Maura Stanton

Maura Stanton’s first book of poetry, Snow On Snow, was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and published in 1975. She has also published Cries of Swimmers (Utah 1984), Tales of the Supernatural (Godine 1988), Life Among the Trolls (Carnegie Mellon 1998), Glacier Wine (Carngeie Mellon 2002) and Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois 2008). She has published a novel, Molly Companion, and three books of short stories, most recently Cities in the Sea (University of Michigan Press 2003) which won the Michigan Literary Award. She has been awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her poems have been selected for Best American Poetry in 2003 and 2005. Her poems have appeared in many magazines including Ploughshares, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Tin House, PN Review and The Atlantic; her work has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and the BBC radio program Words and Music. She teaches in the MFA Program at Indiana University in Bloomington.


TATYANA

She leaves the room. Onegin writhes
On stage, ashamed of his emotion.
He scorned her as a young girl.
Now he's mad about her! But she's
Married, rich, so stern and cold. . .
I lean forward in my opera seat.
There goes me. And isn’t that
Every man I loved in vain?
The cast bows to wild applause.
Our Tatyana smiles, steps forward
To catch a bouquet of red roses.
I button my coat, grab my purse,
And make my slow way down the aisle
Of well-dressed, gray-haired couples
Watching their steps with downcast eyes.
I bet I'm not alone in wishing
I could go back in time, and break
A few cold hearts that broke mine
With all my hard won understanding
Of the game of love, its rules
And stratagems, and power plays.
Then through the open lobby doors
Where the crowd hesitates, tying
Scarves or pulling on wool gloves,
I see the promised snow’s begun
And someone’s whistling an aria
From the first act. A sweet joy
Rushes through me. No, of course
I’d fall in love the same way.
I’d make every great mistake
I could, and earn this lovely moment
Walking home through fresh snow
My head full of unsingable music,
Remembering this one and that one
Who made me feel by feeling nothing.


When was the poem composed? How did it start? How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

In my memory it goes like this: I wrote the poem in one sitting after watching a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in January or February. The poem just sprang out of me, needing no revision. Everything in the poem happened just as I describe it.

But here’s the truth: I keep a little “events” journal, and I still have the drafts of the poem, so I decided to check.

“Tatyana” was written in the fall of 1997 after I saw a performance of Eugene Onegin put on by the opera theater at Indiana University. The opera was on a Friday, October 31, and I began writing on Sunday morning, November 1. At first I was just playing around with words but after a few lines a subject emerged. By November 2 I had the first three lines of the poem as it now stands, plus many others describing Tatyana getting undressed and thinking about the past. On November 3 the poem got even wordier. I abandoned it, and wrote a long “Ode to Sleep” which ended with an image of weaving a silver thread through black cloth. I worked on this ode for a couple of more days and it got longer and looser and became “Ode to Concentration.” I knew it wasn’t working, so I focused on the image of the cloth, which came from a Girl Scout project I’d never finished (we had to weave silver thread through a piece of black cloth, then make an evening bag, but I never finished mine). The new poem was called “Craft” and I finished it on Nov. 9 but ultimately decided it was dull. On Nov. 13 I returned to “Tatyana” which got even longer with a big patch of italics in the middle as she unbraids her hair before her mirror. On Nov.15 I looked at the poem again, and turned two stanzas into one. I cut out all the stuff I’d imagined about the character of Tatyana, and focused on the stage performance and the audience.

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

Inspiration occurs at the intersection of writing and memory. I didn’t set out to write about going to the opera, but the subject emerged as I sat doodling with words. In retrospect, it seemed like a natural thing to write about—I love Pushkin’s poem, the opera had delighted me—but it snuck up on me.

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

I began this poem in the meter that is most difficult for me: tetrameter. Blank verse is my default meter, and trimeter is my magic, conjuring meter, but I’ve always felt awkward using the four beat line. Maybe this is why I had trouble with the poem, and abandoned it for a while for some sloppy blank verse. I think it was a lucky choice here. Tetrameter gave me something technical to struggle against as I described my experience at the theater.

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

It appeared in Southwest Review about two years later.

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

In practice, I’m ready to send a poem out as soon as I feel it’s finished, but I’m often too busy. Every fall, I weed out the weaker poems before the new writing season begins.

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

Until I began to do research on myself, I really believed that everything in “Tatayana” happened as I described it, but now I’m not so sure about the snow. Most of the poem really did happen. The scene in the opera when Eugene Onegin meets the married Tatayana and regrets that he scorned her as a young girl was beautifully presented, and very moving. Everyone in the audience was leaning forward, breathless. The music was stunning. The singers were all young people, and when the lights came up, I was struck by the fact that most of the audience were older people like me. We were all wise about love now, we’d all read Proust, but once upon a time we’d been naïve and innocent. So here’s the question: was it snowing when I left the theater? I thought it was, but now I’m not so sure. There was a lot of snow in early November, so at times it was snowing while I was writing, and I do remember coming out of operas in the winter when it was snowing. But I may have transposed the snow from some other opera.

Is this a narrative poem?

“Tatyana” is a lyric poem with a dramatic situation—watching an opera, walking out afterwards, hearing someone whistling an aria, noticing the snow—but the poem ends with the speaker’s realization, not an action or event. I’d say it’s a lyric poem that uses some of the devices of narrative, but it’s not really a narrative poem.

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?

I don’t think “Tatyana” has much to do with morality or ideas of right and wrong. It just describes how things are, the way love works. Good poetry might make us think about ethical questions, it’s not in itself ethical or not-ethical, just or unjust.

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

I don’t remember, but I can check! Looking through my “events” journal, I see that during the period I was working on the poem I read The English Patient, Robert Pinsky, Horace, The Life of Olaudah Equiano, and Carol Anshaw’s Seven Moves in addition to many literary magazines and MFA theses.

But Proust and Puskin are the chief influences behind “Tatyana.”

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

I’d like to be accessible to a wide, general audience.

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

I don’t show my work to anyone while it’s in progress, but afterwards I show it to my husband, Richard Cecil, also a poet, and welcome his comments or suggestions.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s realistic, straightforward, light but serious—there’s no humor or craziness in the poem. That’s why it tricked me into thinking it was completely true.

What is American about this poem?

It’s written in colloquial American English.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished—or it would not be in my book.

Jerry Williams

Jerry Williams lives in New York City and teaches at Marymount Manhattan College. In 2003, Carnegie Mellon University Press published his collection of poems, Casino of the Sun, which was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A new collection, Admission, is just out from Carnegie Mellon. His anthology of breakup and divorce poetry for Overlook Press, called It’s Not You, It’s Me, was published on Valentines Day, 2010. His poetry and nonfiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House, Crazyhorse, New Ohio Review, Witness, and many other journals.


NEW SUIT, JUST LIKE MAYAKOVSKY

It was two in the afternoon
and I was playing chess
with my sister's live-in boyfriend.
We were both out of work.
He'd been laid off by General Motors
and had three weeks' unemployment left.
I had forty dollars to get me
through the rest of the summer.

"Is it my move?" I said.
"Yeah," he said, draining his beer.
He was a male stripper
before moving in with my sister.
I felt ill at ease around him.
He was always getting rough with me:
wrestling holds and quasi-martial arts stuff.
I'm not sure what he did at GM;
probably he worked on the line.

"We gotta finish this game," he said,
"before your sister gets home."
He was winning again.
I had a rook and a few pawns left.
He had his queen, a knight,
both rooks, a bishop ― it was a slaughter.
I borrowed a beer from the fridge
and braced myself for the end.
He wouldn't checkmate my king
until he captured every piece I had.
It was the only decent thing in his life.

A week later my sister broke it off with him,
and he moved back in with his folks.
She didn't like the way
he treated her daughter
and didn't much like him anymore either.
After a few days he returned
wearing a brand new suit
and asked if they could start over;
she stood her ground and told him no.

"Then I'm going to kill myself," he said
and instructed her as to where
and didn't stop her from picking up
the telephone as he marched out.

The police found his body in the park
across from the station.
He'd been a gymnast in high school,
so he stood between the parallel bars
and shot himself not once but twice
in the temple with a .32-caliber pistol.
That's determination.
To be wearing a new suit
in your final moments,
just like Mayakovsky,
without ever having heard of Mayakovsky,
even though you're a laid-off auto worker,
woman gone, no victories left in you at 26,
only half in this world now,
birds scattering,
the blue sky in knots above you.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in the early 1990s. I was beginning to find some sort of voice in my mid-twenties, and I felt I could start handling larger themes with a bit more aplomb. I've never had much contact with members of my family, but I spoke to my sister on the telephone around that time, and she told me that her ex-boyfriend--the subject of this poem--that his younger brother had later also committed suicide (handgun). I thought, Jesus, two brothers from the same family suicided--how absolutely awful. I knew I wouldn't be able to touch that theme with a ten-foot metaphor, but maybe I could deal with the ex-boyfriend's self-murder. The conversation with my sister triggered the poem, but the story about the breakup and suicide had built up over the past few years. The realities that inspired the poem happened in the late-1980s. After this phone call from my sister, I wrote everything I remembered about the ex-boyfriend and the chain of events leading up to the suicide. Straight reporting. Not too many frills.

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

I write poems in two different ways. Sometimes they come out as a blast of writing that appears nearly fully formed (probably because I've been composing in my head surreptitiously). I'll do some revision work, change some words, tighten, read the poem out loud a number of times, and if it sounds right and rings true, I will call it finished. The other way I write poems is to compose a line or two and then make sure those lines work and then write those same two lines over again and add another line or two and then revise those four lines within an inch of their lives and then write everything again, add another line or two and revise all those lines, reading them out loud along the way, and then I'll start at the beginning again and continue in this manner for half a composition notebook, just putting pen to paper in order to feel the experience in my hand and eradicate the space between thought and text. So it would take a mathematician weeks to figure out exactly how many revisions a poem has endured. Every syllable gets revised again and again until I come to the end and then I'll work the ending like it's a heavy bag, reading out loud to hear the notes and cadences. "New Suit" came about using both of these methods. Like that Hemingway quotation. How did you go bankrupt? Gradually and then suddenly--except maybe it was the other way around. I would say the whole process took about six months, but what I had when I called the poem finished was not the final draft, as it turned out.

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

I do believe in inspiration, but I also believe you need to put the vessel in the right place at the right time so the vessel can receive the inspiration, meaning that I try to stick to a writing schedule and I would advise everyone to do the same, but I'm always failing of my ambitions. In the case of "New Suit" the inspired aspect of the poem revolved around finding the connection between two disparate concerns: a suicidal, laid-off American auto worker and a disillusioned, suicidal Russian socialist über-poet. The sweat and tears resulted from heating up the language in the appropriate places in order that the poem didn't sound like a pretentious campfire story broken into lines.

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

At the time, I was very much under the spell of that 1980s redemptive swoosh thing that poets utilized at the end of their poems. I liked the way it sounded and I liked the attempted forgiveness and resolution, but it just wasn't in my nature to stay married to that brand. But I was definitely writing what I termed "Roy Orbison Poems" where you have the predicament, some action, a relevant objective correlative, a compelling double plotline and various forms of doubling throughout the piece--and then this massive collision of sound and story upsurges at poem's end. That's pretty much how "New Suit" turned out. I guess we're calling that organic form these days. It felt so natural to start with this idea that both Mayakovsky and my sister's ex-boyfriend got snubbed by women and killed themselves wearing new suits, to pile on the details in as mellifluous a way as I could manage, and then to plunder a big theme towards the end. Of course, I didn't know, really, what in the world I was doing at the time. That takes us back to inspiration. Maybe inspiration is simply the waking dream of uncovering the sense and sound of a poem, where it resides, a few feet below the dirt surface of your consciousness. I ended up employing a few other techniques as well, including various forms of irony and contextual symbolism.

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

I would say it took a year or so to get the poem published. I sent it to Sycamore Review, and it appeared in the Winter 1994 issue of that magazine. At the time, I was publishing under my dreaded proper name, Gerald Williams, so I've actually revised my own sobriquet since then. I literally possess the worst given name in the world. My middle name is Wayne (see News of the Weird's exhaustive list of homicidal maniacs with the middle name Wayne). Around the same time, I sent a book manuscript that I ominously entitled Swimming Away from the Ark to manic d press, and they rejected the book but wanted to publish "New Suit, Just Like Mayakovsky" in an anthology called Signs of Life: Channel Surfing Through 90s Culture, which was nice. Then, of course, I included the poem in my first book, Casino of the Sun in 2003: the final poem in the collection.

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

My practice varies with every poem. I don't have any rules about how long something sits around, nothing official anyway. But I'm sure I wait at least six months without thinking about it. I do sometimes send stuff out too early. I always feel like I'm behind, running late. This is probably why no magazine ever accepts more than one of my poems at a time. Or maybe they find out what my middle name is.

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

Like most writers, I feel perfunctorily obligated to state that I hate this question; therefore, I hate this question. That said, this is possibly the most essential question one could ask about "New Suit, Just Like Mayakovsky." Pretty much every detail in the poem is utterly factual. However, I'm not quite sure if the ex-boyfriend got off two rounds or not. None of the gun nuts I've known throughout my life ever disputed this achievement, so I certainly think it's physically attainable. I remember hearing this two-shot theory somewhere along the way--though it could simply have been the voices of poiesis rendering a concrete action that represented the ex-boyfriend's sense of purpose--thus I left it in. Also, the anecdote about Vladimir Mayakovsky donning a new suit before he shot himself is true, according to Ann and Samuel Charters beautiful biography, I Love, which I had read some time before writing the poem. On the other hand, I left two fairly important details out of the poem: (1) During the autopsy--again, if memory serves--the ME discovered that my sister's ex-boyfriend had tuberculosis and (2) before we started a game of chess we sometimes smoked a joint, which seems hilariously counter-intuitive, oxymoronic, and just plain self-defeating, like taking four or five Ambien and forcing yourself to stay awake.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes. With benefits.

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

The poets I admire rant and rage. They can barely manage to contain their exuberance, their disenfranchisement, their association with various –isms, their love, their moral outrage, their addiction to language, their need to shriek, their solipsism, their humor(s), their pleasure, and their pain. But they do manage, and what ends up on the page vibrates across time and space. These poets have something they need to say, and they say it in an innovative yet lucid manner because they desperately want to communicate (no one who uses words writes simply for herself). Their poems can best be described as breathless, scornful, socially-conscious, bold, self-limiting, self-aggrandizing, apocalyptic, funny, hyperbolic, risky, antagonistic, complaining, aggressive, ironic, anaphoristic, apostrophic, vivid, despairing, triumphant, testimonial, collectively-voiced, individualistically-voiced, transforming, morally just, morally questionable, courageous, blasphemous, investigative, and generally hard-hitting. As far as direct influences go, at the time, I would have been reading Matthew Arnold; the French Surrealists, mainly Jean Arp and Guillaume Apollinaire; Charles Baudelaire; Elizabeth Bishop; Richard Shelton; Vladimir Mayakovsky, of course; James Wright; Sharon Olds; Anna Akhmatova; Sylvia Plath; Charles Bukowski; the poet Ai; and Pablo Neruda.

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

I would love for the seasoned poetry reader to appreciate the layers and language in my work, and I love it when people who have never read a poem in their entire lives read something like "New Suit, Just Like Mayakovsky" and feel gut-shot, suddenly curious about poetry, and suspicious of their own preconceived notions about the form.

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 usually keep a few trusted readers around who serve specific purposes; I send drafts to each person and consider their reactions accordingly. I've got my irony guy, my title gal, my have-I-gone-too-far-here? guy, my last-line gal, and so forth. Afterwards, I engage in some serious internal bartering. "New Suit, Just Like Mayakovsky" actually has a rather dramatic revision history. In the mid-1990s, I asked one of my graduate school professors at the University of Arizona, Richard Shelton, to critique the Sycamore Review version of the poem. I had begun to realize that my poems were not as aurally inevitable as I needed them to be. In minutes, Professor Shelton taught me the most important lesson I would ever learn about my own poetry. He said, "You're an accentual poet, so if you ever write a line that doesn't contain at least two or three hard stresses, then the line should be cut or thoroughly revised because it probably wasn't that necessary to begin with." The Sycamore Review draft of "New Suit" consisted of 4 stanzas, 68 lines, and 410 words. The final composition that ended up in my first book consisted of 5 stanzas, 57 lines, and 358 words. Quite an overhaul. I cut lines like "We were pretty broke" and "House rules" and made the speaker get out of the way of the narrative. The finished product is sleeker and, I hope, more devastating and artistic.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

"New Suit" sits right up in the wheelhouse of what I've wanted to accomplish in poetry up to this point. As a result of an ongoing apprenticeship, I have tried to consolidate the major free verse prosodic techniques and fixations to craft a darkly humorous, high-stakes, sardonic, narrative-lyric hybrid grounded in accessibility. I start off with the personal yet I resist the temptation to stop at the check-point of mere self-reflexivity. I feel no shame in announcing that my poetry is post-confessional in nature. As a post-confessional poet, I do realize that I attempt to go so deep within that I create a kind of authentically fictionalized Self which I can stand beside and comment on and learn from and try to repair. I believe the psychiatricals call it depersonalization.

What is American about this poem?

Live-in boyfriends, laid-off auto workers, dragging out unemployment benefits, cheap beer, poverty, the desire to vanquish one's opponent, strippers, breakups, guns, preoccupation with martial arts and wrestling, depression, single mothers, threats, cops, nostalgia, ruinous determination, straightforward lineation and stanzaics, colloquial speech, declarative sentences, and the progressive Left's romanticizing of all things Russian.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This poem was, without a doubt, finibandoned.

Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000), and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002), for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, The Paris Review, National Public Radio’s “This American Life,” and The New York Times Book Review. His film credits include “field poet” and artistic collaborator on the film “Darwin’s Nightmare,” which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. One semester a year he teaches at the University of Houston, and he then spends the rest of the year elsewhere.


EMPTYING TOWN

I want to erase your footprints
from my walls. Each pillow
is thick with your reasons. Omens

fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman
in a party hat, clinging
to a tin-foil balloon. Shadows

creep slowly across the tar, someone yells, "Stop!"
and I close my eyes. I can't watch

as this town slowly empties, leaving me
strung between bon-voyages, like so many clothes
on a line, the white handkerchief

stuck in my throat. You know the way Jesus

rips open his shirt
to show us his heart, all flaming and thorny,
the way he points to it. I'm afraid

the way I'll miss you will be this obvious.

I have a friend who everyone warns me
is dangerous, he hides
bloody images of Jesus
around my house, for me to find

when I come home; Jesus
behind the cupboard door, Jesus tucked

into the mirror. He wants to save me
but we disagree from what. My version of hell
is someone ripping open his shirt

and saying, Look what I did for you. . .


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

It was begun sometime in the early 1990s, when I was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was the first full winter I spent in that town, which can get pretty desolate, wonderfully desolate, strangely empty, by February.

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

It’s hard for me to say at this point, but I usually go through many revisions, especially with a poem such as this, which is basically a collage of three different failed poems.

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

I think there is such a thing as inspiration, yet without the work it won’t come to much, except in very rare instances, the occasional gift. I try to maintain the initial spark in a poem, and then build a structure around it, if that’s what is called for.

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

I use a collage technique, the principles of which had to be found (unlike, say, a given form, like a sonnet).

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

I don’t remember.

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

Usually I’d never send anything out for at least a year, just to make sure it had actually found its final form. Found itself.

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

It’s all based on actual incidents from my life at that time, some of which took place in the “real” world, some of which took place inside of me. I hate to break it apart, but here goes: It begins with an evocation of a scene, then moves into a retelling of a troubled friend (he’d probably thought I was the troubled one) who tried to convert me to jesus, then ends with a meditation on a central tenet of Christianity, that of sacrifice being equated with love. If my friend hadn’t left all those images of jesus around my house, with him pointing at his heart, which made their way into the deep caves of my subconscious, connecting to other violent images from my life, the poem likely wouldn’t have found me.

Is this a narrative poem?

It has narrative flashes.

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

The title, of course, comes from Richard Hugo’s great book, Triggering Town.

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

I try not to think of any reader until fairly late in the game, but I would like my friends who wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves poets, though every word they utter is poetry, to be able to enter into my work.

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 was part of a writing group for years, which was amazingly helpful. I don’t think anything gets created by one individual.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

The ending is almost didactic, which isn’t something I’m usually comfortable with.

What is American about this poem?

American? I don’t know, the scene it evokes might happen anywhere, yet it did happen in a particular place, which was America, which was the threshold into my subconscious, at that moment.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I think it found itself, by the end.

Vince Gotera

Vince Gotera has published two poetry collections with Pecan Grove Press: Fighting Kite (2007) and Dragonfly (1994). Ghost Wars, from Final Thursday Press, won the 2004 Global Filipino Literary Award in Poetry. The University of Georgia Press published his book of criticism titled Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans (1994). His writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Zone 3, and other literary magazines, as well as in such anthologies as Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America, Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing, and Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary Poets from 1951 to 1977. He serves as Editor at the North American Review and is Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. Vince is a bassist and lead guitarist whose favorite color is blue: aquamarine, royal, robin’s-egg, cerulean, sky. No surprise then that his blog is called The Man with the Blue Guitar. Check it out.


NEWLY RELEASED, PAPA TELLS ME WHAT IT’S LIKE INSIDE

Vin, that psych ward is Dante’s Inferno—circles
within circles, you climb and climb. The sons
of bitches in white, they’re monsters and devils.

You see, son, you’re paying for your sins
while you’re there. Each circle a privilege
you purchase with blood and bile. It starts with seclusion,

the innermost circle. Almost a jail, but your bed’s
made up with wet sheets and you become Satan
on ice—the teeth chattering inside your head,

stones rattling round and round in a can.
Then once a week, they take you down for shock,
the mouse killed again with an elephant gun.

First time was ’46: the bed just like
an electric chair—electrodes, colored wires—
That’s all I can remember. Except for that shock,

vibration, a lightning flash dead in the eyes.
And on your tongue a taste like bitter almonds
or wet pennies. A buzz in your ears like flies.

Closest to outside is the circle called grounds
privileges, they let you walk all the way out
to the high, black, wrought-iron fence surrounding

the whole hospital. Air, trees, grass, flowers,
the sky. Only the fence, your blue pajamas,
saying you’re different from real people. But how

do you get there? Between is a tortured drama:
wide, sloping stairs of kowtow and kiss-ass
—mixing with real lunatics, the gamut

running from rapists to certified pigstickers,
manic depressives to schizos. And always the devils
in white, those sadists and macho bitches. But, Vin, it’s

always the walk I’ll remember. The Thorazine shuffle.
We’re all diviners doomed to Dante’s Eighth
Circle: our heads on backwards for time eternal.

We shuffle like mules rounding a millstone, wish
it would end ... we shuffle in line for lunch, we shuffle
in line for meds, in line to piss, we shuffle
in line ... our slippers whispering shh, shh, shh.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

It’s been quite a long while since this poem was written. I’m guessing two decades, at least. So probably late 1989.

My poem “A Visitor on Ash Wednesday” was published in 1989, which is partly how I place the time of this poem’s writing; “Newly Released ...” was written as a companion piece to “A Visitor ...” after it appeared in Caliban.

My father Martin Gotera was a schizophrenic. Because of this condition, in the Philippines he was considered a seer, a visionary, and that’s what I portray in “A Visitor ...”; in the US, he was just plain crazy and spent a lot of time in psych wards, hence this poem.

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

That’s not how I work. I don’t really have discrete versions. I write (or type, actually), tweaking all the way, until I have what I think might be the whole poem. Then I dip into it and change a word here, an image there, alter a line break, change it back, move stuff around, and so on.

I wish I were as disciplined as Jessica Garratt, who talks in your recent interview of her about Word documents and their dates. I’m jealous. Without such records, I can’t tell you how much time separates the starting and finishing of this poem, or any poem. I do remember (vaguely) that the drafting was pretty quick. That this was one of those painless poems.

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

Yes, I do believe in inspiration, thank you. In fact, I should say thank you to the muses, floating up there like invisible tethered balloons above all our furrowed brows. A thankless gig, that whole muse thing.

As I suggested earlier, “Newly Released ...” was in all the best ways “received.” Though there’s always some sweat and tears involved. Wouldn’t be any fun otherwise. Nah, I’m being glib. Poems are almost always made better by hard work, if not sweat and tears.

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

Yes, I did. I always do.

This poem is in slant-rhymed terza rima, sometimes really slant. Probably the most distantly rhymed words here are “kiss-ass” / “pigstickers” / “Vin, it’s” ... assonance with short i in the penultimate syllable, falling rhythm, plus the consonance of the closing s in all three. Tough for some readers to get, who may insist these are not rhymed at all. And I’m fine with that.

I also use here what I call “roughed-up pentameter.” I don’t worry about iambs and trochees and all that shmanzy shtuff—I just get five stressed syllables into each line. Actually, the stress patterns are pretty roughed up too. Some lines could probably be scanned, traditionally, as having four or six stresses. For rationale, I often fall back on Hopkins’s notion of sprung rhythm, which pretty much says you can stress whenever you damn well want to. I know some folks will argue with that characterization, but it sure opened and freed up metrics for me.

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

Pretty quickly. It appeared in Kenyon Review in 1991. So maybe a year and a half.

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?

You know, Brian, it’s different with every poem.

I have one poem I sat on for sixteen years. I wrote it in 1993 (I think) and finally sent it out last week. That poem was about an old friend with whom I’d lost touch, and I worried about exposing confidences. But then I found out a couple of years ago that she had died. So then I worried about not having gotten her permission. Finally last week I got over all of that.

I generally wait quite a while before sending out a poem. We’re talking months to a couple of years. I don’t think I’ve ever sent a poem out on the same day I finished it, as people say Bill Stafford would sometimes do with his poem-a-day practice.

It’s a bit like letting chili simmer. Gets better and better the longer you simmer. And if you leave it in the fridge overnight, it’s even tastier the next day. So, the poem simmers, stews in the old Frigidaire, and at some point I remember it’s there and send it out.

Mostly what happens nowadays, though, is that editors will solicit poems from me, perhaps on a particular theme, and that will remind me to peek in the fridge.

In the case of “Newly Released ...” I sent it off rather quickly to Kenyon Review because Marilyn Hacker was editing an issue (I think this was before she became the editor of Kenyon) and I knew she would catch on to my shenanigans with meter and rhyme.

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

Fact: My father was a schizophrenic.

Fact: He was in and out of psych wards ... the stuff of daily life in my childhood.

Fact: In terms of psychiatric treatments, he indeed had electroshock or electroconvulsive therapy ... which, by the way, is still used today, a fact that surprises many people. And he also was given the wet-sheet treatment. And a plethora of psychotropic medications.

Fact: My father loved Dante and The Divine Comedy. He frequently read religious thinkers from widely divergent periods: St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Ávila, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Fulton J. Sheen.

Fiction: Pretty much everything in the poem except those facts already mentioned. What I know about psych wards I learned when I was in the Army. As a military pay clerk, I worked at Letterman Army Medical Center and on many occasions observed psych patients when they would come to see me about pay problems or, when they didn’t have grounds privileges, I would go see them. That’s how I learned about the psych ward’s levels of privilege, like the Inferno’s concentric rings of punishment. And also the Thorazine shuffle, how meds would make patients catatonic and they would walk with a characteristic gait. Knowing all that stuff helped me create the fictional stuff in this poem, and make it sound authentic in my father’s voice. You can learn more about life in a psych ward in any number of movies and books, such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Girl, Interrupted.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes. No. It is narrative when the speaker says “First time was ’46.” It’s somewhat in the realm of narrative when the speaker lays out a patient’s potential movement from “seclusion” to “grounds privileges”—one hopes that patient is getting better and progressing from one level to another to another with some deliberateness, though of course in reality that movement for anyone is hardly ever in one direction, as in the traditional narrative arc, but more like a shaky pendulum.

I suppose if we insist on categories “Newly Released ...” is a dramatic poem. More precisely, a dramatic monologue. Though at no time in real life did my father ever sit down and tell me this. He was pretty mum about what went on in the psych ward.

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?

I don’t know about right and wrong, or good and evil. I just know my father felt wronged. Wronged by the country he’d fought for. (He served in the US Army during WWII, where he was part of the Bataan Death March.) Wronged by both American and Philippine society. (He was raised in the Philippines, where the schools instilled American ideals, but in the US he never felt those ideals realized.) Wronged by the arts. (He was a fiction writer who took correspondence courses—with the Famous Writers School, I think—but was never published, at least in fiction.) So in some way this poem speaks to those wrongs and gives my father a voice he never felt he had in life.

But I’m dodging the question, aren’t I?

I believe good poetry somehow speaks from the heart. I know that can sound maudlin or mystical, and I don’t mean it to be so. I’m talking here about honesty, integrity, passion. In turn, good poetry speaks to the heart. I would like to think such heart-to-heart poetry would be ethical and just, that good poetry would champion people to have dignity and justice and the feeling that things are all right, that ultimately they are not being wronged.

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

Marge Piercy, Molly Peacock, Marilyn Hacker. At Humboldt State University in 1989, I was teaching Piercy’s novel Woman on the Edge of Time as well as Peacock’s Raw Heaven and Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. Piercy inspired content while Peacock and Hacker influenced craft.

Marge Piercy’s Chicana character Connie made me think a lot more about my father’s illness and hospitalizations. This was quite a bit on my mind in those days because my father had died earlier in 1989. Connie’s rebelliousness and anti-authority jones as a psych patient jived quite a bit with what I knew of my father, who was probably not a model patient. In fact, he was quite likely a very difficult patient, and I wanted to get that liveliness and spunk into the speaker of this poem.

Molly Peacock and Marilyn Hacker, you will remember if you know po-biz in the late ’80s, were two of the strongest proponents of New Formalism. When I was an MFA student at Indiana University, I was much attracted to meter and rhyme, but had to live among classmates who were predominantly free-verse writers. Remember how acrimonious that debate was? How free-verse writers (who couldn’t acknowledge they were now “the establishment”) called the New Formalist poets Reaganites? Seems silly now, but that debate was a fact of life for poets at that time. What this controversy meant for me personally and artistically was that I developed a kind of craft that employed rhyme and meter but in highly disguised fashion, so that free-verse enthusiasts could read my poems as free verse while those who appreciated rhyme and meter could decipher my encoded formalisms. “Newly Released ...” is in that vein.

Another influence—an unusual one, very specific to this poem—was my professor David Wojahn at Indiana. During an MFA workshop, he introduced us to Craig Raine’s poem “In the Kalahari Desert,” and pointed out the genius of its last line: “Shhh, shhh, the shovel said. Shhh.” Some time later, when he gave a reading, David performed a poem that also had, as its last word, “shh.” He may have even talked about competing with Raine and writing a poem ending in “shh.” Whether or not David actually voiced that competition, I picked up on it and, not long after leaving Indiana, wrote my own poem ending in “shh.” And there you have it. All sorts of reasons, both profound and petty, why a poem is what it is.

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

I don’t think so. Way in the back of my mind, there’s this large amorphous mass the color of “flesh” from the Crayola box. This blob is my audience, gathered and glimpsed from far away. I know they’re back there. I know they’re listening. I know they’re going to read the poems. But I don’t write for them. Though I gotta admit that sometimes my poems are didactic, that I have designs on teaching the blob something. But generally I don’t worry about audience too awful much.

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

No, not really. The impression I have with this poem is that there was only me and the computer screen. Tug o’ war between me and me, carving out meter and rhyme. “Brachiating with a hoot from rhyme to rhyme,” as John Gardner wrote in Grendel. The more I think about it here, I’m realizing I don’t usually let anyone see a poem in progress.

To the second question, again “no, not really.” I do share new work with classes if I’m writing poems along with them, in response to my own assignments. The person with whom I share my poems more than anyone else is my wife Mary Ann, who is a damn good editor and tells me when I’m faking it, when swagger is displacing truth.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don’t know that it does. Readers will have to answer this.

I suppose I could say it’s a lot like my other poems: close attention to lineation and rhythm and euphony and inherited forms, with improvisation and mixing of registers in diction, as well as an eye and ear toward issues of social justice and peace. I don’t know if those qualities are what readers sense when they read my work, but those are what I try to keep in the forefront when I’m writing.

What is American about this poem?

When I read your interviews, Brian, I’m always intrigued by this question and how various poets answer it. I found Galway Kinnell’s reply about wild animals popping up just hilarious. Well ...

Thinking of Kinnell leads me to think of Walt Whitman, for whom listing and cataloguing, particularly via robust and muscular word choice, was a distinctly American mode. While I am not worthy to touch a pinky to Whitman’s cloak, I wonder if this language from the poem may qualify as distinctly American and Whitman-like: “kowtow and kiss-ass ... real lunatics, the gamut / running from rapists to certified pigstickers, / manic depressives to schizos.” Howzat?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

When I sent off “Newly Released ...” to Marilyn Hacker at Kenyon Review, it was finished. I had buffed it to a nice sheen, though I also left in those intentional rough edges (the distant rhyme and the dodgy meter).

The poem has never been abandoned as such, because sixteen years later it showed up in my book Fighting Kite. And I featured it about a year ago in my blog The Man with the Blue Guitar.

And I quite often perform “Newly Released ...” at readings. This poem continues to be very much alive for me: immediate, present, powerful, moving.

Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger is the author of Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and the chapbook Saint Monica (forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press). Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, The Collagist, Copper Nickel, diode, Gulf Coast, The Laurel Review, North American Review, Passages North, Third Coast, and many other journals. She is the editor of the Akron Series in Poetry, co-editor-in-chief of Barn Owl Review, and co-editor, with John Gallaher, of the new Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. She directs the NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, and teaches literature and creative writing at The University of Akron. For more information please visit her website or blog.


SHIPWRECK

His name wasn’t even a word.
You could never ask him to make the tea.
Glass broke in his hands, and storms

kicked out their best hail when he stood
beneath a willow. I’d exhale his name
instead of counting down the days.

The last time I pressed my body
against the length of his screen door
I hoped the sunset would burn through.

He was always running a fever.
The doctors said he turned cold instead
of hot. That’s not what his mouth

told me. There were hundreds of bats
in the attic, but none of them listened.
I felt we were never alone. He said:

what is this sliver of wood for, if not
the hull of a miniature ship, shattered
on the rocks, some woman who lured it

there, and a sailor who would spend
the rest of his life trying to carve her
out of Ivory soap. His wife walking in

on him, the thing in his hand, a knife,
a word the woman could never say
but couldn’t stop saying. His wife

adjusting the shower curtain, asking
how he had cut his knee. The woman
on a bus five minutes down the road.

He knew exactly which alley they’d
exit to, which of his hands would move
up her back first, the direction her skirt

would fall. The frozen lake that did not
regard any of this with much interest.
The temperament of the sky above.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem at the end of the Fall semester of 2008, so it’s about a year old. I usually begin a poem with one line that I mutter under my breath for days, until I can’t hold it in any longer. That’s what happened with this one. It’s funny, thinking back, how many potential poems could have followed the line “His name wasn’t even a word,” but this is the one that developed.

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

My very primitive and unsophisticated records indicate that I sent this poem to Gulf Coast on December 1st 2008, so apparently I didn’t allow it to mellow for long before submitting. Most of my revision takes place during the composition process. By the time I am finished writing, often I have read the poem aloud twenty times or more at the computer. I write a little, go back to the beginning, read it all, write a little, and so on.

I did, however, play with the final lines quite a bit, with the guidance of my friends Susan Grimm and Amy Bracken Sparks, who were instrumental in nailing the landing.

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

I do believe in inspiration, but this poem was less received than intercepted. I wore that first line around my wrist like one of those braided bracelets you make in summer camp. After a while it got dirty, so I (clumsily) cut it off with some scissors. Then I examined it. At that point I had to let it go and move on, catching thoughts as they came to me.

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

This poem came out whole, but I was very conscious of where I was going with it, because I wanted a distinct point of view departure in the middle, a sort of story within a story. Most of my awkward fumbling took place as I wrote it. There’s often a five to ten minute period in the writing of any poem where I look over it and wonder why on earth I am writing it, or who it could possibly interest and satisfy. Thankfully, I’m usually able to shake that off.

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

It took a little less than a year from when I sent it to Gulf Coast and when it appeared. I did not send it to any other journals. I’m not a simultaneous submitter, and I take great care in choosing which journals to send certain poems. It’s always a delight when poems are picked up their first time out in the world.

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 let poems sit long enough, I fear. Sometimes I even get a journal in mind and keep it in mind when writing, and the day after writing the poem (and after at least one set of eyes views it) I send it out. I guess I would rather the poems didn’t stagnate for too long, but sometimes I scare myself.

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

When I was in sixth grade French class I was assigned the task of carving an Arc de Triomphe out of Ivory soap. Mine came out looking more like a misshapen albatross. But the idea of carving a likeness stuck with me. It is so physical, but also so imprecise, and once you cut there’s no going back. I have never tried my hand at whittling since then, but I have been haunted by an image intensely enough that I wanted to draw it on everything I saw. This is a common experience, right? Taking extra trips to the carnival so that you can pretend the cotton candy is the voluminous hair of your beloved? Tracing the imagined outline of your lover’s face onto a brick wall? Yes?

At any rate, the poem has a relatively complicated dramatis personae for being so brief. I filtered the second half of the poem through the consciousness of the “he,” the man who relates the story of a sailor who spends the rest of his life trying to carve the likeness of a lost beloved out of soap. Perhaps this is a metaphor for the creative process in general, and how we try to recreate, or reclaim, lost people with poems. The hardest part was transitioning into the second perspective without making the reader especially aware of it.

This poem is 100% emotionally autobiographical, but I have never known a man whose name wasn’t even a word. I have never intentionally lured a literal ship to destruction. I do not hold myself responsible for any metaphorical truths that may have inspired this poem, however.

Is this a narrative poem?

It is a narrative poem if the reader allows it to be. I would say that story is the most important feature of the poem. All of my narratives are fragmentary in construction, but to me, reality seems similarly fragmented. Imagine standing in line at Target while eavesdropping on people in front of you and at the next register over, while also sending a text message and subliminally absorbing the Lionel Richie song in the background. Nothing interesting happens in a purely linear timeline, at least to my sensibility.

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?

Poetry is my number one source for truth. I’m not sure what that says about my morality, or about my poem’s morality. My poem certainly isn’t a cautionary tale.

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

Shortly after Elton Glaser passed along the Akron Series in Poetry editorship to me, I began working with Heather Derr-Smith’s book, The Bride Minaret. It changed me forever. I had never considered the power of the end-stopped line with any great seriousness up until that point, and it made me reconsider the line in every aspect possible. I can see my Derr-Smith-induced line revelation here in this poem.

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

My ideal reader is a thirtysomething woman who wears very cute shoes. She probably loves black cats, and may drink a bit too much diet soda. She gets approximately six hours of sleep per night. She might secretly prefer reading fiction over poetry, but she doesn’t advertise this. However, I am thankful when my work connects with people who don’t like black cats or diet soda. I may write poems to please and delight certain people in my life, but I try not to aim my work toward a particular literary demographic.

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?

There’s one person who reads all of my poems the second I finish writing them. I have also been blessed with a spectacular writers’ group that gives the best advice I’ve ever had. In theory it seems like it would be best to have readers with differing sensibilities, but my writers’ group contains a number of women poets who are risk-takers like me. I find their commentary to be incredibly energizing. My college workshop experiences often left me wondering why I ever chose poetry, and often persuaded me to undo a lot of the work in my poems. Eventually I gained enough confidence to mute the refrain of this is too strange, can you please explain, I just don’t get it, what on earth is this.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This was the last poem I wrote in my now-nixed manuscript of poems about bad marriages. I finished that manuscript, and then realized that I was incredibly happy. I could not envision doing a book tour in 2011, a very happy woman, reading poems about misery. This poem is therefore quite different from all of the new work I’ve produced in the past year, which culminated with a new manuscript that will soon land in a couple of presses’ mailboxes. The new manuscript is a book of love poems, often hyperbolic, that share some craft sensibilities with “Shipwreck” without all of the sublimated desire. It was both challenging and exhilarating to write with such a different tone.

What is American about this poem?

Well, in my travels I’ve noticed that screen doors are not always as popular abroad as they are in America. When my family lived in England there were no screens on the doors or windows. Cats and magpies could just stop on by whenever they pleased. So I suppose the third stanza might reveal an American setting. I also imagine that the sailor is suffering from an American sense of moral obligation or shame over his desire. If he were from another country, he might do his whittling at the kitchen table instead of on the sly in the bathroom.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I will confess to having abandoned a few poems along the road, but this one was finished, and I did not feel the immediate desire to take a vigorous bath with Ivory soap upon completion, thankfully.