Richard Frost

Richard Frost’s most recent collection of poems is Neighbor Blood, from Sarabande Books. During the past sixty years his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, New England Review, Poetry, Harper’s Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, and many other journals. He is a working jazz drummer and is Emeritus Professor of English at the State University College, Oneonta, NY.


ONE MORNING

My brother’s wife phones me and says I’d better drive over
right away for what will probably be the last visit,
so I get in my mother’s old Buick and two hours later
I’m at their apartment at Smugglers’ Village in Stockton.
My brother’s life has been a mess all along.
He came out of the war a drunk, lost on the horses,
failed in real estate and fiction writing,
got a good job and wrecked two company cars.
He is alternately charming and a bully, and I probably
wouldn’t be his friend if he were not my brother.
Now he is dying of brain cancer. The surgeons
have removed an apricot-sized tumor from the back
of his head. He has regained the power of speech
but is dying fast. Here I find him standing
at the door in his brown leather jacket
and the blue knit sailor’s cap to hide his baldness.
No one has told him that he is going to die,
and like everyone else he believes he will live forever.
The first thing he tells me is that he has gained two pounds.
On his way back! He told his doctor to turn off the switch
if they couldn’t get the whole tumor. His doctor
let him wake up, so that means they took out the cancer,
and now he will have a long, gradual recovery,
which is all a “hell of a problem.” He is six feet tall
and weighs in at a hundred and twelve. Do I want some Scotch?
Back in the kitchen, his wife flits to and fro,
fixing a sandwich. She has hidden her bottles
for twenty years in the laundry basket,
behind the canned preserves and under the dresser.
She can’t remember things. Their little terrier
Packy hysterically yaps, rattling his claws
on the picture window, jumping down from the couch
and skidding into the kitchen. Do I want some Scotch?
Yes. And we talk about the war, our father,
the cars we’ve owned, the family fishing vacations.
My brother’s skin is yellow, and his eyes
are a very clear blue. He remembers the time
he was on the Ralph Edwards television show
This is Your Life, because he’d been a friend
of the Chicago policeman whose life this was. We talk
about this for a half hour. Do I want
more Scotch? Yes. His wife brings sandwiches
and three capsules for my brother. I am not making sense
because the dog wants out and my brother’s wife
is back there crying, and finally all I remember
is that we laugh about something. My brother and I
laugh about something we did. It is about
the time he faked an earthquake, or ate the ant
crawling along the drainboard, or stole the chairs
from the restaurant. I will never remember exactly
what it is we laugh about, but we laugh.
Then I drive home, across the bay
in the evening. It makes no sense at all.
I come home, and my brother’s wife is right
about that being the last visit.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

My brother, fifteen years older and my only sibling, was my hero and role model and finally, as the poem suggests, a grand failure in life. He worked himself up to a high executive position with Pacific Gas & Electric and then self-destructed—killed himself with booze and cigarettes. He’s the subject of several of my poems. He showed me a lot about how to live and how not to.

How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts? Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears? How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

Some of my brother poems were stitched and unstitched for years. This one wrote itself pretty quickly, probably in less than a month. It’s a fairly straightforward telling. In a sense, my brother poems were handed to me by the unfortunate circumstances I wanted to set into order. The sweat and tears were in the events and needed to be turned into words that could suggest them to the reader. My main “technique” was to tell it in the loose five-stress lines that come naturally to me after long practice in the old forms. It’s regular talking, with the added pulse.

As a jazz musician, has music influenced your sense of the poetic line in any palpable way?

People always ask whether for me there’s cross-fertilization between jazz and poetry, since I’m a drummer. Music came naturally to me—I learned the forms before I knew what I’d learned. Poetry too was something like that. But they’re quite different. With my kind of music, it’s a simultaneous combining of old structures and improvised utterance, invented as it goes along, each moment a step in a composition created in real time. Poetry is more like formal musical composition. You can take as long as you wish piecing the thing together, and in the end the effect must be that of a natural sequence in real time. With that difference understood, I will say that probably the same sensitivity, comprehensions of rhythmic and tonal patterns, all the stuff that lets me play music, must be working somehow also when I’m writing.

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?

The practice varies, but I’ve learned to wait awhile. Maybe the longer the better! (But, being practical, sooner or later one must turn the beast loose.) After the poem cools off for a week or two, one sees it more judiciously and can find the necessary tuning. I can always get back into the original feeling and revise, better after such a wait.

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

In this poem I didn’t lie as much as I often do. I’ve even lied about my brother. But in this case, I was given some pretty good whole cloth. Their dog actually was named Packy. Of course, it’s a narrative poem—which is what I do. I’m not smart enough to be a lyric poet like my wife, Carol Frost. She has flashes of metaphor and meditative insight that I wonder at and can’t approach. It’s probably why we’ve stayed together so happily for forty years. I love lyric poetry, yet I fall so naturally into storytelling. First comes one thing, then another, and next… It’s how my mind works. It gives me a chance to talk about the world as if I’m watching it happen, and I can remark about it as it goes along.

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

Influences? Donne, Wilbur, Hopkins, Hall, Keats, Dobyns, Dickinson, Cummings, Blake, Justice, Chaucer, Whitman, Wright, Rilke, Stevens, Marvell, Thomas, Pope, Browning, Bishop, Shakespeare, Collins… Oh, boy!

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

My ideal reader is someone like myself; or a beautiful, appreciative woman; or my dead brother. Mainly, someone who can hear and understand the language, and who understands irony.

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’m not in cahoots with a group, but I always ask Carol to look at my first draft, and I look at hers. I’m often helpful down on the punctuation and grammar level and with other small important matters. Carol tells me enormously important things, like the need to develop the poem beyond the elementary stage where I’m stuck or prematurely satisfied.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s one of my running narratives, like a lot of the others. Then I have the pithy ones.

What is American about this poem?

I suppose that the basic events of the poem, with details changed, could translate into any other culture; language, more than anything else, is what makes it American. That’s when I really do follow in the steps of Whitman, as best I can. He began (overblown as his language often is) the American sound in our poetry.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Abandoned, with the exciting delusion that it’s finished. I reserve the right to add, delete, make any changes as long as I live. After that, it stays as it is.

Sandra Beasley

Sandra Beasley won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize for Theories of Falling, selected by Marie Howe. Her poems have also appeared in Verse Daily, Slate, The Believer, AGNI online, Blackbird, and the Black Warrior Review Chapbook Series. Honors for her work include the 2008 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and fellowships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, and VCCA. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she serves on the board of the Writer’s Center and periodically contributes to the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. She is working on Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a memoir forthcoming from Crown.


METRO SECTION, PAGE 4

For Big Ryan

I didn’t know you’d left grad school,
joined up, didn’t know your first name

was really Donald. Came under
heavy fire in Ubaydi. I read fire

& think absurdly of a red blanket,
as if the insurgents tucked you in,

& though I know you have died,
how you must be hating the desert.

When your dorm room had no A/C,
you declared Rogers 100 was Hotter

than two rats fucking in a wool sock.
How many years? Five? Seven?

I was nothing to you, the girlfriend
of a friend. Already the you I picture

smudges, stenciled over by the Marine
you became: hair clipped at the temples,

a ROTC t-shirt you probably never wore.
You are quoted, months ago, as saying

Dad, if I die, I did it doing my duty
and protecting my country. History

is a hand folding over you,
a magician stealing the coin.


November 18, 2005


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem started in the Metro Section. On page four. “Marine from Va. Killed in Iraq Firefight.” I’m not usually so literal in my titles, but there you have it. My first hint of Big Ryan’s death came from my ex-boyfriend’s (this will date me) AIM away message, which included his proper name, what looked like birth/death dates, and four or five classic quotes including the one about Rogers 100. I dismissed the away message as some sort of weird joke—Ryan had gotten hitched, maybe, and his life as a “free man” was over. But less than an hour later I was reading the Washington Post, and there he was.

I wrote the poem within the day. The misreading of “came under fire” as a “red blanket” came first, within the moment. Between that and the two direct quotes—one from the article, the other courtesy of my ex—I had the poem’s arc in place.

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

Gosh...maybe three revisions, over the course of a week. With a meeting of my then-writing group during that week, which helped. My poems go from first draft to final draft in relatively short time. I don’t say that to mean I don’t revise: I revise voraciously, word by word, but I tend to integrate it in the initial drafting, which often involves a four to six hour burst of attention to a poem that fits on a single page.

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

When you’re working in the mode of elegy, crediting your own sweat and tears feels
pretty crass. On a craft level, I suppose I was fortunate in that the death was of someone close enough to register, but not of such an intimate relation that raw grief obscured my job as a poet approaching the topic. On a personal level: aw hell. Big Ryan, the best lines are just things you said in the first place.

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

One of the first things I do after drafting a free verse poem is take out all the line breaks—moving it back up into prose—checking that the syntax and grammar work, then re-breaking it all over again. The editor in me won’t tolerate a lot of indeterminate pronouns or tense confusion. The line lengths, the voice, came very naturally.

The closest thing to a poet’s indulgence here is the use of ampersands in lieu of “and.” You can find this affect in other poems from Theories of Falling (“The Puritans”), all composed at about the same time, all some of the earliest work in the book. The ampersands are a nod towards momentum. I felt that it was important for the poem to move fast: to try and capture the speaker’s growing understanding of what has happened in something like real time.

The hardest part for me was having the speaker tackle her own credibility and ask herself if what she is really mourning is the man, or her image of the man, a romanticized connection to a part of her life now past. But that was where the risk was, so that was where I had to go. An elegy without risk borders on exploitative sentiment.

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

Well…funny story. Shortly after I won the New Issues Prize in 2007, a friend solicited some poems for an online journal she was working with at the time. I sent this poem along, and the editor wrote to say he would like to run it in his Autumn issue. In the meantime the frontmatter for my book was due, so I dutifully entered it as a “first appeared in” credit. Autumn came…autumn went…no publication that I ever saw.

I wish I could say it was the only such case—in my book, or in the books of many other poets I know. I welcome the notion of poetry as a gift economy, but I think it’s a shame when editors use that to absolve themselves of accountability. Dream big, solicit widely, but back it up at the end of the day.

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 submit for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is at the request of an editor; sometimes it as the reading period closes for a brass ring of a journal; sometimes it is a journal that feels like a safe port for a well-loved but hard-to-place poem; sometimes it is just for immediate gratification, that momentary mood lift as I press a stamp to the envelope.

I don’t hesitate to send out a brand-new poem if the opportunity seems right. Some of my poem-a-day drafts have been revised and accepted by journals in less than a month’s turnaround. My chapbook of sestinas for Black Warrior Review, Bitch and Brew, was being written right up to the deadline. My work right now celebrates the values of speed, clarity, humor, music; I think these qualities thrive when writing under pressure. There are modes I will return to sooner or later—meditative poems, ekphrasis, multi-sectioned sequences—that will require longer gestation periods. I’ll honor that.

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

For this poem I’ve completely torn away the fictive veil that protects the poet from accusations of autobiography. (Though note how I still carefully differentiate between “the poet” and “the speaker”—years of workshop experience on display!) I hope I did justice to the people whose opinion on this poem really matters. . . . I’m not one of them. When I read this poem at Busboys & Poets, a venue in Washington, D.C., I was approached afterward by a William & Mary graduate who recognized Big Ryan. She probably knew him better than I did, and she liked the poem. That was good.

Is this a narrative poem?

Sure. It’s an unusual variant on narrative, because the story follows the speaker’s developing cognition of an event that took place outside her knowledge. I don’t relate the timeline of the attack in Ubaydi, which could be called the driving event of the poem.

On the other hand, a definition of “lyric” is a poem that privileges the speaker’s mindset over the external world. If this poem starred a fictive soldier and a generic “she” as speaker, without factual antecedents, and I was a critic, not the poet, I might call it a lyric.

In the wrong hands, the narrative/lyric divide is one of the great straw men of lit-crit. The great poems have both. Even in The Iliad, Homer was careful to build in descriptive passages that worked as mini-lyrics and proved his value, amidst all that marshalled history, in the role of delivering poet.

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

Blame those ampersands on Nick Flynn and Some Ether. That’s a book I turn to again and again when I’m trying to rally in my writing. And in the process of answering these questions I’m remembering a Sharon Olds poem in which she recounts learning of an ex-boyfriend’s death from the radio, as she’s reading The New York Times. “First Love (for Averell)” appears in The Gold Cell. If I loved the poem enough to remember it now, I’m sure it influenced me then.

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

Do I want the careful reader, spectacled, savoring these poems by the fireside with a tumbler of rye? Do I want the excited undergrad with a well-creased book, gulping poetry down by the mouthful between bus stops? Do I want the powerful reader/editor who can pick up the phone and say “Sandra Beasley, send me your next book manuscript! I must have it!” Do I want my aunt, who doesn’t read much poetry, to say “Now that. That I get. That’s pretty good”?

I want all those things. I’m greedy.

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?

As I mentioned, at the time I was meeting once a month with a small writing group. But I quit the group soon afterwards. I felt like the group’s feedback clung to the tenets of the poems I had been turning in, and resisted principles I wanted to explore—using more surrealism, more associative leaps, abandoning a coherent and personifiable speaker.

Marie Howe told me I needed to find some good readers, some trusted readers, and I guess I’m still looking. Part of the problem is that my cohort of poets is still moving around—changing jobs, homes, getting married, having first children—and asking for them to read even one poem feels like a rare favor, not part of an ongoing ritual.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

The ending of the poem takes an unusually large leap into metaphor; usually my endings are a bit more organic, often offering some kind of narrative conclusion. But how does a poet create closure in the wake of the death of someone interrupted mid-stride? Endings are always problematic in the elegiac mode.

Mentions of stage-magic show up throughout Theories of Falling: Houdini makes a cameo in one poem, and a tasseled girl loads a gun with blanks in another. Maybe the ending is lazy, drawing upon a comfortable body of imagery, the poet’s security blanket. But I don’t think so. The magician who steals the coin—not to re-appear it behind your ear, necessarily, but to tuck in his pocket before moving on to the next mark—that feels very indicative of this particular war. To close your hand over something, to pin a medal on it, to sign proclamation #1,001; as if any of these things could vanish a loss.

What is American about this poem?

This poem is in the last section of Theories of Falling, “This Silver Body,” a section of what I think of as entirely American poems, bird’s-eye-view poems that take a look at culture beyond the self. Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are onto something with their celebrations of America’s plurality, its sweats and sacrifices and foolish moxies and sad, incremental epics. This poem has two sister poems, “Theories of Non-Violence” and “My Los Alamos,” that can be found in Theories and elsewhere on the web.

Death in wartime is not uniquely American. But this is an American death, and this is an American elegy—self-aware, regretful, littered with the mundane. Coming from a military family myself, I find it strange that our culture has taken to talking about “America” versus “America at war in Iraq.” It’s the same country. You can’t dissociate yourself just because you voted for Barack Obama and you wish it wasn’t still going on. It’s only when someone “unlikely”—an upwardly mobile student with a lot of options, well on his way to a Ph.D.—joins up voluntarily, and is killed, that some folks are faced with this reality.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. How could I not finish it? Who are these ego-less poets who can claim to abandon their poems? They seem like they’d be good drinking buddies.

Dan Albergotti

Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. In 2008, his poem “What They’re Doing” was selected for Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, Albergotti currently teaches creative writing and literature courses and edits the online journal Waccamaw at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC.


VESTIBULE


I sometimes wish I could find Cindy
to thank her for agreeing with my fine idea
that we sneak into the university chapel
late one night in 1983 to make love.
I don't just want to thank her for giving me
the trump card — “house of worship”—
I hold in every stupid party game that begins,
“Where's the strangest place you've ever . . . ?”
No, I want to thank her for the truth of it.
For knowing that the heart is holy even when
our own hearts were so frail and callow.
Truth: it was 1983; we were nineteen years old;
we lay below the altar and preached a quiet sermon
not just on the divinity of skin, but on the grace
of the heart beneath. It was the only homily
we knew, and our souls were beatified.
And if you say sentiment and cliché, then that
is what you say. What I know is what is sacred.
Lord of this other world, let me recall that night.
Let me again hear how our whispered exclamations
near the end seemed like rising hymnal rhythm,
and let me feel how those forgotten words came
from somewhere else and meant something.
Something, if only to the single moth
that, in the darkened air of that chapel,
fluttered its dusty wings around our heads.



When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I believe it was early 2004. I have a terrible time remembering these things. I don’t keep good records of draft composition, so I can’t say for certain. I do have an old note card that indicates I sent it out to a journal in April of 2004. How the poem started is an even murkier memory. I know that I’d toyed with writing a poem on that subject for a while, but how it came into this form—what initiated it—at that time I’m quite unsure. I may have been thinking about the structure I’d decided on for my full manuscript around that time. “Vestibule” ends up serving a prefatory function in that organization. More on that later.

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

Not many. Aside from a few words changed here or there, this one pretty much came out whole. I’d say that’s true for about half my poems. I’m obsessive about working ideas and rhythms and lines in my head, but I’m not as diligent as I wish I could make myself when it comes to working over poems on the page or screen. For me (and I don’t recommend this approach to my students, or anyone else for that matter) the majority of the work is often done before the first line is written. I’ve referred to this “method” before in an interview with Town Creek Poetry, where I liken my process to making soup.

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

I certainly don’t believe there’s a magic wind floating out there biding its time before willfully flowing through me to produce a divine text. But at the same time, I don’t think creating a poem is a purely mechanical, conscious process. I believe in trusting the subconscious mind. I think it’s an essential part of realizing yourself as a poet (or as any other sort of artist). If your art is entirely within the realm of your articulation, I don’t believe you’ve begun to tap your potential. As for how much of this poem is “received,” I’ll just say that I have no idea where the dusty-winged moth came from. I don’t know why it flew into my poem, but I’m very happy it’s there now.

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

No conscious employment of form or technique in this one. But I hope that the poem’s free verse lines reflect my experience with meter. I will always argue that the free verse poet who has never written in the old formal meters has denied him- or herself incredibly valuable lessons about rhythm that cannot be learned in any other way. I think—I hope—that I write a stronger free verse precisely because I’ve written sonnets and villanelles.

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 does vary from poem to poem. But it’s hard to be a very good judge of one’s own poem’s status. Sometimes I feel very confident that a poem is ready only to realize much later that it wasn’t. Other times I think a poem isn’t entirely there but put it in the mail against my “better judgment” and then see it snatched up by the first editor and reveal itself, over time, to be wholly realized in that form. In the case of “Vestibule,” I believe I sent it out pretty soon after composition—in the spring of 2004—for consideration by journals. I never simultaneously submit work, so the poem spent a few years auditioning for 8-10 journal editors, returning home each time. It first saw print in The Boatloads in April 2008.

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

When I present this poem at a reading, I often follow it with this reminder to the audience: “Remember, you can never safely assume that the first-person speaker of a poem is autobiographical. Of course, you can’t rule it out either.”

Is this a narrative poem?

I’d probably call it “meditative” before narrative, but more and more I find those sorts of distinctions to be unhelpful and distracting. I’d call it a poem. I don’t mean to disrespect the question—I’m just tired of poetic taxonomy these days.

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

I don’t know who I was reading, but I can say that the voice of Jack Gilbert is often in my ear. I think you can see a little of his influence on this poem, both in its stichic structure and its speaking of memory in sacred terms. But I say that with the knowledge that the author is usually the least qualified to make such observations. For all I know, my reading of Alan Shapiro or Brigit Pegeen Kelly could be all over this poem in a way I cannot see.

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

My ideal reader is the person born a couple hundred years from now who might read my poem and find it meaningful to his or her life.

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 don’t have a regular group of readers. I used to share my work in process with others a good bit, but it’s a rarity now. I think it’s natural for that just to fade away after a while.

“Vestibule” is the first poem (or proem) in your first book. What made you decide to give it such a place of prominence in the manuscript?

The book’s organization is roughly liturgical, and I thought a poem titled after the entryway to a church would be an appropriate starting place. There’s also that audacious line, “What I know is what is sacred.” I thought that if I’m going to be arrogant enough to write that line, I should be bold enough to present it up front.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I feel particularly unqualified to answer that question meaningfully (see my answer to the “influences” question above). I think that, more often than not, we’re our own worst critics—not in the standard use of that cliché, but in the sense that we are unlikely to see what is most important or relevant in our own work. So, with respect, I’ll pass on the attempt.

What is American about this poem?

I think one of the particularly American elements is not so much in the poem itself, but in the sense of transgression that’s the result of its American context. I imagine that if you conducted a poll, you’d find a much higher percentage of Americans than of Europeans offended by the idea of coitus in a church building. We’ve got a lot more uptight prudes on this side of the Atlantic.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Oh, far be it from me to wrestle with Paul Valéry. Abandoned, abandoned, all of them abandoned! But not abandoned until, as urged by Beckett, I had “failed better.” At least I hope so.

Richard Newman

Richard Newman’s newest book of poems, Domestic Fugues (Steel Toe Books), appeared in the fall of 2010. He is also the author of Borrowed Towns (Word Press, 2005) and several chapbooks, including 24 Tall Boys: Dark Verse for Light Times (Snark Publishing/Firecracker Press, 2007). His poems have recently appeared in Best American Poetry, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry East, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He lives with his wife and daughter in St. Louis, where he teaches at Washington University and St. Louis Community College and edits River Styx.



ASH

for John Hilgert

With your cock-eyed rhythm you couldn’t play your way
out of a 12-bar blues with your eyes closed,
so we’d strum a minute and spend the rest of the night
sighing and telling lies. Drowsy from pot roast,
we’d sprawl across the back porch and guzzle
Rolling Rocks like children eat chocolate,
though even then you complained of stomach pains,
and though I’d smoke a pack of cigarettes,
you would be the one we’d lose to cancer.
One night my backyard neighbor built a bonfire,
burning what must have been a decade’s worth
of newspapers and phonebooks, who knows what—
wedding pictures, love letters? In a month
he’d sell his house and move. “Gee,”
you said, “that must feel really really good.”
We watched his silhouette stalking back and forth,
tossing more and more things onto the fire,
each time sending up a fountain of sparks
blinking orange then drifting over the fence
into our yard, winking out and whitening
as they fluttered to us and settled on the porch
like a flock of grizzled gulls, a silent ash-storm.
We breathed and tasted ash, and you lay peppered
and unperturbed, an empty on your chest.
“You asleep?” I wondered. “No,” you said,
“just taking in the night. And your neighbor’s past.
But I wouldn’t mind another beer.” Inside,
I scrounged another stale cigarette,
bleeped the messages from my own ex-wife
(“Who cares,” you’d say, “she’ll still be pissed tomorrow.”)
and grabbed a few more beers for each of us,
but back out on the porch I found you gone,
drawn to the dying fire like a moth
or child, pushing your way through leafy greens,
my dogwoods, further into the dark. Below me,
the whole porch mottled in white and gray except
the blank space where your body had lain, your outline
in ash, and you, covered in the ashen remains
of what can only cling to us, the living.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I inherited this big bear of a guy, John Hilgert, when I started editing River Styx. He had been the magazine’s Art Editor when it was about ready to collapse. Together we changed the look and feel, size and format. Subscriptions had plummeted to double digits, so we wanted to make the magazine more compelling and appealing, livelier and more visual, with color covers and illustrations and art—as he said, “so the words and pictures talk to each other.” John was great fun to work with (great ideas, epic water gun fights in the building), and he soon became one of my best friends and drinking buddies.

Several years later, although I knew he was fighting a losing battle against cancer, his death stunned me. His wife, Betsy, asked me to write a poem for his memorial service, which I figured would be packed—John was not only a talented artist but a popular teacher. I’m sure the pressure is nothing like being asked to write an inaugural poem for the president, but it felt claustrophobic for me. I had no ideas, nothing that didn’t feel tired, obvious, sentimental, clichéd, and stupid, and I was about to call Betsy and apologize, but then the day before the service I was looking at his picture and suddenly I could hear John’s voice saying some of the funny things he used to say, particularly one time when we were grilling in my backyard and he looked over at my neighbor burning all of his stuff and said, “That must feel really good.” I got the image of the ash and the whole poem came pretty quickly from there, pretty much one draft with a little light editing months after I’d read the poem at the memorial.

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

My best poems either come all of a sudden, almost out of nowhere, in pretty much one draft, or I have to work and work draft after draft until I get it right. I tend to hate revising after a certain point, and if I don’t feel there’s much potential, I won’t waste any time working on it. It’s easier to throw it away and start something else. That’s not to say most of the poems from Borrowed Towns or Domestic Fugues haven’t gone through a number of drafts—it’s more accurate to say I wish those sudden one-draft moments came more often than they did, but then who doesn’t. “Ash” feels like a lucky gift to me—all I had to do was unwrap it.

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

“Ash” is in a very loose blank verse, written back when I was playing as much with five-stress accentual lines as regular iambic pentameter. Though I enjoyed an erratic iambic pulse, I cared much more about beats than feet, and I found strict accentual syllabic patterns unnatural, boring, and plodding. Since then, maybe because my own temperament has evened out, my meter has grown more regular. Maybe I’ve grown unnatural, boring, and plodding.

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

It’s funny that you ask. “Ash” is the one time I published my own poem in River Styx. Several board members asked me to include it, and since we were dedicating a whole issue to John, featuring much of his art on the covers and inside, I agreed. The funny part is some people’s reactions to me publishing my own poem. We even had some River Styx interns who were in a poetry class taught by an MFA student who apparently didn’t think much of me as a writer or editor. The interns told me that he sanctimoniously told the class, “Newman must be very proud to be notching his publication belt by publishing his own poems.” To that guy, I’d like to send out a very hearty fuck you. Publishing that poem in that issue, with so much of John’s art, was one of the better decisions I’ve made as an editor, and it reached a lot of people, which is the best we can hope for in this business unless we’re out for prizes, awards, and belt-notching publications.

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

Regarding how much of that poem is true, I honestly don’t remember. The events in the poem certainly didn’t happen that way—it’s more a hodgepodge of different scenes and quotes from different places, all stuck together with some outright lies to make a central narrative. Some of the quotes John says in the poem he actually didn’t even say, but I can’t remember which ones anymore. After I read the poem at the memorial, dozens of people came up to me or emailed me and said, “You really captured John’s voice in that poem—I could really hear him.” He may not have said those things, but those are exactly the kind of things John would have said, likely even the way he would have said it. As with most poems, I felt I needed to tell some lies to get at a greater (more universal and more entertaining) truth.

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

I’m certain at the time that I was reading Frost and Larkin, because I always go back to Frost and Larkin. At that time I was also reading and reviewing books by Rodney Jones, Andrew Hudgins, and Lucia Perillo.

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

I always have an audience in mind when I write a poem—my wife, various friends, family members, a colleague or neighbor, the people in my workshop group, favorite living or dead poets. With “Ash,” I assembled in my mind a handful of specific people, friends and colleagues who knew and loved John and keenly felt his death. With the dialogue and images, particularly the last image, I wanted to move them the way I was moved by John’s absence in the world, unite us, I suppose, in a communal gesture around this poem and his absence. Of course I also hoped, although probably later, that the poem had a more universal appeal beyond John’s circle of friends.

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?

The first group I shared that poem with was probably the 250 people at the memorial. These days, I usually show early drafts to my wife, who is also a poet and a good close reader. I was in an online workshop group called KFM. It was formed by a bunch of Fellows at the Sewanee Writers Conference and named after a game we played on the porch at the French House—“Kill, Fuck, or Marry.” We sent poems to the group once a month over the last three or four years, but we’re currently on hiatus.

What is American about this poem?

The opening 12-bar blues reference makes it American, right? Despite the Larkin influence, I do think that my speech rhythms and lines are distinctly American, specifically Midwestern. My work is influenced by the Midwestern landscapes, many of which are flat, bleak, and dreary, yet sometimes wondrously expansive. That’s actually another thing John Hilgert and I shared. Many of his best photographs were these huge breathtaking rural landscape images. Coincidentally, while I was writing about people in rural southern Illinois, where my people come from and where I spent much of my childhood, he was taking pictures of it. A couple years before he died, we did a collaborative show together at what they now call The Contemporary—his photographs and my poems on the walls, along with watertower and grain elevator sculptures by Christina Shmigel. We called the show Bottomlands. That’s one of his pictures from Bottomlands on the cover of my first book, Borrowed Towns—a picture of Carmi, Illinois, where my family comes from, where my mom was raised, where our family cemetery lies tucked between silty cornfields, and where my brother still lives today. I don’t think John knew all that when he took the picture, and we discovered we were working on similar projects from two different ends after we’d already known each other and liked each other’s work for years. I have other images from that show in my study behind me where I write.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both. It came out so fast as an organic whole, and I wanted to retain much of that spontaneous voice, spirit, energy, naturalness, and original architecture. Rereading it now, I want to fix the meter, which in some places could probably be done easily enough by shifting some line breaks. But what’s done is done, and it’s nothing like what I’m working on now—very impersonal, very formal, very much a kind of poetry that looks closely at the world, not gazing at the self. We have to learn to live with the flaws.