Camille Dungy

Camille T. Dungy is author of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006) and Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, forthcoming January 2010), editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, forthcoming December 2009), and co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, 2009). Dungy has received fellowships from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the Dana Award, and Bread Loaf. She is associate professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.


REQUIEM

Sing the mass—
light upon me washing words
now that I am gone.

The sky was a hot, blue sheet the summer breeze fanned
out and over the town. I could have lived forever
under that sky. Forgetting where I was,
I looked left, not right, crossed into a street
and stepped in front of the bus that ended me.

Will you believe me when I tell you it was beautiful—
my left leg turned to uselessness and my right shoe flung
some distance down the road? Will you believe me
when I tell you I had never been so in love
with anyone as I was, then, with everyone I saw?

The way an age-worn man held his wife’s shaking arm,
supporting the weight that seemed to sing from the heart
she clutched. Knowing her eyes embraced the pile
that was me, he guided her sacked body through the crowd.
And the way one woman began a fast the moment she looked

under the wheel. I saw her swear off decadence.
I saw her start to pray. You see, I was so beautiful
the woman sent to clean the street used words
like police tape to keep back a young boy
seconds before he rounded the grisly bumper.

The woman who cordoned the area feared my memory
would fly him through the world on pinions of passion
much as, later, the sight of my awful beauty pulled her down
to tears when she pooled my blood with water
and swiftly, swiftly washed my stains away.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem began a long time before it was completed. One summer, while working in England, I took a trip to Bath. Some travelers are better able than others to remember to look both ways when crossing English streets. At one major round about, my colleague and I witnessed a tourist fatally hit by a tour coach (bus). Leaving the event with a mixture of shock, horror and—I will admit now—morbid fascination, my friend said, “You’re the poet. You have to write about that.”

I took this as something of a double dog dare. The event was shocking and moving and I did want to write about it. I felt a sort of responsibility to memorialize the event I’d witnessed and the life that had ended right in front of my eyes.

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

Easier said than done, writing a poem about an event like that. I tried all sorts of entries into the poem, none of which seemed to work. They were all too voyeuristic or titillated by their own morbidity or just plain dull. I tried for a whole year, came up with nothing.

At the end of that year, I happened to attend a concert of Mozart’s Requiem. It was during that performance that I heard the phrase, “Will you believe me when I tell you it was beautiful, my left leg turned to uselessness and my right shoe flung some distance down the road?” I say “I heard” because the lines came into my head as if spoken. I wrote them down on the concert program but, as I was in the middle of a major move, I didn’t go any farther than that.

Several months later (I actually think it wasn’t until the following spring, nearly two full years since the precipitating event), when I had fully settled into my new home (this poem, then, traveled with me from England to North Carolina to Boston and finally to Virginia), I ordered a recording of the concert I’d attended, played it over and over and over, and, finally, was able to construct the poem in the form in which it now appears. None of the rest of the poem came as easily as the first line I wrote down, but at least I had a point of entry after that.

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

In the case of this poem, I think it’s a pretty lovely combination of inspiration and perspiration. Certainly, the poem wouldn’t have happened had I not been willing to put in all the sweat and years and tears, but at the same time, there are aspects of the poem that were dependent on pure, beautiful and horrible, inspiration.

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

Two technical frameworks went into constructing this poem. First of all, I decided to write it in the manner in which I received Mozart’s Requiem. So the poem is broken into five stanzas to represent the five movements of Mozart’s version of the mass. The epigraph at the front (which is my own writing) represents the “Ave Marie” that opens the mass. As I recall, I actually listened to each movement as I wrote each stanza.

By the time the poem entered What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, I knew I was writing sonnets, so the poem was reshaped slightly so it fits into twenty-eight lines (a double sonnet) and reflects some of the components of the sonnet I privilege in my collection.

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

Referring back to my submission records it looks like about four years and ten rejections before it appeared somewhere.

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

It varies from poem to poem, but I usually wait at least a month, just to be sure the high doesn’t wear off. I like to be sure I’ll be happy to see the poem in five, ten or more years. Sometimes I get really excited and send something off right away, but not usually. Also, though, I have to admit I only submit in sort of submission binges, so it’s likely the poems are just hanging out waiting for me to get the energy for a round of submissions. Nothing more carefully calculated than that.

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

Well, I really saw the guy die. And all those things I describe happening around him and to his body I saw too. Of course, the “I” of the poem is the dead man, so I guess that’s a fiction.

Is this a narrative poem?

I guess. But, then again, I guess not.

If forced to classify your poem, would you call it a dramatic monologue or persona poem? Neither? Both? Something else entirely?

Oh dear, you’re going to push the issue. I don’t suppose you want me to say neither and both, something else entirely.

Here’s the thing. The poem came to me as it came to me. Though I was aware of the structure of Mozart’s piece, and though I was trying, finally, to think about some of the ways a sonnet can work, and though I often write in the voices of others because I find the world and its inhabitants infinitely rich and compelling, and though I wanted to be true to the truth of the situation without being bogged down by the facts of the situation in order to report what happened but also transcend what happened, I never had in my mind, “Hey, I think I’ll write a dramatic monologue” or “Gee, what I need are a few more persona poems in my collection.” So, in the end, I don’t know that I’m equipped to answer this question.

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

I can’t even begin to recall. If I were to pull out my journals from the time I could tell you because I always keep a record of what I’m reading in my journals. This is for no more noble reason than that I only really remember things when I write them down and at some point early in my career as a reader/writer I grew tired of rereading things I’d already read but hadn’t registered. But, I am on a plane right now headed, coincidentally, to Boston (the town I moved from ten years ago just after first hearing the Mozart Requiem concert), and all my possessions are, as happened when I was writing “Requiem,” in boxes. So I can’t go back and recreate the past for you.

There’s the Requiem mass, though. That’s a beautiful mass. You should read it some time.

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

My ideal reader: one who reads with care and patience and lights in her eyes and heart.

My particular audience: Heavens, I’m an American poet. I won’t deign to be picky.

Also, I’ll add, I am often surprised by who is moved by my poems, so I wouldn’t want to be silly enough to close anyone out before the poem’s even started.

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 sometimes have readers. I’m sure some of them read this poem at some point, but like I said, I was in a period of extreme transition at the time, so I don’t know who the readers would have been. In the cases of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison as well as my forthcoming collection, Suck on the Marrow, my readers often saw whole manuscripts rather than individual poems. It’s not an unheard of way of doing things, I suppose.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Wow, another broad question. In many ways I don’t think this poem does differ from my others. At least not the work in the two collections I’ve just mentioned (the collection I’m finishing now is pretty dramatically different from these two and so I won’t really bring it into this discussion). “Requiem” reconsiders a received history, it is in and/or around a persona, it is crafted with careful attention to one or more formal considerations, it’s written around music….Then again, every poem is its own poem, and so I could come up with a list just as long of the ways “Requiem” is different than the poems with which it shares space in What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison or its closest cousins in Suck on the Marrow.

What is American about this poem?

Ha! That’s funny. It’s a poem about an incident that happened in England to an Italian tourist, written alongside the score of an Austrian composer (whose concert I attended because of an invitation from a Middle-Eastern friend. Perhaps what is American about this poem is its multi-national origins.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

In answer to the question above regarding what some of my rules in terms of when I feel ready to send a poem out for publication, I don’t submit for publication until I feel a poem is finished. If I feel like I’m abandoning the poem, it stays in my drawer.

Philip White

Philip White’s poems have won a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, Slate, Poetry, Agni, New England Review, Southern Review, Hudson Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. His first book, The Clearing, from which “Six O’Clock Flight to the Interment” is taken, won the Walt Macdonald Prize and was published in Texas Tech University Press in 2007. He teaches Shakespeare at Centre College.


SIX O’CLOCK FLIGHT TO THE INTERMENT

Sometimes it seems that everything’s dislodged,
slipping, and all we really know is pain
coming back, along perhaps with glimmers
of places we have been, made visible
by change or changed attention. As, lifted now
through brief turbulence into this routine
sublimity, I feel both freed and lost,
and see the embryonic moon in its swirl
of fluids wobble in inhuman view,
the clouds below like the very earth but scraped
and colorless, a blank moraine, a surface
infinitely formed and varied but by strictures
that elude me. Illusion of a surface,
I should say, because they are only clouds.
There’s room in this cabin to forget them, though,
and the crude thrust forward that unanchors us.
We can close the windows and sleep, or try
again to feel what we feel, or try not to.
I’m going to see my second mother lowered
in the ground, beside her daughter, my late wife,
and in the pause I try to trace strands back
that hardly hold together anymore
or hold me to what’s gone. I have to face
what is at last a limit if not a failure,
the points at which my loves fell from me
and even my pain was lost and what remained
was a mere place, the fields I walked in day
by day. It’s ugly feeling nothing, but worse
to be unaware of it, or to call it moving on
or working through or healing, to mock ourselves
with snapshots, memories, adjusting the focus
and sentiments to suit our needs, as if
nothing at all had been lost or the lost
were only what they seemed to us to be.
Pain may be true, but in time the mind numbs
and wanders, and the dead don’t come. Instead,
random places, the small dark gap in the arms
of the pine that looked inviting from inside
my first grade classroom, or the flat in Hong Kong
where I lay some mornings taking in the tops
of trees below me on the street that seemed
so disappointing but so real, though the spot
I then lay is now two hundred feet in the air
between new buildings. But sometimes simply being
someplace is all we need, and in bare sunlight
on a wall we sense a signature of what is
conducting us, arraying, granting us
entry, moving us from love to love.
After all there’s room for joy here, too.
I try to piece it together, the rocky hill
where the body will be laid, the various cries
and yawps of birds that breed or pass over,
the trees in all seasons, the eroding cliffs,
small tufts or shifting atolls of cloud,
and always the vagaries of light on the cusps
of everything, and a face, maybe, something said.
But why so little of that, of others, here,
of their way of being in this place, of what
they made of the look of things that stopped us,
wrapped us in wonder, from which we took our cues?
As if they were mere scenery, props,
or like that bird back home whose call I knew
too long for it to stay with me; so lost
it was in my surroundings that only drifts
of tone, of rhythm, will come until I find
my way back to that place. But weren’t they
more than that? Weren’t they themselves sometimes,
maybe from the start, a world for us, a field,
and so the dead are like a struck stage, a slate
wiped clean, a cloud moraine above or below
or within which everything takes place
and we will never find ourselves again?


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

After my mother’s death in 1995, I didn’t write much for five years. There were other reasons, but I think it was partly because something about her love of life, her creative and responsive way of being, the mere fact of it in the world, had been elemental for me. I still haven’t written very directly about her, but her presence and her loss are behind virtually everything I’ve written since then. “Six O’Clock Flight” is one of the more explicit poems on the subject, and even so it’s pretty oblique. The immediate impetus for writing it was the death, in 2006, of my first wife’s mother, but that event was just the surface layer of a succession of losses. In other words, the poem, even more than most, started a long time before it was composed.

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

As I remember, there were three major revisions involving deleting, adding, or overhauling large sections of the poem, and about ten or eleven more line-by-line run-throughs involving local changes—all within about a month of beginning to write. I typically spend far longer on a poem—decades, even. I probably would have lingered over this one too, but Texas Tech had solicited a manuscript from me and under deadline I put the poem in my manuscript and sent it off. I knew pretty early on that the poem had a culminating power for what I’d been writing for twenty years, and I thought the manuscript would be stronger for its inclusion, even without the usual time to get a settled perspective on each word and phrase and line. When the manuscript was accepted, the editor didn’t welcome revisions, so the poem was published largely as submitted, in the book, a year after I wrote it. I was basically comfortable with the poem when I sent it off, and fortunately still am. That’s not often the case with poems I haven’t spent a lot of time with. So this poem was neither “finished” in the usual way for me, nor really “abandoned.” More like “released,” “let go.”

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?

I don’t seem to write unless a place, a person, or some intriguing, disturbing, or beautiful object gets tangled up with or catches on an internal need or imperative or driving emotion. I think everything I’ve written was “inspired,” in that sense, by something outside of me. There’s also a happiness of thought or perception that sometimes occurs after mulling or brooding on something for a long time, and a serendipity of phrase that can happen when I’m immersed in the experiential properties of words—their sounds, rhythms, and layers and nuances of meaning, their histories, the ways they interact with each other—and am writing by ear and intuition. But for me those flashes hardly seem like divine afflatus or badges of native genius. They rise out of cultivated habits of openness and attention, even out of long thought and hard study. I’m enough of a Romantic to like the idea of each poem finding its own form even if it ends up resembling or re-actualizing some inherited one, and to recognize in the very phrasing of these questions a familiar complex of anxieties and hedges about craft and its supposed ideological implications. Still, I think all writers, brilliant originals or just plodding laborers like me, “consciously employ principles of technique,” though they may not analyze in real time what they’re doing or remember it later. This particular poem, certainly, emerged from conscious attention to form and craft as well as from hunches, leaps, feeling around in the dark, and trial and error. With regard to form, I responded to evolving intuitions about how the long the poem would be and how the thought and feeling might proceed, how long and connected the phrases and sentences might be, and how stress rhythms, caesura placement, line length, and line end might interact with the syntactical constructions to control the momentum. Although the poem has some of the properties of blank verse, I didn’t start with the idea of meter, or end up with a truly metrical poem.

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

The narrative of the flight mostly sets up an occasion for lyrical thinking. The narrative refers to factual events; the shape the thinking takes is fiction. I didn’t merely transcribe what I saw and thought on a particular flight. Behind the generalizing impulse in the poem is layered experience of other trips home to funerals in the years after I moved to the other side of the continent from where I grew up. The poem finds a voice for thoughts that had been germinating over time about those losses, but it also voices other thoughts, some of which writing the poem helped me to have.

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

My reading usually takes a long time to percolate down to where the poems come from, and just as long to get wicked up back to the surface, so what I was reading at the moment probably isn’t relevant. I’m just far enough from the poem not to remember what my conscious influences were, anyway. I could surmise some from rereading the poem, but that would be literary criticism, no better than anyone else’s.

Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader? Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

I don’t aim this way in every poem, but I like the idea of writing poems that all the different people in my life, particularly non-literary ones, might find approachable. Even so, I hardly ever show anything to anyone. At some point, of course, I send things out to magazines, and I eventually show all my poems to my wife, Lisa Williams, who is also a poet. Her responses have helped me more than anything else, besides my own reading and thought. Before that, I showed everything to my first wife, who was a very good reader. I’ve also had a few generous friends over the years who have given me criticism and encouragement, but I’ve never been part of a “group” and have only had a few hours of experience in a “workshop.” I usually don’t show anyone my poems until I’ve done as much as I can with them, allowing time for revisiting and reconsideration. What readers tell me may convince me that I’m not in fact finished with the poem, but if I haven’t done everything I can beforehand I don’t want to waste their time.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s more loose and meandering in its thinking and more sustained in its rhythms than some, maybe. It’s also longer than most of my poems.

What is American about this poem?

Even if death is the great universal, love and grief, and attitudes toward time and place, self and other, are all tinged, if not shaped, by culture. I’m sure the poem is American in some way. But it doesn’t make a point of it.

Donald Hall

Donald Hall is widely read and loved for his award-winning poetry, fiction, essays, and children’s literature. He has published sixteen collections of poetry, most recently White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946 – 2006. A former poet laureate of the United States, Hall is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His honors include two Guggenheim fellowships, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Silver medal, a Lifetime Achievement award from the New Hampshire Writers and Publisher Project, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry. Hall lives on his ancestral farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire.


AFFIRMATION

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I’m not sure when I wrote it. Something like 2000? It started with the first line, not particularly original, but flashing in my mind and leading on.

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

Fewer revisions than usual. If I had to make a guess I would say thirty-five. Over four or five months?

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

Some inspiration. I remember that first line came accompanied by an energy and a momentum. But I have to keep a poem around and keep staring at it, changing a word every day or week.

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

At some point I realized that I had a liquid, or muddy, metaphorical area. I remember, in the lines about the lapsed friendship, having “ruin” or “destroy”—and changing it to “pollute.” It was a late revision.

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

I do not remember how long I let it lay about. I remember sending it out to the New Yorker thinking that the end of it did not work, and wondering whether I should send it or not. Unlike most of my New Yorker poems, this one was accepted immediately and published in just a couple of weeks. Sometimes I wait a year and a half.

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?

Often I let a poem sit around for a year or so. It depends. When I have finished something, or taken it to a point where I don’t know what to do next, I show it to friends. I listen, make changes or not, and let it sit around some more.

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

I always opt for fiction if it makes the poem any better. The first friend who died did not die near a body of water.

Is this a narrative poem?

I don’t think it’s a narrative.

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

I have no notion of influences. This is not a denial.

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

I never have an audience in mind. At some point I am aware of a level of audience. When I work, I have no sense of myself or of any one to whom I am writing.

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 no recollection of anybody’s response. I am sure I showed it to friends.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

There are so many differences among my poems, formal with line-length or concentration on a long line or on a short line and assonance, narrative, rhyme, etcetera. I don’t think that this one differs from some others. But how would I know?

What is American about this poem?

I don’t know. It was written by an American.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I certainly thought a lot about abandoning it. Obviously I didn’t. I’m glad I didn’t. I have had much response to it since its publication.

Nancy K. Pearson

Nancy K. Pearson’s first book of poems, Two Minutes of Light (Perugia Press, 2008), won the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award and is currently a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have been published in journals such as The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Pearson has received numerous awards including two seven-month poetry fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from Chattanooga, TN, she now lives on Cape Cod.


FROM THE MOTEL-BY-THE-HOUR

1.
I lost my straight shooter, a sawed-off sparkplug
somewhere in a cheap motel.
All night, I search for pipes —
tire gauge, rusted beer can, hollowed-out cigar.

Months ago, I drove across the country,
left my home in the wet hills of Tennessee,
found the unfolding pageant of billboards,
squashed possum, tugboat clouds,

hills repeating hills, freewheeling leaves going insane.
Thought I could drive my past away.
I’m here now and hunched over,
searching for a boost.

Behind me, that red suspension bridge
sinks into the deep fog,
leaves this bright world behind
for another.

2.
Strung out, Silva and I need a bump.
The wind, spring-loaded and snap-buckling
through the cypress, creeps in,
splinters the stash thin across the motel floor.

We are crawling and picking through the carpet.
Silva says, stop pushing my head down, Reggie,
my knees got seeds mashed in them.
Night is a rerun rerun. Fight over a pebble high:

that long five minutes. Reggie watches us buck and kiss.
Silva on the floor again. (Stop pushing my head down, Reg.)
The shag hooks her silver hoop —
ear snagged and hanging off

like old fish bait. Stuck down there,
someone just cover her up.

3.
Silva’s in the hallway bathroom.
She’s clawing up her face again.
Reggie is laughing real loud,
Silva, you a goddamn puller now.

I don’t want to see her face,
her skin peeling off her cheekbone,
pores torn bigger, a face on hinges.
I’m high and want to feel her tits,

put my mouth on her hard nipples.
Fuck Reggie’s laughing.
I don’t want to think about the scabs,
the other night, me with my panties

twisted up in my crack,
biting down hard on her,
getting up quickly
with blood in my teeth,

peeing in the free-standing sink
in the middle of the room,
my thighs shaking
like the hind legs of a dog.

4.
I carry my index finger in my hand.
I cut it off earlier, straight through the bone
just to see if I could.
I cup it warily

as if the bone could beat free,
a broken bird with flittering wings.
The hospital is down Fillmore Street.
I walk with a spring, kick an old donut

eaten out by ants, shoot it right into a drain.
God, I’m good. Good god.

5.
Jimmy has a tattoo of a beet on his left arm.
People often mistake it for an organ.
I like the idea of someone who loves taproots so much
he’ll suffer an afternoon under the needle

for a swollen red stem. That Jimmy.
I want to see him again and the other gay boys from Greens
with their clean haircuts and brilliant skin.
Tonight, Silva yells, honey git me my wig and I do.

Her left arm is swollen up like an udder,
her silver rings cut deep into her ashen skin.
Somewhere, young Jimmy chops onions and parsley,
his tuber tattoo beating like a purplish heart.

6.
Silva runs down the hallway after Reggie
leaving with the stash. Her feet sound like stakes
shoving into the floor.
Silva, eat something for god’s sake,

I yell and don’t know why I’m yelling this right now.
I think of an old cow, wobbling on thin ankles,
spine like a curtain rod, skin in the breeze.
Baby, she says later, throat full of smoke, open your mouth.

The sweet crack flows into me.
I touch her teeth with my tongue.
They are cow-licked and scoured out.
Baby, she says, you’ve got it bad.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem started in the summer of 2003. I wrote much of it from my small cubicle at The State Department, a post-MFA job that required me to fill in zip codes. So, the government actually helped support the writing of this poem.

The poem began as a one-stanza piece about the Golden Gate Bridge. I never intended to write a six-part poem about a woman’s experience in a crack motel. Once I wrote the first part, however, I knew I needed to finish the speaker’s story. The poem is a collage that pieces together notes I’d written on napkins, on newspaper and in journals almost ten years ago while I was living in San Francisco.

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

I’d say the poem went through about ten major drafts. I made other edits over the course of a few years. I abandoned the poem for a while. I stopped believing in the project or, rather, my ability to write about the subject matter. I thought the poem needed a happy ending and I didn’t have one. I gave that up after about a year. The poem was officially finished in 2006, I think.

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

The poem was difficult to write for so many reasons. I was “inspired” to write the poem, but that’s like saying I was inspired to pray. Once I began the actual writing, I worked very hard, sometimes for eight or nine hours at a time. I had to immerse myself in the world of the speaker to keep from being sentimental. I wrested with the details and the language. I wanted to find the most accurate language to describe the motel and the people living in it. The physical details, the one’s I took from my notes and from memory, served as an anchor for the larger concerns in the poem.

I tried very hard to get that so called “genius of place” in the poem. In his poem, “Tower Beyond Tragedy,” Robinson Jeffers writes, “I have fallen in love outward.” In a way, I had to fall in love with the hellish place/time in this San Francisco streetscape. I had to care about it.

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

I tried making the whole poem rhyme. That was a failure, but I purposely wrote in sonnet-like form. I needed to contain hell, so to speak. Back in 2005, I had seven parts, as well as a prologue, epilogue and a dream series. I imagined the whole poem would be book-length one day. Can you imagine a whole book about this motel room?

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

Two years. The poem was the runner-up for The Iowa Review Award and was published there in 2007. Two years after that, it was reprinted in Ordinary Genius: A Guide for The Poet Within by Kim Addonizio (Norton, 2009).

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

I let my poems sit for many months. Usually.

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

Oh no, this question! Well, after I did a reading for about twenty seventy-year-olds at the tiny West Tisbury Library on Martha’s Vineyard, a woman came up to me and said, “I know of a great AA meeting you can join right now. It’s down the street from here.” People assume my poems are autobiographical and often assume the I/me in the poem is still living in the crack motel or the psychiatric ward. It’s like I’ve gotten a “day pass” from the ward to come out and read poetry. I can’t blame them. I am the speaker in most of my poems. It’s ugly and embarrassing, yes. Of course, I’ve changed details and embellished. To answer your question, Brian, I actually lived in the motel in The Motel by the Hour, but I’m not consistently the speaker in this poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

More narrative than most of my poems.

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

I think I was reading C.D. Wright and Mark Doty then. I’m still reading them. I’d say I’m influenced by every poem I read.

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

I don’t have an ideal reader and I try not to think of an audience while I write. I’m in my own world of line breaks and rhythm while I’m crafting a poem. But as soon as I stop the actual writing, I start thinking about audience. I love to write. The solitary act of writing energizes me. But I’m also thrilled when someone (a judge, a critic, a friend) reads my work and likes it. Kay Ryan said it better (in Poetry, April 2005) when she said, “When I am writing, I feel that I have insinuated myself at the long, long desk of the gods of literature—more like a trestle table, actually—so long that the gods (who are also eating, disputing, and whatnot as well as writing) fade away in the distance according to the laws of Renaissance perspective. I am at the table of the gods and I want them to like me. There I've said it.”

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

I let you see it, Brian. And a few other people in that post-MFA GMU group. Usually, I don’t share my work with anyone. Ashley Capps and I may start sharing poems, though. I feel very shy about this.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I think this poem is less image-driven than some of my others poems. It’s a story, like many of my poems, but a story with more characters and dialogue. There’s no remorse or guilt, no “aha” moment in the poem, either. The speaker isn’t redeemed. It’s ironic. You know, I’d like to write more poems like this. Why do I always try to find redemption?

What is American about this poem?

Reggie and Silva and Jimmy and every other gritty detail.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both, but ultimately finished.


NOTE: "At the Motel-by-the-Hour" was first published in The Iowa Review, Winter 2007/8 and was reprinted in Ordinary Genius: A Guide for The Poet Within by Kim Addonizio, Norton, 2009.

Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1948. In 1970 he moved to Maine with his wife Janet. From 1975 to 1998 he lived with his family in Mercer, Maine, in an off-the-grid house on forty-eight acres. His memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid (University Press of New England, 2006), concerns that experience. In 2000 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine. Since 2002 he has taught in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2000 he was writer in residence at the University of South Dakota. For eight years he led the Frost Place Seminar at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. Wormser is the author of eight collections of poetry, mostly recently Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems (Sarabande, 2008), and a book of short stories, The Poetry Life: Ten Stories (Sarabande, 2008). He currently teaches in the MFA program at Fairfield University.


DUCTWORK

Dave Mitchell doesn’t see the picture in the newspaper
Of Abdul Munim Ali Hamood who is gesturing in a grimace
Of grief toward the corpse of his twenty-two-year-old son
Who was blown up by a lunatic in a car full of explosives.

It’s not on the front page of the local paper, which has
A picture of a moose because the moose lottery was that day
And the right to legally shoot a moose is a big deal in Maine
Though who knows how many are poached for meat
Or shot for the evil hell of shooting something.

Dave doesn’t read the paper anyway.
Words give him a headache and he’s got enough
To think about what with driving his truck around
Delivering ductwork to contractors who are installing
Ventilation and heating systems in—you name it—
Restaurants, Laundromats, stores, garages, offices.

Probably when you’re sitting and eating pork fried rice
You don’t think about the ductwork and how the fans
Are blowing those hot oil fumes out into the night
But it’s got to be there and Dave is good at it
Because it’s steady work and he’s married with a little girl
Though things have turned frosty between his wife and him.

They make love rarely and when they do it’s over
Fast: two busy cogs, a narrow duty.
When Dave watches the women on the street
He craves them with a longing that goes beyond wishing.
He needs their bodies, needs to touch their nipples
And cup their breasts and break loose inside of them.

It’s a bad feeling because he loved his wife
And doesn’t know where that love went. Sure as shit
It’s not in the daily with its headline moose story.
Dave used to hunt deer but doesn’t do more now
Than keep his rifle clean and come winter sit
In an ice-fishing shack with some buddies, gab about
What happened to so-and-so and drink Jim Beam.

There are worse things, like pulling your back out the way
Rick Davis did at work last week or being a father
In Baghdad who has no twenty-two-year-old son anymore,
Who has nothing but the air to move his hands around in.

We can’t live without air, Dave knows that, and some days
When he’s idling at a light and surrounded by spewing
Exhaust pipes he can imagine we’ll ruin that. We’ll get up
One morning, start gasping and turn blue. Right now, though,
It’s lunchtime on the road, which means pulling the truck
Into Burger King and eyeing a woman in another line
And wondering what he’ll do tonight when he gets home.
Maybe he’ll finger the remote and see what’s on.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

It was composed in 2004. The name of the Iraqi father is the name of an actual man who lost his son in a car bombing. I saw a picture of him on the front page of the New York Times. You see what seem like an endless number of photos of grief but that one went right through me and I started writing. Immediately, though, the character of the guy driving the truck in Maine came to me as part of the poem.

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

It went through a fair number, twenty at least, possibly thirty. I was still revising it when Scattered Chapters was about to come out in 2008.

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

Certainly I believe in inspiration. One never knows what is going to set off a poem. And some have stronger inspirations than others have. Getting the details to be what I wanted them to be took a certain amount of sweat if not tears.

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

I knew it was going to be in relatively long lines and I knew it was going to take a certain number of lines to go where I wanted to go, to draw the comparisons I wanted to draw and make Dave a credible human being.

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

It first appeared in print in the book Scattered Chapters. In terms of sending poems out into the world, I don’t send that many poems to journals anymore. I can hold onto a poem for a long time and even after poems have appeared in books I often keep revising them. A number of poems in Scattered Chapters have been revised. Some were in anthologies. If I feel that I have more to bring to the table, then I’m going to bring it.

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

The poem is based on some facts—the father who lost his son and the moose lottery. The character of Dave is made up but is a composite of many guys I knew in Maine. I wanted to present two different realities—Iraq and Dave—but have them in the same poem.

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?

I wouldn’t do this poem in first because I wanted Dave to be a character with a limited point of view. And of course the father is in Iraq, far away from Maine. So third-person was natural for this poem. Third lets you create a socialized world in which your characters can move independently of one another.

Is this a narrative poem?

It isn’t to me. It’s more like a few vignettes, scenes from lives.

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

I read a lot of books. No influences in particular come to mind.

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

I write for myself and for strangers.

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 sometimes show poems to my wife who is very astute about my weaknesses. Other than that I don’t show poems much to other people. I’ve never been in a group.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don’t think it does differ. It’s the political/historical hoodoo I’ve been writing about for decades.

What is American about this poem?

The character Dave is an American—moose hunting, ice fishing, TV watching, Jim Beam drinking. Then there is the American quality of know-nothingism.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

As I noted, I tend to keep revising. At the moment this one feels done but I could wake up tomorrow with a word or line that somehow bugs me.