Bob Hicok

Bob Hicok was born in 1960. His most recent collection, This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), was awarded the 2008 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. His other books are Insomnia Diary (Pitt, 2004), Animal Soul(Invisible Cities Press, 2001),a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Plus Shipping (BOA, 1998), and The Legend of Light (University of Wisconsin, 1995), which received the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year. A recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, his poetry has been selected for inclusion in five volumes of Best American Poetry. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. A new collection, Words for Empty and Words for Full, is forthcoming this year from University of Pittsburgh Press.


THE ACTIVE READER

Reading a used book on evolution I wonder
about fingerprints, how long they live.
Were the fingers licked before the pages
were turned, did the owner
of the book, of the fingerprints
read in the bathroom, will there be a hair
on page 231, on a train, did he take the C
uptown, did she eat lunch with pigeons
and hold the book open with her foot
as she sat cross-legged on the lawn
of the Municipal Building, a short hair,
curly and black or blond and straight
and long as my finger? Was she reading
instead of getting her license on the day
she’d promised to, after five months
of dreading the DMV, instead
of looking into the bill for lab tests,
one hundred and seventy seven dollars
to peek into her blood, her urine,
instead of calling the furnace guy
and dealing with his boots on the carpet,
with his mouth moving in front of hers,
with the expectation of small talk,
did the book keep her from visiting
her mother and asking about MS,
did he hold the book between his face
and his wife, is it how he asked
for a divorce, by not speaking, by saying
the name Leaky over and over to himself,
by letting the pages stand in for his face?
Will I become everyone who reads this book,
did their eyes change the letters,
is reading a sexual act, is there congress
between the text and my gaze,
is there no mirror left me but words,
why am I afraid of people, why do I talk
behind them to the edge of their shadows,
why did the continents drift, why didn’t
the thumb stay put, is fear what it means
to be human, am I what it means to be human,
why did the brain ransom the heart
to the mouth, why did we ever come down
from the trees?


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

January 18, 2004. I’d been reading the night before and thought that I might turn the page and find a hair there. So the poem began with that basic idea.

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

I have just one computer file for it, so it was likely written straight through and not changed.

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

I believe I don’t know, on an intimate level, how I arrive at the choices I make. I can’t see my brain function. So even with simple things – what kind of Ben and Jerry’s do I want? – I’m not capable of articulating exactly how the decision was reached. (Though of course, Cinnamon Buns is the way to go.) I sometimes feel poets do themselves a disservice when they speak of inspiration, as if they’re merely vehicles, typists with MFAs. Inspiration, for me, is a matter of being open to the ideas my mind offers up. Why always sweat and tears, by the way? Why not puss and blood? I suppose because that’s really gross.

How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print? 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’m not sure. No rules. I’ve sent poems out the same day I wrote them, and have poems I like – that I think work – that I’ll never send out.

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

Well, besides the questions, which are sincere, are factual, there are no facts here. But for the poem to work, I think, the situations I mention have to seem real, or possible. They have to operate as facts or potential facts.

Is this a narrative poem?

In that it tells the story of what I was thinking while I wrote, yes. That’s the only story it tells.

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

Of course you mean poets. Poets always mean poets when they ask that question. I don’t recall who I was reading at the time, or if I was reading. I like reading TV, to be honest. It turns the pages for you. When I was learning to write I didn’t read poetry, so influence is hard for me to sort through. Don DeLillo and Saul Bellow were important to me. Their energy and reach. Now, I read a lot and like a lot of what I read, but it changes. I think it’s a good time to be a poet, and a reader of poetry. The field seems wide open.

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

I never think about people reading these. It feels presumptive, on the one hand, creepy on the other, and to have three hands for a moment, impossible on the other other hand. Impossible to think my way through another mind encountering my poems. I really don’t want to deal with another opinion while writing, or even after. My thoughts, feelings, mistakes.

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?

Well, there was just the one version. I probably showed that to my wife, Eve.

What is American about this poem?

That it was written by an American.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This poem was written.

David St. John

David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both the Rome Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize (a career award for teaching and poetic achievement) from The Folger Shakespeare Library, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has been published in countless literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper's, Antaeus, and The New Republic, and has been widely anthologized. He has taught creative writing at Oberlin College and The Johns Hopkins University and currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he served as Director of the Ph. D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing. St. John is the author of nine collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for The National Book Award in Poetry), and, most recently The Face: A Novella in Verse, as well as a volume of essays, interviews and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is presently completing a new volume of poems entitled, The Auroras. He is also the co-editor, with Cole Swensen, of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry.


THE SHORE

So the tide forgets, as morning
Grows too far delivered, as the bowls
Of rock and wood run dry.
What is left seems pearled and lit,
As those cases
Of the museum stood lit
With milk jade, rows of opaque vases
Streaked with orange and yellow smoke.
You found a lavender boat, a single
Figure poling upstream, baskets
Of pale fish wedged between his legs.
Today, the debris of winter
Stands stacked against the walls,
The coils of kelp lie scattered
Across the floor. The oil fire
Smokes. You turn down the lantern
Hung on its nail. Outside,
The boats aligned like sentinels.
Here beside the blue depot, walking
The pier, you can see the way
The shore
Approximates the dream, how distances
Repeat their deaths
Above these tables and panes of water—
As climbing the hills above
The harbor, up to the lupine drifting
Among the lichen-masked pines,
The night is pocked with lamps lit
On every boat offshore,
Galleries of floating stars. Below,
On its narrow tracks shelved
Into the cliff’s face,
The train begins its slide down
To the warehouses by the harbor. Loaded
With diesel, coal, paychecks, whiskey,
Bedsheets, slabs of ice—for the fish,
For the men. You lean on my arm,
As once
I watched you lean at the window;
The bookstalls below stretched a mile
To the quay, the afternoon crowd
Picking over the novels and histories.
You walked out as you walked out last
Night, onto the stone porch. Dusk
Reddened the walls, the winds sliced
Off the reefs. The vines of the gourds
Shook on their lattice. You talked
About that night you stood
Behind the black pane of the French
Window, watching my father read some long
Passage
Of a famous voyager’s book. You hated
That voice filling the room,
Its light. So tonight we make a soft
Parenthesis upon the sand’s black bed.
In that dream we share, there is
One shore, where we look out upon nothing
And the sea our whole lives;
Until turning from those waves, we find
One shore, where we look out upon nothing
And the earth our whole lives.
Where what is left between shore and sky
Is traced in the vague wake of
(The stars, the sandpipers whistling)
What we forgive. If you wake soon, wake me.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem “The Shore” was begun in draft in the late fall of 1975 or in the early spring of 1976, while I was living in both Cleveland, Ohio and Oberlin, where I was teaching. My first book, Hush, appeared in the summer of 1976. I knew from the very first that I wanted this to be the title poem of my second book, and that the book itself would be a sequence of poems that talked back to one another, all charting the course of a relationship. I knew too that the poems would take as a landscape the California shore.

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

I write slowly and poems usually go through about fifty revisions or so. This poem easily went through fifty revisions, probably more. I was finished by the fall of 1976.

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

You forgot blood. My personal life was a disaster much of the time in those years. I write to discover what I have to say, and then revise carefully, slowly… a little like a cabinet maker trying to work without nails. So, I’d say 50/50.

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

Oh yes, and I’ve talked about this (the process of working on the poems of The Shore) in other interviews, about how I wanted a very liquid, fluid and yet extremely clear style – more like Bishop than anything I’d done before. I wanted the poems to tell a story by using both highly particular details and pieces of the story, sometimes isolated vignettes. I tried to keep the line breaks to a phrasal integrity, but with surprises.

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

In appeared in The New Yorker in May of 1977, which is to say very, very quickly. I should add that it had twenty lines that originally began the poem that Howard Moss asked me to drop. He was right, as he usually was about these things, and those lines became the poem “From the Notebook” which appeared in my chapbook The Olive Grove and subsequently in the book In the Pines.

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 wildly. Sometimes I let a poem sit a year or more; that’s more the rule. In this case, I was curious to see what people would think of my “new” style, since I felt it was something of a departure for me, so I sent it off to Moss immediately. He ended up publishing five of the twelve poems that make up the book The Shore.

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

The poems are inventions, for the most part, based upon actual experiences and actual events. However, the emotional weathers and some of the particular details always have to be recast so that one’s allegiance to the “facts” doesn’t corrupt the poem itself. So, the drama was real, the details shifted.

Is this a narrative poem?

It’s a dis-narrative poem, joining with some of the other poems in the collection to form a more coherent narrative. But, basically, of course. Yes, I confess; it’s narrative.

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

Elizabeth Bishop and Montale, who remains a god to me and is the single most important poet to my work.

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

I write for Larry Levis, even now that he’s dead, it doesn’t matter; Norman Dubie, whose imagination constantly humbles me; Philip Levine, from whom I learned 95% of what I know about craft; and Charles Wright, the most elegant, visceral, and visionary of American poets. Those are the people I’ve always written for – the poets who I knew would read my work with both sympathy and skepticism.

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?

At that time, the poets I’ve just named were my closest and first readers. However, my memory is that I was so unsure of my new work, beginning with this poem, well, I’m pretty sure that I didn’t show it to anyone before I showed it to Howard Moss.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’m not the one to answer that question, I’m afraid. Let me say, though, that this poem embodies for me the tradition of meditative lyric – and love poem – that I have always written within to a greater or lesser extent.

What is American about this poem?

Well, it simply couldn’t be more American; after all, the book for which it is the title poem shifts from one coast of America to the other, going from the coast of California to the Maryland coast and the city of Baltimore, where I was living when I completed the book. It is without question and by far the most “American” of any of my books, and “The Shore” itself much in the tradition of Bishop and Robinson Jeffers’ more lyric poems.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

The poem was finished. It was meant to be in some ways a testimony of faith, framing (along with book’s final poem) with belief, and hope, a pattern of failures in the relationship the book depicts. In the end, though the poem and the book were finished, the relationship itself cried out to be abandoned, and so, mercifully and mutually, it was.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of Miracle Fruit and At the Drive-In Volcano (both from Tupelo Press). New work appears in the American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Gulf Coast. Awards for her writing include an NEA grant and the Pushcart Prize in poetry. She is associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia. She lives in Western NY with her husband and young son.



SMALL MURDERS

When Cleopatra received Antony on her cedarwood ship,
she made sure he would smell her in advance across the sea:
perfumed sails, nets sagging with rosehips and crocus
draped over her bed, her feet and hands rubbed in almond oil,
cinnamon, and henna. I knew I had you when you told me

you could not live without my scent, bought pink bottles of it,
creamy lotions, a tiny vial of perfume—one drop lasted all day.
They say Napoleon told Josephine not to bathe for two weeks
so he could savor her raw scent, but hardly any mention is ever
made of their love of violets. Her signature fragrance: a special blend

of these crushed purple blooms for wrist, cleavage, earlobe.
Some expected to discover a valuable painting inside
the locket around Napoleon’s neck when he died, but found
a powder of violet petals from his wife’s grave instead. And just
yesterday, a new boy leaned in close to whisper that he loved

the smell of my perfume, the one you handpicked years ago.
I could tell he wanted to kiss me, his breath heavy and slow
against my neck. My face lit blue from the movie screen—
I said nothing, only sat up and stared straight ahead. But
by evening’s end, I let him have it: twenty-seven kisses

on my neck, twenty-seven small murders of you. And the count
is correct, I know—each sweet press one less number to weigh
heavy in the next boy’s cupped hands. Your mark on me washed
away with each kiss. The last one so cold, so filled with mist
and tiny daggers, I already smelled blood on my hands.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this in 2000, around Valentine’s Day in fact. I was a poetry fellow at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and figuring out the spiderwebs of a tumultuous on-again, off-again long-distance relationship.

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

Back then, because I was writing pretty intensely five to six days a week, most of my poems written at that time were only one or two drafts, with line edits here and there. Most days I could finish a pretty polished poem with only a few minor tweaks. About half of my first collection, Miracle Fruit, was written in this way. I don’t mean to sound like poems just come easy to me, but I do believe when you are in a continuous practice and drafting stage (I was scribbling on receipts, napkins, and my hand when I wasn’t in front of my desk), and your pores are just open and alive to the possibilities of language and wordplay all around us, then nine times out of ten, the writing does come out the way I want it to come out—a nice mix of deliberation, supposition, utter surprise, and a dash of hocus-pocus ‘Where-did-THAT-image-come-from?’ I’m a lot slower, but, I think more focused now if that is possible (meaning, when I get two hours to write, I get right down to business and don’t mess around), with a lively two-year-old and another on the way.

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

Yes—of course, I find I am more inspired when I am more alive and more present in this world. And focused. If I have a series of deadlines, grading, family stuff, etc, I feel more scattered and the writing is hard—no amount of sweat and tears will help. But when I focus, for example, on my teaching and grading, and am really present and there when I am conferencing with students or discussing their poems, I feel like I get tons of writing ideas out of it. When I am thinking of my son or a new poem I’m working on while I’m teaching, I get nada, zip. Drafting a poem is that much more difficult. On my best teaching days, I come home excited to write. On my best writing days, I am excited to go back and teach. They go hand in hand and feed off of each other. I have to remember that, especially right about mid-semester when things are always piling up.

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

I felt this was the most intimate I had ever been at that point with any poem I’d written—it was an amalgam of three relationships I’d had and at times it did feel very confessional and raw, and dark, so I wanted to tell a story at first—thus, the fairly tight stanzas. But I was hoping the neat little blocks of stanzas would also unsettle the reader.

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

This was one of those rare “gift” poems that come from being in a place where I had the luxury and gift of time to focus almost exclusively on my poems. I sent it off within days of finishing it to Shenandoah, one of the magazines I had been dying to get into but that had always rejected my work up until that point. They not only accepted it, but gave me my first Pushcart nomination and then awarded it their Boatwright Prize for the best poem published that year. Please don’t hate me. It doesn’t usually happen like this. I swear.

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

One of the things I am very proud about in my poems is the use of science and biology as metaphor or image for jumpstarting a poem. I take great pains to do extensive research for my poems and I feel like I owe that truthfulness or “fact” to the readers when I do employ imagery from the natural world. I don’t want anyone reading about a flower or an animal only to find that I just made it up. I don’t dare make it up—I don’t want the reader to feel cheated in that way. I feel this obligation with any of the natural images in my work, but I feel zero obligations to the reader about being “factual” about any of the relationships in the poems. It isn’t autobiography, after all, I remind my parents, my husband, etc. Like I said before—the “you” in this particular poem is really three guys. Obviously there is one person that stands out in this poem, the one who is being addressed in the last stanza. Maybe because even if I am writing about say, my son, or my mother, I still want to hold something back, something private? When I was touring for Miracle Fruit, the number one question I would get would be about what is real and what isn’t. I never gave a straight answer about my relationships. But I can say that any little bit of scientific trivia or natural elements used in my poems is 100% real.

Is this a narrative poem?

I think it can be both. There is certainly a story-telling element here, but I think at the heart of the poem, the speaker leaps into a mode of association: Josephine, perfumes, the speaker’s perfume, and then a metaphor of the speaker’s feelings.

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

Confession: I almost never read poetry when I am writing poetry. At the time I was savoring all of Diane Ackerman’s Natural History books and probably reading a Margaret Atwood novel of some sort. Almost certainly reading a bird guide or three. I read poetry on days when I don’t plan on writing, especially when I travel. So poetry is always with me when I write, just not directly in front of me.

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

No. Even though I had a wonderful coterie of writer-fellows, I was very solitary when it came to the actual writing. Still am. But every summer I have a small writing group that exchanges poems online, so that has been very helpful. Otherwise, my husband is the one who first sees my work. He is not afraid to tell me when I have a weak line or when a poem or essay is just floundering. He’s a wonderful editor (the non-fiction editor for Mid-American Review) and I’m lucky to have his eye.

["Small Murders"is from Miracle Fruit published by Tupelo Press, copyright 2003 Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Used with permission.]

Chard deNiord

Chard deNiord is the author of three books of poetry, Night Mowing (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), Sharp Golden Thorn (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), and Asleep in the Fire (University of Alabama Press, 1990). A new collection, The Double Truth, is forthcoming from The University of Pittsburgh Press in late 2010. His poems and essays have appeared recently in the following journals: New England Review, Literary Imagination, Salmagundi, American Poetry Review and The Hudson Review. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Providence College and cofounder of the New England College MFA Program in Poetry. He lives in Putney, Vermont.


AN INCIDENT AT THE CATHOLIC WORKER

Sitting in peace in the dining room
of the country community house one Sunday morning,
reading the paper about the latest truce
in Israel, I heard a disturbance in the living room.
People were scurrying and yelling, "Watch out,
he's got a knife!" and "Put her down!"
Then Kenny, the epileptic from Hudson Valley,
appeared at the door with a little dog in one hand
and a cleaver in the other. He said he was going
to take the dog up the hill and throw her in the well.
He said he was tired of how the people in the "community"
were treating him, and he was going to kill the dog
in order to change their attitude. He had
a crazed look in his eye while the dog hung limp,
Mrs. Smith's terrier. I followed him up the hill
while the others prayed below. I said, "Kenny,
what good do you think this will do? They'll only take
you back to the hospital." Then it was there interposed
a fit and he dropped the dog beside the well and fell
to the ground and cut himself with the flailing blade.
I stepped on the hand that held the knife and watched
him twist like a snake with its neck pinned down.
He frothed at the mouth and swallowed his tongue.
I tried to stick my fingers in and pull it out
but he clenched his teeth in a human vise.
I thought in retrospect I could have cut a hole
in his throat with the knife but he was writhing
to the end, turning blue. I watched his ghost
shut down his skin, then disappear inside the well.
I held his body as a souvenir of the fallen world
and thought no less of him. The little dog began to bark
from the edge of the woods. "Shut up!" I yelled,
"Shut up!" and almost felt what Kenny felt as he held
the dog above the well and dangled it like the angry god
who'd crossed a wire inside he head. It was his hatred
for the little dog that had set him off, just its yapping
every night in Mrs. Smith's adjacent room. He had been
treated kindly by everyone, according to the wishes
of our saintly mother, Dorothy Day, who had always said,
"Treat every stranger as if he were the Christ."


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in 1990, seventeen years after I lived for four (May-August) months at the Catholic Worker in Tivoli, New York, but didn’t publish until 1997 in the The Gettysburg Review, and then again in my last book, Night Mowing, in 2005. It started as a memory of an actual event, which I recount accurately in the first three quarters of the poem.

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

This poem went through approximately twenty revisions over the course of a few months.

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

I believe in inspiration, although I feel much of inspiration’s initial electricity provides more impetus for delving into the poem than the ensuing writing and revising. I feel this poem was received as a near death experience that needed both crafting into engaging narrative lines and a fictive shift at its conclusion.

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

Through many revisions and my eventual decision to conclude with a fictional account of Kenny’s death rather than simply recounting what happened. Kenny did terrorize his fellow community members at the Catholic Worker, but he did not die of his epileptic fit. He agreed to return to the main house, a converted resort, where a policeman was waiting to arrest him. Rather than arrest him, however, the policeman agreed to take him to Hudson Valley Hospital. Since the poem recounts a violent event, I decided to employ a randomly alternating meter of iambic tetrameter, pentameter and hexameter lines that capture the chaos and velocity of the event, as well as an intense lyrical music I felt was inherent in this narrative.

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

Seven years.

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

I have no set rule about this. I generally keep my new poems in the “aging” drawer for several months before sending them out.

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

This poem is mostly true, except for the end, where I decide to heighten the drama by imagining Kenny swallowing his tongue and dying. Even though this didn’t actually happen, I feel it tells a truth that is truer than what occurred. Tim O’Brien in his story “How To Tell A True War Story” describes this paradox well in a colorful commentary within the story.

Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen—and maybe it did, anything’s possible—even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Happeningness is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.

That’s a true story that never happened.

Although what happened to Kenny is the opposite of what happened to “the jumper” in Tim O’Brien’s story, it transcends what O’Brien so aptly call “happeningness” with a greater truth, namely the doomed quality of Kenny’s life. Kenny was hospitalized in a mental hospital shortly after the incident recounted in the poem, and died, I heard, shortly afterwards. The poem ends up being more about what the speaker of the poem perceives about death, his own mortality and the agapaic principles of Dorothy Day than Kenny’s violent act. I realized that I had to find a fictional truth that was “truer than the truth” to turn this otherwise journal entry into a poem with a mythic conceit.

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?

In addition to Tim O’Brien, I was also reading Elizabeth Bishop and C.K. Williams.

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

I was actually thinking of the police officer, who is not in the poem but a participant in the “happeningness” of the actual story, as my ideal reader. Also Dorothy Day.

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 showed this poem to my friend and fellow poet Bruce Smith, who gave me a few very helpful suggestions.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This is one of the few narrative poems in which I have fictionalized the ending so dramatically. I wait for such opportunities to transcend “happeningness” with a more memorable and true alternative that divines a “grounding reality” in an imaginative leap that both suspends the disbelief of my reader and enlightens him or her as well with an original, truth-telling lie.

What is American about this poem?

While it’s set in an uniquely American institution, the Catholic Worker, I hope it performs the American two-step of dancing originally on its own on a particular, local floor, while also making a universal leap.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Almost finished.

Patricia Fargnoli

Patricia Fargnoli, the New Hampshire Poet Laureate from December 2006 to March 2009, is the author of four books and two chapbooks of poetry. Her newest book is Then, Something (Tupelo Press, 2009). Her fifth collection, Duties of the Spirit ( Tupelo Press, 2005) won the New Hampshire Jane Kenyon Literary Book Award for an Outstanding Book of Poetry and was a semifinalist for the Glasgow Prize. Her first book, Necessary Light (Utah State University Press, 1999) was awarded the 1999 May Swenson Poetry Award judged by Mary Oliver. “Pat”, a retired social worker, has been the recipient of a Macdowell Colony fellowship. She’s been on the residence faculty of The Frost Place Poetry Festival, and has taught at the New Hampshire Institute of Art and in the Lifelong Learning program of Keene State College. She was the recipient of an honorary BFA from The NH Institute of Arts, has won the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award and five Pushcart nominations. Twice a semifinalist for the Discovery, The Nation Awards, she has published widely in literary journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, North American Review, Mid-American Review, Connecticut Review, Margie, Massachusetts Review, etc. She currently resides in Walpole, NH.


TWO SKELETONS FOUND IN A BARN WALL

One’s arms around the other’s middle,
delicate bones of the toes, the feet,
heads with their outsized eye sockets
in which I glimpse only shadow.

It must have been terrible, those last hours
in that darkest of places,
thirst setting in. Then hunger.
Only each other for companion.

Small inhabitants of this earth,
I don’t know what I believe
or don’t believe, but I wish for you
what I’d wish my own:

may you have found whatever solace
you needed from each other,
may you have found whatever heaven
is possible and awaits your kind.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem had its genesis in a weekly writing workshop several years ago. Once a month, someone would bring in a prompt, and that week, a woman brought in those gnarled together skeletons of two kittens that had been found when a local barn was torn down. My initial reaction was horror and repulsion. But then, also, a strange fascination as I began to explore the ideas that came to me.

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

I don’t remember exactly how many revisions. Usually I revise a draft several times after it’s first written, then put it away or ask friends for feedback…and revise several more times. Up to sixty or more total, although the later revisions are apt to be of single words, changes in line breaks or the form on the page, punctuation, things like that. I think this poem, the idea for it, came together within a few weeks…but then I kept revising until it was finally nearly “finished” when I put the book manuscript together.

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

It’s always a combination. The skeletons made me ask myself “why does this thing move you so? What is it you want for them?” And I had been writing many poems about the boundaries between things (in this case between the human and animal world). So that was the initial inspiration. But it took many drafts for me to discover that I wanted them to have had solace in each other’s company, and that I wished them a heaven (I guess as I’ve wished all my own pets a heaven and wish one for myself…though my doubt is great).

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

I think of the first draft of a poem as a block of marble and, I am the sculptor carving away at it until the poem itself emerges from that bulk of stone. It was so with this poem: It needed its beginning and end chopped off and some of the middle rearranged. And I went back and forth with whether or not to say that these were kittens…or to leave it a bit mysterious. I also cut out a bunch of unneeded stuff about the barn where they were found….that, after all, wasn’t important. And I had to work hard to avoid toppling over the line into sentimentality….simply because the subject lends itself to that. I was walking a tightrope between honest emotion and too much sweetness.

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

It was about five years from start to finish and it first appeared in print in Then, Something (my latest book). As I’ve said, it changed slightly even after the manuscript was accepted.

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 with every poem. If a poem feels send-worthy to me, and I’m in the process of sending out submissions (which I do a couple of times a year), then I may send it. If it feels like a dud, it goes into my “working poem” file, and I keep pulling it up for more revision…..or simply abandon it.

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

Unlike many poets, most of my poems are based on fact….and so was this one. The “fiction” is only one of omission; I mean that I don’t say that a woman brought these to a workshop as a prompt. Instead, I tell the story as if I’ve found them myself (perhaps), as if I were speaking directly to them.

Is this a narrative poem?

No. I think of it as a lyric.

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

A tough and interesting question. I think that all good poetry presents some part of the poet’s world view, his/her reality, some piece of the world really. Hopefully, most often, that aims for being ethical and just…..though I don’t think that’s a necessary condition.

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

I read a great deal of poetry and read it constantly so I don’t remember who I was reading back then. But my major influences (there are many) are: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, Charles Wright, Louise Gluck, Linda Gregg, and Robert Hass.

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

I am very conscious of communicating with an audience when I write…and thus want to be transparent, but also deep and crafted. My ideal readers are “townspeople” in the sense that they are ordinary people who will see themselves and their own worlds in what I write. I want my poems to be a bridge between us. But, to be ruthlessly honest, I also yearn for those who know craft and skill to see the value in my work. In fact, it would be fun to be famous!

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

Yes, I ran the poem by the workshop where it was first generated. I often show my poems to trusted others (by “trusted” I mean skilled poets whose suggestions I value).

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s more similar than different. I often write, in Then, Something about interstices between worlds, the meeting places, the yearning for connection, primarily spiritual connection. Animals are common in the poems in this book, as is the natural world.

On the other hand, this poem seems slighter to me somehow than many of the poems. It’s shorter than most and focused around a small single event (rather than a longer meditation).

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. Finally.

[Note: "Two Skeletons Found in a Barn Wall" is from Then, Something published by Tupelo Press, copyright 2009 Patricia Fargnoli. Used with permission.]

Sherod Santos

Poet, essayist and translator Sherod Santos is the author of five books of poetry, Accidental Weather, The Southern Reaches, The City of Women, The Pilot Star Elegies (winner of the 2002 Theodore Roethke Memorial Award, a National Book Award Finalist and one of five nominees for The New Yorker Book Award), and The Perishing. In 2005 he published Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation. He is also the author of a book of literary essays, A Poetry of Two Minds, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. His awards include the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the Discovery / The Nation Prize, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize from Poetry magazine, and the 1984 appointment as Robert Frost Poet at the Frost house in Franconia, New Hampshire. Mr. Santos has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1999 he received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming in March of 2010.


CAROUSEL

He’d just switched off the overhead light and stretched out
For a nap before dinner, the quiet end of a travel day.
A plastic cup of orange peels, an empty half-bottle
Of some sweet wine he’d found in the hotel mini-bar,
And he remembers too a car horn sounding, then laughter
And voices spilling out into the parking lot below.
And then a fight broke out. Two men, he imagined,
Around whom others formed the cordon of a makeshift ring,
Their threats and goadings followed by the heavy thud
Of blows. He called the front desk and they said they’d go,
But for what still seems the longest time, it did not stop.
And then it did. And then there was a sound like
Hose-water splashing off asphalt, a car door closing,
And what he thought he recognized as the slurred, parenthetic
Phrasings of a boardwalk carousel winding down.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem began years ago with the raw sensation of that final auditory image. I suppose you could call it a premonition, for it seemed as though something very particular was suggested by the simultaneous sounds of hose water washing blood off asphalt and a boardwalk carousel winding down that.

All I knew at that point was that the nature of that “something” was fear.

Needless to say, this was a difficult place to start, and it has taken me years—through versions that have changed from journal publication to book publication to its next appearance in a new and selected poems—to find the end. And I can’t say for sure that I’ve found the end.

How many revisions did this poem undergo?

I couldn’t begin to count. Hundreds, I would imagine—and it’s hard to think of this tendency of mine as anything other than an affliction.

In terns of time, my best guess is that I’ve been struggling with it—or it has been struggling with me--for ten or so years.

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

I’m sure artists and writers of every sort have differing experiences they associate with the term “inspiration.” My own personal sense is that labor and inspiration are not so easily separated.

How often I’ve found that the sheer impossibility of the task becomes, in the struggle to overcome it, a source of enormous inspiration. It’s a state of mind or alertness or attention that derives (again, in my experience) from the ridiculously hard work required to say even the simplest thing.

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?

Though I’ve certainly tried, I’ve never been good at getting my poems to abide by any of my rules.

I’ve come to accept the frustrating fact that poems have minds of their own, and that they have a tendency to override, or even contradict, whatever sights I’ve set for them.

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

Here too I find it difficult to isolate the one from the other. Since poetry is a branch of imaginative literature, it is, by nature, fictional. And since it’s fictional, “facts” are less factual (that is, less “realistic”) than material—a 6-legged horse in one poem is just as much a “fact” as a 4-legged horse in another.

In my poem, I think it’s safe to say that every detail is “realistic,” but it’s impossible for a reader to know whether or not that “realism” derives from the facts of my own experience. That’s one of poetry’s more interesting illusions.

Is this a narrative poem?

No.

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

My reading is, unfortunately, completely unsystematic and sporadic, so what I was reading then might not have been poetry at all, but a novel, travelogue, art history, biography, etc.

I like to think that everything, not just poetry, influences me as a writer. If not, I’m probably not taking it in deeply enough.

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

I’m always tripped up by this question because I feel like I ought to have an answer. But the truth is, I’ve never been aware of any particular audience. For that matter, I’ve never been aware of any general audience either.

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

No, not regularly or irregularly.

What is American about this poem?

That’s an interesting question and one I hadn’t considered before. I’m not sure how accurate this is, but I wonder if there’s some icy, hollow, senseless nature to violence in this country that distinguishes it from others.

Certainly, that feeling permeates this poem.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Neither.

Robert Hass

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley, California, where he teaches at the University of California. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. A MacArthur Fellow and a two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, his most recent collection of poetry is Time and Materials (Ecco, 2007), which won the 2007 National Book Award. He is married to the poet Brenda Hillman.


THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION

When I was a child my father every morning—
Some mornings, for a time, when I was ten or so,
My father gave my mother a drug called antabuse.
It makes you sick if you drink alcohol.
They were little yellow pills. He ground them
In a glass, dissolved them in water, handed her
The glass and watched her closely while she drank.
It was the late nineteen-forties, a time,
A social world, in which the men got up
And went to work, leaving the women with the children.
His wink at me was a nineteen-forties wink.
He watched her closely so she couldn’t “pull
A fast one” or “put anything over” on a pair
As shrewd as the two of us. I hear those phrases
In old movies and my mind begins to drift.
The reason he ground the medications fine
Was that the pills could be hidden under the tongue
And spit out later. The reason that this ritual
Occurred so early in the morning—I was told,
And knew it to be true—was that she could,
If she wanted, induce herself to vomit,
So she had to be watched until her system had
Absorbed the drug. Hard to render, in these lines,
The rhythm of the act. He ground two of them
To powder in a glass, filled it with water,
Handed it to her, and watched her drink.
In my memory, he’s wearing a suit, gray,
Herringbone, a white shirt she had ironed.
Some mornings, as in the comics we read
When Dagwood went off early to placate
Mr. Dithers, leaving Blondie with crusts
Of toast and yellow rivulets of egg yolk
To be cleared before she went shopping—
On what the comic called a shopping spree—
With Trixie, the next-door neighbor, my father
Would catch an early bus and leave the task
Of vigilance to me. “Keep and eye on Mama, pardner.”
You know the passage of the Aeneid? The man
Who leaves the burning city with his father
On his shoulders, holding his young son’s hand,
Means to do well among the flaming arras
And the falling columns while the blind prophet,
Arms upraised, howls from the inner chamber,
“Great Troy is fallen. Great Troy is no more.”
Slumped in a bathrobe, penitent and biddable,
My mother at the kitchen table gagged and drank,
Drank and gagged. We get our first moral idea
About the world—about justice and power,
Gender and the order of things—from somewhere.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I don't remember exactly when it was written. It started, I remember, from a situation that set me to thinking about double binds and why I hated being caught in them.

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

I don't remember this either. I tend to write drafts and then tinker with them for months. I think I wrote a first version of this poem in a sitting—the beginning and middle of it, the description of the child and the parents, and the way the comics and the epic floated in. I struggled with an ending, which I am still not thrilled with.

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

I believe in both. There are different kinds of sweat and tears—the hours spent on the particular poem and the hours spent in the reading and writing and thinking involved in learning the craft. Often long hours and days and weeks of work on a poem that never works out or comes to life precedes a poem that seems to come almost fully formed. This was not an instance of that.

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

I worked at it. I did apply something like conscious principles to a couple of elements of the poem and think that is a subject better left offstage. Some of it is in the poem anyway, which does comment on its process.

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

A couple of years, I think. I don't remember exactly when it appeared in print.

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 rules. I tend to let poems sit for months or years sometimes—more often than not. It's partly a matter, in a busy life, of not getting it together to send things out.

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

Well, there are different meanings of fact. There is objective information—the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the extent of the shrinkage of the polar icecap—which if it appears in poems which ask the reader to presume accuracy need to be accurate, and there is the kind of detail that belongs to apparently autobiographical narrative—as a poem beginning “When I was child” could or could not entail. Since I've written elsewhere about my mother's alcoholism, it seems fair for a reader to assume that this writing is governed by the rules of truth-telling that ordinary life requires of a teller of life stories. And I would feel it, therefore, as an obligation I had incurred not to pass off as my personal experience, the author's experience, what isn't. (I also understand the impulses that would lead a poet to do just that.) But what the presumption of truth-telling requires is mysterious, and it wasn't the main thing I was after. It was a condition of the writing that happened to happen. Is it important that, if the father in the poem wore gray herringbone suits, my father did? I don't think so. Does it matter whether I have made up the whole business of antabuse as a specific against alcoholism in the late 1940's and the way it operated in my family, that would matter to me. I want the reader—for better or worse—to feel the child's situation and to feel it as a situation the child has undergone and that the adult speaker is remembering. I could have found fictional ways to distance the telling so that the poem did not invite the reader to identify the speaker in the poem with the author, and I didn't do that. Which is why the question of fact and fiction, always tricky, is an appropriate one to ask about this poem, I think

Is this a narrative poem?

Partly.

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

I don't. The first line is a rough pentameter and proposes a narrative, which should suggest a particular set of influences.

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

Usually not. In this case I did.

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

Yes, I showed it to Brenda Hillman, to whom I often show work. I have had friends with whom I shared poems regularly at certain points in my life—but not lately and not when I wrote that poem.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don't have a ready answer to this question. I think each of my poems differs from every other of my poems. Easier to say the ones it is like than the ones it is not like. It is like the poems that hover around a pentameter line, like the poems with a strong narrative element, like the poems that refer to my childhood, less like the poems—most of them—that don't contain these elements.

What is American about this poem?

Autobiographical narrative, or the fiction of autobiographical narrative, which has been one of the typical—I'm not sure whether to say sites or tropes of American poetry since Howl and Life Studies—since Williams's poems about his family, really. My poem is in that way unoriginal. Also American—the material of the poem—the comics and the attention to period idioms from my parents’ generation.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Something between the two.