Philip Pardi

Philip Pardi is the author of Meditations on Rising and Falling (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), which won the Bittingham Prize in Poetry. has published poems in Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere, and his work has been reprinted in Best New Poets 2006 and Is This Forever or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas. A former Michener Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, he now lives in the Catskill Mountains in New York and teaches at Bard College.


DRINKING WITH MY FATHER IN LONDON

With his mate, Wilfred, who was dying,
I discussed ornithology as best I could
given the circumstances, my father flushed
and silent, a second pint before me,
my fish and chips not yet in sight.
Condensation covered the windows
and in the corner a couple played
tic-tac-toe with their fingers.
Behind it all, convincingly, the rain fell.
The mystery, Wilfred was saying, isn’t flight.
Flight is easy, he says, lifting his cap, but
landing – he tosses it at the coat rack –
landing is the miracle. Would you believe
thirty feet away the cap hits
and softly takes in the lone bare peg?
Would you believe no one but me notices?
I’d like to come back as a bird
Wilfred says, both hands on the glass
before him, and here my father
comes to life. You already
were a bird once,
Wilfred, he says, next time,
next time you get to be
the whole damn flock.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem back in 2000 or so. For a long time now, I’ve been writing every morning, as early in the day as my life allows. And this poem emerged one day. It was the first two lines that got me started. They seemed to hold an entire poem, and the task of writing became figuring out how to unfold the rest of it.

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

It underwent numerous revisions. The bulk of the poem was there quite early, but I fiddled with it for a long while.

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

I do, and I don’t. When it comes to questions like this, or any question of spirit and matter, I’m terribly and sometimes painfully uncertain. Some days I kill the slugs I find in my vegetable garden, other days I carry them across the yard and set them down carefully. When it comes to “receiving” a poem, I can’t really believe I’m worthy of any such thing. The only thing I know how to do is to be quiet. To get as quiet as I can and follow each thread and then listen. And there are times when it feels like I’m taking dictation from somewhere, and those are the best mornings, the ones when I suddenly realize hours have passed and my tea is cold. Somehow I never forget my tea when I’m doing other things, or even writing other things. I suppose I prefer a steady, sweaty practice over faith, but it depends when you ask.

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

At one point, this poem looked almost like a sonnet, and I thought, Hey, maybe it needs to be a sonnet. It was a short and failed experiment, but in that process I cut some things I had been holding on to. Once they were cut, I realized I didn’t need them, even when I let go of the metrical reasons for cutting them in the first place. I think the main technique I used was reading the poem aloud.

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

It appeared in Gettysburg Review four or five years later.

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

I let things sit. Even in the writing process, I like to set things aside and come back to them with fresh eyes. A few years ago I wrote a sequence grounded very much in the landscape and weather around me, and I started putting poems away for a year. I would come back the following January to look at the January poems, etc. It had a wonderful effect. With so much time between drafts, I could see them much more clearly. I don’t always wait a year, but letting them sit and simmer is important to me. I might send a new poem to a friend, but I always wait before sending it anywhere else.

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

Much of what interests me about poetry these days is the way the line between fact and fiction is necessarily and happily blurred. In poetry we can place what might have happened alongside what did happen. We can elevate past events into myth. We can excavate moments and bring to light what would have happened, if only – well, on that “if” hangs everything, a whole world, a world we create that includes but isn’t limited to the world around us. We do seem, as readers, to want to know where fact leaves off and where fiction begins. If you read the early books on Lorca’s Poet in New York, many of his friends try to explain the literal scenes that underlie the wild imagery. “He says ‘three blind horses’ because there really was a blind horse on the farm he visited,” and so on. Or take Philip Levine’s poem about the meeting of Lorca and Hart Crane: everyone wants to know, Is it true? Did they meet? Was Levine’s cousin really there? I think it’s a tribute to poetry that the world we create casts such real shadows in the world around us. I guess I’m not answering the question, but it’s because one of the things I love about poetry is the way that question is so carefully given life.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, compared to most of my other poems, but the arc it completes is very small.

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

I remember I was reading a lot of Charles Wright at that time, but I don’t see a lot of his influence here. Wright and Merwin and Louise Glück were probably on my bedside table back then.

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

There was a time when all I cared about was getting the poem so that it sounded right in my own ear. I suppose that felt safe. But later, when I started doing readings, I began to consider how the poem would read to an audience. For a long time now, that’s the reader I imagine: an interested, unusually generous, and well-caffeinated listener. In the end, I’m not sure there is much difference between getting it right for my ear and getting it ready for a listener. Either way, it needs to feel precise, worth its weight in silence. I’ll often cut a line in the middle of reading a poem if the line feels unneeded – better silence than an extra few words. There are some poems – long ones, for instance, but also poems that somehow feel more nailed to the page – that I might never read at a reading, but the same sense of “does this sound right?” kicks in. I suppose it’s rather Platonic, as if each poem aspires to a form that is out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered but probably out of reach. But I keep listening for 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?

When my book came out, a friend reminded me (I’d quite forgotten) that when I first drafted this poem, I called her and said, “I’ve just written a strange poem about my father.” I’m not sure now what felt so strange. Nowadays, I have a small group of friends scattered here and there with whom I share poems. I often read drafts of new poems at readings, too, not for the audience reaction but just to see how I feel about it. What lines make me cringe, etc.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Like several of the poems in my first book, it feels bolder, more confident in its reckoning with the world, and more interesting in wrapping up the story its begun than later work. I felt more certain about certain things back then.

What is American about this poem?

As soon as you say you’re "drinking in London," you sound like a tourist. Not doing it, mind you, but saying it. It feels like the acts of naming in this poem are the acts of an outsider. Beyond that I’m not sure I have a good answer. I’m not sure what “American” means anymore, especially if by “American” we mean “of the Americas,” if we include Neruda and Elsa Cross and Jaime Sabines and Ruben Darío, etc. Perhaps the overlay of Eastern and Western imagery, Christian rising alongside Eastern reincarnation – perhaps that is more likely to emerge in the Americas? Perhaps. But I can already think of exceptions.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

There comes a time when I just can’t change a poem any more. The moment of living that helped create it fades, and the poem is left, like a fossil of the encounter. It might take years to happen, but eventually it feels as finished as I can make it. A lot of these poems live the rest of their days in a folder somewhere – they are finished and abandoned. Others I like, or like enough to share, and these are finished and invited to stick around for a bit. But even as you befriend a poem, you see what it didn’t achieve. But the next poem – the next poem will really get there. So it goes.

Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Names (Norton, 2009), and of ten collections of translations of contemporary French poets, including Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2008), winner of the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and three collections by the Lebanese French poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata. She received the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets and a Lambda Literary award for Winter Numbers, a Lambda Literary Award for Going back to the River, and the National Book Award for Presentation Piece. She was editor of the feminist literary magazine 13th Moon, and, for four years, editor in chief of the Kenyon Review. She is also a writer of incisive criticism and reviews of contemporary poetry, with particular attention to the work of feminist poets, poets of color, any poets whose work she judged worthy of more attention from the American (and sometimes British) reading public: a collection of her essays, Unauthorized Voices, will be published in the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series in the spring of 2010. Marilyn Hacker lives in New York and Paris. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and co-editor of the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series.


PARAGRAPHS FOR HAYDEN

1.
I want to talk to you about desire,
Hayden, the letter I could have written
on a subject you’d never tire
of turning in a glass, smitten
by a song, an argument, long sorrel hair,
profile of a glazed clay icon in the river,
while your knees needled and breathing
hurt, two packs a day bequeathing
what didn’t, in fact, kill you in the end.
Was it a distraction
from the inexorable fear, my friend,
its five AM gut-contraction ?
But who, of your critics or cortège, pretends
the expense of spirit of lust in action,
didn’t earn you magnificent dividends?

2.
The week they told me my genetic code
was flawed, I ricocheted, desire and fear
like sun and clouds, a mood-
swing reason had no reason for
(but reason’s calibrated in the blood).
Terror. Tumescence. Cloudbursts. Solitude.
No diagnosis, no beloved: balance…
I write, not to you; to silence.
By anybody’s reckoning, now I’m “old,”
and you, an occasion instead
of an interlocutor. Aura of beaten gold
in a winter of cast lead.
Will the scale tip to the side of pleasure
when a taut cord plucked across the grid
invites, vibrates according to your measure ?

3.
A taut-tuned string asserts: the girl in green,
a six-year-old in an oversized sweatshirt
in Gaza City, on a computer-screen
video, not dead, not hurt
but furious. This is what they’ve done
to our house! Our clothes smell of gas! I never wore the sun-
glasses my father gave me
or the earrings my grandmother gave me!
She tosses dark curls, speaks, a pasionaria
in front of a charred wall.
Arching her brows, she orchestrates her aria
with swift hands that rise and fall
while she forgets about fear
even as she ransacks the empty cradle
of its burnt blankets. That baby’s – where?

4.
Not like “upstate,” our January freeze
still killed my window-box geraniums.
Beyond that ragged khaki frieze
of dead plants, Sunday hums
up to my windows. I count each of these
hours, respite, respite, from broken treaties
uprooted orchards, shattered concrete.
Eight years later, still on the street
eight years older, two women squabble
and survive improbably.
A dark-haired boy, pale, imperturbable
sits in front of Monoprix,
wrapped in blankets, stroking a silvery cat.
Your voice begins to slip away from me.
Life is like that. Death is like that.

5.
A glass of red wine spills on the grammar book –
the pupil and the teacher gasp, then laugh.
Their voices branch into the baroque
logic of the paragraph.
Does the Brouilly birthmark presage luck
in learning elementary Arabic?
This school desk is a kitchen table,
but the street outside is peaceful.
Schoolchildren with satchels weave among
shoppers, construction workers, dogs.
No one here is speaking their mother tongue:
perhaps several dialogues
are contradicting contrapuntally.
Two girls in hijab with computer bags
go hand in hand into the library.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

In January of this year. It began with a desire to write something in homage to the great American poet Hayden Carruth, who died at the age of 87 in September; to continue, in a sadly fictitious way, a voluminous correspondence with him that had gone on since the early 1990s; to prolong the life (that is to say inscribe as a possibility within the many of poetic form) of the “paragraph,” (or of the sequence of “paragraphs” ) , a form Carruth himself created, first in the 1950s, and continued to use throughout his long career. It was, at the same time, a response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which left close to 1,400 dead, most of them civilians, and immeasurable damage to the lives, property, to the future of the survivors, present in my quotidian life through newspaper articles and videos from many sources, and also from testimony from people I knew, or who know people I know, who were there. There was a personal impetus as well: the discovery that I was positive for the so-called “breast cancer gene,” actually a genetic lack or malformation. The imaginative link between that and occupation/invasion is fairly easy to imagine.

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

Several drafts—separate drafts on the separate sections, and further revision to make them cohere insomuch as they do.

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

“Inspiration,” in my experience, is a reward for persistent work when one is not in the least inspired. The “paragraph,” despite a name that makes it sound like a prose poem, is a fairly complex form. As Hayden Carruth used and described it, it is a fifteen-line poem, which, like a sonnet, can either stand alone or work in sequence. It has a fixed rhyme scheme, and a fixed variation in the number of stresses per line. It is accentual rather than accentual-syllabic, though there is quite a bit of not-necessarily inadvertent iambic pentameter in most of them. With the letter representing rhyme and the numeral the number of stresses, the template would look like this:

5A A carpet raveling on the loom a girl
5B with a widowspeak and misty legs a moon
4A like a fisheye rising from a pool
3B a black longwing loon
5A bursting afire in the sunset a torn sail
5A groveling in a wave a whisper in a stairwell
4C a helmet upturned in the black rain
4C and later a star reflected on a coin
5D glimmering on seastones a sound of motors
3E and machineguns
5D in the dawn a kiss and candleflame a sonata
4E for clarinet a bone cracking a woman
5F wearing a blue veil and in kashan a room
5E where the little darkeyed weaving girls lay down
5F and died a carpet raveling on a loom.

The poem I’ve used to illustrate the template is from “Contra Mortem,” a sequence of thirty paragraphs written in 1966, in which Carruth “loosened” his own strict form somewhat (one could read lines 8 and 12 as having five stresses), as well as being freer with punctuation, which here follows the trajectory of a free-associative but directed thought-and-image process. Carruth liked to emphasize the paragraph’s differences from the sonnet: how the shorter lines 7 and 8 introducing a third rhyme break the train of thought while not forming part of a sestet’s response/resolution, for example.

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

Given the form above, it is clear that “principles of technique” were conscious. But I don’t know that it would be possible to write any poem--a highly experimental poem, a sonnet sequence, a poem in the narrative unmetered verse to which American readers are most accustomed--without consciously employing principles of technique! A poem is made up of words, in some usually syntactically meaningful order, interesting in their denotations and connotations and equally interesting in their sonorities and their interplay. A jazz pianist (or a clarinetist – that is what jazz-buff Carruth was!) improvising is employing principles of technique that had to be learned before improvisation was possible, and so is the poet, even in the rare situation of sitting down to write a poem that “arrives” more or less intact: this is a reward that follows long practice.

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

It appeared in the British journal PN Review about four months later. They publish bi-monthly!

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

It varies. Because this poem is at once a response to a series of urgent events in the world and something of an elegy to someone recently dead, I wanted it to appear fairly soon – if possible.

Is this a narrative poem?

There are several narratives and dialogues being negotiated here. The little girl in Gaza is at the heart of the poem, and yet she is cut off from “dialogue,” telling her story and her indignation to an unseen interlocutor. The question of desire (and of disease) is left open-ended. The girl’s anger, and the deliberately unspecified (not to embroider on a reality as far as I could observe it) situation reverberate from everything else evoked (including the language in which I might understand her) but remain painfully separate. The narrative opens out into another one (just as the scene shifts from a room to a populated street).

At the heart of this poem is the specter of morality, the idea of right and wrong. Is all good poetry in some way ethical or just?

Wouldn’t it be neat and tidy if that were the case!

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

The influence of Hayden Carruth is so clear it is hardly a disclosure. I was also reading the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who had himself died a month before Carruth, both in Fady Joudah’s English translations and in Elias Sanbar’s French ones. Poems by Alicia Ostriker, Marilyn Krysl, George Szirtes, Peter Dale Scott, Mimi Khalvati. The Syro-Lebanese poet Adonis’ thorny, violent and erudite “Al-Kitâb,” in Houria Abdelouahed’s French translation. I was myself finishing the translation of a collection of poems by Emmanuel Moses, a French poet steeped in European and Jewish history.

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

Hayden Carruth was one, and he is dead. Marie Ponsot. The Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant. Several friends, not all of them poets, writers, or even Anglophones. But the ideal reader still seems to me someone about whom I know nothing, who picks up a book in a library or a bookshop. . . .

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it?

Yes – my friend the poet and critic Alfred Corn.

Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

Alfred is one; Marie Ponsot – who rarely “comments,” and never blue-pencils, is another. There are several others, more intermittently than regularly. Not a group.

What is American about this poem?

The form is “American,” devised by a thoroughly American poet. Perhaps the situation, that of expatriation, as it swings from imagination to a “reality” itself part fiction. It is written in American English, unmistakeably.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both. I hope it is finished as is. At the same time, the “paragraph” sequence lends itself to longer continuation. In this case, I wanted the poem to be included in Names, because of its elegiac aspect and because of the immediacy of the Gaza reference – so I let it conclude where it did, with those two young women on their way into the library, and a wine-stain on the Arabic grammar, a toast to Abû Nûwwas!

Sean Hill

Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill has an M.F.A. from the University of Houston, where he was awarded the 2003 Michener Fellowship for poetry. He has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bush Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, and Stanford University, work-study scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a Travel and Study Grant from the Jerome Foundation. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Pleiades, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, The Oxford American, Tin House and other literary journals, and in the anthologies Blues Poems, Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear, and the forthcoming Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. In 2008 the University of Georgia Press published his first book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. For more information, please visit Hill's website.


UNCLE JOHN

That was the year
Granddaddy Thomas died
Left the family worse than broke

Uncle John stole a ham
from Mr. Ennis’s Meat Market
He was seventeen

Lost his taste for it
locked up
fourteen years

Ham salt cured and earth-red
sliced with the fat hanging on
yellow sunshine on a white plate
The hambone cut crosswise
rings marrow
a dark eye
All in the skillet
making gravy for grits

Lost the taste for all things salt
The ocean he hasn’t seen
Woman and man
He don’t never want to see
no more ham on his plate
Hates pigs
Was hard for him
Hates white folks too

Time off for good behavior
They didn’t hold him to the last six

He’s a hog farmer
only eats beef and chicken and turkey
fish turtle and rabbit
squirrel possum and coon
and he seasons his greens with smoked oxtails

Can’t raise white folks for slaughter.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The idea of this poem, the trigger, was a newspaper article I came across while doing research for Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. I read 19th and early 20th century issues of Milledgeville’s newspaper, the Union Recorder, to get a sense of how people lived in my hometown back then—to get a sense of the texture of the times. This particular article was published sometime in 1904, I think. This was during the era of leased convict labor when the state could lease convicts to privately owned businesses. This system offered a source of revenue for the state and cheap labor for businesses. Very often Black men were arrested and convicted on trumped up charges. The article related the story of a recently released convict who’d been sentenced to work for twenty years in, I believe, a coal mine for stealing a ham. The happy ending spin the article put on this situation was that the man was now free to pursue his dream of starting up a farm. I think I read the article sometime in late 1999 or early 2000. I couldn’t shake this story. The nagging question of “and then what?” needed answering, so I wrote my way to an answer. I wrote the first drafts of it at the Cave Canem workshop and retreat in June 2000.

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

I think because the story was with me for a while before I actually tried to write anything on paper, it went through very few drafts over a few months. I checked my computer files, and I seem to have saved only two drafts before the final. I’m sure there were a few more that were printed out but not saved on the computer.

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; it’s what stops me, pulls me out of the everyday. Those moments of attentiveness are often something coming to me and saying, “pay attention.” A great part of “Uncle John” was “received,” but, as I said, only after I’d sat with the material for a while. The lines “Lost his taste for all things salt / the ocean he hasn’t seen / woman and man” definitely felt “received” from a place farther out than the rest of the poem. Those lines, especially “the ocean he hasn’t seen,” surprised me more than the rest of the poem, which surprised me too. I think I put myself in a place to “receive” this poem. Then I cried and sweated.

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

In looking back at the drafts I have, it seems I tried to write it in tercets, but that didn’t work out. The poem, the voice, resisted that, and I listened.

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

A few months.

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

I don’t have any hard and fast rules for lengths of time to let poems “sit” before sending them out. It’s intuitive—dependent upon how I’m feeling about the poem.

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

The facts of the poem are what I gathered from the newspaper article: a Black man was sentenced to twenty years hard labor for stealing a ham, and he was made to serve sixteen of those twenty years, and, allegedly, he was going to start a farm after his release. Those facts along with the facts I gleaned from history books and growing up Black in Milledgeville in the last quarter of the twentieth century and hearing older generations of Black people speak about their lives and, as an adult, asking them questions and listening to their answers are the facts of this poem. The brief rhapsodic ham reverie came from fond childhood memories of having country cured ham for breakfast at my grandmother’s house and from the fact that by the time I was writing those lines I hadn’t eaten pork for close to ten years. My empathic imagining of the voice of the relative of Uncle John who understands what John has lived through and lives with filled in the rest.

Is this a narrative poem?

It’s narrative in that it relates a sequence of events. It has, I think, the structure and, possibly, punch of a joke. And if the reader is laughing, I think he or she is laughing to keep from crying.

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

I’m not really sure what I was reading around this time, but it’s probably safe to say I was reading Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Nelson, Sterling Brown, Seamus Heaney, and Kevin Young.

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

No and yes. I think the consideration of audience, for me, comes in during the revision process when I’m thinking of the best order for the words. I start thinking more consciously about how the words can mean to someone encountering them for the first time, a 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?

Yes. As I said, I wrote the first drafts at Cave Canem and turned in a version to workshop there. And in fall semester of 2000 I turned in a draft to Robert Phillips’s workshop at the University of Houston. A question about something that I saw as obvious or irrelevant or both was raised by Professor Phillips, I believe; the question was, why did he steal the ham? I guess that’s where audience comes in.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Well, I think it employs humor in a way that most of my other poems haven’t.

What is American about this poem?

Among other things, the story and the story behind the story are what is American about this poem. The spin the newspaper article put on it sounds like a twist on the rags-to-riches story. And the particular series of events the poem relates form a very American story. And I think the language of the poem is American. And the humor in the poem that is born of the situation is a very American kind of humor.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I think it was finished.

Harvey Shapiro

Harvey Shapiro’s many books include The Sights Along the Harbor: New and Collected Poems (2006), How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems (2001) and National Cold Storage Company (1998), all published by Wesleyan. A veteran of World War II, he published his first book in 1953, and has taught at Cornell University, Bard College, Columbia University, and Yale University. In his career as a journalist, he has served as editor of the New York Times Book Review and senior editor of the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.


HOW CHARLIE SHAVERS DIED

He had a gig
but he was hurting.
His doctor said, play the date,
then check into the hospital.
That night, when the party ended
and the band packed up,
Charlie started to give stuff away—
his watch, his rings—to the women
in the room. Then
he circled the room with his horn
playing: “For all I know we may never meet again.”
At this point, the man who was telling the story
in the locker room at the Manhattan Plaza gym
and who had sung the line slowly, with
a pause between each word, began to cry.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

In 2000, I think. I can't remember the season or month. It began with a line overheard at the Manhattan Plaza Gym: locker room.

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

The poem took shape over several months. I didn't try to get it on the page until I knew how to set it up.

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

Yes, I believe in inspiration. But I also believe in reporting. Wallace Stevens called the poetry of William Carlos Williams "rubbings of reality." That's what this poem means to be.

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

The poem arrived at its final form when I figured out how to get into it--begin with a voice and then set the scene at the end.

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

I can't remember.

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

Usually I let a poem sit in my notebook for some weeks before I go to the computer. Then I print it out and let it sit some more.

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

Writing during World War II, Stevens said that, in the face of an overwhelming event, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. I think that sometimes the event doesn't have to be overwhelming.

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?

No.

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

No.

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.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

More anecdote, less language.

What is American about this poem?

Everything.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.

Kathryn Stripling Byer

Kathryn Stripling Byer was raised in southwest Georgia and studied with Allen Tate, Robert Watson, and Fred Chappell in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Since 1968 she has lived in the mountains of North Carolina, teaching off and on at Western Carolina University. Her first book, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, was chosen by John Frederick Nims for the Associated Writing Programs award series and published by Texas Tech University Press in 1986. Her second, Wildwood Flower, was published by LSU Press(1992) and was the Lamont Selection for the year's best second book from the Academy of American Poets. Her other books include Black Shawl (1998), Catching Light (2001), and Coming to Rest (2006), all from LSU Press. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Hanes Award from The Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her poetry and essays have appeared in journals ranging from the Atlantic Monthly to Appalachian Heritage. Her latest collection is a collaboration with poet Penelope Scambly Schott, due soon from Ash Creek Press in Portland, Oregon. For the past five years, she has served as North Carolina's Poet Laureate. To learn more about Byer please visit her blog and her website.


PRECIOUS LITTLE

“... the passageway down which they had just gone
was bright as the eye of a needle.”
—Eudora Welty, Losing Battles

So we’d gathered to talk about writing,
remembering great ones who’d recently gone
from our midst and the various ways
they had followed each voice through

the needle’s eye into the clearing of art,
when a novelist slouched
on the front row opined
that the only real subject is battle

and how men survive it.
I seethed while my student poets,
all of them women, sat waiting for someone
to challenge his vision of literature,

belligerent canon
where warring tribes battle it out
in their epics and blood-spattered novels.
“Miss Welty,” I countered, “stayed

clear of the battlefield, if you recall.
She sat down every day at the same desk
and made language raise the world up
from the grave of our common amnesia.”

He barely acknowledged
my comment. He wanted to flirt.
with my students. He shrugged at me,
stood up and showed off the fit

of his tight jeans. My god,
what a chasm he opened up right there
between us: we stared like combatants
across the trench, loading our weapons,

his now on full frontal display,
along with a first novel already lobbed
to reviewers by Random House. As for me,
middle-aged poet, what were mine?

Precious little. The shot I recalled
having seen months ago of a woman my age
holding up to the camera a photo of daughter
or sister or good friend who’d disappeared

into the rubble of felled towers, the same woman
I had seen sifting through ruins in Fallujah
or Kabul, even now cringing
when she hears the gunfire in Baghdad,

a woman who stares back at me
when I’m dusting my daughter’s face
framed on the shelf,
smiling out at a day that’s been gone

for so long I can barely remember it,
nothing much going on, no bombs,
no fireworks, just late summer afternoon
and the dogs asleep under the oak tree.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem began after a writers conference in Asheville, NC to which I took a small group of women students. Eudora Welty had just died, and we spent a portion of the morning session talking about her work, so her influence was much on my mind as the rest of the day unfolded. Welty's lyrical short stories helped to shape my sense of how language can create a world that pulses at the center of the lyric moment. “The Wide Net,” in particular, really woke me up to the kind of writing I wanted to attempt; by then, I knew I wanted to write poetry, not fiction, but I also knew I wanted my poetry to sound as much like Welty’s wide net as possible.

The fiction writer, made much younger and more successful in the poem, actually said that war was the story, expressing his regret that he had never experienced war first-hand. I countered with E. Welty's never having been to war, yet being one of our greatest American writers. My students were appalled by his attitude, and over the next few weeks, we kept spiraling back to this incident in our discussion. The poem began out of my initial irritation and growing frustration at not having spoken more forcefully and eloquently that day.

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

It went through more revisions than I can remember. I’d lose count if I tried. I wanted to bring Welty into the poem somehow, thus the epigraph from her novel Losing Battles and the introductory lines about her passing. As the poem shape-shifted over a year or more, its texture became denser and its narrative less simplistic. It finally became a way for me to defend my stance, you might say, as I enter my late middle-age, challenged by younger, more successful writers, represented by the poem's novelist in his tight, enticing jeans.

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

That day at the writers conference was definitely “received,” but I had to work hard to bring that incident to life in a way that worked on more levels than the basic narrative. Sure, I went home and bitched about this encounter to my husband and friends, but ranting won’t take you very far. At some point—the sooner the better—language has to begin its transformative work, teasing out connections and images, probing deeply enough to make the poem worth working on and finally worth reading.

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

This poem arrived in final form by leading me into one dead end after another! At one point I didn’t think I’d ever be able to consider it finished. Slowly several stanzas began to interweave. I remember the image of fireworks coming on during one 4th of July, how our dogs were driven crazy by the sounds, especially the echoes resounding through the valley. The images of 9/l1 were still fresh in my mind, as well as the earlier images of women in Palestinian refugee camps. At the same time I was also wrestling with the poem “Her Daughter,” (also in Coming to Rest) taking as its subject civilian casualties during the US bombing of Baghdad. These images began to seem more and more powerful as an answer to the war-loving novelist than any way of responding. The image of my daughter in my favorite photograph of her suddenly appeared near the end of the poem, along with the dogs sleeping under the oak tree.

I wanted a flexible line that would allow me to gather in as much material as I needed, but that line has never been able to free itself of my natural bent toward the anapestic. Don’t ask me why I fall into a tri-syllabic rhythm. Maybe that’s how my circulatory system hears the beat of my blood. Breaking the lines into quatrains was a later revision, one that helped me to focus more intensely on lineation and internal rhyme.

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

It first appeared in my collection Coming to Rest, and I’d say the time between final revisions and publication must have been two years. I don’t know that I ever sent it out to a magazine. If so, I’ve forgotten. How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world?

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

I have no rules. If a poem feels finished, maybe I will send it out eventually. I’m not as driven about submissions as I was in my younger days. I’m trying to generate the energy to get back into the hustle, but I have very few journals that I feel good about sending to, which simply means that by now I know which editors like my work and will give it a careful, sympathetic reading.

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

Well, this poem began as a real event but had to be fictionalized to avoid getting myself into trouble with the novelist, who was at the time an older colleague. He doesn’t read poetry, so I probably needn’t have worried, but turning him into a brash young novelist with a first book out from a major NY press allowed me to address some of my own defensiveness as an aging woman poet confronted with an indifferent younger man, and a novelist, at that. A so-called friend once asked me after my first collection was published, "When are you going to write a real book?" I'm confronting myself as much as the young novelist in the poem, my fear that what I'm doing doesn't really matter that much anyway.

Is this a narrative poem?

It certainly begins as one, but it shifts into a more reflective mode around the middle.

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

I'd been reading Ruth Stone, for one. And Barry Lopez, whose work I consider essential. And of course I was reading lots of commentaries about the selling of the Iraq War and the reports coming out of that besieged country.

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

I try not to think about an audience, especially my “ideal reader,” who is my husband. I’d be self-critical to the point of paralysis if I did. I let the language itself guide the poem. The only reader I care about at that point is the interior listener/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?

No, I didn’t let anyone see it. I did read an earlier version of it at a reading in Atlanta and heard some things I didn’t like. The poem obviously was not ready. I’ve no group with whom I share work regularly.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It takes on political issues rather than mostly personal ones, though the two always intersect.

What is American about this poem?

The reference right away to Eudora Welty places it in the American sway of influence, I guess you’d say. And the later allusions to the Twin Towers falling and the Iraq War root it in recent American sensibility.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I came to feel I’d done all I could with this material, so I guess I’d declare it finished. I enjoy reading it aloud; the audience seems to like it, especially women. Especially the reference to the novelist’s tight jeans! Yes, I think I definitely had the last word in this confrontation.

Mark Halliday

Mark Halliday teaches at Ohio University. His books of poems are: Little Star (William Morrow, 1987), Tasker Street (University of Massachusetts, 1992), Selfwolf (University of Chicago, 1999), Jab (University of Chicago, 2002), and Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008). His critical study Stevens and the Interpersonal appeared in 1991 from Princeton University Press. He co-authored with Allen Grossman a book on poetics, The Sighted Singer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).


CHICKEN SALAD

Everybody’s father dies.
When it happens to someone else, I send a note of sympathy
or at least an e-mail. It’s certainly worth the bother.
But when my father died, it was my father.

*

Three hours before he died
my father felt he should have an answer
when I asked what he might like to eat.
He remembered a kind of chicken salad he liked
weeks ago when living was more possible
and he said “Maybe that chicken salad”
but because of the blood in his mouth
and because of his shortness of breath
he had to say it several times before I understood.
So I went out and bought a container of chicken salad,
grateful for the illusion of helping,
but when I brought it back to the apartment
my father studied it for thirty seconds
and set it aside on the bed. I wasn’t ready
to know what the eyes of the nurse at the Hospice
had tried to tell me before dawn, so I said
“Don’t you want some chicken salad, Daddy?”
He glanced at it from a distance of many miles—
little tub of chicken salad down on the planet of
slaughtered birds and mastication, digestion, excretion—
and murmured “Maybe later.” He was in
the final austerity
which I was too frazzled to quite recognize
but ever since his death I see with stony clarity
the solitary dignity of
the totality of his knowing
how far beyond the pleasure of chicken salad
he had gone already and would go.

*

Everybody’s father dies; but
when my father died, it was my father.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

My father died in August 2003. In the days following his death I did a lot of notebook writing, trying to hang on to some of the countless details of his final weeks and especially of his last two days; I was afraid these troubling memories would soon get mixed up, and I knew I would want to keep hold of the truth of the experience as I perceived it. A few of my notebook jottings became the factual or anecdotal centers for drafts of poems. Eventually I gathered nine poems about my father’s dying to include in Keep This Forever. I think “Chicken Salad” was one of the first written of these poems.

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

Not sure, but I think the poem came more or less all at once, handwritten, and then got revised slightly when typed on computer, which may have happened more than two years after I drafted the poem. I think I needed to let time pass before publishing poems about my father’s death.

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

I tried to make the narrative part of “Chicken Salad” entirely factual. I’m not aware of having simplified or “smoothed out” or mythified any of the details. Sometimes we have to do so in order to give a poem shapeliness and metaphorical rightness and impact; but in this case I felt the true details were what I needed.

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

My impression is that many of my best short poems arrive very quickly in a first draft that then will be changed only in fairly small ways; however, in such cases the writing has been preceded by a great deal of brooding over the scene, the images, which have been riding around in my head (and also maybe in factual notebook jottings) for weeks or months.

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

I remember deciding that I would allow myself to use a series of abstract words—austerity, clarity, dignity, totality, knowing—toward the end of the poem’s narrative part, because this seemed necessary for accuracy about my father’s state of mind and my own perception of it. Sometimes a careful interaction among abstractions can have poetic power, partly because it cuts against the reader’s traditional expectation of vividly metaphorical words.

Another difficult decision was about whether to keep the passages at the beginning and end which frame the narrative part. When Peter Stitt accepted “Chicken Salad” for The Gettysburg Review, he asked me to drop the framing lines. In his view, they diluted the impact of the narrative. I understood his way of seeing this, and I agreed to publish the poem without the framing lines, but I knew I would restore them when I put the poem in a book. I felt they were an important acknowledgment of the inescapable gap between the vast importance of one’s own losses to oneself and the distant or very temporary small importance of most other people’s losses.

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 first submitted “Chicken Salad” to a journal in March 2006. I think I felt confident about the poem then. In some cases, though, I send out a poem when I’m not yet confident but I want to see what happens, I’m using the submission process as an effort to get new perspective on the poem. I wish I could resist this temptation, but sometimes I don’t.

Is this a narrative poem?

The main middle part is unmistakably a narrative of one small event on the last afternoon of my father’s life, along with a reference back to a moment early that morning, and a glance forward into many moments of remembering this day. The narrative part is framed or “bookended” by statements in a declarative, explanatory tone.

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

Many of us who are now in our fifties, or sixties, have had to write poems about our parents dying; I have encountered a lot of these poems in recent years, including many strong ones. “Her Creed” by Sharon Olds, “Mediterranean” by Rosanna Warren, “Cold Wood” by Alan Shapiro, “The Passing of Time” by Mary Ruefle, “Under the Pines” by Tom Sleigh, “Benevolence” by Tony Hoagland, “The Last I Heard of My Father” by Dean Young–these are just a few good poems that come to mind. I’m not sure what specifically influenced my poem. There’s a tone in Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” that for some reason comes to mind when I think of the tone I wanted in “Chicken Salad”.

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

I always hope to be readable by those readers out there—they do exist!—who don’t focus their identities in being poets or being part of the poetry scene. The intelligent, reflective, skeptical but generous reader, someone not snowed or intimidated by confusing flimflam, someone who feels human life is an amazing mystery and wants to absorb someone else’s intensely intended “take” on an aspect of the mystery—that’s the reader I love!

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, not any more. I should show all my drafts to my wife, the poet J. Allyn Rosser, as I know she could save me from some follies, but often I don’t want to face her critique.

What is American about this poem?

It’s true that “Chicken Salad” would look more unusual in a British journal than in an American journal. We Americans tend to have a gut-level confidence that the details of the individual life will be worthy of attention—“I’m just as important as anybody else!”—a confidence that comes less naturally to British poets, and so (I think) they are less willing to sound nakedly colloquial.

Bruce Snider

Bruce Snider is the author of The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. His poetry and non-fiction have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and PN Review, among other journals. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, he lives in San Francisco.


THE CERTAINTY OF NUMBERS

It’s not the numbers you dislike—
the 3s or 5s or 7s—but the way
the answers leave no room for you,
the way 4 plus 2 is always 6
never 9 or 10 or Florida,
the way 3 divided by 1
is never an essay about spelunking
or poached salmon, which is why
you never seemed to get the answer right
when the Algebra teacher asked,
If a man floating down a river in a canoe
has traveled three miles of a twelve mile canyon
in five minutes, how long will it take him
to complete the race? Which of course depends
on if the wind resistance is 13 miles an hour
and he’s traveling upstream
against a 2 mile an hour current
and his arms are tired and he’s thinking
about the first time he ever saw Florida,
which was in seventh grade
right after his parents’ divorce
and he felt overshadowed
by the palm trees, neon sun visors,
and cheap postcards swimming
with alligators. Nothing is ever simple,
except for the way the 3 looks like two shells
washed up on last night’s shore,
but then sometimes it looks like a bird
gently crushed on its side.
And the 1—once so certain
you could lean up against it
like a gray fence post—has grown weary,
fascinated by the perpetual
itch of its own body.
Even the Algebra teacher
waving his formulas like baseball bats,
pauses occasionally when he tells you
that a 9 and a 2 are traveling in a canoe
on a river in a canyon. How long
will it take them to complete their journey?
That is if they don’t lose their oars
and panic and strike the rocks,
shattering the canoe. Nothing is ever certain.
We had no plan, the numbers would tell us,
at the moment of our deaths.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote the earliest draft of this poem sometime in the fall of 1997. I had been writing a number of poems about my middle school and high school experiences, and so this subject was a natural outgrowth of those. If I remember correctly, I started with the opening line, “It’s not the numbers you dislike,” and just went from there to figure out what I meant by that.

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

This poem came much more quickly than most. I think I wrote the first draft in two days. Then I tinkered with it a bit over the next couple of months. For the most part, though, it arrived mostly as it is, with only minor edits. Usually poems come to me in fragments and require more labor to weave together. This was just one of those poems that showed up one day.

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

I do believe in inspiration, but I also think it generally requires a lot of help, which often means sweat and tears. Or at the very least it means showing up and making yourself available. I’m not generally someone who’s struck with lines, images, or ideas while walking down the street. Not much happens for me unless I’m sitting in front of an empty page or at the computer. I wrote this poem, for example, during a time that I was keeping a pretty strict writing schedule, getting up early in the morning before work, writing in coffee shops on the weekend, etc. The poem wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t done that.

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

I wasn’t thinking much about technique when I wrote this poem. It was all pretty instinctive.

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

I started it in the fall of 1997 and it eventually appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of Third Coast, so not quite three years.

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

I don’t have any strict rules about this, though I do try to let poems sit for a few months until I can see them more clearly.

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

The poem came out of my own resistances to math as a kid, so in that way the poem has its roots in autobiography, though certainly not all of the details refer to my life.

Is this a narrative poem?

No. It’s more rhetorical and digressive in its structure, but as with most poems, there’s certainly an implied narrative, or at least elements of narrative.

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

I’d been reading the New York School poets, especially Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. Both were a huge influence on me at the time. In part, I think their work accounts for the poem’s playfulness as well as its discursiveness and use of conversational speech.

I was also influenced by Naomi Shihab Nye’s early work, some of which treats language as a physical object in the landscape, animating it as a quasi-character or concrete force in the poem. I just applied that same strategy to numbers, which, because I’d always had an antagonistic relationship with math, provided me with a natural tension for the poem.

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

Like many writers I mostly write what I’d like to read. I’m not sure that makes me my own audience exactly, but it does shape the direction of my work. Of course, my own tastes are always changing, so hopefully the poems are changing, too.

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

Yes, I showed it to a couple of friends and former teachers for feedback.

I have a good friend, who tends to be my first reader. Her instincts are quite different from my own, so she’s a good counter to my own excesses. I also usually share my work with my partner, who is a fiction writer. In my experience, fiction writers often have better bullshit detectors, so I’m always grateful to get that perspective.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Its tone and strategies are similar to a number of the poems I was writing at that time, though more recently my poems have become less playful and more interested in experimenting with elements of form, meter, internal rhyme, line and stanza, etc.

What is American about this poem?

The ironies and idiomatic speech of the New York School poets strike me as very American, so to the extent that this poem bears their influence, it is as well.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. Or maybe abandoned. I don’t know. I just decided it was done, or at least I was, which may be the same thing.

Lucia Perillo

Lucia Perillo has published five books of poetry including Dangerous Life (Northeastern University Press, 1989); The Body Mutinies (Purdue University Press, 1996), which was awarded the Revson Prize from PEN, the Kate tufts prize from Claremont University, and the Balcones Prize; and The Oldest Map with the Name America (Random House, 1999). Luck is Luck (Random House, 2005) won the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Her new book, Inseminating the Elephant, was published by Copper Canyon in 2009. In 2000, Perillo was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. She lives in Olympia, Washington with her husband and dog. To learn more about Lucia Perillo, please visit her website.


THE SECOND SLAUGHTER

Achilles slays the man who slayed his friend, pierces the corpse
behind the heels and drags it
behind his chariot like the cans that trail
a bride and groom. Then he lays out
a banquet for his men, oxen and goats
and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat
until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.

The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—
in the morning more animals must be killed
for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds
no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;
not even heaving four stallions on the pyre
can lift the ballast of his sorrow.

And here I turn my back on the epic hero—the one who slits
the throats of his friend’s dogs,
killing what the loved one loved
to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent
by vanishing from my concern
after he throws the dogs onto the fire.
The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.

When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep
until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh. But once

I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals
my first lament. So now I guard
my inhumanity like the jackal
who appears behind the army base at dusk,
come there for scraps with his head lowered
in a posture that looks like appeasement,
though it is not.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Firstly, I’d like to caution people against a straight-on explanation of a poem by its writer, which seems like a recipe for misinformation. But in this case I do have a specific memory of writing the fourth stanza in 1991, during the first gulf war.

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

My ability to write by hand deteriorated during the long assemblage of this poem. Since I write mostly with a computer now, I can’t say how many revisions the poem underwent. I finished the poem in 2008, when I decided to write a poem about the Iliad. I finally had a place to put the old fragment.

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

I compose using lyric methods—words pop into my head and I begin reciting/semi-singing them. And I also use intellectual/analytic methods. You could say one method is received and one is work. But I don’t like to analyze the process too much—probably for fear of damaging it.

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

The sense of final form seems to me like received knowledge that the poet finally surrenders to.

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

It was a quick one, for me, if you discount the seventeen-year gap. Maybe a year?

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

The problem of the poem was how to allude to a complex text, and how to add something to the recapitulation of an often-recapitulated work. I wanted the allusion to be clear to those who haven’t read the Iliad. My poem moves from that poem to a snip of a personal anecdote, which incorporates both fact and fiction.

Is this a narrative poem?

It has various narratives in operation: Homer’s, mine, and the historical narratives of our two most recent wars.

Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem?

Homer, of course, but I will also say the jackal is real and comes from a book called Birding Babylon, which is a transcription of a soldier’s field notes/blog, from his time in Iraq.

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

I guess that would be me.

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?

Unfortunately, I have no one to share poems with regularly. But the flip side of that is that a unicorn was not designed by a committee.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

That’s a question for critics, I think. It’s best not to get outside one’s poems.

What is American about this poem?

It happens to be very American because it draws on our recent history. To get outside myself (and violate the rule I just set forth), I suppose it’s unusual for me.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

The poet Valéry said that we never finish, only abandon.

Tony Hoagland

Tony Hoagland was born in 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His chapbook, Hard Rain was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005. His other collections of poetry include What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Donkey Gospel (1998), which received the James Laughlin Award; and Sweet Ruin (1992), chosen by Donald Justice for the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and winner of the Zacharis Award from Emerson College. Hoagland's other honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the O.B. Hardison Prize for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Shakespeare Library, as well as the Poetry Foundation's 2005 Mark Twain Award in recognition of his contribution to humor in American poetry. He currently teaches at the University of Houston and Warren Wilson College.


LUCKY

If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to help your enemy
the way I got to help my mother
when she was weakened past the point of saying no.

Into the big enamel tub
half-filled with water
which I had made just right,
I lowered the childish skeleton
she had become.

Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed
her belly and her chest,
the sorry ruin of her flanks
and the frayed gray cloud
between her legs.

Some nights, sitting by her bed
book open in my lap
while I listened to the air
move thickly in and out of her dark lungs,
my mind filled up with praise
as lush as music,

amazed at the symmetry and luck
that would offer me the chance to pay
my heavy debt of punishment and love
with love and punishment.

And once I held her dripping wet
in the uncomfortable air
between the wheelchair and the tub,
until she begged me like a child

to stop,
an act of cruelty which we both understood
was the ancient irresistible rejoicing
of power over weakness.

If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to raise the spoon
of pristine, frosty ice cream
to the trusting creature mouth
of your old enemy

because the tastebuds at least are not broken
because there is a bond between you
and sweet is sweet in any language.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem seems quite antique to me now, but it was written in a period of time in the early nineties—even then, it had been twenty years since the events reported on took place, caring for my mother during her last months of dying.

Of course it derives from real experience, one of those many many uncharted constellations of intimacy that constantly occur between family members, friends, and partners. I say "uncharted" with pleasure, since experience offers an ongoing infinity of such moments, each never before observed and represented.

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

I had a lot of trouble with the wording of a bridge passage –I think the description of the bathtub scene—three quarters through, and I struggled with the economy of the phrasing for a year or more before getting it as close to right as I could.

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 such a thing as getting lucky sometimes. I also believe that one of the gifts we cultivate as working poets is the instinct for where a poem can be found—the coordination of details and dimensions, the angularity with which a tone can be established or how a story can be positioned, to best catch the light. In this poem, (to me) that special angle is the exposure of how Power—not gender or familial attachment—is at the core of the interaction.

The rhetoric of the poem, which is to say the opening sentence, was a rock-solid way to begin. But I remember I had a lot of trouble with other moments, like knowing that the last line was the last line. I'm sure I wrote well past it.

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

I solved some of the poem's necessary movements with rhetorics of phrasing, like the chiasmus ("punishment & love, love & punishment") two thirds through. In any case, I still think "Lucky" is a rather plain-Jane poem.

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

Soon after finishing it, my friend Conrad Hillbery requested some poems from me for an issue of Passages North; at the time, I didn't think the poem was particularly special.

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?

Different for different poems. Some poems have taken years and years to finish, and by the time they are finished, they might not be interesting in terms of subject matter anymore. Some get finished and half forgotten, then turn up again looking better for the vacation. Yet I believe in laboring through the technical problems presented by almost any poem, even a mediocre one, because it has a long term technical benefit, like a callisthenic.

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

The facts—I just now remembered—had been turned into a story years before the poem was written, when a woman I was dating asked me to tell her a story. So I told her the story of bathing my mother's ravaged body, and how strange it was looking down at her—the pale suture marks and scars, the gray-haired pubis. Because the facts had been turned into a story, years later it was there in the refrigerator of language-memory, ready for the poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

Narrative dominated (probably over-dominated) by rhetoric.

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

I learned many of the things I needed to know about narrative from Larry Levis's book Winter Stars. Some other influences were probably John Skoyles's elegantly straightforward book A Little Faith, and John Engman's book Keeping Still Mountain. Also Tess Gallagher's Under Stars. All extraordinary books.

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

Someone willing to go along for the ride. I believe in The Ride, the poem as carnival concession.

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?

Over the years it has changed, but when I'm lucky, I have one or two keen, reliable friends.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Well, in retrospect, it is much of a piece; plain and urgent, trying to use both intelligence and feeling to get more deeply at each other. I try to do verbally fancier things now, but Force and Intensity are primary assets of poetry.

What is American about this poem?

Its merciless candor.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Yes.

Anna Journey

Anna Journey is the author of the collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems are published in a number of journals, including American Poetry Review, FIELD, and Kenyon Review, and her essays appear in Blackbird, Notes on Contemporary Literature, and Parnassus. She’s won the Sycamore Review Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Diner Poetry Contest, fellowships from Yaddo and Bread Loaf, the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the J.A. and Isabel Elkins Fellowship from Inprint, a University Presidential Fellowship, and the University of Houston’s Inprint/Barthelme Fellowship in Poetry. She’s currently a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston. In 2006, Journey discovered the unpublished status of Sylvia Plath’s early sonnet “Ennui” and the influence of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby on it.


THE MIRROR’S LAKE IS FOREVER

That’s when I knew the mirror was all sex and hard
fact. Unlike knowing my grandfather

posthumously. Because a ghost can’t be
androgynous as a lamp is,

as peat moss is,
as the smell of cedar—

knife-feathery. Because the dead
can watch me pee without

even a trace of embarrassment. And who
has the right to more? Mirror

that couldn’t reach my dead
grandfather’s closet—his jewel-colored

medical books in former editions,
his gay porn magazines: men smooth

as conchs in softcore seascapes. My mother,
who found them while cleaning

out his house, asks, Are you sorry
I told you? I said, No,

I’m not sorry. As if staring
into his horn-rims and my grandmother’s

coral dress could help me understand
the selfishness of portraits—

their shut door splintering the past’s
exact coffin-space.

I know that shame
is beard-high with two daughters—the blonde

one with cats and the dark one with red-
haired girls. I know

the mirror’s lake is forever
dragged for corpses, lily-buoyant

arteries, livers, and cocks. I know
he’s caught there: doctor,

with his white coat, and gold-veined
tobacco. And what is more haunted

than the smoked voices
of cicadas under plums? And what

heats faster than silver? His constellation:
cold instruments raised

over useless space. Somewhere
there’s a ghost

I’ll open my shirt for, recount my
Entire Medical History for,

who I’ll forgive for wearing
tweed and love beads and for hiding

stacks of magazines in the dark, who will press
that silver scope to his ear, who will listen.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I’d been reading a lot of Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s poetry at the time—this was during the spring of 2007, I think. That spring was my last in Richmond, Virginia, as I finished up my MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. I’d received a thesis fellowship, which gave me a semester-long respite from teaching. I’d wake up at noon, caffeinate, maybe stay in my plaid pajamas until four, and then take a stroll around Hollywood Cemetery—named for the thorny ambience of the holly trees and not the movie industry—or cross the arcing footbridge to Belle Isle and dangle my feet in the muddy James. It was a kind of paradise, actually, except that I had to fry my own veggie sausage.

Anyway, I’d been devouring Goldberg’s Lie Awake Lake like a crazed beast. The collection consists mostly of elegies regarding the death of the poet’s father. There’s a strange, incantatory energy to Goldberg’s lines that makes even the frightening or macabre seem irresistible. Her wild images and surprising associations, her lyrical repetitions, and the defiant voice of her poems thrilled me. In Goldberg’s poem, “Sly Sparrow,” in which a sparrow gets shaved for surgery and a new wing grafted on, the bird says:

I began to call up song like a knot.
I became one mean musical
motherfucking sparrow: Call me Nicole. Though
by nature
we are a tolerant sort, like therapists
or pears.

I want to be one mean musical motherfucking sparrow! You know?

Also, the fact that Goldberg’s speakers are occasionally posthumous ones (like the resurrected mutant sparrow, for example) got me thinking about how I might engage these kinds of fabular characters, or ventriloquize them, in my writing.

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

Well, it’s been awhile, so my memory isn’t even remotely reliable. But when is it ever? I’d say the poem went through many drafts (which means, for me, probably six to ten), with a year elapsing between the first and final drafts.
The penultimate draft seemed to be motoring along just fine, right up until the ending slammed into a wall. I considered cutting the poem from my first book, actually, because the ending felt so abrupt. That draft stopped when the speaker discovered “the mirror’s lake is forever / dragged for corpses, lily-buoyant // arteries, livers, and cocks.” I thought, “Yeah, ending on ‘cocks’ would sure be a high-volume ending,” but it just felt showy and unearned. I needed something more risky and emotionally resonant, not just a big, profane cymbal-clang. I mean, so the speaker stares into a lake. So what?

A year later, faced with the unpalatable notion of cutting the poem, I decided to tackle the ending. It’s unusual for me to return to a poem after so much time, but I wanted to keep it in the mix if I could. I realized during that final revision that the grandfather must fully materialize from the lake’s floating organs, that the speaker needs to commune more directly with her specterly relative. I needed the speaker to become more exposed.

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

I do believe in inspiration. I also believe, however (to paraphrase Randall Jarrell), if you want to be struck by lightning, you have to be there when the rain falls. For me, being there when the rain falls involves reading (poems by my old favorites or by new authors, nonfiction articles in The New Yorker, even some zany local city paper feature on North Carolina’s Kudzu Jesus on a telephone wire, whatever)—with my feelers out searching for triggers. Being there when the rain falls also involves my actively making space and time to write for an uninterrupted period of time. So I plunge in, write with risk, revise with energy, and, hopefully, the poem keeps on getting better and better as I stick with it.

Many of my poems grow from stories I hear that resonate with my own peculiar obsessions. My interest in the macabre probably comes from my family’s certain oddness of perception. We’re the kind of family who, on Christmas Eve, sits up late on the grey couch flanked by red and green sequined stockings poring over old crime scene photographs on the internet (courtesy of Lizzie Borden and Jack the Ripper). I’m not kidding; my mom, my sister, and I really do that.

When my mother finally revealed her discovery of my grandfather’s telling stash of magazines while cleaning out his house after his death in 1987, I knew instantly that the story would wind up informing a poem. I was surprised, of course, but I also experienced a disorienting sense of loss; I felt like my grandfather had prevented us from fully knowing him. I kept thinking, “If he’d only told us, he would have met with complete acceptance, understanding.” I felt deprived; I felt like my chance at really knowing him was long vanished.

The sexuality of our own parents, or grandparents, however, isn’t something most of us are comfortable with; it’s transgressive; it’s taboo. Especially taboo, too, was my grandfather’s living simultaneously as a closeted bisexual man and the patriarch of a nuclear family, in Mississippi, before the civil rights movement was in full swing. My grandfather was an active member of the community: he shrunk the heads of all sorts of people in town; he founded an Episcopal church; he volunteered his time to work toward advancing integration policies. He was a painter, guitarist, collector of newfangled technologies; he was the first person on the block to purchase a television. In the sixties, the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses in the front yard of his suburban brick home in Jackson. He also got passed over for promotions with some regularity at the hospital, despite his popularity with patients and effectiveness as a psychiatrist.

In this context, then, keeping his bisexuality a secret from his children, as best he could, seems an act of bravery and protection. Surely, though, it must also have been a deeply painful and self-destructive sacrifice to make. The project of the poem is most certainly elegiac and yet one that, in spite of the speaker’s hauntedness, I hope, is also tender and celebratory.

Anyway, when I start to wonder, “Should I really be writing about this?” I know it’s exactly what I ought to be doing. I like to challenge myself; it keeps me off the couch.

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

I often choose to write in couplets; perhaps that’s because they’re about as far away as you can get from prose. There’s a cool restraint to couplets, a formal clarity, and a kind of—I don’t know—buoyancy that helps give my speedy, image-packed, lush language room to breathe. So, it’s about balance; it’s my recipe for staving off some sort of baroque implosion.

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

About two years after I finished the poem, the online journal Blackbird published it, along with audio clips and five other poems from my first collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. Click here to read them.

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

I don’t have any rules about how long I wait to send out poems. Usually, if I return to a poem after a week or two and still think it’s good, then I go for it.

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

Wallace Stevens calls poetry the supreme fiction. After all, why should we poets cede any damn territory to fiction writers? When I make use of factual details, as I do in “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever,” I also try to allow plenty of room for invention. If I cleave to my autobiography, then the poem falls flat. I suspect one reason I’m drawn to writing about my grandfather is that I never got the chance to know him as an adult; he died when I was seven. Because I have such a limited understanding of him, I suppose I feel freer to make up details—to elaborate, invent, exaggerate, and omit—until I arrive at a poem that speaks the truth through the necessary art of fiction’s lies.

Is this a narrative poem?

The poem contains narrative elements. There’s a story at work here; there are characters; there’s a setting; there’s a discernable plot. I suspect the poem has more in common with the lyric mode, however, in that it emphasizes personal feeling and a single moment rather than a narrative. But that’s the line I constantly walk and upon which I slip and blur the boundaries. I’m happy with that. I love getting way out there in moments of lyric, cosmic drunkenness just as much as I love the vivid stories that weave throughout narrative poetry—Larry Levis and Norman Dubie are gods to me.

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

I mentioned before that I’d been excited by Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s approach to elegy in Lie Awake Lake. I’d also been reading Anna Akhmatova’s Selected Poems (Judith Hemschemeyer’s translation). There’s a brilliant poem of Akhmatova’s, “In Tsarskoye Selo,” in which the image of lake as a mirror, in the second section, really stuck in my head:

…And there’s my marble double,
Lying under the ancient maple,
He has given his face to the waters of the lake,
And he’s listening to the green rustling.

And bright rainwater washes
His clotted wound…
Cold one, white one, wait,
I’ll become marble too.

I borrowed Akhmatova’s line, “He has given his face to the waters of the lake,” for the title of another poem I wrote during that time. Although I don’t remember which poem came first, both “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” and “He has given his face to the waters of the lake” are sister poems of sorts; they’re closely related in that they both sprang from the lake image as a kind of haunted psychic landscape.

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

Although I don’t have a particular audience in mind when I sit down to write, I do think a lot about clarity: clarity of image, dramatic circumstance, syntax, etc… I often recall a dear mentor’s simple mantra: “Clarity is never a vice.” This isn’t to say that you can’t have both clarity and mystery in a poem; because you can. Leaving room for mystery is important, but it’s not the same thing as being vague or imprecise.

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 wrote the poem during my MFA at VCU, so my teachers Gregory Donovan and David Wojahn read it and advised me. At that point, however, I was no longer taking a formal workshop; I met with them each one on one. Both Greg and David worked tirelessly and generously with me, for three years, on most of the poems in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. I couldn’t have done it without their devoted mentorship.

A little later in the book’s evolution, after I moved from Richmond to Houston (to begin my PhD at UH), Mark Doty helped me immensely. He said, “You should try a seduction poem,” so I wrote a whole series of devil/eros poems that wound up going in the manuscript. Those poems with a sharp sexual edge added new textures and tones to the collection, which excited me quite a lot; they helped tip the scales away from an onslaught of total gravitas.

My boyfriend, Patrick Turner, reads most of my drafts. He’s an upright bass player, but he trained early on in creative writing, so he offers me all kinds of valuable insights. He also brings me little snippets of stories he reads or hears that might be poem-worthy. (I wonder if he does this to make up for all the basses, banjos, fiddles, singing saws, etc, that sit around our apartment like they own this place…)

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

“The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” is more directly autobiographical than many of my poems in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. The poem’s setting, though, is perhaps more slippery and oblique than others in the book. A good number of the poems in my collection are anchored in highly specific, if strange, concrete settings: a costume ball in a basement, an artificial limb factory, a Confederate cemetery, the garden section of a suburban hardware shop, a city bayou. The landscape of “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” is more of a psychological projection.

What is American about this poem?

I’m an inheritor of confessional verse, which is, I think, a particularly American mode of writing. Sylvia Plath, especially, is a great heroine of mine. Much of my poetry is highly personal, like “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever.” I refuse to be boxed in, however, by What Really Happened, or “paralyzed by fact,” as Robert Lowell says of the trappings of confessional verse in his poem, “Epilogue.” I’m loyal to poems, not facts.

What’s also American about this poem is probably the setting—however in flux and bizarre it may be—which is the cicada-inflected, fraught American South. Some of the images and associative leaps, though, pull not from the stars and stripes but from European surrealism.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

For me, it’s both. I don’t give up on a poem until I’ve reached an ending that has certain qualities; it has to make some kind of unexpected, exciting turn. The rhythms have to be emphatic; the last image or phrase has to be resonant, strange, and precise. Charles Wright says somewhere that you’ve got to “hit the right notes hard,” and that’s what I always try to do, but especially when I gear up to end a poem.

I know when to stop revising when I keep making the same changes over and over again, like a little OCD worker bee; I’ll change an “a” to “the,” for example, or I’ll delete a conjunction and pat myself on the back, sipping my coffee. Even when I reach an ending that I feel good about I do still find myself scratching my head, wondering if there’s a better one out there. At that point, though, I just try to keep my fingers away from the keyboard!

In “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever,” I surprised myself when, toward the end of the poem, my speaker sits before her dead psychiatrist-grandfather as a patient. I surprised myself even more when she started unbuttoning her shirt, exposed and ready to recount her “Entire Medical History” for him. I thought, “Whoa, this is kind of disturbing! Should I be doing this?” That’s when I knew I had to follow through with it and hit the right last note, when the grandfather reaches out and, even posthumously, listens. I had to balance the shock of the floating cock imagery and the weirdly sexual undressing with a note that laid bare the speaker’s own vulnerability and need.