Steve Scafidi

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








TO WHOEVER SET MY TRUCK ON FIRE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did you ever find the guy?

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

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

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

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes.

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

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

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

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

What is American about this poem?

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

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

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

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

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

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

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

Ron Slate

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

BELGIUM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next time it’s mine.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this a narrative poem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

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

What is American about this poem?

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

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

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

Michael Ryan

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


OUTSIDE

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


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this a narrative poem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

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

What is American about this poem?

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

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

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

Dorianne Laux

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


FACTS ABOUT THE MOON

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


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this a narrative poem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

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

What is American about this poem?

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