Jeffrey Harrison

Jeffrey Harrison is the author of four full-length books of poetry, most recently Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way Books, New York), which made the Book Sense top ten poetry list for 2007 and was runner-up for the 2008 Poets’ Prize. In addition, a selected poems, The Names of Things, was published in England by the Waywiser Press in 2006. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, two Pushcart prizes, and other awards, he currently teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. For more information, please visit Harrison's website.


COINCIDENCES

When I switch on the car radio,
a voice with the singing inflection
of an Indian is saying

that what we call coincidences
are really glimpses
of the cosmic harmony,

and I think of my sister weeping
on the other end of the phone
when I told her the story,

beginning with our older brother
who, five years earlier, called me up
from his apartment in Chicago

to tell me about this poet
from Minnesota he’d met
after her reading at the Art Institute.

He didn’t read a lot of poetry,
and it was unusual for him
to be telling me about a poet,

and he seemed a little disappointed
that I hadn’t heard of her,
but I told him that didn’t

mean anything—that she
hadn’t heard of me, either,
which he laughingly confirmed.

I saw him in Cincinnati that Christmas
and he had her book with him
and wanted me to read it,

but he wouldn’t let me take it home
to Massachusetts so I had to
read it fast, but I liked it.

Then three years later (and two ago),
I met the poet at a book fair in Seattle,
not realizing right away

that she was the same poet,
but when I did, I told her the story.
She said she remembered my brother,

because it was so unusual
for anyone who wasn’t a relative
or friend to actually buy a book

and talk to her after a reading.
She said he’d been sweet
and funny, which sounds like him.

I told my brother, too,
and I’m sure he was amused,
but I can’t remember what he said.

A year later, he was dead.
I found the book in his apartment
among his not many books:

The Green Tuxedo, by Janet Holmes.
There were yellow post-its
next to particular poems,

with notes in his childlike
non-script: “True story.”
I left them there and took the book.

It has the same dark aura
as his video of Sam Shepard’s True West
or his bootlegs of the Grateful Dead.

I told Janet about Andy’s death
and she wrote a nice note back,
but we were not in very close touch,

and another year went by before
I got an e-mail from her saying
that her husband’s son by a previous marriage,

a widower with a teenage daughter,
was dating my divorced sister—
is dating my sister.

Wow, I think, what a strange
coincidence, and I wonder, the way
I used to wonder when I was younger

and less skeptical, if this could
mean anything. So I call my sister
and tell her the whole story,

and that’s when she starts crying,
and I think it’s because I’m talking
about Andy, and I say I’m sorry,

but she says no, it’s because she
really likes this guy, and she had
already been thinking that Andy

had somehow sent him to her
because he wanted her to be happy
after the bad end of her marriage

and the shock of his suicide.
And I say wow out loud now, and I keep
wondering what is at work here.

Who knows what it is or what
will happen, but the voice on the radio
is talking about “quantum non-locality”

and how two particles that have come
into even the most glancing contact
and go off in different directions

are forever related, and if you know
where one of them is you know
where the other one is,

which makes me wonder about
my brother’s non-locality
in relation to Janet, who I know

is now in Idaho—and whether,
from his non-locality, Andy
has anything to do with all this.

The radio guru seems to be saying
yes, that coincidences mark
a state of grace, and we are all

living inside the mind of God,
and I don’t care if he is
promoting his newest book,

I roll my window down and toss
my skepticism out like a bad grape,
and despite all that can go wrong

in a lifetime and everything
awful that has already happened,
right now, at least, I believe him.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I heard the radio show that triggered the poem while I was driving home from a teaching stint in Maine (the winter residency of the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program), in the first days of 2004. I had to dig through a box in the attic to find the drafts, and they start with some very sketchy notes I made on a pad I kept in the car—really just phrases from the radio show, not notes for a poem. I’m pretty sure the person being interviewed was Deepak Chopra, and it was the way his phrases and ideas connected to thoughts about my brother’s suicide that sparked the poem. The background is that my older brother had killed himself (completely unexpectedly) a little over a year earlier, in November 2002, and that, for the past ten or eleven months, I’d been writing and revising poems on that grim subject, including a twelve-part sequence about the immediate aftermath of his death. That was, at times, a grueling process, all mixed together with tremendous grief. With all those poems behind it, this slightly more hopeful and perhaps more open poem seems to have come somewhat more easily. The first real draft is written in pencil on pages from a legal pad, and, reading it now, I am surprised to find that it already has the same basic shape as the final version. I often think of narrative poems, with their shifts between various time-frames, as more “constructed” than lyrics, but if that is true, this poem would appear to be the exception. It always started with the radio show calling up the phone conversation I’d had with my sister Ellen a month or so earlier, followed by the flashback (via the phone conversation) to the story about my brother which began five years before. The first three stanzas are almost exactly the same in the first typed draft (dated January 6, 2004) as they are in the final version. The difference is that, in the first draft, there was a period at the end of the third stanza—but in pencil I changed it to a comma and wrote in rephrasings that allowed the sentence to keep going, in an attempt to better represent the way the mind moves through time and is called back to memories.

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

It depends how you count: there are eight versions, but a couple of them are very close to each other. The final draft isn’t dated, but it is almost identical to a previous version dated January 13, 2004 … which is a week after the first draft (assuming I went right to the computer when I finished the hand-written draft). This is an unusually short time for me, especially for a poem of this length. Many of my poems go through numerous versions over a much longer period of time … to the point where even a large paperclip won’t hold the drafts together and I have to graduate to one of those black spring clips.

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

I believe in inspiration and work. As I said earlier, this poem seems to have come fairly naturally, and some of the work I put into it I undid later (which is also work).

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

Revision of this poem involved both subtracting (or compressing) and adding (or expanding)… with some of the additions being later subtracted again. One thing I added and kept were place names, because I began to realize the importance of locality (and non-locality) to the poem: there is the interweaving of time-frames but also the web of various locations, like pins on a map. Chicago was there from the start, but Minnesota, Cincinnati, Massachusetts, Seattle, and Idaho (the actual locations of the people and events) were all added in the second typed draft. Usually this just meant adding a phrase like “from Minnesota,” “to Massachusetts,” or “in Cincinnati,” but near the end of the poem, it led to the addition of the stanzas

which makes me wonder about
my brother’s non-locality
in relation to Janet, who I know

is now in Idaho—and whether,
from his non-locality, Andy
has anything to do with this.

This added passage went on for one more stanza, but I ended up cutting it. I knew that length was an issue with the poem—that, while it was in some sense a “loose and baggy” poem (“a shaggy dog story,” as one friend called it), some compression was needed to keep it from bogging down. Oh, one other thing: the poem did not get its final title until the last draft. Before that, it bore the cumbersome working title “A Series of (Un?)related Events.”

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

I waited three months—until mid-April—to send the poem out, submitting it to Image magazine, and three months after that, the editor, Gregory Wolfe, wrote to accept it. Like everything else about this poem, it seems, that went more smoothly than usual, too. I think one reason, besides luck, is that I had a sense that the poem might fit the religious nature of the magazine, though it might very easily have been rejected. It appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Image, so, a year and a few months after it was written. That’s a fairly short turn-around, in my experience. Later, the poem was included in my book Incomplete Knowledge (New York: Four Way Books, 2006).

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. I don’t have any rules, but normally every stage of the process is longer than it was for this poem.

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

Everything in this poem is pretty much true, though I streamlined a little by cutting some details. For instance, in real life (and in an earlier version of the poem), it wasn’t until I got home that I realized that the poet I met in Seattle—Janet Holmes—was the same person my brother had met in Chicago, and then I sent her an e-mail to explain. That was too cumbersome to stay in the poem. But the play between life and this poem has been compelling for me. I didn’t meet Matt Greenberg, my sister’s then-new partner, until six months after I wrote the poem, and I didn’t meet his father Al Greenberg—Janet’s husband, and a wonderful poet himself—until three years later, in early 2007. It felt like a momentous occasion.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, though also meditative.

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

I hate to sound vague, but not really. In this case, I may have been thinking of the real-life players in the poem—my sister and Matt, etc. And my dead brother. Afterwards, at least, I thought he might like this poem more than some of the darker poems about his suicide. He always liked my funny poems, and although this poem isn’t funny, it’s not quite as heavy as some of the others I’d been 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 a handful of trusted poet friends with whom I share poems—some regularly, some irregularly. Bob Cording and I show each other everything, and he definitely saw some versions of this, probably starting around the third draft.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

That’s hard to answer, since I write everything from short lyrics to longer narratives and meditations, from the humorous to the elegiac. I guess it’s a little more “New Agey” than anything else I’ve ever written.

What is American about this poem?

The fact that the speaker is driving a car strikes me as quintessentially American. Also, the way it ends up including locations all across the country… or at least the top half of the country, from coast to coast, with Cincinnati being as far south as it goes.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

God (or Valéry) only knows. I hadn’t looked at it in a while before answering these questions, and there were a few small things I questioned as I read it. But I’m not going to tell you what they are!



“Coincidences” from Incomplete Knowledge, © 2006 by Jeffrey Harrison. Used by permission of the publisher, Four Way Books, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

Maxine Kumin

Maxine Kumin lives on a farm in central New Hampshire. She has published thirteen volumes of poetry, as well as novels, short stories, and essays on country living (including Women, Animals, and Vegetables). She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1973 and has been a poetry consultant for the Library of Congress and Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She was awarded the Poets Prize in 1993 and received the Aiken/Taylor Award for Modern Poetry in 1995. She also received the Ruth E. Lily Prize in 1999. In 1995, Kumin became a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets but resigned that post four years later, along with Carolyn Kizer, in protest over the board’s reluctance to admit poets of color. This act led to an entire restructuring of the institution’s bylaws. Kumin's most recent collection of poetry is Still to Mow (Norton, 2007).


JACK

How pleasant the yellow butter
melting on white kernels, the meniscus
of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets

where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are
after shucking the garden's last Silver Queen
and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses

the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon:
our first foal, now a bossy mare of 28
which calibrates to 84 in people years

and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster
at 22. Every year, the end of summer
lazy and golden, invites grief and regret:

suddenly it's 1980, winter buffets us,
winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow
we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them,

a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president's portrait
lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it
the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his

hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others
who hang their heads over their dutch doors. Sometimes
he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters.

That spring, in the bustle of grooming
and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go
to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following

fall she sold him down the river. I meant to
but never did go looking for him, to buy him back
and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table

my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons
the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order.
Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone

did you remember that one good winter?


When was this poem composed? How did it start? How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

“Jack” didn’t start with a description of the setting but in medias res with the remembrance & guilt. I can’t remember how many takes later it sort of fell into place beginning with the wine, old friends and corn shucking.

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

I do believe ultimately in inspiration; without it I would probably never write as I do not trust what George Starbuck used to call “thunk up” poems. I’d say it was mostly received but in stages that required a lot of trial and error and that is my usual experience.

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

Conscious principles? Not really. I have learned over a lifetime to employ what I call “poetic tact,” a seat-of-the-pants knowledge of what works, what isn’t too much, or minimalist. I dislike bare poems that leave almost everything to the reader but I also believe in leaving room for the reader to do some of the work, to enter into the poem.

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

Alas, I can’t remember how long after I wrote it that it was published (or even where).

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 tend to let a poem sit for several weeks or even months (in some cases years) before I submit it—in the first flush of completion I often think it is done when it isn’t and it takes time for a poem to come back down to room temperature to where I can see it a bit dispassionately.

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

Just about everything I write begins in, or is in some way anchored in fact, which gives me the freedom to fictionalize as needed.

Is this a narrative poem?

I am a narrative poet; in other poets’ work I want to see at least a narrative thread running thru, something to hold onto.

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?

No particular audience in mind. It has to please me first but of course I am conscious of readership. I have never trusted the writer who says she/he only writes for her/himself. I’ve never met a musician who didn’t want the work to be performed. Ca va.

As for sharing drafts, I do so, occasionally, and I think most poets do as well. It shortcuts the process to be able to bounce a draft off a trusted adviser and can save me from heading wrong-way down a narrow alley.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours? What is American about this poem?

“Jack” doesn’t differ from the general body of my work. The older I grow the more elegiac my poems become. I write more about our lives here on the farm, probably too much about our dogs and horses, but these, along with vegetables, are what I know best. If that makes this an American poem, so be it.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I think this poem was finished.

James Harms

James Harms has published six books of poetry, most recently After West (2008) from Carnegie Mellon University Press. His second collection, The Joy Addict, for which he received the PEN/Revson Fellowship, will be reprinted this year in Carnegie Mellon’s Classic Contemporaries Series. Newer work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Oxford American, West Branch, Poetry International, Quarterly West, The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, Cave Wall, Barrelhouse, and others. A recipient of an NEA Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, he is Professor of English at West Virginia University, where he was the founding director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. He also directs the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry at New England College.


PHOTO OF MY STEPFATHER IN AN ALTADENA EVENING

There is only one picture of Gene
that stills the sadness long enough
for me to see it. He sits
on a piece of patio furniture in a shirt
aswarm with blue and gray fish,
slumped slightly as if settling in
before stiffening his spine against
the chair's rubber straps.
There is a streak of shadow
slanting through the frame
and dusting his hair with darkness,
as if the evening at the edges of the photo
is swelling with time,
is rinsing away the years as well as the light.
But there is little gray in Gene's hair,
which even now is clay-colored
and fine, as it's been as long
as I've known him. Unlike my father
or mother, I remember not knowing him,
an empty sleeve attached to a jacket,
which hangs in the hall closet
of a house long sold.
Gene has never listened
to Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mathis.
He has never asked to throw a baseball
with me, for which I am grateful.
The one time I saw him finger a satin shirt
was a moment I imagined as I ordered tuxedos
for my groomsmen, my father
and for him. He stood close to my mother
through the service like a birch
leaning slightly toward the clearing
where the sun strikes first
before spreading to the woods.
For twenty years he took all the pictures.
Which is why there is only one
of the sadness stilled, the patio cooling
and Gene at rest in the play of light
and shadow at afternoon's end, the edge
of evening. Perhaps
he is beside my mother now
in their new house near Modesto,
in the kitchen I'm sure, the windows open
to almond trees, the muffled noise
of branches budding. They seem
to be listening to the threads
giving way in the earth,
the soft rip of dahlias pushing up.
But no. It's music in the living room
they hear, Beethoven I would bet, the sadness
of air blended into song,
a wordless story the two of them
have heard so often they know enough
to stop, to turn toward each other
against the steady pull
of the earth, which spins as always
in the other direction.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem was written in the early spring of 1999. Toward the end of the poem there are actually a few references to spring, which suggests I was trying to imagine myself west, to the San Joaquin Valley, and to conjure up the strange beauty of those endless acres of almond groves that surround my mother’s house in Escalon, California. The first time I visited Escalon it was spring (several years before this poem was written), so the impression of blossoming almond trees seems to be my default image for the place; I’ve used it in several other poems.

Anyway, I think I was trying to do two things in this poem: 1) come to terms with a fairly (if domestically) cataclysmic event: my parents’ move away from our childhood home in Altadena (which is in greater Los Angeles) to their new life in retirement in the central valley; and 2) pay homage to my stepfather, who is one of the most important figures in my life.

My stepfather, like my mother, rarely appears in my poems. I think the two of them are such dependable constants that I’ve never needed to write about them; there’s no problem to solve when it comes to them, no trauma or injury that requires the repair of poetry. So I willed myself to make this poem by remembering a photograph of my stepfather. I didn’t actually look at the picture until after I finished the poem; I didn’t want the real thing to get in the way of my imagination. But just the memory of the photo sent me in two directions at once: to our old home in Altadena (in the past), and to their new one in Escalon (near Modesto, the present). I find that I need poems to exist in more than one place and time. I’m most interested in the simultaneity of the lived moment, how the past and future complexify the present.

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

I really can’t remember the process of writing the poem in any specific detail, though if it was in any way normal it would have gone through a dozen or more drafts. I’ve become a fairly fastidious editor, and can keep a poem alive in manuscript form through many edits before I need to kick out another draft. As a result, I don’t put poems through as many iterations as I did twenty years ago, when a typical poem went through forty or fifty drafts. The poem probably took between three and six months to complete.

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

Writing poems is inspiring; it’s a way of creating inspiration in our lives. So yes, I believe in cultivating inspiration through hard work. I do seem to remember that this poem was difficult to write. There are a few complicated metaphors that were tough to orchestrate, and which required the introduction of a degree of self-consciousness that I’m not always comfortable with. So all of that took some time to work out. But there are a few lines that seemed magical to me as I wrote them, that seemed to arrive out of the air. I love it when that happens. A few.

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

I wanted this poem to resemble the easy drift of memory and meditation, that state of consciousness that most of us slip into several times a day when a particular image or overheard phrase triggers a reverie. Eventually I arrived at a line that undulates for the most part, and line breaks that are comfortable and emphatic, as opposed to disruptive and transformational. So the form is an extension of tone, a way of supporting mood and atmosphere. I was certainly conscious of working with all those issues as I moved into the last couple of drafts. The technique is fairly intuitive, but I do spend a lot of time considering the shape of the finished product, and I’m not averse to taking a poem I’ve thought of as finished and completely disassembling it, changing line length or getting rid of breaks all together (most of my prose poems start out as lined poems). This particular poem found its shape fairly early and easily.

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

Well, this could be an embarrassing answer, though I’m betting it’s not all that unusual. I sent this poem out regularly for two and a half years before it was accepted by Poetry International, a journal that has been very kind to me over the years. For whatever reason, Poetry International tends to publish the poems that matter most to me, and I’m very grateful for their support. (I’d send them more work but that would be trading on that support.) The only other journal that has published more of my poems is Crazyhorse, another terrific magazine.

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?

No rules. I'm certainly more patient than I used to be: I remember regretting the publication of some early poems, most of which were either revised before inclusion in a book or discarded. Then again, I can't say that I'm sure I'm always right. The reasons I like or don't like my own poems are often very personal and subjective, and don't always have much to do with the overall success of the poems. So I tend to trust certain editors and friends; if they think a poem works, I'll hold onto it or even go with an earlier version that they prefer.

But back to the original questions: nowadays I often wait months, even a year or more to send out work. I just don't feel the same urgency to get the poems into the world. Rather, I enjoy fiddling with them for a long time, seeing how they hold up to different moods, different seasons, whatever. Who was the painter who used to sneak into museums and galleries after hours to continue work on his paintings, paintings that were supposedly finished? Yup, I get that.

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

Well, I have a mother and stepfather who live near Modesto and used to live in Altadena. Beyond that, most of the details and situations in the poem are invented, even if they resemble the actual. These distinctions aren’t all that important to me.

Is this a narrative poem?

The poem is descriptive and meditative, and is controlled by a clearly defined voice. This gives the impression of narrative because we’re very aware of a narrator performing acts of memory and description. But there’s not much in the way of linear story telling. So yes, it’s narrative to a degree, but not plot driven.

There are all sorts of ways to enact meditation in poetry. Since I favor situational enactment, and love the sound of a voice on the page, my poems will resemble narratives even when they don’t do much in the way of story telling. When a poem is less connected to a situational reality, it seems more lyric, even if the degree of story telling isn’t all that different from one of my poems. I find these distinctions (like the ones in the previous answer) fairly unimportant. My students are devoted to the bifurcation of poetry into camps, and those camps are usually defined by their relationship to lyric versus narrative disclosure. It seems to me that every poem requires its own specific tools, and I like to make sure my toolbox is as big as possible.

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

I don’t remember who I was reading when I wrote this particular poem, though I know that the book Freeways and Aqueducts, which contains this poem, was informed by my deep reading of W.H. Auden (one of the epigraphs for the book is from “In Praise of Limestone”), as well as James Schuyler, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hass and David St. John, among others. And Ashbery, whose importance to my work is central: I’ve learned more from his poems than I can say.

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

I really don’t think about audience when I’m writing. I assume that if I’m satisfying my own demands for the poem that it might prove worthwhile to other readers of poetry. I tend to feel that poetry that lacks access at the level of the phrase is probably overly concerned with the wrong things; in other words, I’d like for a general reader to be able to understand my poems phrase by phrase. I’d like for them to hear a voice on the page. That’s about 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?

Not anymore. There were years where I showed many of my poems to a small circle of fellow poets, or mailed them off to friends, but that’s not the case anymore. Occasionally I’ll email something to a friend for a quick look. And I do show my wife most of my poems for her impressions. But I don’t expect the sort of intense critical feedback that was so necessary years ago.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It resembles one sort of poem I enjoy writing, which might be described as a meandering meditation. I like poems that surprise themselves as they proceed, that explode out of narrative tracks and find ways of moving into different temporal and spatial realities without losing their way. But I also enjoy writing other sorts of poetry, so I hope that this poem is both similar and different.

What is American about this poem?

Most of my work is concerned with the way place shapes identity, and I think that’s a very American notion.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Ah, yes: Valery. I tend to agree with him. I’d like to think I finished the poem and that’s that. But the truth is (as I suggested in an earlier answer) I could probably fiddle with a poem forever. At some point I just stop, usually when the fiddling seems less productive or interesting. But is it really finished? Who knows?

Erin Belieu

Erin Belieu was born and raised in Nebraska and educated at the University of Nebraska, The Ohio State University, and Boston University. A former editor at AGNI, she currently serves as a contributing editor to The Kenyon Review. She has taught at Washington University, Boston University, Kenyon College, and Ohio University. Belieu is the author of three poetry collections, all published by Copper Canyon Press: Black Box (2007); One Above & One Below (2000); and Infanta (1995), which was selected for the National Poetry Series. Belieu currently teaches in the English Department at Florida State University.


LAST TRIP TO THE ISLAND

You're mad that I can't love the ocean,

but I've come to this world landlocked
and some bodies feel permanently strange.
Like any foreign language, study it too late and
it never sticks. Anyway,

we're here aren't we? —
trudging up the sand, the water churning
its constant horny noise, an openmouthed heavy

breathing made more unnerving by
the presence of all these families, the toddlers

with their chapped bottoms, the fathers
in gigantic trunks spreading out their dopey
circus-colored gear.

How can anyone relax
near something so worked up all the time?

I know the ocean is glamorous,
but the hypnosis, the dilated pull of it, feels

impossible to resist. And what better reason to
resist? I'm most comfortable in

a field, a yellow-eared patch
of cereal, whose quiet rustling argues for
the underrated valor of discretion.

And above this, I admire a certain quality of
sky, like an older woman who wears her jewels with
an air of distance, that is, lightly,
with the right attitude. Unlike your ocean,

there's nothing sneaky about a field. I like their
ugly-girl frankness. I like that, sitting in the dirt,

I can hear what's coming between the stalks.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I think I wrote it in early 2006 when I was working on the poems for my last book, Black Box. It was one of the first ones to come for that book.

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

This was an odd one in that I usually go through many (possibly too many) revisions of a poem and it takes months and months—sometimes years—to eke out anything, but in this case Doug Powell got a hold of me and kindly asked if I had anything for him to publish in The Electronic Poetry Review. I’m not a very prolific writer--I didn’t have much to show him--still I didn’t want to miss the opportunity as I really admired what Doug was doing there. So I kind of sheepishly sent “Last Trip to the Island,” which was only in its third or fourth draft, and said, “Hey, you know, this probably isn’t finished and you may not want it, etc. etc.” And Doug wrote back something like “What are you talking about, you idiot? I think it’s terrific…” And then he writes this brilliant explication of the poem and why he thinks it’s well done and by the time I was finished reading what he’d written I decided maybe it wasn’t so hopelessly pointless after all. Marie Ponsot once told me years ago “Erin, you really need to lower your expectations” but I still struggle a lot with this self-sense of nothing ever being good enough. And pretending to be exacting is also a handy way of masking my inherent slothfulness.

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

I do believe in inspiration, but really, inspiration and $1.50 is worth a cup of coffee. Everybody’s inspired, aren’t they? It’s getting it on the page where the ditch digging begins. So I carried around this idea about how I wanted to write a poem about how much I mistrust the ocean and how uncomfortable I feel when I go to the beach—any redheaded freckled people who might be reading this know what I’m talking about—and it took some years before the notion gelled with a scene and point-of-view and argument. That vague idea needed an occasion and a stance. So ideas are like asses: everybody has one. I guess I think all the various elements have to gather together and you almost always have to sweat for those. Sometimes you win the poem lottery, but for me the muse doesn’t hand out the free samples very often.

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

Again, I’m not certain that it did arrive at its final form. I’m very much a sculptor with my poems, even when my poems appear to approximate narrative, free verse voice as some of them do, and this one came out a little bit too loose for my tastes. But other people liked it and I’ve finally learned when I get that lucky to say “Oh, good!” and shut my cake hole.

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 to admit that I don’t often send my poems into the world. I’m really not trying to sound repulsively self-deprecating, but I’m under no delusion that the world can’t sleep without the next Erin Belieu poem. Plus I react very badly to rejection. Back years ago when I did try and send out a few things, the first time I got rejected I nearly beat the mailbox to death. Seriously, I kicked it till the post broke. And I’m pretty sure that’s a felony. Anyway, I’m in the ludicrously lucky position to sometimes have editors ask me for things and then I send them along. Better for everyone involved. But I do suspect that people write and send and publish too much generally. I remember Edith Wharton describing a powerful New York society couple—Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden—in her novel The Age of Innocence. When one character asks why these two—who are neither particularly fascinating nor entertaining—wield so much influence over the social scene, another character responds by saying “they make themselves valuable by making themselves rare.” I may be paraphrasing slightly, but I think the point is a useful one.

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

I could talk about it and I completely understand why you ask—it’s a fair question—but honestly I’m sick to death of discussing the supposedly biographical elements in poetry. Even if themes or images originally spring in some way from the biographical, any poem worth reading moves beyond that quickly. I mean, I know that Hardy had a miserable relationship with his first wife, but I didn’t know that when I first fell in love with his poems and knowing this doesn’t add anything to them. “The Voice” is an incredibly powerful portrait of grief without this “fact.” My persistent fear is that reality television and celebrity blogs and all that delicious but nutritionally void garbage are completely devaluing acts of imagination in every form. I hate those “based on a true story” stickers they put on books now. I think we all need to take the pledge to stop caring about what the facts are and just be hopeful for something imagined that truly moves us. On my next book I’m putting stickers on them that say, “based on an imagined story.”

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, I suppose so. A lyric-narrative, technically speaking.

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

I think I was reading Josh Bell and Marina Tsvetaeva. Man, that’ll give you a nosebleed! But in the good way…

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

Maybe my editor, Michael, at Copper Canyon. It’s always good to make him happy.

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 little posse who’ve been generous enough to give me feedback over the years—Carl Phillips, Susan Aizenberg, Mark Bibbins, Josh Bell, Kay Horwath. Very good souls. Couldn’t do without them. And my best and toughest critic is my partner, Adam Boles, who’s a wonderfully mean editor. Really, I just picked him for his looks, but then he turns out to be brilliant. Go figure. So he wrestles with me whenever I shout, “I’m done!” Then I snarl at him, tell him he doesn’t understand my genius and stomp back to my desk to try and fix what he was talking about. He’s almost always right. Very annoying. But unlike the mailbox, I never kick him.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I guess it seems pretty much like a typical Belieu specimen—oppositional, contrary, hopefully amusing in some black humored way. It doesn’t have any dirty words in it, though. That’s strange.

What is American about this poem?

What an interesting question. Well, its currency privileges the image, so I suppose that distinguishes it from what my friends are doing in Britain where the focus is still more often pointed at music. And it has bad manners but a big heart.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Puh-lease….

Mark Jarman

Mark Jarman was born in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, and grew up in California and Scotland. He is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author of nine books of poetry: North Sea (1978), The Rote Walker (1981), Far and Away (1985), The Black Riviera (1990), Iris (1992), Questions for Ecclesiastes (1997), Unholy Sonnets (2000), To the Green Man (2004), and Epistles (2007). Jarman’s awards include a Joseph Henry Jackson Award for his poetry in 1974; three NEA grants in poetry in 1977, 1983, and 1992; and a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for 1991-1992. His book The Black Riviera won the 1991 Poet’s Prize. Questions for Ecclesiastes was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine.


GROUND SWELL

Is nothing real but when I was fifteen,
Going on sixteen, like a corny song?
I see myself so clearly then, and painfully--
Knees bleeding through my usher's uniform
Behind the candy counter in the theater
After a morning's surfing; paddling frantically
To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me,
Trundle me clumsily along the beach floor's
Gravel and sand; my knees aching with salt.
Is that all I have to write about?
You write about the life that's vividest.
And if that is your own, that is your subject.
And if the years before and after sixteen
Are colorless as salt and taste like sand--
Return to those remembered chilly mornings,
The light spreading like a great skin on the water,
And the blue water scalloped with wind-ridges,
And--what was it exactly?--that slow waiting
When, to invigorate yourself, you peed
Inside your bathing suit and felt the warmth
Crawl all around your hips and thighs,
And the first set rolled in and the water level
Rose in expectancy, and the sun struck
The water surface like a brassy palm,
Flat and gonglike, and the wave face formed.
Yes. But that was a summer so removed
In time, so specially peculiar to my life,
Why would I want to write about it again?
There was a day or two when, paddling out,
An older boy who had just graduated
And grown a great blonde moustache, like a walrus,
Skimmed past me like a smooth machine on the water,
And said my name. I was so much younger,
To be identified by one like him--
The easy deference of a kind of god
Who also went to church where I did--made me
Reconsider my worth. I had been noticed.
He soon was a small figure crossing waves,
The shawling crest surrounding him with spray,
Whiter than gull feathers. He had said my name
Without scorn, just with a bit of surprise
To notice me among those trying the big waves
Of the morning break. His name is carved now
On the black wall in Washington, the frozen wave
That grievers cross to find a name or names.
I knew him as I say I knew him, then,
Which wasn't very well. My father preached
His funeral. He came home in a bag
That may have mixed in pieces of his squad.
Yes, I can write about a lot of things
Besides the summer that I turned sixteen.
But that's my ground swell. I must start
Where things began to happen and I knew it.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem must have started sometime in the late 1980’s, because my records show that it was published in The Indiana Review in 1988. I think the poem was finished in 1987. But I have always believed the poem described its own process of composition. I was writing about Santa Monica Bay where I grew up, yet again, and started asking myself why I kept returning to that subject. The poem tries to answer that question.

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

I wrote the poem at a time when I was not saving drafts (I do save them now), but most of the drafts would have been written in a notebook. That notebook is packed away somewhere. As I recall I began writing and stalled at the point I asked myself the question: “Why would I want to write about it again?” In this case “it” was growing up on Santa Monica Bay, in Redondo Beach, California, in the late 1960’s. I’m pretty sure I looked at the few lines I had several times over the next few days before the older boy appeared on his surfboard.

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

I would be lying if I said I didn’t believe in inspiration, but I honestly don’t wait for it. Once the older boy, who would die in Vietnam, appeared in my memory of surfing one morning, I was able to revise the opening of the poem, and move things through to the poem’s conclusion. That took a lot of work, but all of it was the best kind of toil. Sweat and tears? I had not forgotten the grief and sorrow that settled on the church my father served when this boy, the son of a prominent family, was killed. His death profoundly affected that little community and our own family. My father began to oppose the Vietnam War, for example, and even preach against it – but that’s another story.

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

I was listening for a blank verse line, but trying not to do so slavishly. And since I had discovered an answer for my own question, it was simply a matter of intuiting when the answer was sufficient. I realized, too, that I wanted to echo the end of Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (“down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart”) and the legendary Irish hero Finn McCool’s description of the most beautiful music in the world, “the music of what happens.” But I wanted this layered, highly literary allusion to seem anything but.

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

As I said earlier, I think it was about a year before it appeared in a magazine. But it was ten years before it appeared as the first poem in my book Questions for Ecclesiastes.

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?

My practice varies from poem to poem. Usually once I think a poem’s finished, I let it sit for a few months before I send it anywhere.

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

This poem hews pretty closely to the facts as I remember them. I even verified them recently in conversation with my father. I did not know why I knew about the condition of the boy’s body, though. My father reminded me that the body was returned accompanied by a military officer who insisted that the remains not be viewed. But the boy in this poem was not the only older kid I knew who was killed in Vietnam. A boy I admired in my high school, who was a member of the writing club, died in Vietnam. The first time I visited the Vietnam Memorial I found their names.

Is this a narrative poem?

Sure, it’s a narrative poem. It follows a way of recollecting through anecdote and situates an event in history. But simply because it employs narrative in this way doesn’t mean that the poem is not also lyric.

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

I already mentioned Yeats, though I got to the quote from Finn McCool via Seamus Heaney. I was reading Robert Frost. And I was reading a lot of a contemporary master of narrative poetry, Larry Levis. Yeats, Heaney, Frost, Levis – all have been important and cherished influences.

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

Anyone who wants to read a poem.

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 show my wife my work in early stages, and I have a few friends – fellow poets – whom I trust to give me advice about new poems.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It deals with a subject about which I have written many poems, but its reflexivity, its self-consciousness about being a piece of writing, being a poem, is unusual for my work, I think.

What is American about this poem?

The composer and music critic Virgil Thompson was once asked to describe what distinguished American music. He answered, “It is written by Americans.” This poem is set in a distinctive landscape of the American West and it deals with an important moment in American history, albeit from a little known local perspective. I think these are what is American about the poem, besides the fact that an American wrote it.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Once I managed to write the ending of this poem, I knew it was finished.