Kathryn Stripling Byer

Kathryn Stripling Byer was raised in southwest Georgia and studied with Allen Tate, Robert Watson, and Fred Chappell in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Since 1968 she has lived in the mountains of North Carolina, teaching off and on at Western Carolina University. Her first book, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, was chosen by John Frederick Nims for the Associated Writing Programs award series and published by Texas Tech University Press in 1986. Her second, Wildwood Flower, was published by LSU Press(1992) and was the Lamont Selection for the year's best second book from the Academy of American Poets. Her other books include Black Shawl (1998), Catching Light (2001), and Coming to Rest (2006), all from LSU Press. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Hanes Award from The Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her poetry and essays have appeared in journals ranging from the Atlantic Monthly to Appalachian Heritage. Her latest collection is a collaboration with poet Penelope Scambly Schott, due soon from Ash Creek Press in Portland, Oregon. For the past five years, she has served as North Carolina's Poet Laureate. To learn more about Byer please visit her blog and her website.


PRECIOUS LITTLE

“... the passageway down which they had just gone
was bright as the eye of a needle.”
—Eudora Welty, Losing Battles

So we’d gathered to talk about writing,
remembering great ones who’d recently gone
from our midst and the various ways
they had followed each voice through

the needle’s eye into the clearing of art,
when a novelist slouched
on the front row opined
that the only real subject is battle

and how men survive it.
I seethed while my student poets,
all of them women, sat waiting for someone
to challenge his vision of literature,

belligerent canon
where warring tribes battle it out
in their epics and blood-spattered novels.
“Miss Welty,” I countered, “stayed

clear of the battlefield, if you recall.
She sat down every day at the same desk
and made language raise the world up
from the grave of our common amnesia.”

He barely acknowledged
my comment. He wanted to flirt.
with my students. He shrugged at me,
stood up and showed off the fit

of his tight jeans. My god,
what a chasm he opened up right there
between us: we stared like combatants
across the trench, loading our weapons,

his now on full frontal display,
along with a first novel already lobbed
to reviewers by Random House. As for me,
middle-aged poet, what were mine?

Precious little. The shot I recalled
having seen months ago of a woman my age
holding up to the camera a photo of daughter
or sister or good friend who’d disappeared

into the rubble of felled towers, the same woman
I had seen sifting through ruins in Fallujah
or Kabul, even now cringing
when she hears the gunfire in Baghdad,

a woman who stares back at me
when I’m dusting my daughter’s face
framed on the shelf,
smiling out at a day that’s been gone

for so long I can barely remember it,
nothing much going on, no bombs,
no fireworks, just late summer afternoon
and the dogs asleep under the oak tree.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem began after a writers conference in Asheville, NC to which I took a small group of women students. Eudora Welty had just died, and we spent a portion of the morning session talking about her work, so her influence was much on my mind as the rest of the day unfolded. Welty's lyrical short stories helped to shape my sense of how language can create a world that pulses at the center of the lyric moment. “The Wide Net,” in particular, really woke me up to the kind of writing I wanted to attempt; by then, I knew I wanted to write poetry, not fiction, but I also knew I wanted my poetry to sound as much like Welty’s wide net as possible.

The fiction writer, made much younger and more successful in the poem, actually said that war was the story, expressing his regret that he had never experienced war first-hand. I countered with E. Welty's never having been to war, yet being one of our greatest American writers. My students were appalled by his attitude, and over the next few weeks, we kept spiraling back to this incident in our discussion. The poem began out of my initial irritation and growing frustration at not having spoken more forcefully and eloquently that day.

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

It went through more revisions than I can remember. I’d lose count if I tried. I wanted to bring Welty into the poem somehow, thus the epigraph from her novel Losing Battles and the introductory lines about her passing. As the poem shape-shifted over a year or more, its texture became denser and its narrative less simplistic. It finally became a way for me to defend my stance, you might say, as I enter my late middle-age, challenged by younger, more successful writers, represented by the poem's novelist in his tight, enticing jeans.

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

That day at the writers conference was definitely “received,” but I had to work hard to bring that incident to life in a way that worked on more levels than the basic narrative. Sure, I went home and bitched about this encounter to my husband and friends, but ranting won’t take you very far. At some point—the sooner the better—language has to begin its transformative work, teasing out connections and images, probing deeply enough to make the poem worth working on and finally worth reading.

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

This poem arrived in final form by leading me into one dead end after another! At one point I didn’t think I’d ever be able to consider it finished. Slowly several stanzas began to interweave. I remember the image of fireworks coming on during one 4th of July, how our dogs were driven crazy by the sounds, especially the echoes resounding through the valley. The images of 9/l1 were still fresh in my mind, as well as the earlier images of women in Palestinian refugee camps. At the same time I was also wrestling with the poem “Her Daughter,” (also in Coming to Rest) taking as its subject civilian casualties during the US bombing of Baghdad. These images began to seem more and more powerful as an answer to the war-loving novelist than any way of responding. The image of my daughter in my favorite photograph of her suddenly appeared near the end of the poem, along with the dogs sleeping under the oak tree.

I wanted a flexible line that would allow me to gather in as much material as I needed, but that line has never been able to free itself of my natural bent toward the anapestic. Don’t ask me why I fall into a tri-syllabic rhythm. Maybe that’s how my circulatory system hears the beat of my blood. Breaking the lines into quatrains was a later revision, one that helped me to focus more intensely on lineation and internal rhyme.

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

It first appeared in my collection Coming to Rest, and I’d say the time between final revisions and publication must have been two years. I don’t know that I ever sent it out to a magazine. If so, I’ve forgotten. How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world?

Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

I have no rules. If a poem feels finished, maybe I will send it out eventually. I’m not as driven about submissions as I was in my younger days. I’m trying to generate the energy to get back into the hustle, but I have very few journals that I feel good about sending to, which simply means that by now I know which editors like my work and will give it a careful, sympathetic reading.

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

Well, this poem began as a real event but had to be fictionalized to avoid getting myself into trouble with the novelist, who was at the time an older colleague. He doesn’t read poetry, so I probably needn’t have worried, but turning him into a brash young novelist with a first book out from a major NY press allowed me to address some of my own defensiveness as an aging woman poet confronted with an indifferent younger man, and a novelist, at that. A so-called friend once asked me after my first collection was published, "When are you going to write a real book?" I'm confronting myself as much as the young novelist in the poem, my fear that what I'm doing doesn't really matter that much anyway.

Is this a narrative poem?

It certainly begins as one, but it shifts into a more reflective mode around the middle.

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

I'd been reading Ruth Stone, for one. And Barry Lopez, whose work I consider essential. And of course I was reading lots of commentaries about the selling of the Iraq War and the reports coming out of that besieged country.

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

I try not to think about an audience, especially my “ideal reader,” who is my husband. I’d be self-critical to the point of paralysis if I did. I let the language itself guide the poem. The only reader I care about at that point is the interior listener/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, I didn’t let anyone see it. I did read an earlier version of it at a reading in Atlanta and heard some things I didn’t like. The poem obviously was not ready. I’ve no group with whom I share work regularly.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It takes on political issues rather than mostly personal ones, though the two always intersect.

What is American about this poem?

The reference right away to Eudora Welty places it in the American sway of influence, I guess you’d say. And the later allusions to the Twin Towers falling and the Iraq War root it in recent American sensibility.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I came to feel I’d done all I could with this material, so I guess I’d declare it finished. I enjoy reading it aloud; the audience seems to like it, especially women. Especially the reference to the novelist’s tight jeans! Yes, I think I definitely had the last word in this confrontation.

Mark Halliday

Mark Halliday teaches at Ohio University. His books of poems are: Little Star (William Morrow, 1987), Tasker Street (University of Massachusetts, 1992), Selfwolf (University of Chicago, 1999), Jab (University of Chicago, 2002), and Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008). His critical study Stevens and the Interpersonal appeared in 1991 from Princeton University Press. He co-authored with Allen Grossman a book on poetics, The Sighted Singer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).


CHICKEN SALAD

Everybody’s father dies.
When it happens to someone else, I send a note of sympathy
or at least an e-mail. It’s certainly worth the bother.
But when my father died, it was my father.

*

Three hours before he died
my father felt he should have an answer
when I asked what he might like to eat.
He remembered a kind of chicken salad he liked
weeks ago when living was more possible
and he said “Maybe that chicken salad”
but because of the blood in his mouth
and because of his shortness of breath
he had to say it several times before I understood.
So I went out and bought a container of chicken salad,
grateful for the illusion of helping,
but when I brought it back to the apartment
my father studied it for thirty seconds
and set it aside on the bed. I wasn’t ready
to know what the eyes of the nurse at the Hospice
had tried to tell me before dawn, so I said
“Don’t you want some chicken salad, Daddy?”
He glanced at it from a distance of many miles—
little tub of chicken salad down on the planet of
slaughtered birds and mastication, digestion, excretion—
and murmured “Maybe later.” He was in
the final austerity
which I was too frazzled to quite recognize
but ever since his death I see with stony clarity
the solitary dignity of
the totality of his knowing
how far beyond the pleasure of chicken salad
he had gone already and would go.

*

Everybody’s father dies; but
when my father died, it was my father.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

My father died in August 2003. In the days following his death I did a lot of notebook writing, trying to hang on to some of the countless details of his final weeks and especially of his last two days; I was afraid these troubling memories would soon get mixed up, and I knew I would want to keep hold of the truth of the experience as I perceived it. A few of my notebook jottings became the factual or anecdotal centers for drafts of poems. Eventually I gathered nine poems about my father’s dying to include in Keep This Forever. I think “Chicken Salad” was one of the first written of these poems.

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

Not sure, but I think the poem came more or less all at once, handwritten, and then got revised slightly when typed on computer, which may have happened more than two years after I drafted the poem. I think I needed to let time pass before publishing poems about my father’s death.

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

I tried to make the narrative part of “Chicken Salad” entirely factual. I’m not aware of having simplified or “smoothed out” or mythified any of the details. Sometimes we have to do so in order to give a poem shapeliness and metaphorical rightness and impact; but in this case I felt the true details were what I needed.

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

My impression is that many of my best short poems arrive very quickly in a first draft that then will be changed only in fairly small ways; however, in such cases the writing has been preceded by a great deal of brooding over the scene, the images, which have been riding around in my head (and also maybe in factual notebook jottings) for weeks or months.

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

I remember deciding that I would allow myself to use a series of abstract words—austerity, clarity, dignity, totality, knowing—toward the end of the poem’s narrative part, because this seemed necessary for accuracy about my father’s state of mind and my own perception of it. Sometimes a careful interaction among abstractions can have poetic power, partly because it cuts against the reader’s traditional expectation of vividly metaphorical words.

Another difficult decision was about whether to keep the passages at the beginning and end which frame the narrative part. When Peter Stitt accepted “Chicken Salad” for The Gettysburg Review, he asked me to drop the framing lines. In his view, they diluted the impact of the narrative. I understood his way of seeing this, and I agreed to publish the poem without the framing lines, but I knew I would restore them when I put the poem in a book. I felt they were an important acknowledgment of the inescapable gap between the vast importance of one’s own losses to oneself and the distant or very temporary small importance of most other people’s losses.

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 first submitted “Chicken Salad” to a journal in March 2006. I think I felt confident about the poem then. In some cases, though, I send out a poem when I’m not yet confident but I want to see what happens, I’m using the submission process as an effort to get new perspective on the poem. I wish I could resist this temptation, but sometimes I don’t.

Is this a narrative poem?

The main middle part is unmistakably a narrative of one small event on the last afternoon of my father’s life, along with a reference back to a moment early that morning, and a glance forward into many moments of remembering this day. The narrative part is framed or “bookended” by statements in a declarative, explanatory tone.

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

Many of us who are now in our fifties, or sixties, have had to write poems about our parents dying; I have encountered a lot of these poems in recent years, including many strong ones. “Her Creed” by Sharon Olds, “Mediterranean” by Rosanna Warren, “Cold Wood” by Alan Shapiro, “The Passing of Time” by Mary Ruefle, “Under the Pines” by Tom Sleigh, “Benevolence” by Tony Hoagland, “The Last I Heard of My Father” by Dean Young–these are just a few good poems that come to mind. I’m not sure what specifically influenced my poem. There’s a tone in Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” that for some reason comes to mind when I think of the tone I wanted in “Chicken Salad”.

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

I always hope to be readable by those readers out there—they do exist!—who don’t focus their identities in being poets or being part of the poetry scene. The intelligent, reflective, skeptical but generous reader, someone not snowed or intimidated by confusing flimflam, someone who feels human life is an amazing mystery and wants to absorb someone else’s intensely intended “take” on an aspect of the mystery—that’s the reader I love!

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, not any more. I should show all my drafts to my wife, the poet J. Allyn Rosser, as I know she could save me from some follies, but often I don’t want to face her critique.

What is American about this poem?

It’s true that “Chicken Salad” would look more unusual in a British journal than in an American journal. We Americans tend to have a gut-level confidence that the details of the individual life will be worthy of attention—“I’m just as important as anybody else!”—a confidence that comes less naturally to British poets, and so (I think) they are less willing to sound nakedly colloquial.

Bruce Snider

Bruce Snider is the author of The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. His poetry and non-fiction have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and PN Review, among other journals. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, he lives in San Francisco.


THE CERTAINTY OF NUMBERS

It’s not the numbers you dislike—
the 3s or 5s or 7s—but the way
the answers leave no room for you,
the way 4 plus 2 is always 6
never 9 or 10 or Florida,
the way 3 divided by 1
is never an essay about spelunking
or poached salmon, which is why
you never seemed to get the answer right
when the Algebra teacher asked,
If a man floating down a river in a canoe
has traveled three miles of a twelve mile canyon
in five minutes, how long will it take him
to complete the race? Which of course depends
on if the wind resistance is 13 miles an hour
and he’s traveling upstream
against a 2 mile an hour current
and his arms are tired and he’s thinking
about the first time he ever saw Florida,
which was in seventh grade
right after his parents’ divorce
and he felt overshadowed
by the palm trees, neon sun visors,
and cheap postcards swimming
with alligators. Nothing is ever simple,
except for the way the 3 looks like two shells
washed up on last night’s shore,
but then sometimes it looks like a bird
gently crushed on its side.
And the 1—once so certain
you could lean up against it
like a gray fence post—has grown weary,
fascinated by the perpetual
itch of its own body.
Even the Algebra teacher
waving his formulas like baseball bats,
pauses occasionally when he tells you
that a 9 and a 2 are traveling in a canoe
on a river in a canyon. How long
will it take them to complete their journey?
That is if they don’t lose their oars
and panic and strike the rocks,
shattering the canoe. Nothing is ever certain.
We had no plan, the numbers would tell us,
at the moment of our deaths.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote the earliest draft of this poem sometime in the fall of 1997. I had been writing a number of poems about my middle school and high school experiences, and so this subject was a natural outgrowth of those. If I remember correctly, I started with the opening line, “It’s not the numbers you dislike,” and just went from there to figure out what I meant by that.

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

This poem came much more quickly than most. I think I wrote the first draft in two days. Then I tinkered with it a bit over the next couple of months. For the most part, though, it arrived mostly as it is, with only minor edits. Usually poems come to me in fragments and require more labor to weave together. This was just one of those poems that showed up one day.

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 I also think it generally requires a lot of help, which often means sweat and tears. Or at the very least it means showing up and making yourself available. I’m not generally someone who’s struck with lines, images, or ideas while walking down the street. Not much happens for me unless I’m sitting in front of an empty page or at the computer. I wrote this poem, for example, during a time that I was keeping a pretty strict writing schedule, getting up early in the morning before work, writing in coffee shops on the weekend, etc. The poem wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t done that.

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

I wasn’t thinking much about technique when I wrote this poem. It was all pretty instinctive.

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

I started it in the fall of 1997 and it eventually appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of Third Coast, so not quite three years.

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 strict rules about this, though I do try to let poems sit for a few months until I can see them more clearly.

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

The poem came out of my own resistances to math as a kid, so in that way the poem has its roots in autobiography, though certainly not all of the details refer to my life.

Is this a narrative poem?

No. It’s more rhetorical and digressive in its structure, but as with most poems, there’s certainly an implied narrative, or at least elements of narrative.

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

I’d been reading the New York School poets, especially Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. Both were a huge influence on me at the time. In part, I think their work accounts for the poem’s playfulness as well as its discursiveness and use of conversational speech.

I was also influenced by Naomi Shihab Nye’s early work, some of which treats language as a physical object in the landscape, animating it as a quasi-character or concrete force in the poem. I just applied that same strategy to numbers, which, because I’d always had an antagonistic relationship with math, provided me with a natural tension for the poem.

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

Like many writers I mostly write what I’d like to read. I’m not sure that makes me my own audience exactly, but it does shape the direction of my work. Of course, my own tastes are always changing, so hopefully the poems are changing, too.

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?

Yes, I showed it to a couple of friends and former teachers for feedback.

I have a good friend, who tends to be my first reader. Her instincts are quite different from my own, so she’s a good counter to my own excesses. I also usually share my work with my partner, who is a fiction writer. In my experience, fiction writers often have better bullshit detectors, so I’m always grateful to get that perspective.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Its tone and strategies are similar to a number of the poems I was writing at that time, though more recently my poems have become less playful and more interested in experimenting with elements of form, meter, internal rhyme, line and stanza, etc.

What is American about this poem?

The ironies and idiomatic speech of the New York School poets strike me as very American, so to the extent that this poem bears their influence, it is as well.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. Or maybe abandoned. I don’t know. I just decided it was done, or at least I was, which may be the same thing.

Lucia Perillo

Lucia Perillo has published five books of poetry including Dangerous Life (Northeastern University Press, 1989); The Body Mutinies (Purdue University Press, 1996), which was awarded the Revson Prize from PEN, the Kate tufts prize from Claremont University, and the Balcones Prize; and The Oldest Map with the Name America (Random House, 1999). Luck is Luck (Random House, 2005) won the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Her new book, Inseminating the Elephant, was published by Copper Canyon in 2009. In 2000, Perillo was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. She lives in Olympia, Washington with her husband and dog. To learn more about Lucia Perillo, please visit her website.


THE SECOND SLAUGHTER

Achilles slays the man who slayed his friend, pierces the corpse
behind the heels and drags it
behind his chariot like the cans that trail
a bride and groom. Then he lays out
a banquet for his men, oxen and goats
and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat
until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.

The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—
in the morning more animals must be killed
for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds
no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;
not even heaving four stallions on the pyre
can lift the ballast of his sorrow.

And here I turn my back on the epic hero—the one who slits
the throats of his friend’s dogs,
killing what the loved one loved
to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent
by vanishing from my concern
after he throws the dogs onto the fire.
The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.

When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep
until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh. But once

I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals
my first lament. So now I guard
my inhumanity like the jackal
who appears behind the army base at dusk,
come there for scraps with his head lowered
in a posture that looks like appeasement,
though it is not.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Firstly, I’d like to caution people against a straight-on explanation of a poem by its writer, which seems like a recipe for misinformation. But in this case I do have a specific memory of writing the fourth stanza in 1991, during the first gulf war.

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

My ability to write by hand deteriorated during the long assemblage of this poem. Since I write mostly with a computer now, I can’t say how many revisions the poem underwent. I finished the poem in 2008, when I decided to write a poem about the Iliad. I finally had a place to put the old fragment.

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

I compose using lyric methods—words pop into my head and I begin reciting/semi-singing them. And I also use intellectual/analytic methods. You could say one method is received and one is work. But I don’t like to analyze the process too much—probably for fear of damaging it.

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

The sense of final form seems to me like received knowledge that the poet finally surrenders to.

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

It was a quick one, for me, if you discount the seventeen-year gap. Maybe a year?

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

The problem of the poem was how to allude to a complex text, and how to add something to the recapitulation of an often-recapitulated work. I wanted the allusion to be clear to those who haven’t read the Iliad. My poem moves from that poem to a snip of a personal anecdote, which incorporates both fact and fiction.

Is this a narrative poem?

It has various narratives in operation: Homer’s, mine, and the historical narratives of our two most recent wars.

Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem?

Homer, of course, but I will also say the jackal is real and comes from a book called Birding Babylon, which is a transcription of a soldier’s field notes/blog, from his time in Iraq.

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

I guess that would be me.

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?

Unfortunately, I have no one to share poems with regularly. But the flip side of that is that a unicorn was not designed by a committee.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

That’s a question for critics, I think. It’s best not to get outside one’s poems.

What is American about this poem?

It happens to be very American because it draws on our recent history. To get outside myself (and violate the rule I just set forth), I suppose it’s unusual for me.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

The poet Valéry said that we never finish, only abandon.

Tony Hoagland

Tony Hoagland was born in 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His chapbook, Hard Rain was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005. His other collections of poetry include What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Donkey Gospel (1998), which received the James Laughlin Award; and Sweet Ruin (1992), chosen by Donald Justice for the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and winner of the Zacharis Award from Emerson College. Hoagland's other honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the O.B. Hardison Prize for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Shakespeare Library, as well as the Poetry Foundation's 2005 Mark Twain Award in recognition of his contribution to humor in American poetry. He currently teaches at the University of Houston and Warren Wilson College.


LUCKY

If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to help your enemy
the way I got to help my mother
when she was weakened past the point of saying no.

Into the big enamel tub
half-filled with water
which I had made just right,
I lowered the childish skeleton
she had become.

Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed
her belly and her chest,
the sorry ruin of her flanks
and the frayed gray cloud
between her legs.

Some nights, sitting by her bed
book open in my lap
while I listened to the air
move thickly in and out of her dark lungs,
my mind filled up with praise
as lush as music,

amazed at the symmetry and luck
that would offer me the chance to pay
my heavy debt of punishment and love
with love and punishment.

And once I held her dripping wet
in the uncomfortable air
between the wheelchair and the tub,
until she begged me like a child

to stop,
an act of cruelty which we both understood
was the ancient irresistible rejoicing
of power over weakness.

If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to raise the spoon
of pristine, frosty ice cream
to the trusting creature mouth
of your old enemy

because the tastebuds at least are not broken
because there is a bond between you
and sweet is sweet in any language.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem seems quite antique to me now, but it was written in a period of time in the early nineties—even then, it had been twenty years since the events reported on took place, caring for my mother during her last months of dying.

Of course it derives from real experience, one of those many many uncharted constellations of intimacy that constantly occur between family members, friends, and partners. I say "uncharted" with pleasure, since experience offers an ongoing infinity of such moments, each never before observed and represented.

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

I had a lot of trouble with the wording of a bridge passage –I think the description of the bathtub scene—three quarters through, and I struggled with the economy of the phrasing for a year or more before getting it as close to right as I could.

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 such a thing as getting lucky sometimes. I also believe that one of the gifts we cultivate as working poets is the instinct for where a poem can be found—the coordination of details and dimensions, the angularity with which a tone can be established or how a story can be positioned, to best catch the light. In this poem, (to me) that special angle is the exposure of how Power—not gender or familial attachment—is at the core of the interaction.

The rhetoric of the poem, which is to say the opening sentence, was a rock-solid way to begin. But I remember I had a lot of trouble with other moments, like knowing that the last line was the last line. I'm sure I wrote well past it.

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

I solved some of the poem's necessary movements with rhetorics of phrasing, like the chiasmus ("punishment & love, love & punishment") two thirds through. In any case, I still think "Lucky" is a rather plain-Jane poem.

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

Soon after finishing it, my friend Conrad Hillbery requested some poems from me for an issue of Passages North; at the time, I didn't think the poem was particularly special.

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?

Different for different poems. Some poems have taken years and years to finish, and by the time they are finished, they might not be interesting in terms of subject matter anymore. Some get finished and half forgotten, then turn up again looking better for the vacation. Yet I believe in laboring through the technical problems presented by almost any poem, even a mediocre one, because it has a long term technical benefit, like a callisthenic.

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

The facts—I just now remembered—had been turned into a story years before the poem was written, when a woman I was dating asked me to tell her a story. So I told her the story of bathing my mother's ravaged body, and how strange it was looking down at her—the pale suture marks and scars, the gray-haired pubis. Because the facts had been turned into a story, years later it was there in the refrigerator of language-memory, ready for the poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

Narrative dominated (probably over-dominated) by rhetoric.

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

I learned many of the things I needed to know about narrative from Larry Levis's book Winter Stars. Some other influences were probably John Skoyles's elegantly straightforward book A Little Faith, and John Engman's book Keeping Still Mountain. Also Tess Gallagher's Under Stars. All extraordinary books.

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

Someone willing to go along for the ride. I believe in The Ride, the poem as carnival concession.

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?

Over the years it has changed, but when I'm lucky, I have one or two keen, reliable friends.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Well, in retrospect, it is much of a piece; plain and urgent, trying to use both intelligence and feeling to get more deeply at each other. I try to do verbally fancier things now, but Force and Intensity are primary assets of poetry.

What is American about this poem?

Its merciless candor.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Yes.