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).

Eric Pankey

Eric Pankey's most recent collection is The Pear as One Example: New & Selected Poems 1984-2008 (Ausable Press, 2008). Born in Kansas City in 1959, Eric Pankey directed the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis for many years. His work has been awarded numerous honors, including grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. For the last decade he has taught in the MFA program at George Mason University, where he is Professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing. He lives in Fairfax, VA with his wife and daughter.


THE OLD BRICKYARD ROAD QUARRY

The world begins with a gaze, impromptu,
The first light endlessly divisible,
Starless, submerged in vapor, unscored, loosed,

So that one does not think of proportion,
Abrupt edges, magnetic poles, remnants,
Or, for instance, the quality of mercy,

Or the maker. To dispense with narrative,
To let go of the ledger, the inventory,
The ten-thousand stains where blood redeemed,

Is to believe in the dream's irrational
Counter-history, the limestone scree,
The said and to-be-said held in solution,

The weight a body takes on, inch by inch,
As it's pulled from the quarry's clouded water,
A body bloated, radiant. Jade-tinged. Pearl.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I believe I started this poem in the late 1990s—1998-1999. This poem started as most of my poems start with words, images, and half lines jotted in notebooks:

In solution
Poles, equinox, sallow
Jade axe, jade coffin
The world begins as a gaze

Things like that and I look and see if I can find a way to start speaking, to bring these unlikely things into a whole.

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

I am not sure how to count revisions. Much of the language in this poem had many different shapes before it ended up in this iteration—eight or nine, at least. And then there is the fiddling—changing a word here and there, reconsidering the lines as interval of sounds, as units of meaning. I remember there were some versions in couplets, but those seemed clunky and heavy-handed.

Three or four years elapsed between the notebook entries and the poem showing up in the book Oracle Figures (Ausable, 2003).

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

I do not believe in inspiration.

I think that there are times when things do open up before one, as if a gift from some unknown source, but those times are usually because one has prepared oneself for writing—reading, thinking, note-taking, conversation, meditation, brooding, daydreaming, fretting.

One gets to a time and space where one has the chance to write (for me that is usually the summer months when I am not teaching) and all that preparation makes the poem that ends up getting made possible.

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

From the start a four or five beat line seemed the normative length of the lines. When I am writing quickly, which is often what early drafting is for me, I tend to write lines between seven and eleven syllables. The tercets felt like the right stanza almost from the start, creating a nice counterpoint between the two headlong main sentences in the poem and the cataloging habits of the lines.

When I begin almost any poem, I find myself counting something—syllables, beats, words—because I want the lines to be a space I can work within. This initial count is often adjust or abandoned as suits the poem that begins to take shape.

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 do not have any rules about when to send poems out. I tend to send them out when I have finished working on them. Sometimes that is within days, sometimes many months. This poem I think waited a couple of months and saw a little tinkering here and there before I sent it out. J. D. McClatchy at the Yale Review was kind enough to give it a home and let it find its first readers.

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

I have written about the old brickyard quarry in several poems over the years—an old abandoned brickworks near where I grew up. The quarry had filled with water and we used it as a swimming hole. When McClatchy accepted the poem, he commented on its “abstract nature,” and it is the most hermetic poem I have written on this subject, and yet it is direct as well—the image at the end is not just a figure, but a story I remember as if it were yesterday. A teenager diving from the quarry’s sheer edge missed the water’s edge and broke his neck and the body sunk into the water and had to be retrieved. He must have been swimming there alone in the evening and it was only the following day he was discovered.

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

At this time I was reading Stevens, Milosz, Ondaatje, Brigit Kelly, and others. I am not sure about influences, but I do think each of these poets has a meditative habit that I hope is in evidence in this poem.

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

I imagine a reader who loves all the poets I love, but even more so.

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem when it was still in process? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

At this time a group of poet friends read all my poems: Steve Schreiner, Allison Funk, Jeff Hamilton, Jason Sommer, and Jennifer Atkinson. An eclectic group and as a result I received great commentary from readers who might not love all the poets I love.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This is question probably best answered by someone else.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I hope it is finished, and then abandoned, given up and over to reader. The act of making the poem is the most intimate relationship I have with a poem. In re-reading this poem to answer your questions, I find myself curious about what formal, philosophical, and aesthetical concerns were haunting me back in the late 1990s. For all the assertions in the poems, I sense that much that gets said is really in the form of a question.