Anna Journey

Anna Journey is the author of the collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems are published in a number of journals, including American Poetry Review, FIELD, and Kenyon Review, and her essays appear in Blackbird, Notes on Contemporary Literature, and Parnassus. She’s won the Sycamore Review Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Diner Poetry Contest, fellowships from Yaddo and Bread Loaf, the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the J.A. and Isabel Elkins Fellowship from Inprint, a University Presidential Fellowship, and the University of Houston’s Inprint/Barthelme Fellowship in Poetry. She’s currently a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston. In 2006, Journey discovered the unpublished status of Sylvia Plath’s early sonnet “Ennui” and the influence of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby on it.


THE MIRROR’S LAKE IS FOREVER

That’s when I knew the mirror was all sex and hard
fact. Unlike knowing my grandfather

posthumously. Because a ghost can’t be
androgynous as a lamp is,

as peat moss is,
as the smell of cedar—

knife-feathery. Because the dead
can watch me pee without

even a trace of embarrassment. And who
has the right to more? Mirror

that couldn’t reach my dead
grandfather’s closet—his jewel-colored

medical books in former editions,
his gay porn magazines: men smooth

as conchs in softcore seascapes. My mother,
who found them while cleaning

out his house, asks, Are you sorry
I told you? I said, No,

I’m not sorry. As if staring
into his horn-rims and my grandmother’s

coral dress could help me understand
the selfishness of portraits—

their shut door splintering the past’s
exact coffin-space.

I know that shame
is beard-high with two daughters—the blonde

one with cats and the dark one with red-
haired girls. I know

the mirror’s lake is forever
dragged for corpses, lily-buoyant

arteries, livers, and cocks. I know
he’s caught there: doctor,

with his white coat, and gold-veined
tobacco. And what is more haunted

than the smoked voices
of cicadas under plums? And what

heats faster than silver? His constellation:
cold instruments raised

over useless space. Somewhere
there’s a ghost

I’ll open my shirt for, recount my
Entire Medical History for,

who I’ll forgive for wearing
tweed and love beads and for hiding

stacks of magazines in the dark, who will press
that silver scope to his ear, who will listen.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I’d been reading a lot of Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s poetry at the time—this was during the spring of 2007, I think. That spring was my last in Richmond, Virginia, as I finished up my MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. I’d received a thesis fellowship, which gave me a semester-long respite from teaching. I’d wake up at noon, caffeinate, maybe stay in my plaid pajamas until four, and then take a stroll around Hollywood Cemetery—named for the thorny ambience of the holly trees and not the movie industry—or cross the arcing footbridge to Belle Isle and dangle my feet in the muddy James. It was a kind of paradise, actually, except that I had to fry my own veggie sausage.

Anyway, I’d been devouring Goldberg’s Lie Awake Lake like a crazed beast. The collection consists mostly of elegies regarding the death of the poet’s father. There’s a strange, incantatory energy to Goldberg’s lines that makes even the frightening or macabre seem irresistible. Her wild images and surprising associations, her lyrical repetitions, and the defiant voice of her poems thrilled me. In Goldberg’s poem, “Sly Sparrow,” in which a sparrow gets shaved for surgery and a new wing grafted on, the bird says:

I began to call up song like a knot.
I became one mean musical
motherfucking sparrow: Call me Nicole. Though
by nature
we are a tolerant sort, like therapists
or pears.

I want to be one mean musical motherfucking sparrow! You know?

Also, the fact that Goldberg’s speakers are occasionally posthumous ones (like the resurrected mutant sparrow, for example) got me thinking about how I might engage these kinds of fabular characters, or ventriloquize them, in my writing.

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

Well, it’s been awhile, so my memory isn’t even remotely reliable. But when is it ever? I’d say the poem went through many drafts (which means, for me, probably six to ten), with a year elapsing between the first and final drafts.
The penultimate draft seemed to be motoring along just fine, right up until the ending slammed into a wall. I considered cutting the poem from my first book, actually, because the ending felt so abrupt. That draft stopped when the speaker discovered “the mirror’s lake is forever / dragged for corpses, lily-buoyant // arteries, livers, and cocks.” I thought, “Yeah, ending on ‘cocks’ would sure be a high-volume ending,” but it just felt showy and unearned. I needed something more risky and emotionally resonant, not just a big, profane cymbal-clang. I mean, so the speaker stares into a lake. So what?

A year later, faced with the unpalatable notion of cutting the poem, I decided to tackle the ending. It’s unusual for me to return to a poem after so much time, but I wanted to keep it in the mix if I could. I realized during that final revision that the grandfather must fully materialize from the lake’s floating organs, that the speaker needs to commune more directly with her specterly relative. I needed the speaker to become more exposed.

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. I also believe, however (to paraphrase Randall Jarrell), if you want to be struck by lightning, you have to be there when the rain falls. For me, being there when the rain falls involves reading (poems by my old favorites or by new authors, nonfiction articles in The New Yorker, even some zany local city paper feature on North Carolina’s Kudzu Jesus on a telephone wire, whatever)—with my feelers out searching for triggers. Being there when the rain falls also involves my actively making space and time to write for an uninterrupted period of time. So I plunge in, write with risk, revise with energy, and, hopefully, the poem keeps on getting better and better as I stick with it.

Many of my poems grow from stories I hear that resonate with my own peculiar obsessions. My interest in the macabre probably comes from my family’s certain oddness of perception. We’re the kind of family who, on Christmas Eve, sits up late on the grey couch flanked by red and green sequined stockings poring over old crime scene photographs on the internet (courtesy of Lizzie Borden and Jack the Ripper). I’m not kidding; my mom, my sister, and I really do that.

When my mother finally revealed her discovery of my grandfather’s telling stash of magazines while cleaning out his house after his death in 1987, I knew instantly that the story would wind up informing a poem. I was surprised, of course, but I also experienced a disorienting sense of loss; I felt like my grandfather had prevented us from fully knowing him. I kept thinking, “If he’d only told us, he would have met with complete acceptance, understanding.” I felt deprived; I felt like my chance at really knowing him was long vanished.

The sexuality of our own parents, or grandparents, however, isn’t something most of us are comfortable with; it’s transgressive; it’s taboo. Especially taboo, too, was my grandfather’s living simultaneously as a closeted bisexual man and the patriarch of a nuclear family, in Mississippi, before the civil rights movement was in full swing. My grandfather was an active member of the community: he shrunk the heads of all sorts of people in town; he founded an Episcopal church; he volunteered his time to work toward advancing integration policies. He was a painter, guitarist, collector of newfangled technologies; he was the first person on the block to purchase a television. In the sixties, the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses in the front yard of his suburban brick home in Jackson. He also got passed over for promotions with some regularity at the hospital, despite his popularity with patients and effectiveness as a psychiatrist.

In this context, then, keeping his bisexuality a secret from his children, as best he could, seems an act of bravery and protection. Surely, though, it must also have been a deeply painful and self-destructive sacrifice to make. The project of the poem is most certainly elegiac and yet one that, in spite of the speaker’s hauntedness, I hope, is also tender and celebratory.

Anyway, when I start to wonder, “Should I really be writing about this?” I know it’s exactly what I ought to be doing. I like to challenge myself; it keeps me off the couch.

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

I often choose to write in couplets; perhaps that’s because they’re about as far away as you can get from prose. There’s a cool restraint to couplets, a formal clarity, and a kind of—I don’t know—buoyancy that helps give my speedy, image-packed, lush language room to breathe. So, it’s about balance; it’s my recipe for staving off some sort of baroque implosion.

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

About two years after I finished the poem, the online journal Blackbird published it, along with audio clips and five other poems from my first collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. Click here to read them.

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

I don’t have any rules about how long I wait to send out poems. Usually, if I return to a poem after a week or two and still think it’s good, then I go for it.

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

Wallace Stevens calls poetry the supreme fiction. After all, why should we poets cede any damn territory to fiction writers? When I make use of factual details, as I do in “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever,” I also try to allow plenty of room for invention. If I cleave to my autobiography, then the poem falls flat. I suspect one reason I’m drawn to writing about my grandfather is that I never got the chance to know him as an adult; he died when I was seven. Because I have such a limited understanding of him, I suppose I feel freer to make up details—to elaborate, invent, exaggerate, and omit—until I arrive at a poem that speaks the truth through the necessary art of fiction’s lies.

Is this a narrative poem?

The poem contains narrative elements. There’s a story at work here; there are characters; there’s a setting; there’s a discernable plot. I suspect the poem has more in common with the lyric mode, however, in that it emphasizes personal feeling and a single moment rather than a narrative. But that’s the line I constantly walk and upon which I slip and blur the boundaries. I’m happy with that. I love getting way out there in moments of lyric, cosmic drunkenness just as much as I love the vivid stories that weave throughout narrative poetry—Larry Levis and Norman Dubie are gods to me.

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

I mentioned before that I’d been excited by Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s approach to elegy in Lie Awake Lake. I’d also been reading Anna Akhmatova’s Selected Poems (Judith Hemschemeyer’s translation). There’s a brilliant poem of Akhmatova’s, “In Tsarskoye Selo,” in which the image of lake as a mirror, in the second section, really stuck in my head:

…And there’s my marble double,
Lying under the ancient maple,
He has given his face to the waters of the lake,
And he’s listening to the green rustling.

And bright rainwater washes
His clotted wound…
Cold one, white one, wait,
I’ll become marble too.

I borrowed Akhmatova’s line, “He has given his face to the waters of the lake,” for the title of another poem I wrote during that time. Although I don’t remember which poem came first, both “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” and “He has given his face to the waters of the lake” are sister poems of sorts; they’re closely related in that they both sprang from the lake image as a kind of haunted psychic landscape.

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

Although I don’t have a particular audience in mind when I sit down to write, I do think a lot about clarity: clarity of image, dramatic circumstance, syntax, etc… I often recall a dear mentor’s simple mantra: “Clarity is never a vice.” This isn’t to say that you can’t have both clarity and mystery in a poem; because you can. Leaving room for mystery is important, but it’s not the same thing as being vague or imprecise.

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 wrote the poem during my MFA at VCU, so my teachers Gregory Donovan and David Wojahn read it and advised me. At that point, however, I was no longer taking a formal workshop; I met with them each one on one. Both Greg and David worked tirelessly and generously with me, for three years, on most of the poems in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. I couldn’t have done it without their devoted mentorship.

A little later in the book’s evolution, after I moved from Richmond to Houston (to begin my PhD at UH), Mark Doty helped me immensely. He said, “You should try a seduction poem,” so I wrote a whole series of devil/eros poems that wound up going in the manuscript. Those poems with a sharp sexual edge added new textures and tones to the collection, which excited me quite a lot; they helped tip the scales away from an onslaught of total gravitas.

My boyfriend, Patrick Turner, reads most of my drafts. He’s an upright bass player, but he trained early on in creative writing, so he offers me all kinds of valuable insights. He also brings me little snippets of stories he reads or hears that might be poem-worthy. (I wonder if he does this to make up for all the basses, banjos, fiddles, singing saws, etc, that sit around our apartment like they own this place…)

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

“The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” is more directly autobiographical than many of my poems in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. The poem’s setting, though, is perhaps more slippery and oblique than others in the book. A good number of the poems in my collection are anchored in highly specific, if strange, concrete settings: a costume ball in a basement, an artificial limb factory, a Confederate cemetery, the garden section of a suburban hardware shop, a city bayou. The landscape of “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” is more of a psychological projection.

What is American about this poem?

I’m an inheritor of confessional verse, which is, I think, a particularly American mode of writing. Sylvia Plath, especially, is a great heroine of mine. Much of my poetry is highly personal, like “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever.” I refuse to be boxed in, however, by What Really Happened, or “paralyzed by fact,” as Robert Lowell says of the trappings of confessional verse in his poem, “Epilogue.” I’m loyal to poems, not facts.

What’s also American about this poem is probably the setting—however in flux and bizarre it may be—which is the cicada-inflected, fraught American South. Some of the images and associative leaps, though, pull not from the stars and stripes but from European surrealism.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

For me, it’s both. I don’t give up on a poem until I’ve reached an ending that has certain qualities; it has to make some kind of unexpected, exciting turn. The rhythms have to be emphatic; the last image or phrase has to be resonant, strange, and precise. Charles Wright says somewhere that you’ve got to “hit the right notes hard,” and that’s what I always try to do, but especially when I gear up to end a poem.

I know when to stop revising when I keep making the same changes over and over again, like a little OCD worker bee; I’ll change an “a” to “the,” for example, or I’ll delete a conjunction and pat myself on the back, sipping my coffee. Even when I reach an ending that I feel good about I do still find myself scratching my head, wondering if there’s a better one out there. At that point, though, I just try to keep my fingers away from the keyboard!

In “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever,” I surprised myself when, toward the end of the poem, my speaker sits before her dead psychiatrist-grandfather as a patient. I surprised myself even more when she started unbuttoning her shirt, exposed and ready to recount her “Entire Medical History” for him. I thought, “Whoa, this is kind of disturbing! Should I be doing this?” That’s when I knew I had to follow through with it and hit the right last note, when the grandfather reaches out and, even posthumously, listens. I had to balance the shock of the floating cock imagery and the weirdly sexual undressing with a note that laid bare the speaker’s own vulnerability and need.

Elton Glaser

Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron and the former editor of the Akron Series in Poetry. He has published six full-length collections of poetry: Relics (Wesleyan University Press, 1984), Tropical Depressions (University of Iowa Press, 1988), Color Photographs of the Ruins (University of Pittsburg Press, 1992), Winter Amnesties (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), Pelican Tracks (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), and Here and Hereafter (University of Arkansas Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in the 1995, 1997, and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry. With William Greenway, he co-edited I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (University of Akron Press, 2002).


DEAD RECKONING

I’m done with
The abundance of winter, so full of itself,
The air no more than snow
And the earth no less, nothing multiplied
Zero by zero, until
I can’t take it, I can’t
Keep my mind from skating away
Somewhere south, as the ice melts
To blue and green and a red-tailed hawk
Riding the air, broken summer
Of the sun’s division, where the world
Comes back again, piece by piece,
And I see my shadow
Split the shore, walking the dark
Tideline between the beaten sand
And a thousand white arousals of the sea.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote “Dead Reckoning” in February 2002. It’s not at all surprising that this winter poem was composed in that cold month, when I often think about escaping Akron for someplace sunnier and warmer. I’ve lived in Ohio for thirty-seven years now, but my native state is Louisiana, where snow is a very rare treat, not a constant wintry torment as it is here. I’m sure the poem began on one of those freezing days when my mind, as the poem says, kept “skating away / Somewhere south.”

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

I think the poem was put together over several days, inching slowly forward as I tried to figure out what the next phrase would be. Once the first draft was complete, I probably just did some fiddling with the lines to get the rhythm and music right, no major revisions.

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 both luck and discipline. My habit is to use index cards as bookmarks, writing on them words and phrases and images as they show up and seem interesting. My poems tend to be built out of these chance juxtapositions of language; I flip through these stacks of cards, looking for some clue to where the poem might go next. With “Dead Reckoning,” for instance, I had the last image, “a thousand white arousals of the sea,” on one of the index cards, though I didn’t know it would go in this poem until I got close to what seemed like the conclusion. I loved the sound of that line and probably tried to use it in several earlier poems where it didn’t really fit. Here, I think, it found its rightful place.

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

As someone said, a poem is finished when it uses up all its material. I had nothing more to say about this wintry wish. I was conscious of trying to get the restlessness that sparked the poem into the form itself; thus, the many enjambments that drive the poem forward, with few resting places. I’m always aware of the integrity of the line. In this instance, the first line, “I’m done with,” was isolated like that because of the “Dead” in the title. Maybe only a few readers will pick up on that--my point is, it’s there to be picked up on. Readers should be given immediate pleasures and also some delayed pleasures, little gifts for returning to the poem and looking at it carefully.

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

“Dead Reckoning” was not published in a magazine. It went right into Pelican Tracks, which won the Crab Orchard Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2003, the year after the poem was written. Much of the book is concerned with the experiences of North and South, so the poem slipped easily into that collection.

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 don’t have any rules about how long before I send a new poem off to a magazine. Laziness is often a big factor. Or sometimes I think a poem ought to go to Magazine X, but that magazine is already considering some of my work, so I’ll hold on to the new poem until I hear from the editors about the poems they’re holding (always holding too long, of course).

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

Since my poems tend to start from language or image, I rarely know what they’re going to be before I actually write them. The facts in “Dead Reckoning” are so simple they barely deserve the term. I believe, with Wallace Stevens, that “Poetry is the supreme fiction.” Or, to put it more crudely, you just make this stuff up as you go along.

Is this a narrative poem?

“Dead Reckoning” is less a narrative than a mental itinerary. I’ve written narrative poems before, but only because that’s how a particular poem had to unfold. Mostly, my poems are about states of being, conditions of experience. Or, at least, that’s how I like to think about them.

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

I can’t recall what poet I was reading when I wrote this poem. It may well have been Wallace Stevens, to whom I return again and again. Not to claim too much resemblance, but both Stevens and I often begin with seasons or weather and then let the poem unfold in unforeseen directions. In this case, the direction is south.

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

I used to have in mind when I wrote a poem an undergraduate teacher of mine, the late Raeburn Miller, whose high standards I always tried to live up to. These days, I just try to be as hard on myself as I can, testing the lines for any weakness, again and again. Given how few books I’ve sold in more than twenty years of publishing, it would be delusional to think about an “audience” for my work, only a few stubborn readers who still care about the well-made poem and who still love to go “adventuring in the language,” to borrow a phrase from William Stafford.

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 remember if I showed this poem to anyone before I finished it. I might have, because at the time I belonged to an informal workshop of poets in Akron, some of them my former students. And two Ohio poets, William Greenway of Youngstown and Lynn Powell of Oberlin, good friends of mine, see almost everything I write and usually have some suggestions for improvement. They can see things I miss and often make me look like a better poet than I am.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

“Dead Reckoning” is certainly of a piece with the other poems in Pelcian Tracks. Stylistically, it’s in the lyrical realism mode that I often worked in earlier. Except for the attention to details of nature, it has little in common with the poems I’ve been writing the last year and a half, which are much more oblique in development. Over the years, my interests shift from mode to mode. Whatever I’m working on at the moment seems the right thing to do.

What is American about this poem?

Well, the scenery in “Dead Reckoning” is certainly American. I think the wish at the heart of the poem is universal. We all want to return to our personal paradise--that’s not solely an American desire.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I abandon few poems, and those I do abandon never get sent out for publication. This poem has been “finished,” polished to as high a gleam as I could get it. If a poem has that kind of hard-worked sheen, like a mirror, then maybe a reader can see himself or herself in it.

Todd Boss

Todd Boss’s best-selling debut poetry collection, Yellowrocket (Norton, 2008) has enjoyed widespread critical acclaim. Todd’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded him its annual Emily Clark Balch Prize in 2009. His work has been syndicated on public radio’s The Splendid Table and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. His MFA is from the University of Alaska-Anchorage. Read (and hear) Todd’s poems at his website by clicking here.


TO BE ALONE AGAIN IN THE THICK SKIN

of this low-slung bungalow house,
August overcast and waning,
windows open to the breathings
of the distant interstate passing,
you and the kids on some errand,
no note on the kitchen counter,
the workday done, my computer
on and waiting, I feel so helpless
against a tide of emotion I can
only identify as a melancholy joy.
When I was a boy come home
from school to the farm alone,
my father working, my mom with
my sister to a lesson or something,
I would pass through all the rooms
in a daze, lingering, gazing in all
the mirrors, lying down on all
the beds, trying myself on for size
in every doorway, every hall. Or
I would wander the farm itself,
the lawns, the lanes, the fields.
There was no highway there to
trouble the sound of being alone.
The only noise was wind if there
was wind, or plane if overhead
a plane. I didn't know it then,
but we lived beneath the pattern
of flights from MSP International
to points northeast and pan-Atlantic,
and though they were so far up in
the air, their thin roar glimmered
in your ears if you strained hard
to hear. It never occurred to me
that one day I'd be tired of flying.
That the thrill of passing again over
my own hometown would finally
be lost on me. Looking back on
that clueless boy, I pity him
for who he became. For isn't there
something lonely about a life
that wasn't in the least foreseen?
I live in someone else's city, in
someone else's house, it seems.
It's as if one day I stumbled into a
giant jumble sale of dreams, and
left with my arms loaded, caring
only that I got some good bargains.
I'm not saying I don't love my life.
Your heart and this city and this house
are the only places I can imagine
belonging. But isn't that just it?
In, through the screens of our lives,
the song of the world outside comes
thronging in all its unexpected
discord. And we call that chaos
home, despite everything we love.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem came all in a rush, maybe four years ago, and ended with the line “I pity him for who he became,” which is a bitter ending, but not entirely earned, to that point. I thought it was done until I became aware of a nagging feeling, whenever I came back to it, that the ending was unsatisfying. It took a long time for me to figure out why.

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

There were probably only two or three drafts of this poem, but they each took a long time in between, if memory serves.

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

This poem wasn’t “received” in the way that many of my poems are. Instead, it came in a gush of frankness that felt refreshing to me at the outset, and I followed that impulse.

The trick was trusting that impulse again when I went to finish the poem, picking it up from where I’d left it and catching that same vibe, like a wave, and riding it out. That’s what took me so long.

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

In order to finish this poem in the way it wanted to be finished, I had to be even more honest about what I’d already been honest about, and then be even more honest about even that. This poem is really a little pile of unlaundered honesties, with a recollection in the middle like an outgrown jacket. It’s hard for me sometimes to look at an honest autobiographical poem and say, “I haven’t been entirely honest about this. What would entire honesty look like?” I think that’s probably more often a memoirist’s dilemma than a poet’s, at least where autobiography is concerned.

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

Nobody published it till it came out in book form. Then it appeared on Poetry Daily, I think, which was a surprise. And now you’re interested in it, which is interesting. I think it’s one of those poems that, if you connect with its sense of displacement, can really touch you. I’m always interested in a poem that can’t make the editorial cut at journals, but for some reason resonates with readers. I could point to a dozen of those in my book, and it’s not for lack of sending them out to likely journals. To me, it points to a populist hole in the periodical literature. Which makes sense, because so many journals are based in academies.

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, of course. I know a poem is good when I want to share it immediately with someone. I want to stop people on the street and say, Hey, you. Listen to this! I like to think I’m getting to the point where I can distinguish that feeling from the mere sense of satisfaction that comes of finishing a poem, any poem; but they’re hard to tell apart. Both are flattering feelings, and I’m susceptible to flattering feelings.

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

Fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes fact. Our autobiographies are just the stories we tell ourselves. You think you know who you are, in a nutshell, but in truth your stories represent about 2% of what you might call your “real autobiography.” I no longer worry much about “fact” … it’s overrated. Our stories are the pier from which we think we’ve seen the ocean.

I’m not writing about myself, even when I write autobiographically; if I’m writing well, I’m writing about something much bigger than that, and using myself merely as the fulcrum for that desire.

Is this a narrative poem?

Sure, it tells the story of someone who has changed … Then it ends in a lyric flourish beginning with “But isn’t that just it?”…

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

I went through a wonderful Tony Hoagland phase, and this strikes me as a chatty perspective piece not unlike his.

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

I write for the displaced agrarian in all of us.

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?

Nope.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s chatty and disclosure-oriented. It’s not what Nate Klug who dismissed me handily in a Poetry review called a “Todd Boss” poem… which is to say it’s not clever, sound-driven, syntactically convoluted, or in any other way overtly inventive. It’s just straight-up. Which is what I love about it. Some poems want that.

What is American about this poem?

I give up. What do I win?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Yes. Aren’t we all?

Jessica Garratt

Jessica Garratt grew up in rural Maryland, and since then has lived in Iowa, Ireland, Austin, New York, and now Missouri, where she is a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri in Columbia. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, and from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her MFA. Jessica's first book, Fire Pond, won the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, selected by poet Medbh McGuckian, and was published by the University of Utah Press in April 2009. Individual poems from the collection have appeared in the North American Review, Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Revew, Crab Orchard Review, The Missouri Review, and in the forthcoming Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets' University and College Prizes, 1999-2008.


PILGRIM

I’ve been attended (in my efforts to fall in love
this month) by the mouse in my apartment, who’s nested
its image everywhere: in a wadded receipt
beneath my bed, in the long-tailed phone charger, dying
beside its socket. It’s hidden in the thistled ditch
my bed becomes when I sit up in the night, possessed
by a dream whose paws are still pressed to the smudged side
of my eyes, searching the sheets for what they see.

“Something ate that poison,” I told you on the phone,
“It’s got to materialize eventually.” “Not necessarily,”
you said; and later, “Don’t be afraid.” Afraid? Is that
what I am? I was surprised. I imagined what would change
if you lived here too—how my private late-night vigils
would un-green, snapped free of their source, collected
for kindling to make a fire in the clearing, and see
if there was enough to talk about (or do) till morning.

With you so far away, and us so new, it’s been hard
to discern the likelihood of love. I’ve culled a nice image
of you as Pilgrim: earnest, straight-necked, boyish
New Englander—and found I was tickled by the thought
of your hard-working love, not yet called to its task—the city
still a wilderness, the hill stifling its light. I can see it
much better during the sprints my vision does
in the unmarked fields between our talks. But,

when you speak, each of your best qualities reveals itself
to be the uncomplicated twin of a subtler brother
you never knew, whose sense of irony, whose mind
like a sweep of moor, and eyes that aren’t always averted
to the sky—never had the chance to rub off
on you. If one such brother had lived, I might tell him
on the phone tonight, how the mouse has finally arrived
dead at the foot of the stairs. How it was midday, not night,

when I found it. How it didn’t seek a shoe or a pillow
or a kitchen drawer to die in, but curled up beside
the front door, as if wanting no more than to leave—
but how really the mouse lay down where it happened to be
when the poison sponged the last fluid from its body.
How its feet are tiny and simple at noon. How
my landlord will come in the morning and sweep
the bare gray fact onto the dustpan’s gray-blue range.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in 2006, soon after moving into a new apartment. On the night I finished moving in, my sister was over and saw a mouse race across the kitchen and into a gap under the kitchen sink. I never saw it myself, but when I mentioned the incident to my landlord, he promptly deposited some little pouches of poison in my apartment. And then for a week or two, I compulsively projected phantom dead mice onto everything small and hidden – everything potentially translatable into mouse and death. I even had a friend come over once and use my broom to push something mouse-ish looking out from under the bed while I stood at a distance on the stairs. That was the ‘wadded receipt’ I mention in the poem.

Meanwhile, a separate part of me was perched above this bout of hyperbole, observing quietly, and noticing some resonance between my dilated, nearly Gothic visions of this tiny, elusive creature, and my sometimes over-grand projections of imaginative but unapt narratives onto romantic situations that cannot sustain them. So there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between the two scenarios in the poem exactly, but I began to play and see how they could enlarge, illuminate, and scuff each other, once I courted this adjacency. I didn’t know how they would come together ultimately, or what the relationship between the threads would mean.

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

Well, from the Word documents dated on my computer surrounding this poem, it looks like the first intense round of drafts (there are six of them I saved) happened between August 29 and September 18. But the ‘final’ one (on September 18) appears to be the draft I turned in to my workshop – and it has a whole extra stanza tacked on to the end that doesn’t exist in the version of “Pilgrim” in my book. I know I tinkered around with it for another month or two after this initial burst. And then again more recently, during the final round of edits on Fire Pond.

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?

Before I turned a draft in to my workshop, I ran it by my friend who, at the time, I showed pretty much every new poem to first. He had trouble with the poem as it stood, because he felt that the poem didn’t provide within its bounds a key to navigate or unlock its own meaning. And I remember having this immediate, sort of rebellious reaction to this idea, like, Really? Is that what I should be doing here? I had felt satisfied, in a way, by the manner in which the different elements in the poem didn’t determine themselves too steadfastly, or map onto a chart of analogies. My friend wanted to know what the mouse was standing in for, whereas I think I was seeing the mouse more as an immanence, radiating in its own right, even as it could cast something new or relevant onto other elements in the poem.

Still, I hadn’t quite clarified all this to myself yet, and I took a stab at providing more closure by writing that extra last stanza, which my friend thought made the poem much better. That’s the version I turned in to workshop. In case it’s interesting to see the different sort of gesture this ending made, here’s that alternate ending to the poem:

“…How
the landlord will come in the morning and sweep. But,
telling all this to you—well, the thought makes me wince.

Perhaps because it’s difficult, as it is, to memorialize
the dismal, ordinary scenes in a life. But when sunk
in the mind of another, such as yours, they shrink even more,
the way a gravestone shrinks from a spring afternoon
that shines its explanations over everything, coming to all
of last year’s conclusions. What about particulars? What about
grit? Even the imagination crawls up from the dungeon
of the body, each stair a fact on its way to myth.”

After some messing with this final stanza for a while, I finally decided to abandon it entirely. It seemed to expand the poem too much, at the same time as it shut down some of its pulse. It was so explain-y, and I wasn’t at all sure that the explanation was actually the conclusion the poem itself seemed to draw or move toward.

This poem, more than most of mine, produced vastly different reactions from people. One reader thought it was a biting and incisive character assassination, whereas someone else thought the mouse really just stood in for the guy in the poem, and saw the speaker as sad and vulnerable. Some looked at me blankly and pityingly when I said I had wanted the poem to be funny. So, in the end, I really just had to stay my own course with this one, and trust my instincts. Which, I guess, is always the case ultimately.

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. Or, maybe what’s more true is that I believe in a state of profound concentration. I think when I’m working on a poem might be the only time I ever entirely concentrate on anything. And in that state, I do feel a sense of ‘tapped-in-ed-ness,’ if that makes sense. The world feels more fluid and connective—itself a kind of unified ecstasy—and I am in it, important to it and also not important at all. I remember asking a friend once, many years ago, what it felt like to be deeply in love (because I was pretty sure I hadn’t been at that point). She said, “It feels like you’re suddenly tapped into the world – like the world is letting you in on this wonderful, mysterious secret.” Pretty wise for a 19 year old, right? In many ways, I feel this is a pretty apt description of the experience of making a poem – especially in the early stages of composition.

And as for sweat and tears – I don’t know. That’s not really how I think about writing poems. The ‘work’ of it – after the initial ‘inspiration’ – is absorbing as well. I’m hungry for the process at that point – to keep helping the poem forward, to keep shaping. I know writers (talented, successful ones) who claim to not really like the process of writing. That sounds like sweat and tears. But that’s not at all how I think about it. And at the same time, I don’t think I’ve ever felt that a poem was simply ‘received.’ It tends to feel more like something in between the aggressively active and the entirely passive.

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

The basic ‘action’ of the poem was pulled from my life. In that sense, many of my poems could be said to begin in ‘fact.’ But I don’t think that means much really. The events in the poem are just the beginning. It’s what happens when consciousness gets to the ‘facts’ and works on them that’s interesting. What begins as experience in the world quickly turns into an imagining of that experience, rather than a recounting of it. What takes over is a curiosity about the nature of that experience, the images that fascinate or suit a certain frame of mind, the ideas that are raised, the psychology that might take hold and cause certain leaps of thought, but also certain actions. The work of the poem is no longer in accurately representing my own state of mind or actions in a particular moment, but in representing a mind, in a more general sense. Dickinson put it well when she wrote: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse -- it does not mean -- me -- but a supposed person.”

Is this a narrative poem?

In a way; but ultimately I always privilege the meditative over the narrative in my poems. If you imagine the narrative as a paved road, threading concretely through a landscape, my poems generally tend to follow the track of the mind of a person walking along it. Or maybe a cloud of map-savvy gnats floating above it with a vaguely forward movement.

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

Well, I remember that I was teaching an American Literature course for the first time. And the beginning drafts of this poem coincided with the beginnings of American literature – Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, the pilgrims, the City on a Hill. It actually happens often enough now, that what I’m teaching at the time enters (or instigates) a poem.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don’t usually write such ‘blocky’ poems. But these dense eight-line stanzas just felt right for this one. I do think, however, that this poem might mark the first in a string of longer, more meditative poems that triangulate disparate subjects and seek to connect them through the writing of the poem. This now feels like my native way of moving through a poem, but it wasn’t always.

What is American about this poem?

A lot, I think. Obviously there’s the pilgrim metaphor, and the early spirit of American idealism (the sacred beacon of a city, hoisted up on a hill). In many ways, I think that the dialectics and Bermuda triangles this poem (loosely, noncommittally) moves between might be said to be American in their concerns (at least historically, and in literature). Is Nature a sacred forest of Platonic forms? An inert gathering of matter and fact? Evidence of the occult (as in very early American literature)? Reflective of the human imagination? I also think that this poem flirts with metaphor without entirely trusting or committing to it. This seems American to me – the move between lofty idealism and gritty pragmatism (in varying degrees of sly and earnest) – between the hankering for a beacon, and an insistence on bare gray facts. I think (in retrospect, of course) that the poem splashes around in these different American underpinnings. “Splashing around” seems American too.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Oh, well, I don’t know… I think being poets means we don’t have to decide on one way of casting this. ‘Finished’ sounds so burly and sealed, ‘abandoned’ too melodramatic, or else falsely modest. Somewhere in between, I suppose. But I do wish I’d found this letter of Dickinson’s (written to Higginson) before “Pilgrim” ended up in my book – I surely would have included the following lines as an epigraph: “Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted.”

Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 1, 1927. He has published several volumes of poetry, including Strong Is Your Hold (Houghton Mifflin, 2006); A New Selected Poems (2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; Imperfect Thirst (1996); When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990); Selected Poems (1980), for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980). Kinnell’s honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Rockefeller Grant, the 1974 Shelley Prize of the Poetry Society of America, and the 1975 Medal of Merit from National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has served as poet-in-residence at numerous colleges and universities, including the University of California at Irvine, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and Brandeis, and divides his time between Vermont and New York City, where he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University.


THE STONE TABLE

Here on the hill behind the house,
we sit with our feet up on the edge
of the eight-by-ten stone slab
that was once the floor of the cow pass
that the cows used, getting from one pasture
to the other without setting a hoof
on the dirt road lying between them.

From here we can see the blackberry thicket,
the maple sapling the moose slashed
with his cutting teeth, turning it
scarlet too early, the bluebird boxes
flown from now, the one tree left
of the ancient orchard popped out
all over with saffron and rosy,
subacid pie apples, smaller crabs grafted
with scions of old varieties, Freedom,
Sops-of-Wine, Wolf River, and trees
we put in ourselves, dotted with red lumps.

We speak in whispers: fifty feet away,
under a red spruce, a yearling bear
lolls on its belly eating clover.
Abruptly it sits up. Did I touch my wine glass
to the table, setting it humming?
The bear peers about with the bleary undressedness
of old people who have mislaid their eyeglasses.
It ups its muzzle and sniffs. It fixes us,
whirls, and plunges into the woods—
a few cracklings and shatterings, and all is still.

As often happens, we find ourselves
thinking similar thoughts, this time of a friend
who lives to the south of that row of peaks
burnt yellow in the sunset. About now,
he will be paying his daily visit to her grave,
reading by heart the words, cut into black granite,
that she had written for him, when they
both thought he would die first:
I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART BUT WHAT
PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU SAFE BESIDE ME.
Or is he back by now, in his half-empty house,
talking in ink to a piece of paper?

I, who so often used to wish to float free
of earth, now with all my being want to stay,
to climb with you on other evenings to this stone,
maybe finding a bear, or a coyote, like
the one who, at dusk, a week ago, passed
in his scissorish gait ten feet from where we sat—
this earth we attach ourselves to so fiercely,
like scions of Sheffield Seek-No-Furthers
grafted for our lifetimes onto paradise root-stock.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This I don’t remember.

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

Countless revisions, over several years.

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

Yes. It was all received, but all soaked in sweat and tears.

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

Six months, with some tweaking in the galleys.

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?

Seeing a poem in galleys hastens finishing it.

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

All of it is fact, with a coating of imagination.

Is this a narrative poem?

I think so.

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

I don’t normally write for a particular audience.

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 send most of my poems to trusted friends, before sending them to magazines.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It feels very heavy. It is in bondage to narrative, familiar surfaces, and an expected outcome, a poem composed on earth.

What is American about this poem?

Only that wild animals pop up.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It was finished and then abandoned.