Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky’s Selected Poems will be published in March, 2011. His recent anthology with audio CD is Essential Pleasures. His honors include the Italian Premio Capri, the Korean Manhae Award, and the Harold Washington Award from the city of Chicago. His best-selling translation The Inferno of Dante was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Pinsky is a former U.S. Poet Laureate. The videos from his Favorite Poem Project can be viewed here.



SHIRT

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem began with a quite different direction. I was thinking of a character, a woman, a sculptor whose work involved black iron and varnished wood, forms vaguely like human muscles but with little wheels and so forth. When she was a child, her single-parent mother did piece-work, and the child was fascinated visually by her mother's treadle sewing machine, that supported them. It was mixed up with playing Solitaire or War and her fascination with the designs and faces of the royalty cards. An unusually plot-ridden, fictional notion for me.

Then I became hypnotized—much more characteristically—by the sounds of the consonants in the language for the parts of those handsome old machines: the treadle, the needle. And then, what else—the bobbin. And what might chime with that? Well, the union. Which led to the old terminology for different garment-worker jobs, and to Irving Howe's book, and to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and the probably-fake, vaguely attributed account of the young man helping the young women and then jumping himself. A story in the attractive realm of what might-be-true. And that led to remembering the left-wing Englishman Hobsbawm's book The Invention of Tradition, where years before I had been delighted by his debunking of the kilt, along with the Coronation regalia and so forth: all nineteenth-century fabrications claiming to be ancient, he says. And the racialist part: the Highland Scots being considered sub-human by the English who tried to tame them as factory workers.

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

Very little once I abandoned the sculptor and her story, everything I've described came probably in an afternoon. The concealed blank verse helped it go quickly.

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

Inspiration comes from great works of art: you remember the feeling you got from something created by Charlie Parker or Emily Dickinson or Buster Keaton or Francisco Goya or Nikolai Gogol or Johannes Brahms . . . and you start wanting to create something that would give that feeling to other people. The spirit you breathe in, you want to exhale. It’s real. The process is visible in some of the videos at the Favorite Poem Project website.

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

“Consciously” is not quite the right word for the way an old prizefighter or hornplayer like me works in iambic pentameter. I have done it for so long, lived with it so intensely, that it is like walking. The discovery and the difficulty is in where you walk.

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

I don’t remember. I think it was in The New Yorker, and they usually take 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?

A small number of friends and relatives help me decide a work is finished. (Or not!) Once it passes that test, I’m ready to sing it on the streetcorner . . . figuratively speaking.

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

The old newspaper account, which quotes “a witness” and from which I steal (and pentameter-ize) language like “into a streetcar, and not eternity” is probably a sensationalist fake. But nobody can prove that—it might have happened. In the realm of imagination, it is true: which means that in the realm of reality it has meaning. Even though it may originate with one of those guys hanging out with Rosalind Russell, playing cards, in His Girl Friday. More meaning, I can hope, than my true answers on a form, more meaning than the facts of my biography, date and place of birth, etc. More meaning than the term paper I didn’t write about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Meaning means a lot to me: matters to me more than fact and fiction.

Is this a narrative poem?

I'm too goofy and impatient to write a narrative poem, but it has chunks of narrative in it, I hope bouncing off one another and other elements like bumper cars on the boardwalk.

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

Hard to say. Howe’s book, Hobsbawm’s book, George Herbert’s poems, Sam Johnson teasing and debunking the sacred hippy baloney of Ossian, Gogol, Babel, Alan Dugan, Faulkner . . . who knows. All of them in the realm of might-have-happened.

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

Sometimes, at some point, I try to imagine myself if I hadn’t written it. Sometimes—I'll confess—I try to imagine some dead master of craft—Emily Dickinson or Wallace Stevens or William Butler Yeats—looking at it and saying something like “I don't know what he’s trying to say, but he has spent his time practicing in the woodshed, he has the chops.” I try to imagine that! I’m not saying I succeed . . . and it’s just about making lines and sentences.

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?

A small number of poet friends. Ones I admire; I’m very fortunate in that.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Hard for me to say. It may speak more directly than most from my lower-middle-class background, the scarey time in my childhood after my father got fired. And the implicit chutzpah of claiming the upper-class Englishman George Herbert as my spiritual or poetic ancestor.

What is American about this poem?

Every damn thing about it—especially the parts about European history, the Kilt and Herbert and Ossian.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I have done my best with it. Apollo or Dionysus might be able to improve it.

Erika Meitner

Erika Meitner is the author of Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (Anhinga Press, 2003), and Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner. Her third book, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, is due out from Anhinga Press in February 2011. Meitner’s poems have appeared most recently in APR, Virginia Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, The New Republic, and on Slate.com. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program.


MIRACLE BLANKET

My mother calls it
that straitjacket.
Do you still put
the baby to sleep
in that straitjacket?
she asks, and I say
Mom, you mean
the miracle blanket?
and she says yes,
the straitjacket,
and I have to
admit she’s right,
that it looks
like a straitjacket
for babies, especially
in the “natural” color
which resembles a tortilla
so when he’s wrapped
the baby seems like a
burrito with a head,
and some nights
the straitjacket
helps him sleep, but
some nights
it does not
though we follow
step-by-step
instructions
and we shush and
swing the baby
wrapped tight
in his straitjacket,
but he screams and
won’t go down,
which is what we
call sleep now—
going down, as if he’s
drowning in his
straitjacket at 3am
in our bedroom
and we want him
to drown—we’ll do
anything to make him
go down, even pray.
Nicholas of Tolentino,
the patron saint
of babies, is said
to have resurrected
over 100 dead children
including several
who had drowned
together. He always
told those he helped
to say nothing of this.
Holy innocence, my son
in his miracle blanket
is sleeping. O faithful
and glorious martyr,
say nothing of this.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem was composed on August 12, 2007, says the file name on the first draft. And I blame Sandra Beasley for its production. Back at the start of August she emailed a bunch of poets (Deborah Ager, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Kathi Morrison-Taylor, Don Illich, Oliver de la Paz, Nathan McClain, Kelli Russell Agodon, Carly Sachs, and me) to see if we would participate in a NaPoWriMo—it was based on Maureen Thorson’s idea of April as National Poetry Writing Month, but Sandra decided we should try, in August, to all produce a poem a day and email them to each other. The poems could be raw, or more finished, and the group accountability was meant to help us produce new work.

I had just had a new baby in March, moved in July, and started a new tenure-track job in August, and that time was perhaps the most chaotic time of my life, ever. I decided I would join the group, but aim for writing a poem every other day. I was still deep in the world of baby products—especially products that would somehow make my son sleep. Sleep was such a luxury then. The only time I had to write was late, late at night, so that poem was composed at some point in the 12am to 3am slot.

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

Ha! Revision! I was so busy that semester that I was just trying to get the poems down at night before I (literally) fell asleep on the keyboard. Often I didn’t have time to even re-read the poems until weeks later. “Miracle Blanket” got edited while I was writing it, and the poems that didn’t get finished in one shot that year didn’t survive. That poem later underwent one small edit—I took out the specific name of a sleep book from the poem, as it seemed too bulky. When I first started writing it, I was working with Saint Philomena (another patron saint of babies), but stumbled on Nicholas of Tolentino and the drowning story, and then the poem just clicked and pretty much emerged whole.

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

This poem was totally "received." My deliriously tired subconscious somehow knew what it was doing. I’d like to say the angels (whoever they are, whatever they are) were whispering in my ear, but it’s more like the Forrest Gump school of poetry-writing—accidentally stumbling on wild success.

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

I knew I wanted it to have shorter lines, and sort of spill down the page. Other than that aspect of the poem, I didn’t really think about technique. I do internal rhyme in my sleep—that music is instinctual—so I knew it would have music.

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

“Miracle Blanket” was first printed in The Florida Review in Winter 2008—so about six months after it was written. I had been solicited for some poems by Kelle Groom, who was helping to edit that particular issue, so I sent her that poem in a batch, and the journal took it. It was later reprinted in my book, Ideal Cities, which came out this past August from HarperCollins.

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 totally varies. I get solicited a lot more for work these days, so my work probably spends less time sitting than it used to just because folks actively ask me for it. I’ll just send stuff out when it feels done though. Sometimes that’s right away, and sometimes it takes years to finish a poem.

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

This poem is 100% true. My mother actually said that verbatim. I tend to practice documentary poetics.

Is this a narrative poem?

Totally. And I’m not ashamed! “Narrative” has been a dirty word in contemporary American poetry for a while now. I get lumped in with new formalists, or Southern poets, or a host of other folks I admire but don’t really generally fit with. I’m usually a free verse poet, and a New York Jew. Actually, though, compared to some of my other work, this is less narrative. I mean, it has narrative elements—dialogue, scene—but it’s really a meditation on sleep, language, and the terror and frustration that accompanies first-time parenthood.

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

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t reading anything at that particular moment. I barely had time to pee that month. But I do know my line in that poem was influenced by Sean Thomas Dougherty’s “The Puerto Rican Girls of French Hill” from American Poetry: The Next Generation (edited by Jim Daniels and Gerald Costanzo). I was putting together my course reader for fall semester those NaPoWriMo weeks, and that poem went into the reader because I love the way it sounded—the way it slides down the page.

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

I’d be paralyzed if I sat down to write and thought about 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?

The NaPoWriMo group I mentioned earlier were the first people to see that poem, but we usually didn’t comment on each other’s stuff—though with that poem, Deborah Ager sent me a little encouraging note. That group (but with a rotating membership) still meets online every so often for a month or a few weeks and writes together. And some of those folks looked at the completed manuscript this poem went into. The poet Taije Silverman has also been helping me with individual poems for many years now, too. She’s an amazing reader and editor, in addition to being an exquisite poet.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I have a few other poems that use a short line like this one, but the majority of my poems have a much longer line.

What is American about this poem?

In some ways, “Miracle Blanket” is about consumerism—and what’s more American than that? When we had a baby, I was floored by the amount and range of products out there that companies tried to convince us we needed. The biggest and best baby emporium in the DC-area is called (no joke) Buy Buy Baby. We got three or four Miracle Blankets in the mail from friends, and it was like this magic talisman that everyone was sending to each other—as if this product would somehow tame the fearsome newborn single-handedly. And the name has such chutzpah! It promises divine intervention so your child will sleep. All for $29.99!

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. Quickly. See “falling asleep on keyboard” above.

Todd Davis

Todd Davis teaches creative writing, environmental studies, and American literature at Penn State University’s Altoona College. His poems have won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and have appeared in such journals and magazines as Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The North American Review, The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, and Image. He is the author of three books of poetry—Ripe (Bottom Dog Press, 2002), Some Heaven (Michigan State University Press, 2007), and The Least of These (Michigan State University Press, 2010)—as well as co-editor of the anthology, Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets (State University of New York Press, 2010). His chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow: The Thoreau Poems is just out from Seven Kitchens Press. Garrison Keillor has featured Davis’ poems on The Writer’s Almanac, and Ted Kooser has selected his poems twice to appear in his American Life in Poetry column. In addition to his creative work, Davis is the author or editor of six scholarly books, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade, or How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism (State University of New York Press, 2006) and Postmodern Humanism in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Reconciling the Void (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).


ACCIDENT

They tell the son, who tells his friends
at school, that the father’s death was
an accident, that the rifle went off
while he was cleaning it. I’m not sure
why he couldn’t wait. We understand
the ones who decide to leave us in February,
even as late as March. Snows swell.
Sun disappears. Hunting season ends.
With two deer in the freezer any family
can survive. I know sometimes
it feels like you’ve come to the end
of something. Sometimes you just want
to sit down beneath a hemlock and never go
back. But this late in the year, when plum
trees have opened their blossoms?
Yesterday it was so warm we slept
with the windows open. Smell of forsythia
right there in the room. I swear
you could hear the last few open,
silk petals come undone, a soft sound
like a pad sliding through a gun’s barrel,
white cloth soaked in bore cleaner,
removing the lead, the copper, the carbon
that fouls everything. My son knows
you don’t die cleaning your rifle:
the chamber’s always open.
I told him to nod his head anyway
when his friend tells the story,
to say yes as many times as it takes,
to never forget the smell of smoke
and concrete, the little bit of light
one bulb gives off in a basement
with no windows.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem was written in spring 2006 when my oldest son Noah was in the 6th grade. One evening at dinner, as the family talked about what had happened during the day, Noah said that a classmate’s father had died over the weekend while cleaning his gun. Needless to say, Noah was upset and visibly confused. My wife Shelly and I knew immediately that the story our son was telling was the way the classmate and his family were trying to cope with what had happened. What made it that much more devastating was the fact that suicide ran in that family. This wasn’t the first time such violence had visited this young boy. What to do? This poem was born out of sorrow and out of the conundrum of how to help my son enter such a world where fathers die by their own hands. I only hoped my poem could help Noah see some way to stand by his classmate, to show some kind of mercy.

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

Revision, revision, revision. It seems that’s all writing is until you send the poem out into the world. Of course, when it comes flying back to you—whether published or not—there still may be some adjustments to make later. Usually when I draft a poem I stay at it for at least a few hours. Then for the next three or four days I keep checking up on the temperature of the poem. What this means is that the poem undergoes some form of revision—often minor adjustments, like line breaks or single word replacements, but occasionally major rearrangements occur, too. I don’t remember exactly with this poem, but I’d hazard a guess that it went through at least twelve to fifteen “revisions.” (I put “revisions” in quotation marks because with this poem it was minor tinkering.)

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

Hmm. . . . inspiration. Yes, I suppose I believe in inspiration, but not in the way many people think of it. No big lightning bolts. No beatific rays of sunlight pouring over my head and giving me a poem outright. I believe inspiration is the blessed act of breathing in the world, of never allowing our senses to be dulled, of being attentive and awe-struck by the radical nature of our very existence. I suppose I’m affected by Emerson’s “ever-present now,” by the Buddhist practice of being fully present to the moment—living moment to moment—and by the Christian idea of the incarnation, the sensual world that blesses our being daily.

With that in mind, yes, occasionally as a result of trying to see the world in this way—which, like all humans, I fail at continuously—a poem seems to come to me virtually complete, as if received from some muse on high.

This poem was a mixture of the proverbial sweat and tears you mention in your question and the more mystical inspiration of the spiritual and writerly practice of attentiveness.

When Noah told me about his friend, after we talked a while and I put him to bed, I went to my desk and wrote this poem in its entirety. While there was revision, I know it was not extensive. The poem was essentially my way of trying to tell Noah how he might respond to his friend the next day, how to help protect him from the other kids who might say that it was bullshit, that no one died cleaning their rifle. Central Pennsylvania is a hunting culture, and like most anywhere kids can be cruel and clueless. So the poem is about how to show mercy, how to live mercifully.

I read Noah the poem the next day before he headed to school. I told him that in this case, even if he didn’t believe the story, the right thing to do was to say, “yes.”

I suppose I should also say that inspiration, at least for me, is tied up in empathy. I remember as I composed this poem that I closed my eyes and entered—if only through the imagination—the world of this father who felt he had come to the end of something. The final images in the poem come from that kind of meditative act, that desire to crossover into another. What the poem’s final lines chronicle is both reportage of what the first person who would discover the body had to confront and a warning to myself and to the reader as to what it means to consider such an act, its consequences in the material world: the concrete blocks lining the basement walls, the single light bulb hanging from the unfinished ceiling, the smoke that hangs in the air after a rifle’s discharge.

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

Many of my poems utilize more formal structures than “Accident.” With this poem I felt stanza breaks, for example, would be at cross-purposes with the narrative thread in the poem, with the associational leaps I was asking the reader to make. The poem’s final form, then, is meant to push the reader through the poem, to leave us asking for mercy, praying for mercy, because we must remember that basement, that smoke, the light of that single bulb. I wanted some of the associational work to be done in tight proximity to what came before and what came after. My hope in doing so was to create a feeling of controlled confusion, of distress linked to stoicism.
How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print?

I believe I sent it out fairly quickly. I wrote the poem in the spring, early April as the blossoms in the poem attest to. Because most magazines and journals stop reading in May, I waited until September and sent it out with several other submissions.

As you know, often you can wait for six months or more to simply receive a copy of a copy of a rejection slip. In this case, I was fortunate; the poem was fortunate. It landed in the hands of an editor at the right time. I received an acceptance from Indiana Review about two months later. So in this case—a true rarity in my experience—the poem was in print about a year after I wrote it.

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 suppose I don’t have any set or fast rule. I need to believe the poem is working on at least two levels before I send it out. These levels have to do with the aesthetic and the content the poem must carry within that aesthetic. When I think a poem has done this, I get it in the mail. If that’s two weeks after I draft it, so be it. If that’s a year after I draft it, that’s okay, too. I’d imagine I’m not alone in making the mistake of getting a poem in the mail too soon, however. But when poems come back to me I try to have a forty-eight hour rule. I read them carefully a few times. If they still seem to be working, they must be back in the mail within forty-eight hours. After all, part of the trick of getting a poem into the broader world through publishing is to make sure it’s in circulation with editors. When you think of the astronomical odds of getting a poem published in some journals, then you realize, like a major league batter, you have to see a lot of pitches before you get your bat on a ball.

And this leads me to one of my mantras: I do not write for publication. I do not write for publication.

Why must I remind myself of this? Because publication can be seductive. It can suggest there’s no meaning in writing unless the work is published. (And we can even play the game of pedigree. How certain journals imbue our writing with even greater value.)

Of course, I do like to share my poems with the broader world; that’s why I send them out to editors. But if that were the end-all and be-all of writing, well, I’d have to stop pretty fast because rejection is the norm. I’m incredibly thankful to the editors at journals who have published my work, but the act of writing, the act of creation itself, has to be the reward. (The other path seems rather sadistic to me.)

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

In my practice, I would say poetry is closer to fiction than to nonfiction. I’m more than willing to make up, to imagine into being, certain elements that will make the poem, as an art object, work. Despite my normal practice, however, this poem relies heavily on fact. Reading back over it, there really is nothing that I’ve made up. Of course, we could get into a philosophical discussion about the matter of my perception, of my choice of framing, what gets left in and what gets left out, and how such decisions are a way of making a fiction about a factual experience that none of us can ever apprehend without these very tools. But let’s keep it simple. This poem relies heavily on whatever reportorial skills I have.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes. But it is more than a single narrative. As you can see there are several narratives occurring at once—the son who tells his friends his family’s story about his father’s death; the implied narrative of a man who has committed suicide; the narrative of the speaker who struggles to understand how this man, this father, could have taken his own life; and the narrative of the speaker in the poem trying to find some way to help his own son, as well as the son of the man who has committed suicide.

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

I don’t remember exactly who I was reading at the time I wrote this poem, but I can offer some pretty good guesses because there is a core group of poets whose work I return to again and again. (And when I say again and again, I mean I read a poem by these folks at least once a week.) It’s a fairly long list, and like most writers I fear I’ve left someone off, but I’ll give it a shot: Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Mary Oliver, Jane Hirshfield. Philip Levine, Stephen Dunn, Charles Wright, Eric Pankey, James Dickey, Wendell Berry, Jack Ridl, David Shumate, Jane Kenyon, Robert Bly, Nancy Willard, Richard Jones, Mary Rose O’Reilley, Mary Swander, Brian Turner, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Julia Kasdorf, Keith Ratzlaff, Jeff Gundy, Sherman Alexie, Dan Gerber, Jim Harrison, William Heyen, Ted Kooser, Greg Rappleye, Maurice Manning, Jim Daniels, Linda Pastan, and William Stafford. There are, of course, so many other writers I read and love, but these writers I’ve named—and I know it’s quite a list in response to your question—really are spiritual and artistic guides, a family or community to which I write back. Some new writers who didn’t have books out at the time but whose poetry now works as a “triggering town,” as Richard Hugo would have it, are K.A. Hays, Chris Dombrowski, and Paula Bohince.

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

My ideal reader is someone generous enough to take the time to read a poem I’ve written. Seriously. But in practice my ideal readers are my first readers. Up until his death this past July, my father either heard over the phone or received via post the early drafts of my poems. My mother, too, gives me a caring ear and listens to my poems. My wife Shelly and my two boys hear what I’m working on at the table over supper. Am I blessed or what?! My family suffers me kindly.
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, and I’m not sure where I’d be without them. Here are the saints who bear my poetry up, offering either encouragement or critique or both: Jack Ridl, David Shumate, Mary Linton, William Heyen, Mary Rose O’Reilley, Dan Gerber, Chris Dombrowski, and K.A. Hays.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I really see my work as all of a piece. I try very hard not to have boundaries or divisions between my physical body, my spiritual practice, my professional work, my writing, etc… I’m sure some divisions or boundaries creep in, but I suppose I’m a disciple of William Stafford. I try to write daily—(I don’t get up quite as early as he did!)—and I’m in love with the process of writing, the act of creation. So this was the poem I needed to write, I had to write, on the day it was written. The practice of poem-making is part of the fabric of my daily living. So everything I do is research. I’m pretty curious about most things, and I see some of the work of poetry as a way of documenting what the world has blessed me with in a given moment.

What is American about this poem?

I suppose it's “American” because of its setting, its cultural context. But I think of all poems as part of the book of poetry. Some poems are forgotten, some are resurrected by critics or publishers or other poets and artists. No one knows what poem will continue to exist even ten years from now, but I do believe the best poems transcend their temporal and cultural boundaries. For example, many of the classical Chinese poets—Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Po Chü-i —speak to me, as if they were the farmer who lives down the road.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I don’t believe in the perfect poem. That’s not to say that I don’t try to polish and polish my work. We spoke earlier of revision. Even after a poem of mine is published in a journal it often goes through another revision or two before entering a book manuscript and being published in that context. So: all poems are finally abandoned. But just like the creators of poems—all of us imperfect, all of us fallible—the poems themselves are all the more beautiful and valuable to me for their imperfections.

Carrie Fountain

Carrie Fountain was born and raised in Mesilla, New Mexico. She was a fellow at the University of Texas’ Michener Center for Writers. Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, AGNI, and Southwestern American Literature, among others. Her debut collection, Burn Lake (Penguin Books, 2010), was a winner of a 2009 National Poetry Series Award. She lives in Austin, Texas and teaches at St. Edward’s University.



EXPERIENCE

When I think of everything I’ve wanted
I feel sick. There was this one night in winter
when Jennifer Scanlon and I were driven out
to the desert to be the only girls there
when the boys got drunk and chose
the weakest among themselves to beat the living
shit out of again and again while the night
continued in its airy way to say nothing. Sure, I wanted
to believe violence was a little bell you could ring
and get what you wanted. It seemed to work for those
boys, who’d brought strict order to the evening
using nothing but a few enthusiastic muscles.
Even when he’d begun bleeding from his nose, the boy
stayed. It was an initiation. That’s what he believed.
Thank God time keeps erasing everything in this steady,
impeccable way. Now it’s like I never lived
that life, never had to, sitting on a tailgate
while Jennifer asked for advice on things she’d already done,
watching the stars ferment above, adoring whatever it was
that allowed those boys to throw themselves fists-first
at the world, yell every profanity ever made
into the open ear of the universe. I believed then
that if only they’d get quiet enough, we’d hear
the universe calling back, telling us what to do next.
Of course, if we’d been quiet, we would’ve heard
nothing. And that silence, too, would’ve ruined us.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I found the first draft of the poem on my computer: 2004. So it probably started in a notebook sometime around then. I take notes in a notebook but compose on a computer. That 2004 draft is very different. The two girls are more participant in the violence, not so much witnesses. That surprises me. I don’t remember that.

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

Loads. I fiddled with it right up until Burn Lake was published last year. (Although, now that I write that, I found the poem published online in 2005 and it’s pretty similar to the final version. Still, I know I was fiddling right up until the end, even if the changes aren’t significant.)

And really, I don’t know that the published version is the final version. I’m just looking at it now. There are still things I’d continue fiddling with. For example, now I think the first line should read, “When I think of everything I’ve ever wanted.” I chose in the final version to rest all that weight on the verb “wanted.” I liked the irony there, as if wanting is so straightforward a thing as to be enumerated. But I also like the charm of “everything I’ve ever wanted”—that worn-in phrase (cliché); I like the idea of playing with that brimming irony, too.

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

I like thinking about what William Stafford says: “Poetry happens in the corner of the eye.” I suppose I caught something in the corner of my eye: a line—maybe that “bell you could ring and get what you wanted”—or the image of the tailgate. Or maybe it began with thinking of the kinds of boys I grew up with—those wild packs of boys: pure piss and vinegar—and how I’d fear those boys if I came across them now and will surely fear them when my daughter is a teenager. The rest was working the poem up. That 2004 version was in long-lined tercets and was over two pages. It’s been whittled down. I don’t actually know how to produce sweat and tears, sadly.

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

I did not consciously employ any principles of technique. One thing I often do while I’m in the middle* of revising is put everything in tercets or quatrains. I bundle the lines like this. That somehow disappears the breaks for me and helps me focus on the body of the poem, the syntax and the tone. Then I rip it open again and break the lines in different ways, modulating the pace. This is not a technique in traditional sense, I suppose, as much as it is a maneuver: a way of levering up the poem to get to its underside.

*Of course, I never know that I’m in the middle and almost always think I’m at the end of revising, very close to being entirely finished. Self-deception: is that a technique?

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

A year.

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 about this. I tend to wait until I have batches of poems finished before I start sending them out. I probably err on the sides of both sitting too long on poems and not sending out enough work.
Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

The negotiations seem unimportant to me, though they’re often troubling. To me, whether a poem is factual or autobiographical is unimportant because that condition usually has nothing to do with whether the poem is successful or not or whether the poem touches on some truth (which is of far greater importance than fact) or not. I mean: Jennifer Scanlon is a real person. That’s a fact. But the poem isn’t really about that.

I think the tendency to assume an autobiography while reading a poem has to do with the intimate nature of poetry, especially narrative poetry. The yielding voice. But it bothers me sometimes because assumptions like these can cheapen the craft. On the other hand, many of my poems are about my experience of the world. In this sense they are autobiographical. Still, material alone doesn’t make a poem.

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?

I remember reading a lot of Jane Kenyon at this time. This was written around the time I fell in love with Jane Kenyon’s poems, right as I was leaving the Michener Center. But I’m not sure I hear that in this poem. I hear Tony Hoagland here to a degree so embarrassing it makes me want to hold my breath for the next fifty or so years.

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

I went to see a weird play once with the poet Steve Gehrke. It was really far out, without context or motif or really any other navigational device. When we were talking about it afterward, Steve said, “When I see something like that, I ask myself, what would my mother think of that play? I think my mother would have liked the singing scarecrow.” (The play had a singing scarecrow.) That’s stuck with me. I would like to imagine writing poems someday that would appeal to different people on different levels and that might even have in them a certain delight that could appeal to a very broad 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?

My husband, Kirk Lynn, reads everything I write first. He’s a playwright and a novelist and he’s a tremendously keen reader and an honest critic. He’s also a tremendously talented writer. I have finished poems on his advice alone. I have some other writer friends. Steve Moore (also a playwright) is a close friend. He reads a lot of my poems. Lots of poet friends read Burn Lake when it was a manuscript. I’ll have lots of poet friends read The Talent of the Body (my next book) when it’s closer to being finished.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I think this poem is more pessimistic in tone than other poems of mine.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It is finished for now and thus it has been abandoned (for now).

Keith Montesano

Keith Montesano’s first book, Ghost Lights, was published in May 2010 by Dream Horse Press. Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, American Literary Review, Third Coast, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He currently lives with his wife in New York, where he is a PhD Candidate in English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University. For more information, please visit Keith's blog.


GHOST LIGHTS

What about the part where the story ends? It ends
with our bodies like machines. Charred like paper—

singed like leaves. Arms reaching out: Come. Now.
Who says the hands of the dead don’t ask us

to go there with them? Isn’t that so sad? The family
parked, crushed by falling rocks. They all burned to death.

I saw it in the papers today. I couldn’t find
a word then. I looked. I’m looking at you now. Yes,

I said, and why are you telling me this? Maybe as I drive
with you I’m remembering her voice: swamp gas

by no swamp, Piezoelectricity. I didn’t believe
that sort of thing existed, you say. Ball lightning. Mirages.

St. Elmo on Boeing wings. Time-lapsed sheets
roaring from our closets. And before our exit: frail bodies

in their otherworldly paths. Bones dusted years from now—
leaving only their voices: We’ve shown you everything.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I think it was sometime during the summer of 2007.

It started from a passage in a Dan Chaon story from his collection, Among the Missing. I don’t know the story’s title, but the narrator was talking about the phenomenon of ghost lights. For some reason it struck me to the point of remembering the family that an ex-girlfriend had told me about years ago: how they were parked by the side of the road somewhere, near a steep hill prone to falling rocks.

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

I know it would be fashionable to say that the poem went through a seemingly endless process of revision, but I would say at most it was revised about three or four times. I was actually reading Among the Missing with a group of friends that summer when I wrote the first draft, so they were the first to see it. If I remember correctly, the first draft was in choppy, short-lined tercets. After some feedback, for reasons I don’t remember, it went into longer couplets.

And I have to mention my friend Nicholas Reading here, since he’s one of the best readers of my work, and has been since I first met him my during my first year of graduate school in 2004. I remember showing him the revised version that was in couplets, and he has an uncanny knack of saying dead-on things like, “Well, I’d go ahead and move the last two stanzas to the front and take out the last stanza,” and the poem ends up becoming that which I’d hoped from the beginning. Of course it’s always something different, on a poem-to-poem basis, but it usually ends up being easy for him to diagnose the problem or problems (if the draft is a decent one, that is). I still don’t understand how he does it.

I’d say, then, that the time it took from the first to the final draft was about two to three months.

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

I think I have to believe in inspiration. I always feel like a poem has to kick around in my head for a while before I finally sit down and a draft comes out. Usually the “sweat and tears” happens in my head, if you will. If I have an idea that’s good enough for a poem, it makes itself known, stays for a few weeks, eats everything in my refrigerator. Like all guests who overstay their welcome, eventually you need to suck it up and kick them out.

In the case of “Ghost Lights,” I was lucky and the poetic lightning struck right away, so I stopped reading the Chaon story after that passage and composed the first draft of the poem immediately.

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

As I mentioned before, I knew in my gut that the short-lined tercets weren’t going to be the final form for the poem, but I wanted to get some feedback before I changed it. From the feedback I received, no one explicitly told me to lengthen the lines into couplets, but I tried for whatever reason, and after a lot of tinkering, I began to see how much I liked the shape and feel of everything. So mostly it was trial and error until the suggestions from Nick really got the poem where it needed to be.
How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print?

The poem was first published in the fall 2008 issue of Third Coast, which probably means it was a year and a couple months total from draft to publication.

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 really have any rules about this. I’ve sent poems out a few days after finishing them, and they’ve ended up getting published. I’ve also worked on poems for months on end, and more often than not, they’re never published. So they end up getting re-worked, thrown away, or mined for maybe a line or two that can be used in another future poem.

I do hope that all the time I spend writing will translate into poems that people will eventually read and enjoy, but when I feel that a poem’s finished, I send it off into the world. More often that not, I would imagine, I shouldn’t, but I know too many writers out there who hold onto their poems like they’re going to be ancient relics discovered and studied for centuries. They won’t be. Eventually, you have to let them go. Write something new, for crying out loud.

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

Mostly the fictional elements come from the phenomenon of ghost lights, which I find fascinating—what we see that is or isn’t real, and what our cognitive senses and creative sensibilities tell us about that. The main factual element is something I mentioned previously: the headline heard about the family. I guess that’s where poetry comes into play: the balance of factual information with the rush and immediacy of language forming into some microcosmic green flash of world.

Is this a narrative poem?

I think the poem does tell a story, but I wouldn’t categorize it as a narrative poem. That said, I couldn’t give a straight answer if someone asked, “What kind of poem is this?”

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

I mentioned the Dan Chaon story before, and I do use a lot of italics to represent others’ speech or thoughts in many of the poems in Ghost Lights. I’m not sure where exactly where that influence comes from, though if I were forced to say something it would be my love of movies—the balance between the visuals and the dialogue of scenes done right can become fascinatingly “whole,” if you will, and I guess I end up trying to blend those two elements to the same effect in my poems.

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

I honestly don’t. Hopefully the audience that doesn’t hate my poems.

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?

Most drafts that have been written in the past ten months or so, (and there haven’t been many) since my wife and I moved to New York, have been sent to my friend Gary McDowell for the first look. Like Nick, Gary’s also a good friend and great reader of my poems.

Lately, though, I’m in the process of finishing a second manuscript, and I’ve had the pleasure of trading this with maybe five or six other poets who also have second (or, in some cases, first) manuscripts. This has been extremely valuable to me, since many of the poets are of an entirely different aesthetic; instead of looking at single poems, working with others’ collections has helped me realize how many strategies are out there in putting a collection together. It’s not an easy thing, but the more collections you read with care, the more you start to realize the faults and strengths of your own.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This is a hard one to answer. Compared to the rest of the poems in Ghost Lights, I think I made the right decision to have it be the last poem in the book—I think it touches on many themes the other poems are dealing with. However, I’d say that Ghost Lights is mostly a book of narrative poems, and even though, as previously mentioned, “Ghost Lights” is “telling a story,” it’s less explicit than many others in the book.
What is American about this poem?

I don’t know if anything is, actually. Anything and everything in the poem seems like it could happen anywhere in the world.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I hold onto the idea that almost all art, in most cases, has to eventually be abandoned. Because you consider a poem “finished” doesn’t necessarily mean everyone who reads it is not going to deem it as a draft. At some point you have to move on.

Ander Monson

Ander Monson is the author of a host of paraphernalia including a decoder wheel, several chapbooks and limited edition letterpress collaborations, a website, and five books, most recently The Available World (poetry, Sarabande, 2010) and Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (nonfiction, Graywolf, 2010). He lives and teaches in Tucson, Arizona, where he edits the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press.



BEFORE VANDALISM

At the end of my day, after huffing gasoline fumes
from sacks collected from the gas station trash,
I consider a board, fifth grade, a container of ice,
and rosary beads, in this order, unconnected

and glorious. There is more than one way into
the world, the school that's torn down
and condemned. Ingress is easy, but egress
(like that of the egrets) is elusive, the mathematics

of bird patterns as they streak South by Southwest
across the sky. I have to think a lot about
my sister the diver whose poor grasp of physics
led to head-crack and red spill—the beauty

leaking from the beauty in the water. Ice
is a ball or a bag on the side of my mouth
after fights or as the sign says, horseplay, as in
has never been allowed by the side of the pool.

Everything takes place on the side of a pool,
for instance: tanning, feeding, straying, divorce.
From the air, pools dot the backyards
of all the houses in your parents' subdivision—

elision between the lake country and the city,
as mediated by chlorine, water wings, and the rising
shrieks of children. Darren, my then-friend,
who would later succumb to the arc of meningitis,

dared me to duck into the girls' changing room,
to see what was there, and what was changed
or could be changing even as we thought
about it. The air would be totally different,

we knew—maybe its total lack like you see
on moons or other planets without the protective
sheaths of atmosphere. Or all starlit, perfumed,
like the inside of a dance you are not invited to.

So the story ends here, so it sucks.
So it's crappy, streaks of light moving on
your bedroom walls, like those glow stars
you ground up and covered your room with

when you were younger and dumber. They lost
their charge years ago. They won't hold you.
You'll never get them off or get their leftover light
off of me. I suspect there's nothing left anywhere in the world.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I started this poem on August 20, 2005, and much of its bulk was composed in the first draft. I don’t remember where it came from, exactly. Most of my poems tend to start with the voice, and this character’s voice is the thing that powers the poem. That and his world.

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

It went through about five edits. Word processing has changed the way most writers think about “drafts,” I bet, in that we no longer have to retype the whole thing every time we do a new draft. Some poets do this still, probably, but I don’t. I compose onscreen 98% of the time, so it’s probably better to think of each of these “drafts” as “edits.” I finished the last edit of the poem in the last revision of the book The Available World last December. So it was composed over about four and a half years.

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

The bulk of my writing work is in starting things, whether that comes from a formal constraint or a voice or a fragment of language. When I find a voice I like, usually a lot of the poem follows from that without a great deal of pushing. Then it needs to be hammered on and edited and tweaked. But much of my poems comes in that first rush. However, few of the pieces I start actually make it into a finished poem because many of these starting points or voices don’t pan out. Maybe they make it three lines. Maybe they make it thirty. But when I come back to it, I don’t see anything really working.

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

The first version was one stanza with longer lines than you see in this poem. It also had a bunch of weak sections which I excised and rewrote, though its shape was, as I mentioned, more or less there in the first version. The starting point and ending point are the same. But the route the poem takes to get there took some overhauling. Much of the revision on this was done trying to figure out the proper line length and line breaks, what the poem’s voice was asking for, how much breath it could hold in its lungs before needing an exhale. Then much of the revision was done on the syllable and line level, editing for rhythm and meter and sound, which sometimes come early on, but more typically they need a lot of work, which happened here.

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

The poem was published in Dislocate in 2007. As I mentioned, though, after that I did edit and revise the poem before it appeared in The Available World in 2010.

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

My submissions habits have been increasingly lax in the last several years. I don’t do very many unsolicited sends anymore, mainly because of the time involved. If I get a solicitation, I look through my files and see what is ready to go and what might work for a given journal. Sometimes I will send out a very fresh poem if the timing works out, but even then I sometimes find myself editing it later when I am older and hopefully smarter and have different preferences about my work.

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

All of my poems are fictional, and all of them are built on fact. The facts that feature in this poem are:

• the signs about horseplay being not allowed by the pool are real signs, as you’ve probably seen if you’ve ever been in a Holiday Inn Holidome

• I knew a kid named Darren

• I knew another kid who died of meningitis

• though neither was my friend

• I had glow stars on my ceiling

• I have been invited to a dance only one time and did not go; my sense of dances is one of exclusion, often self-inflicted

• I have snuck into girls’ changing rooms and bathrooms before

• I have done a lot of vandalism, and know where that comes from (at least in my case; the poem comes from trying to understand where this character’s coming from
  

So from these blocks, the poem creates this character & voice & world—though those three things are essentially one and the same.

Is this a narrative poem?

It’s in the 78th percentile for narrativeness in terms of my poems. Not a lot actually happens in the poem in the present tense, but plenty is related. Mostly it’s a dramatic monologue.

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

I don’t; sorry.

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

Not really. It’s pretty standard to say, but I write for myself. If I like it, if I can live with it—can live in it—after it is no longer in me, and if it feels good to read aloud, then it’s a go. It’s also one of my poems that performs better live.

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 have a few friends with whom I’ll talk shop about manuscripts, but it’s much more rare that I’ll send them individual pieces.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It does the last line big statement thing that I’ve done in a couple other poems that also appear in The Available World, so in a sense it’s a companion piece to a poem like “Rich World.” But this poem’s interests are less in the lyric and the language than many of my other poems, particularly the sermon poems in the new book and the “Availability” poems, which were constructed partly with the aid of arbitrary processes. This poem is mostly interested in the doomed world of the character that it creates. And while it explores that world to some extent via list and via fact and image, it’s not pushing the list and the arbitrary like I do elsewhere. In that sense it’s actually more like some of the fiction I was writing in 2003-2005.

What is American about this poem?

Everything.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.

Traci Brimhall

Traci Brimhall is the author of Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She was the 2008-09 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and currently teaches at Western Michigan University, where she is a doctoral associate and a Kings/Chavez/Parks Fellow.


NOLI ME TANGERE

We do not understand why they are dying,
but we know the disease spreads when they touch

so we let the tree frogs sing to us. We answer,
beckoning, faking mating calls to lure them

to our wet hands. We take note of their length
and weight and wounds, and put them in plastic bags.

Separated, their confused fingers press the surface.
This is not the body they longed for, no broad back

and speckled knees, no eggs waiting to release
and swell. But still, they sing like prisoners

with hands full of moonlight, and I want to quiet them,
the way, as a child, I broke a shell to keep it

from crying out for the sea. It’s so loud here,
this country where a flower dreams of its color

before it opens, where we coax the sick from the trees.
Each morning I wake to kookaburras and a man stroking

a guitar, singing a song another man wrote about love.
At night, we transect creeks, eels skating our shins,

swollen leeches hooked to our calves as we shine
our flashlights on the banks. Everywhere we look

vines are choking the trees. They cling until they suffocate
the trunk beneath them, the strangler taking the shape

of what it has killed. Maybe some animals want to die
this way, to hold fast and feel something weakening

underneath them. Sometimes we interrupt the small male
in amplexus, gripping his lover’s generous back,

limbs freckled by sores, their pile of eggs, round
and imperfect. When we return to our tent, we take off

our clothes. This is not what we expected. We believed
in gristle, tendon and bone. Pathogen and host.

But we are minor kingdoms of salt and heat.
We trace each other’s scars—proof of our small

green hearts and violent beginnings, engines of cell
and nerve, yielding to a silent, lonely union.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

In the winter of 2004 I went to Australia and traveled around New South Wales with a team of biologists catching endangered frogs. Many of the frogs were afflicted with a disease that spread when they touched, which most often happened when they were breeding. The ones that weren’t infected, we released. The ones that had clearly developed sores, we put in plastic bags and brought back to the labs for testing. I wrote the first draft of this poem my first semester in grad school (2006).

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

This poem went through many drafts over a period of three years. I wish I knew the number. Somewhere in the double-digits though.

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

I definitely believe in inspiration, but this poem is the end product of a lot of drafts and conscious choices.

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

This poem went through many drafts where I reorganized and cut down the original version of it. At some point I decided to completely reinvent the poem. Some of the original lines survived, but I basically started over. I wanted to leap more, pull in the landscape, make it bigger than a single moment. I also invented a lover for the poem to sort of mimic what was happening in nature and to make the problem of desire tangible for the speaker.

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

About six months after it was finished it appeared in The Missouri Review.

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 a bit poem by poem, but I’m definitely guilty of sending poems out pretty quickly. I find that I’m often wrong in what my best poems are, or at least can’t guess what an editor will like. Several of the poems I was convinced were the best poems from my first book never found homes. If I let a poem sit around too long, I’m liable to think it’s not any good, so I just shove the fledglings out of the nest and see how they do.

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

I mentioned before that I invented a lover for the sake of the poem. I think many poems, especially ones that come from autobiographical experience, have to weigh the value of truth and Truth. It was more important for me to get closer to the complexities and dangers of desire than it was to adhere to the play-by-play facts of the experience.

Is this a narrative poem?

Definitely, although less strictly narrative than it was in its first draft.

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?

Perhaps if a desire for understanding is ethical, then this poem is ethical. I think many poems seek to discover something, even if it’s just beauty. Even if it’s just the grotesque. Knowledge and inquiry do not make a person just or moral, but they can give us the tools we need to make those choices.

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

I remember reading Yannis Ritsos around the time I finished this poem, although I don’t see him in the poem. Continual influences would definitely include James Dickey, Brigit Pegeen Kelly and Larry Levis.

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

I read that Annie Dillard said her audience for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was two monks she’d never meet. I’d like to borrow her answer.

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 had a group of writers in grad school who were extremely helpful. Now my writing partners are people who see rough drafts not so much for editing suggestions, but as a way to check in with each other and see what we’ve been working on.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This one was more difficult to write than most, largely, I think, because it took me a long time to figure out what it was that I was trying to say.

What is American about this poem?

Pleasure can ruin you anywhere, even America.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both.

James Brasfield

James Brasfield was born in Savannah, Georgia. His book of poems, Ledger of Crossroads was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2009. He has received fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Twice a Senior Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, he is a recipient of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Prize in Translation and The 2000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha (Harvard University Press, 1999). He was a visiting professor of poetry at the University of Memphis for 2008-2009. He teaches in the English Department at Penn State University.


LETTER FROM GERMANY

for my father (1909-1952)

Many things have been done
And many hours merged into so many days
Since I last had time to write you.
It has rained all day and the blossoms
Have nearly all been beaten down.
The bareness and gray scud clouds
Add to the gloom. Cold rain
Keeps us aware that there is a war on.
With the wind behind it, the rain feels like
Someone slapping you with a wet towel.
And the mud is like Prairieville mud.
I was fooled last month,
It was pleasant and the fruit trees bloomed.
I fell to 145 pounds at the front
And I am somewhat embarrassed
The way my clothes drape about me.
I am on swing shift tonight.
Staring into the river, I quit thinking
For a while. I have this dream that I pass
A place called "Hotel Moderne":
I want to rent a room and don't have the time.
The first chance I get, I am going back.
It looked clean from the outside.
Last night I went to the USO show.
Three performers in an old building.
I felt sorry for them. The dancer
Couldn't dance for sour apples,
But got a big hand from the boys
Because she had so little on.
The comedian was good, the best
Was the old fellow who just sang.
He was not good. We wanted his songs
And he sang them. Tonight
There are flares and tracers, stories
Of paratroopers, but no sign of them.
I bought a doll finally for the little girl.
I didn't pay much, it was the best
I could find; there are more dolls' heads
Than dolls on the shelves. I have a radio
Now and get the news hot off the air
And real American jazz. I need
A particular big eyed, light hearted woman
To dance with. But she is not on this side
Of the Atlantic. Looking
At your picture, I have almost
Forgotten how you are. Alabama
Better have a big sweet potato crop
The year I come home. And get a bottle
Or two of bourbon stashed away
If you love me. It has been too long.
There is nothing normal left.
The smell of guns massed in this valley
Hangs bitter in the air.
A town burns across the ridge.
I know the distance. It is late,
And being out of candles, I have to quit.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

“Letter from Germany” is the earliest poem in Ledger of Crossroads. I completed and published the poem soon after I completed graduate study. Since “Letter from Germany” I have published a number of poems that were not included in Ledger. But this poem has held up for me and for other people and has its place in the book’s themes.

My father died weeks after I was born. I knew him from photographs and from things of his—books, fishing tackle, pipes, objects brought back from WWII, etc.—and from stories about him. My mother had a box of his letters written during the war, many of them written on small V-mail pages. I read the letters during my last year of graduate school. In them I heard the voice that I think of as my father’s. The letters were the closest I had ever been to my father. As I read I took notes, many pages of them, and afterward carried the large correspondence in mind. Eventually the poem emerged, sculpted as a portrait.

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

I don’t remember how many drafts were necessary to complete the poem. Most often, many drafts are necessary.

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. In a sense the entire poem was dictated by my father, spoken as if from a moment in time about recent and relevant events under the ongoing pressures during a pause in combat. That I was learning who my father was, line by line, adding to his always incomplete and imagined presence, created a heightened intensity.

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

From the beginning, the poem was conceived in what Frost might call “loose blank verse,” as a dramatic monologue in the form of an epistle.

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. Practice varies with each poem. I have poems that I have been working on for years, knowing they have yet to be realized. Tsvetaeva believed that a poem she was at work on had already been written. Her job was to remember the poem exactly. So there are times when a word might suffice, yet it is not, so to speak, what has always been written. Strange how a poem may seem to be remembered correctly, yet overnight, or over a week, or much, much later, the actual word or words come to mind, replacing the misremembered.

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

From facts in his letters, the life-moment of the epistle’s occasion is a fiction made from thoughts and feelings of my father and me.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes and no. The letter’s details of remembrance have the feel of chronology, yet there is no story, per se. The facts’ storyline works wholly by association, by juxtapositions over the duration of the letter, that is, a pattern of associations is woven for the illusion of a summary story told on a single night.

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

I was discovering many poets, poets in translation as well as English-language poets who may be present in the poem. Also, at the time I was much interested, as I am now, in what a line alone might convey, yet I wanted, too, to be able to write a more pliable line, not simply by utilizing an awareness of means for enjambment, but lines as extended resonances of tone unfolding down the page. When writing “Letter from Germany” I was studying the timing, the feel, the management of duration, in the stichic poems of Daniel Halpern (one of my mentors at the time), as well as in Lowell’s “The Public Garden” and Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi.” Well, since then, there are of course many more poems and poets I’ve come to admire for their various means of shaping a nuanced velocity for emotion.
Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

The addressee is my ear formed by poems that come to mind (and those deeper in mind, unrecalled but part of the psyche) as emotion to match the intentions of what I feel as I work. Reading widely is important for me, discovering new possibilities for what is sensed and thought to be heard and voiced.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It is the only dramatic monologue I have written. So the poem is “heard” differently, derived from my father’s words. Though I have written a verse play, I do not write usually in the guise of another, except perhaps in the way in which Yeats considered the mask assumed—“creative life is a rebirth as something not oneself…perpetually renewed.” “Who is it?” Stevens asks in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.

What is American about this poem?

Certainly, the arena, the soldier, the details of devastation, the moments of humor, the loneliness, and the message home are ancient and universal. But a few phrases are what might be called American English.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

The poem was finished.