Jennifer Chang

Jennifer Chang’s first book The History of Anonymity was an inaugural selection of the VQR Poetry Series and was published in 2008 by University of Georgia Press. She has received recent fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and new poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Believer, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, and A Public Space. A Ph.D. candidate in English at UVA, she is writing a dissertation on race and the modernist pastoral.


OBEDIENCE, OR THE LYING TALE

I will do everything you tell me, Mother.
I will charm three gold hairs
from the demon's head.
I will choke the mouse that gnaws
an apple tree's roots and keep its skin
for a glove. To the wolf, I will be
pretty and kind, and curtsy
his crossing of my path.

The forest, vocal
even in its somber tread, rages.
A slope ends in a pit of foxes
drunk on rotten brambles of berries,
and the raccoons ransack
a rabbit's unmasked hole.
What do they find but a winter's heap
of droppings? A stolen nest, the cracked shell

of another creature's child.
I imagine this is the rabbit way,
and I will not stray, Mother,
into the forest's thick,
where the trees meet the dark,
though I have known misgivings
of light as a hot hand that flickers
against my neck. The path ends

at a river I must cross. I will wait
for the ferryman
to motion me through. Into the waves,
he etches with his oar
a new story: a silent girl runs away,
a silent girl is never safe.
I will take his oar in my hand. I will learn
the boat's rocking and bring myself back

and forth. To be good
is the hurricane of caution.
I will know indecision's rowing,
the water I lap into my lap
as he shakes his withered head.
Behind me is the forest. Before me
the field, a loose run of grass. I stay
in the river, Mother, I study escape.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

My husband, who is also a poet, and I were living in a small one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. I had just come home from The MacDowell Colony, where I worked in a bark-covered cottage; the cottage was bigger than our apartment and was surrounded by hundreds of acres of woods. I had been there from April to May 2002. Soon after, I wrote the poem partly because I wanted to return to that sanctuary of quiet and expansion. The poem also continued many of the preoccupations (fairy tales and the enigmas of childhood and of nature) I had identified and refined during my residency. I remember beginning with the title, a strategy I practiced often back then because it often helped to launch me into a poetic space. I suppose I associated “obedience” with the confinement of our small apartment and “lying” with the freedom of imaginative roaming and the forest. But that sounds like there was much more intentionality in the process; in truth, I missed writing intensively, without the interruptions of daily life, and I was, as I often am, longing for poems and hoping that this could be a poem that would “take.”

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

Seven or eight. I had trouble figuring out the stanzaic form. It was one stanza and then it was all different stanza lengths. As I worked on it, I recognized that the logic of the poem, the circularity and indecisiveness of the speaker’s thinking, sort of resembled the sestina, so I tried to invoke the sestina structurally. I organized the next draft into six sestets and a tercet. I was thinking of the revision process that Rita Dove went through in completing her great poem “Parsley.” I’m sure no one thinks “sestina” or “Parsley” when they read “Obedience,” but I’ve learned a lot about craft from working in form and reading that poem and its drafts. The stanzaic pattern of the sestina didn’t work and I ultimately settled on five octaves. Such symmetry, I think, heightens the tension by presenting an orderliness that neither the speaker nor her environment expresses. The initial writing and revision took a couple weeks and months later I further revised the first two stanzas to make their music more fluid. When it was first accepted for publication, I did more cuts to quicken the poem’s pace. I’m still not happy with the first two stanzas.

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

Yes. But I rarely reach inspiration without steady, ongoing effort. I’ll admit that when I began writing this poem I felt no inspiration whatsoever and as I scribbled out the forest scene I suppose I “received” the phrase “to be good is the hurricane of caution.” I persisted in completing this poem mostly because I was curious about what I could construct from that phrase and where it would take me.

Also, the poem was “received” in a more literal sense. I recently re-read “Little Red-Riding Hood” and discovered that I unwittingly lifted the phrase “I will do everything you tell me, Mother” from that tale. The exact phrase. It was absolutely unintentional. That’s not inspiration so much as the frequency I must have picked up while writing “Obedience.” (Or plain theft!) I was thinking of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, though the poem is not based on any of these tales. It’s more a rendering of the psychological atmosphere I perceived in fairy tales I’d been reading at the time.

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

I’d submitted the poem four times in 2003 and it was accepted in April 2004 by VQR, where the poem appeared over a year later. I actually thought it was a weak poem and had left it out of manuscript for a long time, but the editor really liked it and then it was my first poem to appear on Poetry Daily, who then selected it for their print anthology. And then in 2007 Henry Holt reprinted it in an English textbook for middle school students. And then you interviewed me about it. Which goes to show that a writer is not always the best reader of her own work. When I was sitting down with the final copyedits, my husband told me that I had to put the poem back in. I’m glad I listened to him.

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?

About six months. I don’t have any rules, but I tend to wait a month or so before submitting a poem. I’m terrified of embarrassing myself, so I like to be sure before I entertain the possibility of giving any poem a public record.

Is this a narrative poem?

This is a lyric poem. However, I abide by the conception of lyric as the displacement of narrative and this lyric poem displaces narrative less rigorously than other poems in The History of Anonymity.

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

In the spring and summer of 2002 I remember reading quite intensely Jorie Graham’s The End of Beauty and Hybrids of Ghosts and Plants, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, and Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters.

I can’t say these were very influential to “Obedience” in particular, but I was reading them repeatedly while working on The History of Anonymity. Other persistent influences during that time were Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, God and Plainwater, Simone Weil’s Gravity & Grace, Charles Wright, Sylvia Plath’s Colossus and Ariel, Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris and Meadowlands, and, of course, Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Current influences are T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, John Donne, the letters of Heloise and Abelard, Franz Kafka’s diaries, Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal, Fanny Howe’s Gone and The Wedding Dress, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Willis’s Meteoric Flowers. These are the writers and texts directly affecting my writing right now.

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

Other solitudes and liars. Seriously, I don’t have any particular audience in mind, though I do sincerely hope that the poems find their appropriate audience, that they speak to individuals who need to be spoken to, and that they have the capacity to engage with someone intimately and profoundly. If I could identify who these people are, I wouldn’t need to write poems as much as I do. I’d just invite them over for a glass of wine and engage with them in person.

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 vaguely remember showing this and another poem to a friend in San Francisco and I remember he didn’t say a word about it. (Maybe that’s why I thought it was weak!) I do have a couple good friends, with whom I share work, and while I was living in New York I was part of a short-lived yet vigorous writing circle that consisted of dear poet friends who still inspire me. We met three or four times. I have a brilliant friend whose advice I trust completely, but I hadn’t met her yet when I wrote “Obedience.” And my husband is an exceptional reader, though most days we’d rather go out for dinner than pore over each others’ poem drafts.

What is American about this poem?

I love this question—thank you for asking it. I accept many labels for my poems and my person, but I resist the confinement of categorization. Consequently, I have a vast and murky definition of “American.” I know I’m American, but, other than the fact that I was born here, I don’t know what makes me American. In regards to the poem, I’d say it is American because questioning the stability of place leads the speaker to question the stability of identity. Is that too vast and murky?


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

Malena Mörling

Malena Mörling was born in Stockholm and grew up in southern Sweden. She received an MA from New York University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of two books of poetry, Ocean Avenue, winner of The New Issues Press Poetry Prize in 1998 and Astoria published by Pittsburgh Press in 2006. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times Book Review, New Republic, Washington Post Book World, Ploughshares, New England Review and Five Points. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 and was a Research Associate at The School For Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM also in 2008. Her translation of Philip Levine’s book 1933 is due out in Sweden at the end of the summer. She is currently co-editing the anthology Swedish Writers On Writing with Jonas Ellerström, which will be a part of The Writer’s World series from Trinity University Press. She lives in Santa Fe, NM and teaches at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington.


IF THERE IS ANOTHER WORLD

If there is another world,
I think you can take a cab there—
or ride your old bicycle
down Junction Blvd.
past the Paris Suites Hotel
with the Eiffel Tower on the roof
and past the blooming Magnolia and on—
to the corner of 168th Street.
And if you’re inclined to,
you can turn left there
and yield to the blind
as the sign urges us—
especially since it is a state law.
Especially since there is a kind of moth
here on earth
that feeds only on the tears of horses.
Sooner or later we will all cry
from inside our hearts.
Sooner or later even the concrete
will crumble and cry in silence
along with all the lost road signs.
Two days ago 300 televisions
washed up on a beach in Shiomachi, Japan,
after having fallen off a ship in a storm.
They looked like so many
oversized horseshoe crabs
with their screens turned down to the sand.
And if you’re inclined to, you can continue
in the weightless seesaw of the light
through a few more intersections
where people inside their cars
pass you by in space
and where you pass by them,
each car another thought—only heavier.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote it sometime in the Spring of 2005—I remember riding in a car on the Long Island Expressway where the four or five lanes of traffic was moving forward fast together. I was somehow able to hear the line I think as a result of feeling a certain degree of wonder at everything then--that sometimes happens when I am between two places and there is nothing to do but be for a moment. I had traveled this stretch of the expressway many times and often with my notebook—writing down things along the way. The Paris Suites Hotel was one such item that was probably sitting in my notebook for some months. The idea of the “other world” is something that I often think about and I thought then for a moment that ”the other” world was not a separate far off place but that it was right here on the earth and on this side of things.

How many revisions did this poem undergo?

I think a few. It took me awhile to write it—maybe a few weeks—I remember feeling I did not know how long it would be—I thought that perhaps it was going to be much longer than it ended up being.

How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

I think it was a week or two. This poem was definitely a gift. Many of my other poems are not gifts and stubborn and sometimes take months and years to reveal themselves to me or rather it takes me months and sometimes years to see and hear them.

Do you believe in inspiration?

Yes, I do. So much can be accomplished under the spell of inspiration.

How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

Pretty much the whole thing was a gift, it just took some time to hear and know what was to be the length of the poem. As I mentioned, at first, I thought it might be much longer. When I reached the last line I sat for a few days trying to continue to write it. But nothing else happened and I decided to just end it there.

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

I just followed the first two self-enclosed lines and the rest of the lines took their cue from them.

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

I generally don’t have any rules—it is different with every poem.

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

It is of course a conglomeration of both—as most of my poems are. My poems are I guess often little fictions—but it is hard to know.

In this poem 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 the Paris Suites Hotel, “a kind of moth . . . that feeds on the tears of horses,” and “300 televisions / washed up on a beach in Shiomachi” belonged in the same poem together?

I don’t exactly know how but the three things somehow fell together here and they fit together so that pleased me. My oldest son told me about this kind of moth one day—my kids used to watch a lot of nature shows on TV when they were little and as a result their minds have become little libraries of wondrous odd facts of the natural world.

Is this a narrative poem?

Probably not entirely.

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

I think I was reading Federico Garcia Lorca and Rafael Alberti and Larry Levis’s book The Afterlife.

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

No, I am pleased to have anyone—anyone at all to read my poems.

“If There Is another World” is the first poem in your second book, Astoria. What made you decide to give it such a place of prominence in the manuscript?

It seemed a natural choice–an entry point to the rest of the book.

What is American about this poem?

Its setting is American—it is New York City.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Abandoned.


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

Andrew Hudgins

Andrew Hudgins has published six books of poetry: Ecstatic in the Poison (2003), Babylon in a Jar (1998), The Glass Hammer (1995), The Never-Ending (1991), After the Lost War (1988), and Saints and Strangers (1985). His new book, Shut Up, You're Fine!: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children, will be published by The Overlook Press in March 2009, with illustrations by Barry Moser. Hudgins is currently Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at The Ohio State University.


DAY JOB AND NIGHT JOB

After my night job, I sat in class
and ate, every thirteen minutes,
an orange peanut—butter cracker.
Bright grease adorned my notes.

At noon I rushed to my day job
and pushed a broom enough
to keep the boss calm if not happy.
In a hiding place, walled off

by bolts of calico and serge,
I read my masters and copied
Donne, Marlowe, Dickinson, and Frost,
scrawling the words I envied,

so my hand could move as theirs had moved
and learn outside of logic
how the masters wrote. But why? Words
would never heal the sick,

feed the hungry, clothe the naked,
blah, blah, blah.
Why couldn't I be practical,
Dad asked, and study law—

or take a single business class?
I stewed on what and why
till driving into work one day,
a burger on my thigh

and a sweating Coke between my knees,
I yelled, "Because I want to!"—
pained—thrilled!—as I looked down
from somewhere in the blue

and saw beneath my chastened gaze
another slack romantic
chasing his heart like an unleashed dog
chasing a pickup truck.

And then I spilled my Coke. In sugar
I sat and fought a smirk.
I could see my new life clear before me.
It looked the same. Like work.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I began “Day Job and Night Job” after finishing The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood. After four or five years working on that book, my brain was still locked into the autobiographical mode, and I almost compulsively kept going into the time I was making myself into a poet. I liked the idea partly because it was perverse. Writers aren’t supposed to write about writing or being writers because it’s more than a bit solipsistic. Long before, I’d vowed not to do it for that very reason, which added the thrill of a vow violated when I did do it. A few friends got very upset with the poems, and a part of me agreed with them while another part was enjoying the intensity of their unhappy reaction.

I loved Lowell’s poems about being a poet in the making, but as I raced from school to one job to the next and then home to my parents’ house, where I lived through all four years at a small Methodist college in Montgomery, I was acutely troubled that Lowell traded on the fame of his name, his teachers, his friends, to give the poems cachet. It seemed like a logical devolution of the historical tradition of poetry being the province of the aristocrats.

My life, by comparison, was thoroughly devoid of cachet. I went to college a mile from my house, worked at a dry goods warehouse downtown for four hours every afternoon, drove home for dinner, and did a bit of class work till eight o’clock. Then, four nights a week, I drove to my overnight job, where I tended a bedridden retired man, a job I held for five years.

Could a life so mundane and stultifying be made into poems, I wondered. It didn’t seem so. It seemed more likely to keep me from writing at all. But the aesthetic question stuck in my head as something to continue thinking about. As I came to find out, a lot of other poets, before and since, have thought about it too.

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

Gawd, I don’t know. It seems to me like I worked on this poem forever. It began, if I remember right, as blank verse, and I put it through a good number of drafts that way, probably about twenty. At that time, with blank verse, I was writing about that many drafts to set a preliminary version, a version that allowed me to see the issues, shape, and direction of the poem. But the conversational tone of the blank verse wasn’t working and I couldn’t figure out where the poem wanted to go. When I tried it in iambic tetrameter—to speed it up and move it further away from talk and closer to lyric—it started to have more energy. And there it sat for a couple of years, as an unfinished draft in a folder.

Around that time, I was also writing humorous poems in ballad stanzas, something I’d never done before. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of rhyme, and I wanted to see if rhyme might force me deeper into the material. Having an obstacle to overcome can make you think harder about a subject and examine more possibilities that maybe you hadn’t seen before. I liked the way the rhyme can tolerate a good bit of humor and seriousness jostling each other. Not that you can’t do that in free verse or blank verse, but rhyme is an intensifier, given its long tradition in lyrics and humor. And that, I think, enlarges the understanding of the poem—both taking seriously the anxious boy I was and acknowledging that I was overwrought and over-earnest. The mixed tone let me consider the me I was then a little more kindly that I often do.

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

I don’t really believe in inspiration. Some ideas are better than others, obviously, and maybe we can call the better ones inspired. What I do believe in is that sitting down to work every day provides the opportunity for the many small and medium-sized inspirations that make a work of art work.

Now, as I think about it, I need to qualify what I said about inspiration. I do believe that immersing ourselves in a project allows our brains to work on them without our conscious effort. So I have made a rule for myself that if an idea flashes through my head in those moments before sleep, I will get up and write it down. A lot of incoherent notes—or notes that are merely obvious or dumb—get pitched in the morning, but that twilight of consciousness often enough permits good ideas to flit around in the shadows. My deal with my subconscious is that if it permits me to glimpse those shadows I will take them seriously by getting up and recording what I see, even if it costs me a good night’s sleep.

Sleep itself is another time the brain works without our control. Sometimes I get up and issues that were a mess are clear, or clearer, and I’ll try to focus the process a bit by reading my notes before I go to bed.

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 have no idea. When I was in graduate school I was obsessive about keeping poems and essays in the mail because I hoped that publishing them would help me land a job. Without my realizing it at first, the submission process became part of my revising. I’d push into their preliminary shape, and thinking that was the final shape, I’d send them off for a couple of months vacation to New York. When they returned to me, rested and relaxed, I was able to see them with fresh eyes and begin the next round of revising. But after several years, the poems started to find apartments in New York before I thought they were ready to live on their own. And so I just started keeping them in a file till enough time had passed for me to see them with fresh eyes.

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

This poem is true to fact. What the poem leaves out, though, is the anguish and anger, uncertainty and fear of that time of my life. That seems right to me now. Who cares that an eighteen-year-old boy was all those predictable things? One little prevarication is that I didn’t really appreciate Emily Dickinson’s vast intelligence and artistry till much later. At the time, I was too repelled by the cutsey poems I’d been taught in high school (“I never spoke with God/Nor visited in heaven;/Yet certain am I of the spot/As if the chart were given”—sheesh!, I thought.) to see beyond my own rage at what I saw as simple-minded sentimentalism. But at the time I wrote the poem, I was, as I remain, in awe at the range and complexity of her thinking.

Is this a narrative poem?

Not really. It’s more of a meditation on a time in my life.

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

As background to The Glass Hammer, I read a ton and a half of autobiographies. For instance, after reading all the obvious ones—Ben Franklin, a couple of Frederick Douglass’s, Richard Wright, William Alexander Percy’s unappreciated Lanterns on the Levee, Tolstoy, Gorky, Gosse, and I don’t know what all else—I read all the books studied in Herbert Leibowitz’s Fabricating Lives. After reading an essay on Southern autobiography in The Southern Review by Bill Andrews, I wrote and asked him if he had a working bib I could borrow. With extraordinary graciousness he Xeroxed it and mailed it to me. Fred Hobson’s work was also crucial.

I’m not sure what poets I was reading then, though I remember re-reading Frost and Lowell, and studying several strong studies of Emily Dickenson around that time.

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

That’s a question I used to struggle with a lot. The social impulse behind communication leads us to an almost journalistic clarity of expression. The pleasures of sound and language have their claims on the poem, and so, strongly, does the subject matter itself. And I still hold to the idea of a poem as an object that desires to live outside of time. The truest statement I can make is that the reader is a sort of idealized projection of me, which is not really an answer at all, but there you go.

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 wife sees everything but usually pretty late in the writing. I almost always take her suggestions, whether large or small, and if I don’t, I think about it long and hard before going my own way. I like criticism. I’ve always loved workshops and letting other folks slap the poems around, bruising as that may be. Now I mostly wait till I have a book ready to go before asking friends for help. It’s a tremendous imposition on friends’ generosity to ask that much work of them.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

To me, it seems very much of a piece with the rest of my writing.

What is American about this poem?

Just about everything. I suppose one could argue that the meter and rhyme make the poem British at the base, an idea that has never made sense to me since our language at its base is English. Hey, we stole the language, meter, and rhyme from them, and now they belong to us fair and square. And they have been ours for a long damn time. But the setting, the language, the sensibility, the humor—this poem is as American as soccer moms.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.

Al Maginnes

Al Maginnes is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Film History (Word Tech Editions, 2005) a chapbook, Dry Glass Blues (Pudding House Publications, 2007) and Ghost Alphabet (2008), which won the 2007 White Pine Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared widely and he is the former recipient of a North Carolina Artist’s Grant. He lives with his family in Raleigh, NC and teaches at Wake Technical Community College.


WHAT MAPS WILL NOT SHOW


In a strange town, maps become liars.
Landmarks get left out or lie more distant
than illustrations show. Roads sprout
and bend off the memorized route
and by the time you arrive, the courthouse
is dark and locked for the night.
A woman I know gives directions
in terms of what used to be there—Turn
right on the road where Jones had the store
that burned down—assuming no distance
between her history and our own,
the way those who survive an event
are bound by it and a bit incredulous
the same mold has not shaped us all.
The lawyer stacking papers, the bailiff
locking each door he walks through,
the judge, his robe removed, pouring
the single drink he permits himself,
all remember the man awaiting sentencing
who seized an officer’s gun and swung
the barrel in a wide arc before pushing it
under his chin and pulling the trigger.
Seventeen years since then, and they never
speak of it, but if their eyes meet
in court or they pass in the hall,
they nod the casual greeting of those
who have known each other too long
for rank or ceremony. Last week,
the judge saw a man who had paid
to have the image of each internal organ
tattooed across his torso—heart, lungs,
liver. A car accident shattered him
and he lost a lung, a kidney, several yards
of intestine. His chest, road-mapped
by a maze of stitches, healed
into a scarred map of what was there
no longer. His crime was entering
the homes of women he thought he loved
and stealing small, unnecessary items.
When his sentence was given, he said nothing,
only limped from court. A woman
whose coffeepot he'd stolen studied
his movements, his silence, hoping
for some map to explain his actions.
If she sat in the judge’s chamber
to share his single shot of bourbon
or if the judge had come with her for coffee
she paid for and could not drink,
they would agree the sentence meant nothing.
It did not touch him, so it would not touch them.
The judge wouldn't tell her
that sometimes law and justice seem like towns
miles distant and sparsely populated,
invisible on most maps. That morning
he had hung up on a reporter who wanted
to write another story about the suicide
in the courtroom. The single time
she spoke to the man, he showed her
the inked outlines of his insides and smiled
with pride so bashful, she could not keep
her fingers from touching the broken skin
to feel what fluttered underneath, the muscle
of a heart working and untouched.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I believe this started in the late fall or early winter of 2004. I had the first line and the image of the man with his internal organs tattooed on his body. For me, a lot of poems come from the juxtaposition of two or three seemingly unrelated lines or images and trying to make them fit together.

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

This went through a lot of drafts, some in which I made only minor changes, others where I really moved things around. At one point the poem was a good deal longer than it finally appeared. I probably worked on this poem for a couple of months off and on—I’m always working on several poems at a time, so I don’t want to imply that this poem was my sole focus at the time.

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

I believe that inspiration happens, for me anyway, in getting poems started. Then comes the work of getting words on paper and changing them around. For me, writing poems is mostly fun, so “sweat and tears” might not be the right phrase, but certainly the bulk of any poem I write is the result of a lot of writing and rewriting.

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

Not really. The poem began and ended as a single long stanza. One of my quirks is that I like each line to be more or less the length of the one in front of it.

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 was published a year and a half to two years after it was written. Generally, once I think a poem is done, I’ll send it out. This particular poem bounced off of several journals before ending up in The Comstock Review.

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

This poem is almost entirely fictional. The woman who gives directions “in terms of what used to be there” is someone I know, but other than that, the poem’s events are made up. As far as fact and fiction in poetry, I have never had any compunction about inserting fiction into even an autobiographical poem. As one of my professors said once, “We lie our way to the truth.”

Is this a narrative poem?

I believe it is although I hope the narrative in the poem serves a larger purpose.

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

I read widely and unsystematically. I think I was reading a good deal of Richard Hugo, a poet I return to again and again, at the time, as well as George Looney and Christopher Buckley (the poet from California, not the novelist), whose work I was reviewing at the time. As far as influences, there are a lot of poets I love and return to over and over, but if I start naming them I’ll leave some out and feel bad about that later.

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

Not really. The idea of any audience is a bit novel to me. I’m still surprised when people tell me they’ve read poems of mine, even ones that have appeared in journals with a wide circulation or on a web site that gets a lot of visitors. That said, I’m really pleased when friends who are also poets I admire tell me they’ve liked something I’ve done.

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 have a few friends who look at my poems once I have a batch I think they might like to see. I don’t show anyone a poem until I’m pretty confident that it’s finished or close to finished. Suzanne Cleary, Philip Terman and Walter Butts are three people who have been helpful with my poems in recent years.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

After a lot of thought, I have to say I’m not sure.

What is American about this poem?

I imagine an American setting for all my poems. The line “law and justice seem like towns/ miles distant and sparsely populated” conjures for me the small abandoned towns of the west that Hugo wrote so well about.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I think it was finished, as much as any poem is ever finished. Of course I could spend time tweaking it now if I wanted to, but I think there comes a time when it’s best to look forward to the next poem.

Oliver de la Paz

Oliver de la Paz is the author of two collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, and Furious Lullaby (both from SIU Press). He chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry. A recipient of a NYFA Fellowship Award, his work has appeared in journals like Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. He teaches at Western Washington University.

HOLINESS

The first word in our catechism was “holy,”
and we would march up the aisle, boys matched with girls,
our hands folded while we soaked in grace from the blue
light of stained glass. We were a river of blessings.

I wanted to be “holy,” and I had practiced
my prayers before a mirror until I looked like a statue
or a ghost. No one could deny me this office
and I walked with my eyes toward the altar.

No one drifted. No one held their breath.
I didn’t have visions of angels then.
I could only hold my place, keeping my chin up
as if I were swimming. What else is there to know

about divinity? What else is there to know
about the poverty of a word?


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem was written in the Fall of 2001. I had just started my first tenure track job in upstate New York and I was teaching an introduction to poetry class. One of the poems I had been teaching my students was Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” I taught two sections of the course, so in my preparations for lectures, I practically had the poem memorized. What I love most about Hayden’s poem is its rhetorical subtlety, which, after stressing this point to my students, was not lost on them. What ended up triggering “Holiness” was Hayden’s last two lines of the poem, “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” I wound up echoing Hayden at the end of “Holiness” with the lines, “. . . What else is there to know // about divinity? What else is there to know / about the poverty of a word?”

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

The poem underwent very few revisions after its initial composition. My revision process may be a little unorthodox. I tend to revise as I’m composing, so it winds up taking me a bit longer to compose a poem, but once it’s “done” it’s “done.” So basically, very little time elapsed from the point of initial composition to the poem’s “final” state.

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

As I mentioned, the poem was certainly “received.” I’m a big believer in the mantra that books beget other books. I’m not a writer who’ll sit at a desk, stare at a blank screen, and painfully bang away a few words, sentences, or lines that I ultimately regret. When I’m ready to write, I go to the word processor. Such was the case for “Holiness.” I had been living with Robert Hayden for such a long time, I needed to find a way to pay him homage.

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

I immediately had conceived that the poem would be a sonnet or sonnet-like. There was an argument at the core of the idea of holiness and the sonnet form was, in my mind, an ideal container for questioning belief.

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

It didn’t take long for the poem to find a home. I sent it out in October of 2001 and it landed in Sou’wester’s Fall 2002 issue. I hadn’t been sending it to many other journals.

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 fermentation time from poem draft to journal/magazine submission really depends. When I send work out, so much depends on what poems I send along together. I’ll sit on an individual poem until I think I’ve found companions for the poem in an envelope. This practice does vary, but it’s my usual modus operandi.

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

Much of the poem is based on my remembrance of my Catholic school upbringing. The first word in our catechism was, quite literally, “holy.” The priest extended his arms outward and said “Holy lord . . .” The poem is also a number of memories or narratives spliced together into one narrative. I had in my mind the image of myself as a young boy marching to the altar to receive my first communion. But we also marched in procession to the altar for a number of different things: confession, preparing for scripture class, etc. If readers are looking for a literal matter-of-fact play-by-play of an event in a poem, then they’ll have to look elsewhere. “Holiness” is a collection of events, though I dare not call it fiction because what happens in the poem really did happen.

And if you mean, narrative poem, in the sense that it tells a story—yes, it’s a narrative poem. But if you mean, narrative poem, as a negation or the opposite of lyric poem, I hope it isn’t. I hope that there are lyrical moments contained within it.

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

As I mentioned, Robert Hayden was the primary influence on the poem, but I was also reading The Branch Will Not Break—James Wright has killer ending lines. I always think of platform-divers who knife perfectly into the pool without splashing too much water when I think of Wright.

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

I always write to an audience. It makes it easier to write a poem when I imagine that I’m writing it to or for someone. For me, the act of reading, after all, is an act of intimacy—the reader engaging in a conversation with a writer. Likewise, writing for me is a direct address to someone.

So many of my recent poems have been epistolary pieces. I can’t, however, say that I’m writing to any singular person—though the beloved is always my wife, I’m not always writing to the beloved.

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 didn’t, actually, share “Holiness” with anyone before I had finished it, because the poem was created, submitted, and accepted in such a short span of time.

Years ago, I didn’t share my work with anyone until I believed it to be ready, but lately, I’ve been corresponding with a group of writers for a month-long writing challenge during August. Among the group members are Aimee Nezukumatathil, Sandra Beasley, Erika Meitner, Mary Biddinger, and Jay Robinson . . . I feel I’m forgetting someone. Anyway, we’ve structured the month like NaPoWriMo in April, except we’re doing the work in August when many of us who have teaching obligations are free. It’s been a lot of fun and I suppose we’ve been writing for each other.

“Holiness” is the first poem in your second book Furious Lullaby. What made you decide to give it such a place of prominence in the manuscript?

“Holiness” seemed like the epigraph for the collection. So many of the poems are about coming to grips with belief and unbelief. Additionally, so many of the poems are about finding “grace.”

The poem’s argumentative structure would have created a different resonance for the collection if it were, say, towards the end of the collection. Rather than serving as an entry for a debate, it would be, in some ways, punctuating an argument, and I didn’t want resolution for the collection.

If the poem were in the middle of the collection, it could, perhaps, be construed as a change in tone. After considering all the possibilities for the poem’s location, I finally decided that I wanted the primary idea of the collection to be put forth immediately.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’m a messier poet syntactically. I write longer, winding lines with clausal breaks and a few more disruptions. Sometimes my referents are unclear. I’m aware of this foible because it’s also how I speak and how my parents speak. “Holiness,” in my mind, is easier to parse if you go sentence by sentence.

What is American about this poem?

Such a sticky question! I have no idea! Is there something distinctly idiomatic about the poem that would allow it to be called “American”? For the longest time I’ve wondered if there is indeed something that makes a poem or a poet’s work “American.” Can I plead the fifth?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This particular poem was finished. I had explored what I wanted to explore and I was fairly happy with the results right away. Generally, though, I’m never truly finished with a poem. I do fiddle with poems that are in my two collections, especially when I give readings. Sometimes I change them consciously, for the reading.



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

Philip Levine

Philip Levine was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1928. He is the author of seventeen books of poetry, most recently Breath (Knopf, 2004). His books have received many awards, including the National Book Award in both 1976 for Ashes: Poems New and Old and in 1991 for What Work Is, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He has also published a collection of essays, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (1994), edited The Essential Keats (1987), and co-edited and translated two books: Off the Map: Selected Poems of Gloria Fuertes (with Ada Long, 1984) and Tarumba: The Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines (with Ernesto Trejo, 1979). Levine has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Frank O'Hara Prize, and two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships. For two years he served as chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. Levine lives in New York City and Fresno, California.


THE TWO

When he gets off work at Packard, they meet
outside a diner on Grand Boulevard. He's tired,
a bit depressed, and smelling the exhaustion
on his own breath, he kisses her carefully
on her left cheek. Early April, and the weather
has not decided if this is spring, winter, or what.
The two gaze upwards at the sky which gives
nothing away: the low clouds break here and there
and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven.
The day is like us, she thinks; it hasn't decided
what to become. The traffic light at Linwood
goes from red to green and the trucks start up,
so that when he says, "Would you like to eat?"
she hears a jumble of words that mean nothing,
though spiced with things she cannot believe,
"wooden Jew" and "lucky meat." He's been up
late, she thinks, he's tired of the job, perhaps tired
of their morning meetings, but when he bows
from the waist and holds the door open
for her to enter the diner, and the thick
odor of bacon frying and new potatoes
greets them both, and taking heart she enters
to peer through the thick cloud of tobacco smoke
to the see if "their booth" is available.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no
second acts in America, but he knew neither
this man nor this woman and no one else
like them unless he stayed late at the office
to test his famous one liner, "We keep you clean
Muscatine," on the woman emptying
his waste basket. Fitzgerald never wrote
with someone present, except for this woman
in a gray uniform whose comings and goings
went unnoticed even on those December evenings
she worked late while the snow fell silently
on the window sills and the new fluorescent lights
blinked on and off. Get back to the two, you say.
Not who ordered poached eggs, who ordered
only toast and coffee, who shared the bacon
with the other, but what became of the two
when this poem ended, whose arms held whom,
who first said "I love you" and truly meant it,
and who misunderstood the words, so longed
for, and yet still so unexpected, and began
suddenly to scream and curse until the waitress
asked them both to leave. The Packard plant closed
years before I left Detroit, the diner was burned
to the ground in '67, two years before my oldest son
fled to Sweden to escape the American dream.
"And the lovers?" you ask. I wrote nothing about lovers.
Take a look. Clouds, trucks, traffic lights, a diner, work,
a wooden shoe, East Moline, poached eggs, the perfume
of frying bacon, the chaos of language, the spices
of spent breath after eight hours of night work.
Can you hear all I feared and never dared to write?
Why the two are more real than either you or me,
why I never returned to keep them in my life,
how little I now mean to myself or anyone else,
what any of this could mean, where you found
the patience to endure these truths and confessions?


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem was written—that is begun—in the early spring of 2000; in Fresno often spring arrives in February. I believe it started with the weather, the notion that spring was here & not quite here; one day the forsythia is budding out, the violets are in full bloom, & the next a cold rain is ruining everything. But of course the poem is set in Detroit, a place that’s still alive in me. I don’t know why that particular street corner—Linwood at Grand River—haunts me, but it does. When I was very young, fourteen or fifteen, I got a job just south of there at a used auto parts place, a grease shop. Later one of my brothers had a shop near there. I didn’t recall a diner on that block, so I moved one there from the East side.

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

This poem required several drafts, however to the best of my recollection the bones were there on the first morning. (I don’t have the early drafts of the poem, so all this depends on an old man’s memory.) In fact I thought it was done rather quickly, but then the next day I saw the pacing wasn’t right—perhaps I should say I heard the pacing wasn’t right & that I was trying to hustle it to the finish line—if such a thing exists. I slowed it down & even distracted myself with the passage about the cleaning woman. I knew that woman, she’d worked on a job I had & although she was a lovely person almost no one spoke to her, perhaps because she had such a heavy middle-eastern accent it was a chore to understand her.

I’d say more than six months elapsed before I finally got it right or as right as I’d ever get it.

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

Yes, I believe in inspiration. This poem was “received” because I was there waiting for it, & I had a notion of what to do when it arrived.

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

It achieved its final form when I stopped making it worse. 

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 did not appear in print until two years after I stopped working on it. I generally sit on a poem for at least six months or so before I send it out; some poems I sit on for years simply because I’m not sure they’re done or worth a damn. Right now I have poems I wrote several years ago & haven’t sent out & may never publish. My practice varies: if I believe the poem is as good as I can make it & it’s a decent poem, I’ll send it out. I’m in no particular hurry.

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

The facts. There was a Packard plant on Grand Boulevard; in fact the building is still there. Only Packard isn’t. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that line, “We keep you clean in Muscatine.” There was a traffic light at Linwood & Grand River. You could say those are facts. The Packard plant did not close years before I left Detroit although I thought it did. Do I care I got that wrong? No. Also, I believe in invention; the characters are inventions, but the emotions the poem hopes to convey, they’re mine. That’s a fact.

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

Was the poem always in third person? I began it in third person, but at a certain point it just changed into first person. So now there is a guy talking in the poem, one who might be confused with me. I began the poem planning to complete it in third person. Only in third person could the poem know what was going on in the hearts & heads of the characters. Then it jumped into first person, & the “know-it-all-writer” got involved. So there is a little surprise there. Back to facts: it’s also a fact my oldest son went to Sweden to escape the draft for the Vietnam War. Why is that there? I think anyone who likes the poem will know why.

Is this a narrative poem?

Sure, it’s a narrative; it puts a series of events in a time frame, & then it plays around with its sense of time. The story, what you might call the narrative, evolved as I created the characters, as I recalled just who they might be. I didn’t begin with a story in mind. I began with a feeling, that weariness that comes after eight hours of night work, exhaustion mixed with relief—you did it again, it’s done! You never forget that sense of meaningful, meaningless accomplishment. What have you made? Nothing but money & not a lot of that.

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

I don’t recall who I was reading at the time. The one influence I’m sure of is the English novelist Henry Green. In his books the characters rarely hear each other; Green was partially deaf & thus had a heightened sense of missed connections. About the time I wrote the poem I’d lost most of the hearing in my left ear, so of course I stopped hearing a lot of what went on. In my early thirties I got a broken jaw in a fight I lost, & for seven weeks my jaw was wired shut & it was difficult to talk, so I shut up. During that time I truly listened to people, & I came to realize that I was often the only person in a room who was hearing what was said. I found it exhausting, & as soon as I got my jaw unwired I started talking again & stopped listening.

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

I’m sure there was a time when I had a specific reader in mind, but I believe that was before I had any actual readers. There was also a time when a lot of my poems appeared in The New Yorker, & I would imagine an affluent man or woman on the afternoon train from Manhattan to Connecticut opening the magazine. I wanted to make that person uncomfortable, to push into her face some working slob—someone out of my earlier incarnation—and make her think, “That is a real woman! Where did she get the guts I lack?”

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 know I showed an early draft of this poem to my wife; in fact I show her everything I’m pleased with. I used to show my work to Larry Levis, the poems I wanted help with or the poems I thought would please him, & he did the same with me. I taught in Houston one semester maybe twelve years ago; Eddie Hirsch was still there, & I showed him my work, & I was writing a lot. Eddie was a great help; he’s was both critical & enthusiastic—he must have been a great teacher. This poem I showed only to my wife.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s about exhaustion, about how exhausting loyalty can be, & it’s about romantic love gone wrong in a world that needs it badly but makes almost no room for it. I rarely write about romantic love; maybe I’m scared I could get too gushy, maybe I find it too much of a puzzle. There are so many poems on the subject that I doubt anyone will miss my failure to write more of them.

What is American about this poem?

What European or Asian or African poet can you imagine writing a poem with these people in it & this diner? Neruda or Vallejo might have found room for them, but then they were great American poets.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

For sure it was abandoned, but it might also be finished.


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