice no doubt that I was rewriting my poems over and over again. Sometimes thirty times, I said. Have you ever done that? He took a deep breath and said in that accent of his that makes even hard lessons sound sweet, “I don’t stop before sixty.” I learned a lot in that one sentence, I’ve got to tell you. So, sure, yes: I’m sure I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote “Case Against April.” Revision is so ingrained in me now that I can hardly get through a day without having to revise something—grocery lists, hair, furniture, cars, whole kitchens!

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

I remember feeling how stupid it was to think you could die of love. But of course that’s wrong. We do die a little bit every day of our feelings. I guess this poem taught me that—a lot of my poems seem intent on telling me that my first thoughts are wrong. Or simple-minded—not complex enough to be true. That is, the poem itself is always on its own path, and, at least for me, a lot of the process of writing it has to do with getting out of the way. Is getting out of the way of your own will somehow what inspiration is?

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

One of my insights as a poet and person is the idea that, as Charles Simic says, “poetry is best when it finds itself at the heart of human comedy.” Charles O. Hartman puts it another way somewhere, saying that a great accomplishment of American poetry is the discovery of counterpoint, or tones and /or rhythms that work independently in the same space. Tony Hoagland has a great essay about it—Tony’s always talking about the dialectical. And Twain, Twain—Mark Twain said somewhere: “To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of American art.” Well, these are my main principles. To find a structure to hold things together that don’t fit together—that’s what I want to do.

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?

As I’ve grown older I’ve learned to trust myself more and more—to trust my own taste sometimes. During these times I send poems out (after all those revisions, of course) without what you might call a rest period. But then come those times when I realize that I don’t know jack shit. Of course! How could I? I’m only forty-five! And human. This is when I begin to revise poems I’ve already sent out. It’s when I want to shoot myself for being so horribly narcissistic as to think anybody would ever want to read anything I could ever write. And I do revise those poems. And sometimes they get better. Anyway, I live back and forth like this. I suppose it accounts for my dizziness.

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

Do you know the story of William Maxwell saying he would “be happy to stick to the facts, if there were any”? That’s what I think of facts. I don’t think they exist. Or, if they exist, that they are irrelevant to the task(s) at hand. I think the neurologists are proving this somehow with brain scans: what person A thinks she sees is not what person B thinks she sees, nor what person C thinks. The only thing that matters is the imagination. It might be true that I have three children and gave birth to all three of them. And willingly conceived them and wanted them out of my body when the time came. And loved them absolutely. But it’s also true that I gave birth against my will, as I say in a poem somewhere. The only thing that matters is the imagination. In fact, what things are can only be what they feel like.

Is this a narrative poem?

I think it’s more of an argument—an argument with an understory.

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

I would be lost without the narrative poets, speaking of narratives. I remember hearing a poet say that narrative was dead—I guess I was at Warren Wilson at the time?—and just wanting to scream fucking bloody murder. Jesus Christ! That’s like saying the sun is dead or trees bursting with buds or rivers full of fish. Humans think by and learn by and operate by narrative (and metaphor). Thus: C.K. Williams, Robert Hass, Steve Orlen, Rodney Jones, Tony Hoagland, Sharon Olds, Betsy Sholl, Gerald Stern, David Kirby, Barbara Hamby, Lisa Lewis, Susan Wood, Steve Scafidi, Lucia Perillo—the list goes on and on. But the part of the question here where you’re being polite and giving me permission not to disclose my influences? That worries me because it reminds me of how political the poetry world can be. How patrician and divided. There are certain poets you are not supposed to say you like in certain circles. But that’s just stupid. Isn’t that stupid? It’s ridiculous.

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

I’d just like a nice, open-hearted reader—someone not too busy to be able to listen.

What is American about this poem?

Are the comic aspects especially American? The mixed diction?

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 husband Nate Rudy read the poem, I’m sure—he reads everything I write and usually looks at me after he’s done in some sort of sideways manner as if to say, are you crazy? What do you think you’re doing? Which takes me back to my study, of course. And my friend the poet Patrick Donnelly probably read it—he reads a lot of my first drafts. I think I was finishing up my Warren Wilson MFA when I wrote “Case Against,” so my teachers must have read it. But it’s funny: I remember thinking for years that a good poem was just a good poem, period, and everyone would recognize it as such, like a good mountain or sea. But how silly. Taste does vary. So I would write a poem Exceptional Poet A would adore that Exceptional Poet B would hate. How weird that was. In the end you really do have to trust your own judgment and cross your fingers and pray even though you are an atheist.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I think this poem’s probably par for the Brouhaha course, so to speak, running along that narrative-meditative-slash-rhetorical-lyric hybrid line, with certain confessional motivations. But this term “confessional”: it gets on my nerves. The current zeitgeist dividing the autobiographical and “confessional” from the inventive and imaginative is false because, you know, of course poetry must be inventive. Of course it must be imaginative. It must awaken and reawaken and all of that. It must surprise. Otherwise it wouldn’t be poetry. But who said technique alone is just an embroidered potholder? Eliot’s “objective correlative” is Eliot’s way of saying that thought and feeling can’t be articulated unless they're bound to the more sensual cinnamon world, so to speak. And that’s right, of course. But what if this more sensual world is unknotted from an actual psyche? And is just plucked out of the dictionary? Well, the answer is clear. If you try to make a poem out of such a thing as that, you’re going to get kitchen equipment.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Like all poems, it was abandoned.

Stephen Dunn

Stephen Dunn was born in New York City in 1939. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Different Hours (Norton, 2000), Dunn's other honors include the Academy Award for Literature, the James Wright Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Dunn has worked as a professional basketball player, an advertising copywriter, and an editor, as well as professor of creative writing. His most recent book is What Goes On - Selected and New Poems: 1995 - 2009 (Norton, 2009). Dunn lives in Frostburg, Maryland.



AND SO

And so you call your best friend
who's away, just to hear his voice,
but forget his recording concludes
with "Have a nice day."

"Thank you, but I have other plans,"
you're always tempted to respond,
as an old lady once did, the clerk
in the liquor store unable to laugh.

Always tempted, what a sad
combination of words. And so
you take a walk into the neighborhood,
where the rhododendrons are out
and also some yellowy things

and the lilacs remind you of a song
by Nina Simone. "Where's my love?"
is its refrain. Up near Gravel Hill
two fidgety deer cross the road,
whitetails, exactly where

the week before a red fox
made a more confident dash.
Now and then the world rewards,
and so you make your way back

past the careful lawns, the drowsy backyards,
knowing the soul on its own
is helpless, asleep in the hollows
of its rigging, waiting to be stirred.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

It was written three years ago at Yaddo, and started much as you now see it, the major difference being that it didn’t begin with “And so.”

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

Not many revisions, which is unusual for me. It came rather fast. Certainly I had a viable draft after a morning’s work. Maybe about two months later, with just minor tinkerings, I felt that I had it.

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

As I said, very little sweat and tears with this one, though I can’t say that it was inspired by anything I’m aware of. I do believe in inspiration, though more often than not inspiration comes from what I’ve found myself saying and doing than by anything that preceded the poem.

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

It arrived at its final form after I saw that I used “And so” twice in the body of the poem.

When I decided to then begin the poem with those words, the poem had found its structure. The recurrence of “And so” became an organizing principle.

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?

I sent it to APR with a bunch of other poems about four months later. It appeared in print about a year after. When I was younger I used to rush the sending out of poems. Now I’m in no hurry.

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

All I’ll say is that nothing in this poem actually happened, though things like it have occurred at various times of my life.

In this poem, as in many of your poems, you manage to include a range of disparate material in a way that seems organic, not at all disjunctive. How did it first occur to you that a best friend, a red fox, and Nina Simone belonged in the same poem together?

It only occurred to me after the fact. As Stevens says in a poem, “things occur as they occur.”

Is this a narrative poem?

I’d say it’s a poem of sensibility with narrative elements. It’s less interested in its “story” than it is in how its details might reveal a consciousness in the act of discovering itself.

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

No.

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

The most astute reader that I can imagine, someone who might appreciate how a poem might be stitched together, who might perceive its moves and its orchestration.

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?

Larry Raab was at Yaddo with me, but I don’t remember his input on this poem. I show him everything that I write, and he’s enormously helpful. My wife Barbara Hurd sees everything too. They often hasten a poem’s progress.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’m not sure.

What is American about this poem?

I don’t know, but it ain’t German.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This one, I think, felt more finished.

NOTE: Some questions have been adapted from Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process, edited by Alberta T. Turner (White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, 1977).