Philip Pardi

Philip Pardi is the author of Meditations on Rising and Falling (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), which won the Bittingham Prize in Poetry. has published poems in Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere, and his work has been reprinted in Best New Poets 2006 and Is This Forever or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas. A former Michener Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, he now lives in the Catskill Mountains in New York and teaches at Bard College.


DRINKING WITH MY FATHER IN LONDON

With his mate, Wilfred, who was dying,
I discussed ornithology as best I could
given the circumstances, my father flushed
and silent, a second pint before me,
my fish and chips not yet in sight.
Condensation covered the windows
and in the corner a couple played
tic-tac-toe with their fingers.
Behind it all, convincingly, the rain fell.
The mystery, Wilfred was saying, isn’t flight.
Flight is easy, he says, lifting his cap, but
landing – he tosses it at the coat rack –
landing is the miracle. Would you believe
thirty feet away the cap hits
and softly takes in the lone bare peg?
Would you believe no one but me notices?
I’d like to come back as a bird
Wilfred says, both hands on the glass
before him, and here my father
comes to life. You already
were a bird once,
Wilfred, he says, next time,
next time you get to be
the whole damn flock.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem back in 2000 or so. For a long time now, I’ve been writing every morning, as early in the day as my life allows. And this poem emerged one day. It was the first two lines that got me started. They seemed to hold an entire poem, and the task of writing became figuring out how to unfold the rest of it.

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

It underwent numerous revisions. The bulk of the poem was there quite early, but I fiddled with it for a long while.

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

I do, and I don’t. When it comes to questions like this, or any question of spirit and matter, I’m terribly and sometimes painfully uncertain. Some days I kill the slugs I find in my vegetable garden, other days I carry them across the yard and set them down carefully. When it comes to “receiving” a poem, I can’t really believe I’m worthy of any such thing. The only thing I know how to do is to be quiet. To get as quiet as I can and follow each thread and then listen. And there are times when it feels like I’m taking dictation from somewhere, and those are the best mornings, the ones when I suddenly realize hours have passed and my tea is cold. Somehow I never forget my tea when I’m doing other things, or even writing other things. I suppose I prefer a steady, sweaty practice over faith, but it depends when you ask.

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

At one point, this poem looked almost like a sonnet, and I thought, Hey, maybe it needs to be a sonnet. It was a short and failed experiment, but in that process I cut some things I had been holding on to. Once they were cut, I realized I didn’t need them, even when I let go of the metrical reasons for cutting them in the first place. I think the main technique I used was reading the poem aloud.

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

It appeared in Gettysburg Review four or five years later.

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

I let things sit. Even in the writing process, I like to set things aside and come back to them with fresh eyes. A few years ago I wrote a sequence grounded very much in the landscape and weather around me, and I started putting poems away for a year. I would come back the following January to look at the January poems, etc. It had a wonderful effect. With so much time between drafts, I could see them much more clearly. I don’t always wait a year, but letting them sit and simmer is important to me. I might send a new poem to a friend, but I always wait before sending it anywhere else.

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

Much of what interests me about poetry these days is the way the line between fact and fiction is necessarily and happily blurred. In poetry we can place what might have happened alongside what did happen. We can elevate past events into myth. We can excavate moments and bring to light what would have happened, if only – well, on that “if” hangs everything, a whole world, a world we create that includes but isn’t limited to the world around us. We do seem, as readers, to want to know where fact leaves off and where fiction begins. If you read the early books on Lorca’s Poet in New York, many of his friends try to explain the literal scenes that underlie the wild imagery. “He says ‘three blind horses’ because there really was a blind horse on the farm he visited,” and so on. Or take Philip Levine’s poem about the meeting of Lorca and Hart Crane: everyone wants to know, Is it true? Did they meet? Was Levine’s cousin really there? I think it’s a tribute to poetry that the world we create casts such real shadows in the world around us. I guess I’m not answering the question, but it’s because one of the things I love about poetry is the way that question is so carefully given life.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, compared to most of my other poems, but the arc it completes is very small.

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

I remember I was reading a lot of Charles Wright at that time, but I don’t see a lot of his influence here. Wright and Merwin and Louise Glück were probably on my bedside table back then.

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

There was a time when all I cared about was getting the poem so that it sounded right in my own ear. I suppose that felt safe. But later, when I started doing readings, I began to consider how the poem would read to an audience. For a long time now, that’s the reader I imagine: an interested, unusually generous, and well-caffeinated listener. In the end, I’m not sure there is much difference between getting it right for my ear and getting it ready for a listener. Either way, it needs to feel precise, worth its weight in silence. I’ll often cut a line in the middle of reading a poem if the line feels unneeded – better silence than an extra few words. There are some poems – long ones, for instance, but also poems that somehow feel more nailed to the page – that I might never read at a reading, but the same sense of “does this sound right?” kicks in. I suppose it’s rather Platonic, as if each poem aspires to a form that is out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered but probably out of reach. But I keep listening for 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?

When my book came out, a friend reminded me (I’d quite forgotten) that when I first drafted this poem, I called her and said, “I’ve just written a strange poem about my father.” I’m not sure now what felt so strange. Nowadays, I have a small group of friends scattered here and there with whom I share poems. I often read drafts of new poems at readings, too, not for the audience reaction but just to see how I feel about it. What lines make me cringe, etc.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Like several of the poems in my first book, it feels bolder, more confident in its reckoning with the world, and more interesting in wrapping up the story its begun than later work. I felt more certain about certain things back then.

What is American about this poem?

As soon as you say you’re "drinking in London," you sound like a tourist. Not doing it, mind you, but saying it. It feels like the acts of naming in this poem are the acts of an outsider. Beyond that I’m not sure I have a good answer. I’m not sure what “American” means anymore, especially if by “American” we mean “of the Americas,” if we include Neruda and Elsa Cross and Jaime Sabines and Ruben Darío, etc. Perhaps the overlay of Eastern and Western imagery, Christian rising alongside Eastern reincarnation – perhaps that is more likely to emerge in the Americas? Perhaps. But I can already think of exceptions.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

There comes a time when I just can’t change a poem any more. The moment of living that helped create it fades, and the poem is left, like a fossil of the encounter. It might take years to happen, but eventually it feels as finished as I can make it. A lot of these poems live the rest of their days in a folder somewhere – they are finished and abandoned. Others I like, or like enough to share, and these are finished and invited to stick around for a bit. But even as you befriend a poem, you see what it didn’t achieve. But the next poem – the next poem will really get there. So it goes.

Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Names (Norton, 2009), and of ten collections of translations of contemporary French poets, including Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2008), winner of the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and three collections by the Lebanese French poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata. She received the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets and a Lambda Literary award for Winter Numbers, a Lambda Literary Award for Going back to the River, and the National Book Award for Presentation Piece. She was editor of the feminist literary magazine 13th Moon, and, for four years, editor in chief of the Kenyon Review. She is also a writer of incisive criticism and reviews of contemporary poetry, with particular attention to the work of feminist poets, poets of color, any poets whose work she judged worthy of more attention from the American (and sometimes British) reading public: a collection of her essays, Unauthorized Voices, will be published in the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series in the spring of 2010. Marilyn Hacker lives in New York and Paris. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and co-editor of the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series.


PARAGRAPHS FOR HAYDEN

1.
I want to talk to you about desire,
Hayden, the letter I could have written
on a subject you’d never tire
of turning in a glass, smitten
by a song, an argument, long sorrel hair,
profile of a glazed clay icon in the river,
while your knees needled and breathing
hurt, two packs a day bequeathing
what didn’t, in fact, kill you in the end.
Was it a distraction
from the inexorable fear, my friend,
its five AM gut-contraction ?
But who, of your critics or cortège, pretends
the expense of spirit of lust in action,
didn’t earn you magnificent dividends?

2.
The week they told me my genetic code
was flawed, I ricocheted, desire and fear
like sun and clouds, a mood-
swing reason had no reason for
(but reason’s calibrated in the blood).
Terror. Tumescence. Cloudbursts. Solitude.
No diagnosis, no beloved: balance…
I write, not to you; to silence.
By anybody’s reckoning, now I’m “old,”
and you, an occasion instead
of an interlocutor. Aura of beaten gold
in a winter of cast lead.
Will the scale tip to the side of pleasure
when a taut cord plucked across the grid
invites, vibrates according to your measure ?

3.
A taut-tuned string asserts: the girl in green,
a six-year-old in an oversized sweatshirt
in Gaza City, on a computer-screen
video, not dead, not hurt
but furious. This is what they’ve done
to our house! Our clothes smell of gas! I never wore the sun-
glasses my father gave me
or the earrings my grandmother gave me!
She tosses dark curls, speaks, a pasionaria
in front of a charred wall.
Arching her brows, she orchestrates her aria
with swift hands that rise and fall
while she forgets about fear
even as she ransacks the empty cradle
of its burnt blankets. That baby’s – where?

4.
Not like “upstate,” our January freeze
still killed my window-box geraniums.
Beyond that ragged khaki frieze
of dead plants, Sunday hums
up to my windows. I count each of these
hours, respite, respite, from broken treaties
uprooted orchards, shattered concrete.
Eight years later, still on the street
eight years older, two women squabble
and survive improbably.
A dark-haired boy, pale, imperturbable
sits in front of Monoprix,
wrapped in blankets, stroking a silvery cat.
Your voice begins to slip away from me.
Life is like that. Death is like that.

5.
A glass of red wine spills on the grammar book –
the pupil and the teacher gasp, then laugh.
Their voices branch into the baroque
logic of the paragraph.
Does the Brouilly birthmark presage luck
in learning elementary Arabic?
This school desk is a kitchen table,
but the street outside is peaceful.
Schoolchildren with satchels weave among
shoppers, construction workers, dogs.
No one here is speaking their mother tongue:
perhaps several dialogues
are contradicting contrapuntally.
Two girls in hijab with computer bags
go hand in hand into the library.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

In January of this year. It began with a desire to write something in homage to the great American poet Hayden Carruth, who died at the age of 87 in September; to continue, in a sadly fictitious way, a voluminous correspondence with him that had gone on since the early 1990s; to prolong the life (that is to say inscribe as a possibility within the many of poetic form) of the “paragraph,” (or of the sequence of “paragraphs” ) , a form Carruth himself created, first in the 1950s, and continued to use throughout his long career. It was, at the same time, a response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which left close to 1,400 dead, most of them civilians, and immeasurable damage to the lives, property, to the future of the survivors, present in my quotidian life through newspaper articles and videos from many sources, and also from testimony from people I knew, or who know people I know, who were there. There was a personal impetus as well: the discovery that I was positive for the so-called “breast cancer gene,” actually a genetic lack or malformation. The imaginative link between that and occupation/invasion is fairly easy to imagine.

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

Several drafts—separate drafts on the separate sections, and further revision to make them cohere insomuch as they do.

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

“Inspiration,” in my experience, is a reward for persistent work when one is not in the least inspired. The “paragraph,” despite a name that makes it sound like a prose poem, is a fairly complex form. As Hayden Carruth used and described it, it is a fifteen-line poem, which, like a sonnet, can either stand alone or work in sequence. It has a fixed rhyme scheme, and a fixed variation in the number of stresses per line. It is accentual rather than accentual-syllabic, though there is quite a bit of not-necessarily inadvertent iambic pentameter in most of them. With the letter representing rhyme and the numeral the number of stresses, the template would look like this:

5A A carpet raveling on the loom a girl
5B with a widowspeak and misty legs a moon
4A like a fisheye rising from a pool
3B a black longwing loon
5A bursting afire in the sunset a torn sail
5A groveling in a wave a whisper in a stairwell
4C a helmet upturned in the black rain
4C and later a star reflected on a coin
5D glimmering on seastones a sound of motors
3E and machineguns
5D in the dawn a kiss and candleflame a sonata
4E for clarinet a bone cracking a woman
5F wearing a blue veil and in kashan a room
5E where the little darkeyed weaving girls lay down
5F and died a carpet raveling on a loom.

The poem I’ve used to illustrate the template is from “Contra Mortem,” a sequence of thirty paragraphs written in 1966, in which Carruth “loosened” his own strict form somewhat (one could read lines 8 and 12 as having five stresses), as well as being freer with punctuation, which here follows the trajectory of a free-associative but directed thought-and-image process. Carruth liked to emphasize the paragraph’s differences from the sonnet: how the shorter lines 7 and 8 introducing a third rhyme break the train of thought while not forming part of a sestet’s response/resolution, for example.

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

Given the form above, it is clear that “principles of technique” were conscious. But I don’t know that it would be possible to write any poem--a highly experimental poem, a sonnet sequence, a poem in the narrative unmetered verse to which American readers are most accustomed--without consciously employing principles of technique! A poem is made up of words, in some usually syntactically meaningful order, interesting in their denotations and connotations and equally interesting in their sonorities and their interplay. A jazz pianist (or a clarinetist – that is what jazz-buff Carruth was!) improvising is employing principles of technique that had to be learned before improvisation was possible, and so is the poet, even in the rare situation of sitting down to write a poem that “arrives” more or less intact: this is a reward that follows long practice.

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

It appeared in the British journal PN Review about four months later. They publish bi-monthly!

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. Because this poem is at once a response to a series of urgent events in the world and something of an elegy to someone recently dead, I wanted it to appear fairly soon – if possible.

Is this a narrative poem?

There are several narratives and dialogues being negotiated here. The little girl in Gaza is at the heart of the poem, and yet she is cut off from “dialogue,” telling her story and her indignation to an unseen interlocutor. The question of desire (and of disease) is left open-ended. The girl’s anger, and the deliberately unspecified (not to embroider on a reality as far as I could observe it) situation reverberate from everything else evoked (including the language in which I might understand her) but remain painfully separate. The narrative opens out into another one (just as the scene shifts from a room to a populated street).

At the heart of this poem is the specter of morality, the idea of right and wrong. Is all good poetry in some way ethical or just?

Wouldn’t it be neat and tidy if that were the case!

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

The influence of Hayden Carruth is so clear it is hardly a disclosure. I was also reading the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who had himself died a month before Carruth, both in Fady Joudah’s English translations and in Elias Sanbar’s French ones. Poems by Alicia Ostriker, Marilyn Krysl, George Szirtes, Peter Dale Scott, Mimi Khalvati. The Syro-Lebanese poet Adonis’ thorny, violent and erudite “Al-Kitâb,” in Houria Abdelouahed’s French translation. I was myself finishing the translation of a collection of poems by Emmanuel Moses, a French poet steeped in European and Jewish history.

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

Hayden Carruth was one, and he is dead. Marie Ponsot. The Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant. Several friends, not all of them poets, writers, or even Anglophones. But the ideal reader still seems to me someone about whom I know nothing, who picks up a book in a library or a bookshop. . . .

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it?

Yes – my friend the poet and critic Alfred Corn.

Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

Alfred is one; Marie Ponsot – who rarely “comments,” and never blue-pencils, is another. There are several others, more intermittently than regularly. Not a group.

What is American about this poem?

The form is “American,” devised by a thoroughly American poet. Perhaps the situation, that of expatriation, as it swings from imagination to a “reality” itself part fiction. It is written in American English, unmistakeably.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both. I hope it is finished as is. At the same time, the “paragraph” sequence lends itself to longer continuation. In this case, I wanted the poem to be included in Names, because of its elegiac aspect and because of the immediacy of the Gaza reference – so I let it conclude where it did, with those two young women on their way into the library, and a wine-stain on the Arabic grammar, a toast to Abû Nûwwas!

Sean Hill

Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill has an M.F.A. from the University of Houston, where he was awarded the 2003 Michener Fellowship for poetry. He has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bush Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, and Stanford University, work-study scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a Travel and Study Grant from the Jerome Foundation. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Pleiades, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, The Oxford American, Tin House and other literary journals, and in the anthologies Blues Poems, Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear, and the forthcoming Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. In 2008 the University of Georgia Press published his first book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. For more information, please visit Hill's website.


UNCLE JOHN

That was the year
Granddaddy Thomas died
Left the family worse than broke

Uncle John stole a ham
from Mr. Ennis’s Meat Market
He was seventeen

Lost his taste for it
locked up
fourteen years

Ham salt cured and earth-red
sliced with the fat hanging on
yellow sunshine on a white plate
The hambone cut crosswise
rings marrow
a dark eye
All in the skillet
making gravy for grits

Lost the taste for all things salt
The ocean he hasn’t seen
Woman and man
He don’t never want to see
no more ham on his plate
Hates pigs
Was hard for him
Hates white folks too

Time off for good behavior
They didn’t hold him to the last six

He’s a hog farmer
only eats beef and chicken and turkey
fish turtle and rabbit
squirrel possum and coon
and he seasons his greens with smoked oxtails

Can’t raise white folks for slaughter.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The idea of this poem, the trigger, was a newspaper article I came across while doing research for Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. I read 19th and early 20th century issues of Milledgeville’s newspaper, the Union Recorder, to get a sense of how people lived in my hometown back then—to get a sense of the texture of the times. This particular article was published sometime in 1904, I think. This was during the era of leased convict labor when the state could lease convicts to privately owned businesses. This system offered a source of revenue for the state and cheap labor for businesses. Very often Black men were arrested and convicted on trumped up charges. The article related the story of a recently released convict who’d been sentenced to work for twenty years in, I believe, a coal mine for stealing a ham. The happy ending spin the article put on this situation was that the man was now free to pursue his dream of starting up a farm. I think I read the article sometime in late 1999 or early 2000. I couldn’t shake this story. The nagging question of “and then what?” needed answering, so I wrote my way to an answer. I wrote the first drafts of it at the Cave Canem workshop and retreat in June 2000.

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

I think because the story was with me for a while before I actually tried to write anything on paper, it went through very few drafts over a few months. I checked my computer files, and I seem to have saved only two drafts before the final. I’m sure there were a few more that were printed out but not saved on the computer.

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; it’s what stops me, pulls me out of the everyday. Those moments of attentiveness are often something coming to me and saying, “pay attention.” A great part of “Uncle John” was “received,” but, as I said, only after I’d sat with the material for a while. The lines “Lost his taste for all things salt / the ocean he hasn’t seen / woman and man” definitely felt “received” from a place farther out than the rest of the poem. Those lines, especially “the ocean he hasn’t seen,” surprised me more than the rest of the poem, which surprised me too. I think I put myself in a place to “receive” this poem. Then I cried and sweated.

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

In looking back at the drafts I have, it seems I tried to write it in tercets, but that didn’t work out. The poem, the voice, resisted that, and I listened.

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

A few months.

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 hard and fast rules for lengths of time to let poems “sit” before sending them out. It’s intuitive—dependent upon how I’m feeling about the poem.

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

The facts of the poem are what I gathered from the newspaper article: a Black man was sentenced to twenty years hard labor for stealing a ham, and he was made to serve sixteen of those twenty years, and, allegedly, he was going to start a farm after his release. Those facts along with the facts I gleaned from history books and growing up Black in Milledgeville in the last quarter of the twentieth century and hearing older generations of Black people speak about their lives and, as an adult, asking them questions and listening to their answers are the facts of this poem. The brief rhapsodic ham reverie came from fond childhood memories of having country cured ham for breakfast at my grandmother’s house and from the fact that by the time I was writing those lines I hadn’t eaten pork for close to ten years. My empathic imagining of the voice of the relative of Uncle John who understands what John has lived through and lives with filled in the rest.

Is this a narrative poem?

It’s narrative in that it relates a sequence of events. It has, I think, the structure and, possibly, punch of a joke. And if the reader is laughing, I think he or she is laughing to keep from crying.

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

I’m not really sure what I was reading around this time, but it’s probably safe to say I was reading Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Nelson, Sterling Brown, Seamus Heaney, and Kevin Young.

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

No and yes. I think the consideration of audience, for me, comes in during the revision process when I’m thinking of the best order for the words. I start thinking more consciously about how the words can mean to someone encountering them for the first time, a 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?

Yes. As I said, I wrote the first drafts at Cave Canem and turned in a version to workshop there. And in fall semester of 2000 I turned in a draft to Robert Phillips’s workshop at the University of Houston. A question about something that I saw as obvious or irrelevant or both was raised by Professor Phillips, I believe; the question was, why did he steal the ham? I guess that’s where audience comes in.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Well, I think it employs humor in a way that most of my other poems haven’t.

What is American about this poem?

Among other things, the story and the story behind the story are what is American about this poem. The spin the newspaper article put on it sounds like a twist on the rags-to-riches story. And the particular series of events the poem relates form a very American story. And I think the language of the poem is American. And the humor in the poem that is born of the situation is a very American kind of humor.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I think it was finished.

Harvey Shapiro

Harvey Shapiro’s many books include The Sights Along the Harbor: New and Collected Poems (2006), How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems (2001) and National Cold Storage Company (1998), all published by Wesleyan. A veteran of World War II, he published his first book in 1953, and has taught at Cornell University, Bard College, Columbia University, and Yale University. In his career as a journalist, he has served as editor of the New York Times Book Review and senior editor of the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.


HOW CHARLIE SHAVERS DIED

He had a gig
but he was hurting.
His doctor said, play the date,
then check into the hospital.
That night, when the party ended
and the band packed up,
Charlie started to give stuff away—
his watch, his rings—to the women
in the room. Then
he circled the room with his horn
playing: “For all I know we may never meet again.”
At this point, the man who was telling the story
in the locker room at the Manhattan Plaza gym
and who had sung the line slowly, with
a pause between each word, began to cry.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

In 2000, I think. I can't remember the season or month. It began with a line overheard at the Manhattan Plaza Gym: locker room.

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

The poem took shape over several months. I didn't try to get it on the page until I knew how to set it up.

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

Yes, I believe in inspiration. But I also believe in reporting. Wallace Stevens called the poetry of William Carlos Williams "rubbings of reality." That's what this poem means to be.

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

The poem arrived at its final form when I figured out how to get into it--begin with a voice and then set the scene at the end.

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

I can't remember.

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?

Usually I let a poem sit in my notebook for some weeks before I go to the computer. Then I print it out and let it sit some more.

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

Writing during World War II, Stevens said that, in the face of an overwhelming event, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. I think that sometimes the event doesn't have to be overwhelming.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes.

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

No.

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

No.

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.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

More anecdote, less language.

What is American about this poem?

Everything.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.