Brian Barker

Brian Barker’s first book of poems, The Animal Gospels, won the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize and was published in 2006. He teaches at the University of Colorado-Denver where he co-edits Copper Nickel. Learn more about his work at his website.




DOG GOSPEL

When I dare at last to imagine hunger,
see a farmer wandering his parched fields
knowing nothing to do, finally, but sleep
the day out in the barn's long shadow,
dreaming of the family dog he drove
deep into a neighboring county
and abandoned by the side of the road.
Weeks later a boy finds it in a ditch—
timid and gimp, a halo of gnats
festering between its swollen testicles
and wormy flanks—and he coaxes it
into some pines, tethers it with a tentstake
and a chain as the late summer light
spirals and drapes over the branches,
a mirage the dog slavers and snaps at.
Consider the boy's amusement
as he imagines the animal jerking the light
down and the ruckus of bells that clang
and catapult from the treetop belfries,
the canopy rent like a piñata, spilling licorice
and circus peanuts, coins and fluttering dollar bills.
The real possibilities are beyond him.
The dog as a parable of pain or loss.
Hunger as some small iridescent thing at work
inside the animal, hovering around its heart
the way a lone dragonfly skirts the dry pond crater,
dismantling the day—light unstitched
from dust, dust unbuckled from air.
By now, the dog's given up, and the boy
watches its tongue loll in the pine needles,
the heave and fall of its stomach, its eyes
following birdflight in and out of the shade.
Restless for something he cannot name,
he imagines the music he might make
if he thumped the dog's belly like a drum.
Imagines its eyes are the color of iron.
Imagines the unimaginable and does it,
the tire tool and the belly unwilling instruments,
and the dog's caterwaul is not like music
at all and when night comes the cricketsong
dulcifies nothing, the dog's body
is just a body, is not paltry, is not glorified.
What hunger is this that haunts the boy,
that haunts the man sleeping in the shade?
Watch as the dragonfly dips into his open mouth
and keeps going, a blur between bone and sinew,
a wet thread collapsing soft caverns of flesh,
gone to where his body is a field
honed by sleeves of sunlight,
to where the boy ceases to be and the man wakes.
He knows what flits through him now
keeps the time with its thrumming,
carrying him away from himself
into himself, to where the dog roves in the shadows—
ravenous, luminous—its tail bobbing
in the heat, a winnowing sliver of light.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem began in the fall of 2002. During the late 1990s my sister and brother-in-law worked as house parents at a group home for troubled teenagers. One day two of the boys living at the home found a stray dog and tied it up in the woods to see how long it would take for the dog to starve to death. Luckily, some of the other children told on them and my sister was able to rescue the dog and take it to a shelter. The story, though, haunted me, and I carried it around in my head for several years before I tried to write some version of it. A sensational story by itself doesn’t make a poem, and I needed time to figure out the larger philosophical underpinnings of the event. Ultimately, I began to think about the poem as a meditation on hunger, or a place where two types of hunger—physical and psychic—collide. Thus, the opening line of the poem is a nod to that meditation and a rhetorical gesture that clears the space for the story to be told.

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

A ton of revisions. I always revise obsessively, and in this case, I was trying to write a type of poem that I had never written before. I wanted the imagination to drive the poem and to take leaps. I wanted a tension between the real and the surreal and for the poem to have a kind of mythic heft. So, there were a lot of false starts and missteps. An early draft of the poem also had a different ending that I knew wasn’t right, and it took many tries to write through it to the ending the poem has now.

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

I don’t really believe that any poem manifests purely from inspiration. There can be a mystery to writing when it’s going well, when all self-consciousness falls away and images swim up from the subconscious. You feel completely submerged and being led by the poem to some unknown place. But to say that the poem is being “received” is to ignore all the sweat and tears that came before: all the books that you read and studied and absorbed and all of the many, many more poems that you tried to write but failed. And in those failings, everything you learned about language and craft and stored for the future.

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

I think that I knew from the beginning that the poem needed to be in one block. The one stanza block suggests a seamlessness that helps in weaving the two narrative threads.

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

About a year. I finished the poem sometime in 2003 and it appeared in Poetry in the fall of 2004.

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 probably don’t let poems sit as long as they should. Sometimes, after sending a poem out for some time and having it sent back, I’ll look at it with a colder eye and see what’s not quite right. However, I often work on a single poem so obsessively I usually need some way to let it go so I can go on and work on another poem, or take a nap. Sending it out to journals is a way of letting go.

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

The fact of the poem is the true story of two boys tying a stray dog up in the woods to see how long before the dog starved to death. This story has been fictionalized as the poem warranted. I don’t really believe that poems should “negotiate” between fact and fiction. I tell my students that the only fidelity you have is to the poem, not to the way things happened. The only truth that matters is the large intellectual and emotional truth the poem is trying to discover, and the route the poem takes to get there might often meander a great distance from “the facts.”

Is this a narrative poem?

A lyric-narrative poem. The poem is a narrative. A story is told, characters are present, and the poem moves through time. But the narrative has been lyricized through heightened diction, metaphor, repetition of structure, etc.

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

I was reading Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song and being mesmerized by the incredible title poem of that collection. I wanted to write a poem like Kelly’s, a kind of dark fable. And I certainly discern other ways that Kelly rubbed off on this poem, especially in the pacing and the way the poem uses repetition.

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

When I first begin working on a poem, I don’t think much about audience. I’m interested mostly in the pleasure of the process—the serious play that the act of creation demands. In later drafts, I begin to think of a particular audience—my wife, my friends, my teachers, strangers—and how they might react to parts of the poem that are nebulous or excessive. My imagined audience, then, becomes a corrective to the over-indulgences of early drafts.

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 trade poems with my wife, the poet Nicky Beer. She’s an incredibly intuitive and smart reader of my work. She understands what I’m trying to do in my poems, and she’s honest when something is not working. Every poem I’ve written in the last nine years has her touch on it, and for that I’m extremely grateful. Often people ask us what it’s like to be married to another poet, as if they think we sit around and talk in rhyme, or that we compete with one another in daily sonnet writing contests. Our standard response has become that it feels like cheating. I get to walk down the hall and hand off a new poem to my most trusted reader. I’m spoiled.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Aesthetically, it’s very similar to many of the other poems in The Animal Gospels. I think all of my poems have a similarly robust imagination and attention to language, though the poems I’ve been writing the last four years are much different in both subject matter and tone.

What is American about this poem?

Perhaps the landscape. Given the mythic nature of the poem, I hope that it transcends a particular time and place.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This poem is finished and abandoned.

Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley’s seventeenth collection of poetry, Rolling The Bones, won the 2009 Tampa Review Poetry Prize and will be published by the Univ. of Tampa Press in April 2010. Other recent books include Modern History: Prose Poems 1987-2007 (Tupelo Press, 2008); Flying Backbone: The Georgia O’Keefe Poems (Blue Light Press, 2008); and And the Sea (The Sheep Meadow Press, 2006). Buckley was a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry for 2007-2008, and has been awarded the James Dickey Prize for 2008 from Five Points Magazine. He has received a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing to the former Yugoslavia, four Pushcart Prizes, two awards from the Poetry Society of America, and is the recipient of NEA grants in poetry for 2001 and 1984.


POVERTY

la colera de pobre
tiene dos rios contra muchos mares.
— César Vallejo

Vallejo wrote that with God we are all orphans.
I send $22 a month to a kid in Ecuador
so starvation keeps moving on its bony burro
past his door—no cars, computers,
basketball shoes—not a bottle cap
of hope for the life ahead . . . just enough
to keep hunger shuffling by in a low cloud
of flies. It’s the least I can do, and so I do it.

I have followed the dry length
of Mission Creek to the sea and forgotten to pray
for the creosote, the blue salvia, let alone
for pork bellies, soy bean futures. Listen.
There are 900 thousand Avon Ladies in Brazil.
Billions are spent each year on beauty products
world-wide—28 billion on hair care, 14 on skin
conditioners, despite children digging on the dumps,
selling their kidneys, anything that is briefly theirs.
9 billion a month for war in Iraq, a chicken bone
for foreign aid. I am the prince of small potatoes,
I deny them nothing who come to me beseeching
the crusts I have to give. I have no grounds for complaint,
though deep down, where it’s anyone’s guess,
I covet everything that goes along with the illustrious—
creased pants as I stroll down the glittering boulevard,
a little aperitif beneath Italian pines. But who cares
what I wear, or drink? The rain? No, the rain is something
we share—it devours the beginning and the end.

The old stars tumble out of their bleak rooms like dice—
Box Cars, Snake Eyes, And-The-Horse-You-Rode-In-On . . .
not one metaphorical bread crumb in tow.
Not a single Saludo! from the patronizers
of the working class—Pharaoh Oil, Congress,
or The Commissioner of Baseball—all who will eventually
take the same trolley car to hell, or a slag heap
on the outskirts of Cleveland. I have an ATM card,
AAA Plus card. I can get cash from machines, be towed
20 miles to a service station. Where do I get off penciling in
disillusionment? My bones are as worthless as the next guy’s
against the stars, against the time it takes light to expend
its currency across the cosmic vault. I have what everyone has—
the over-drawn statement of the air, my blood newly rich
with oxygen before the inescapable proscenium of the dark,
my breath going out equally with any atom of weariness
or joy, each one of which is closer to God than I.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I cannot now truly remember when exactly I wrote this. I would guess it began six years ago, though it is the lead off poem in my new book, Rolling The Bones. Eastern Washington University Press accepted the book well over three years ago and missed at least three publication dates before the director was fired and the press collapsed. After the third time the book did not appear, I started sending it around again and got lucky with the Tampa contest. So it’s been sitting in there over three years and I think I had it finished about three years before that? I remember sending it around to contests as I believed in it strongly when it was finally done. One magazine in Missouri that advertises a great deal and runs a yearly contest called to ask if they could publish it cutting all of the poem except the first eight lines. The editor, a poet whose work I have never seen, offered a little homily about accepting constructive criticism from people as experienced as himself. I politely declined. A couple other contests, as they do, offered to publish it as some kind of a runner-up poem, but I again declined and kept sending it out. A journal I’ve admired for years, Five Points, accepted it and two other poems as the James Dickey Prize winner in 2008, and so I was glad that I had held onto it for so long and kept faith.

The poem started as one of my semi-pastoral meditations on the environs of Santa Barbara, CA where I grew up, as many of my poems do. It was two and a half or three pages long, and initially I was struggling for focus, for a theme—I really wanted to move beyond the tangential loss of Eden subtext of earlier work.

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

My best guess is between forty and fifty revisions—90% of my poems receive this much revision. But this poem took more work than most. I think well over a year went by between first and final drafts, and that excludes tweaks a few years later; I am an inveterate reviser.

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?

This poem, gratefully, is the work—as they say in art history—of “later hands.” I have always relied on a couple long time poet friends for criticism and suggestions. I would never think of sending out anything that did not have their eyes on it first, a lesson I learned very early on from my first teacher Glover Davis, who was a rigorous critic. Every writer needs a friend with a shit-detector, is a statement often attributed to Hemingway. Amen. I have friends who write more quickly than I, Gary Soto for instance, who works quickly in two or three drafts. Still Soto always comes to me or Jon Veinberg for critical input before anything goes in a book. And I remember Bill Matthews telling me that if he didn’t have it in a few drafts, he tossed it and went on, but none of us should judge ourselves against Bill, who was brilliant and a major talent. So “Poverty” saw eight or ten revisions—which for me equals a first draft—and then was sent to my main reader, Gary Young, and also to Veinberg who graciously responds to my poems. It came back and was cut down to about two pages. Usually then I hit it a dozen or more times after my friends have worked it over. But I was still not satisfied with the poem. Besides the obvious objective help you receive from friends re what is working and what is not, what to cut, and perhaps a gift now and then about what you might add, you also benefit from time, just staying away from the poem for a while. So when I revised some more and looked at it again, I could see that there were two voices at odds in the poem, and look, I’d done all this work, troubled my friends to give up their time to help me out; where to go with it now? But at least I was on to myself and went through the poem with a yellow highlighter marking about half of it, the portions that I suspected were more usual, softer, throat-clearing poeticisms before I got down the meat of the project. I knew who would tell me with no reservation to cut those parts, or not, Philip Levine. Phil has helped me with three or four poems in thirty years. I am careful not to bother him too much as so many do and I was never really ever a student of his. He once went through an entire book ms. for me, but that was at Bread Loaf and I was a Fellow that year and it was the job of senior staff to respond to so many mss. from Fellows. But otherwise, I tried to save up my requests re specific poems, as Phil was generous to me and so many in many other ways. But I knew this one needed his no-nonsense take. And sure enough he got right back to me and crossed out almost all the lines I had highlighted, but said I needed to keep a couple at the end I was marking for the wreckers ball. And, he gave me a new last line, which I cannot remember now, but it was an improvement. We had cut the pastoral voice, and were sticking with the direct and angry voice, the more political texture, something I realized I was picking up from reading so much Vallejo. That is where the poems turned in the road and made its way. I discovered, looking over recent work, that this angrier voice was popping up in a few poems and that those poems had more grit, engagement and honesty. I found I was writing more political poems in my 50s than I had in my 20s and 30s. I went with it. I revised and sent that revision back to Phil. He approved, added a few bits of house-keeping about the edges, and then re-wrote the final line again—a 2nd new finishing line, and I cannot now remember if it was a take-off on the earlier one he had offered and if either of them had any substantive connection to my original ending line, but I knew enough to appreciate a gift when I was given one, and so the poem owes a huge debt to him. He said that any time I have a poem this good, feel free to send it to him for help. Hmmm . . . how was I going to judge that? Wouldn’t that be arrogant? All I knew was that that particular poem needed rigorous cutting and help if it was going to make it and I knew no one better than Phil to help, and he did. I have not sent him a poem since. I send everything, absolutely everything, through Gary Young who is a marvelous editor as well as poet.

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

One quote I always repeat to my workshops is the old Thomas Edison quote about inventing—it’s 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. The only time I get poems quickly, what you might call via inspiration, is in dreams. Once every two or three years, I will wake up in the middle of the night with a poem rising through the mudflats of my subconscious. I make myself get up and go to the study, turn a light on and write it down, experience teaching me that I will never remember the idea or the lines by morning. When this happens, all too rarely, I get the poem in ten to fifteen drafts.

I think the inspiration and echo of Vallejo’s poems helped me “receive” perhaps four or five lines in the poem and those lines dictated the rest via what to cut, what to reinforce. One gift came to me driving in the car, listening to the news station. At the end of the half hour, this station often tries to come up with some interesting but often useless bits of news, what have been labeled “factoids,” often some silly or humorous items occurring around the country. That day, they had some statistics on the use and sale of beauty products in Brazil and world-wide; they were so amazing that I pulled over and wrote them down, almost immediately realizing that that kind of thing was what the poem—then still in drafts—needed to kick it hard into a serious direction.

The sweat and tears aspect I’ve already addressed above.

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

No, there was no conscious employment of technique, prosody, inherited forms or their elements. Sometimes it is profitable to set yourself such an assignment, or decide upon a particular discipline that might reign in an unruly poem. For many years in my 20s I was a tennis pro. I never made it to Wimbledon; I was a teaching pro but I played a number of tournaments. What you rely on after years of practice is muscle memory and after thirty years of writing, or more, I rely on a poetic muscle memory and each poem most often discovers its form from the long echoes of all the other poetry I have read and written. This poem arrived in its final form just as I have said, but cutting and cutting and revising and revising toward that controlling voice and vision I absorbed from Vallejo—and from the gracious help of friends as I have noted.

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

Years, as I have said. I held onto it. The fact that Phil believed in it gave me great support and helped me turn down lesser offers at publication until Five Points selected it. Probably there was a three year gap.

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

I have no rules regarding this. I do not let a poem sit, though that is probably a very good idea for us all. But by the time I have written a dozen drafts, my friends have gone over it with a ruthless slash and burn, and I write another twenty or so drafts, a lot of time goes by, and that is one kind of “sitting.” What I know is never to congratulate myself about a poem, especially when it comes, as one rarely does, quickly. The one or two times I have sent a poem out without first passing it by Gary Young and/or Veinberg I have looked like a fool, so I do not do it.

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

Well of course, as I have mentioned, there are facts in the poem re Brazil and beauty care products, the money I send monthly to a children’s organization for South America; I have a AAA card. And it is a poem of self examination as much as anything else. But as political and angry as it is, it is a work of the imagination, it is orchestrated from fact and memory, it has, forgive me, some kind of a vision. I love what Picasso said to a critic of his abstract paintings, something to the effect—We all know art is not the truth; art is a lie that helps us realize the truth. I’ll go with that.

Is this a narrative poem?

No, this is not a narrative poem, that seems pretty obvious to me. A lyric, meditative rant maybe, but there is no story being told.

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?

Well Yes and No. I do not think you can say all anything is such and such. That never works for me. Take James Tate for example, a poet whose work I have never felt much affinity for—we’re on different ends of the poetic spectrum, not that my views would ever be of interest to him. But what do you say then about his poem “Good Time Jesus”? It’s glib, irreverent, and yet and yet it has a great imaginative moment and has something to say. It’s not about right or wrong, and doesn’t engage the ethics or the idea of justice. But it’s a good poem.

Still, I have found that most poetry of some humanity and meaning, does engage the ideas you mention. Go back to the ancient Aztecs—one of the main things that makes their poetry (good contemporary translations by Peter Everwine and Stephen Berg) memorable and viable still to day is their confrontation of mortality and the human condition addressing and questioning God/the gods. I have a line in a poem that sounds a bit like a tautology, “If it’s going to mean something / it had better mean something.” It’s a bit Yogi Berra now I come to think of it . . . but the point is meaning, the attempt to understand our lives vis-à-vis an afterlife or the absence of same. The arbitrary orchestration of language and sounds is of little use as I see it. I think truth and beauty still obtain despite theorists running around saying there is no meaning and writers do not know what they are doing. As Vallejo wrote:

A cripple walks by arm in arm with a child.
After that I’m going to read André Breton?

Vallejo knew a life of poverty, grinding physical poverty. This poem hopes to point out on a larger scale the spiritual poverty in the U.S. and in the world, in individuals, as well as the more obvious ills of physical poverty. It hopes to point toward the responsibility we all must bear.

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

I was reading a lot of César Vallejo; I was in fact working on editing an anthology, Homage to Vallejo, for Greenhouse Review Press, a book that collected poems by poets writing in English who had written poems directly influenced by Vallejo and his poems.

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

Nothing ideal. I hope to write clearly enough to be understood and perhaps appreciated by people who are interested in reading poetry.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

“Poverty” has more of an edge. It is more direct, declarative, political. It is not as lyric as it is conscious. A number of new poems take up this voice and view and mix in with the more meditative texture of the other work.

What is American about this poem?

Let’s say greed, that is pretty American. The reaction to the political conservative view that you can substitute money for ethics and morality, for your responsibility to the planet and to society at large.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

With a lot of work and a great deal of help this poem was finished.

Maggie Anderson

Maggie Anderson is the author of four books of poetry, including Windfall: New and Selected Poems, A Space Filled with Moving, and Cold Comfort, all from University of Pittsburgh Press. She has edited several thematic anthologies, including A Gathering of Poets, a collection of poems read at the 20th anniversary commemoration of the shootings at Kent State University in 1970, as well as Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School and After the Bell: Contemporary American Prose about School. Her awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, fellowships from the Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts, and the Ohioana Library Award for contributions to the literary arts in Ohio. The founding director of the Wick Poetry Center, Anderson is Professor Emerita of English at Kent State University. She is a member of the graduate faculty of the Northeast Ohio MFA in creative writing and edits the Wick Poetry Series of the Kent State University Press.


LONG STORY

To speak in a flat voice
Is all that I can do.
—James Wright, “Speak”

I need to tell you that I live in a small town
in West Virginia you would not know about.
It is one of the places I think of as home.
When I go for a walk, I take my basset hound
whose sad eyes and ungainliness always draw
a crowd of children. She tolerates anything
that seems to be affection, so she lets the kids
put scarves and ski caps on her head
until she starts to resemble the women who have to dress
from rummage sales in poverty’s mismatched polyester.

The dog and I trail the creek bank with the kids,
past clapboard row houses with Christmas seals
pasted to the windows as a decoration.
Inside, television glows around the vinyl chairs
and curled linoleum, and we watch someone old
perambulating to the kitchen on a shiny walker.
Up the hill in town, two stores have been
boarded up beside the youth center and miners
with amputated limbs are loitering outside
the Heart and Hand. They wear Cat diesel caps
and spit into the street. The wind
carries on, whining through the alleys,
rustling down the sidewalks, agitating
leaves, and circling the courthouse steps
past the toothless Field sisters who lean
against the flagpole holding paper bags
of chestnuts they bring to town to sell.

History is one long story of what happened to us,
and its rhythms are local dialect and anecdote.
In West Virginia a good story takes awhile,
and if it has people in it, you have to swear
that it is true. I tell the kids the one about
my Uncle Craig who saw the mountain move
so quickly and so certainly it made the sun
stand in a different aspect to his little town
until it rearranged itself and settled down again.
This was his favorite story. When he got old,
he mixed it up with baseball games, his shift boss
pushing scabs through a picket line, the Masons
in white aprons at a funeral, but he remembered
everything that ever happened, and he knew how far
he lived from anywhere you would have heard of.

Anything that happens here has a lot of versions,
how to get from here to Logan twenty different ways.
The kids tell me convoluted country stories
full of snuff and bracken, about how long
they sat quiet in the deer blind with their fathers
waiting for the ten-point buck that got away.
They like to talk about the weather,
how the wind we’re walking in means rain,
how the flood pushed cattle fifteen miles downriver.

These kids know mines like they know hound dogs
and how the sirens blow when something’s wrong.
They know the blast, and the stories, how
the grown-ups drop whatever they are doing
to get out there. Story is shaped
by sound, and it structures what we know.
They told me this, and three of them
swore it was true, so I’ll tell you
even though I know you do not know
this place, or how tight and dark the hills
pull in around the river and the railroad.

I’ll say it as the children spoke it,
in the flat voice of my people:
down in Boone County, they sealed up
forty miners in a fire. The men who had come
to help tried and tried to get down to them,
but it was a big fire and there was danger,
so they had to turn around
and shovel them back in. All night long
they stood outside with useless picks and axes
in their hands, just staring at the drift mouth.
Here’s the thing: what the sound must have been,
all those fire trucks and ambulances, the sirens,
and the women crying and screaming out
the names of their buried ones, who must have
called back up to them from deep inside
the burning mountain, right up to the end.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

“Long Story” was written over a period of ten years, beginning in the early 1980s and completed in its published form in 1992.

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

This poem underwent many, many, many versions over the decade of its composition. It took longer to come to completion than any other poem I have written so far.

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

I don’t know if I believe in “inspiration,” but I do believe in “gifts” that can come after long devotion. “Long Story” (which was, in fact, a very “long” story) is the result of persistence, devotion, and a sustaining hope that it was important to write and that it would, eventually, come around to its best shape.

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

The poem is a narrative, which is obvious from the title. I used a casual “I do this/I do that” voice for the first part of the poem and then created a shift in both diction and rhythm toward the end to embody a larger, angrier, stronger voice to tell the story of the trapped miners.

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

One year. It was never published in a journal but was published in my book, A Space Filled with Moving (Pitt, 1992).

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

I don’t have any particular rules about this, but in general I wait around six months after I think a poem is “finished” before I will send it out for publication. This longer “wait time” suits my temperament, but it also means that I both write and publish very slowly.

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

The facts of “Long Story” are generally true to both personal and social and political history. I do take walks with children; I did have a Basset Hound; I did have an Uncle Craig who was as I present him here. Also, the mine accidents mentioned in the poem are all real historical events, but for the purposes of the impact of the poem I have combined facts from several different disasters into one. The poem is fact; the arrangement of details is made to serve the art of the poem: “Story is shaped by sound, and it structures what we know,” as the poem says.

Is this a narrative poem?

See above.

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

I was reading history of the West Virginia coal mining industry and, as the epigraph would indicate, I was reading the poems of James Wright.

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

Not generally. For this poem, I address an imaginary audience that knows nothing of this place that, to me, is home. The audience needs to be instructed about the place and the poem undertakes that task. I also, of course, imagine the readers to be people from the region who will understand the story and the voice that tells it.

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

Yes. I have several individuals – other poets – with whom I have shared my work in progress for most of my writing life – thirty or more years. I value them enormously.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It is more narrative than many of my poems, somewhat longer, but it concerns matters I have dealt with in many other poems and its shape is a common one for me.

What is American about this poem?

“Long Story” documents the history of a particular region of the United States, its tragic history, its humor, and its “flat voice.”

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Definitely, finished.

Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes' most recent poetry collection, Wind in a Box, was named one of the best 100 books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. His honors include three Best American Poetry selections, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Poems in Lighthead (Penguin 2010), his forthcoming fourth collection, have appeared in journals such as the American Poetry Review, Poetry, and the New Yorker. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives with his family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.


ROOTS

My parents would have had me believe
there was no such thing as race
there in the wild backyard, our knees black
with store-bought grass and dirt,
black as the soil of pastures or of orchards
grown above graves. We clawed free
the stones and filled their beds with soil
and covered the soil with sod
as if we owned the earth.
We worked into the edge of darkness
and rose in the edge of darkness
until everything came from the dirt.
We clawed free the moss and brambles,
the colonies of crab-weed, the thorns
patrolling stems and I liked it then:
the mute duty that tightened my parents’
backs as if they meant to work
the devil from his den. Rock and spore
and scraps of leaf; wild bouquets withered
in bags by the road, cast from the ground
we broke. We scrubbed the patio,
we raked the cross hatch of pine needles,
we soaked the ant-cathedrals in gas.
I found an axe blade beneath an untamed hedge,
its too dull to sever vine and half expected
to find a jawbone scabbed with mud,
because no one told me what happened
to the whites who’d owned the house.
No one spoke of the color that curled
around our tools or of the neighbors
who knew our name before we knew theirs.
Sometimes they were almost visible,
clean as fence posts in porch light;
their houses burning with wonder,
their hammocks drunk with wind.
When I dreamed, I dreamed of them
and believed they dreamed of us
and believed we were made of dirt or shadows:
something not held or given, irredeemable, inexact,
all of us asking what it means to be black . . .
I have never wanted another life, but I know the story
of pursuit: the dream of a gate standing open,
a grill and folding chairs, a new yard boxed with light.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

“How a poem starts” is an interesting question. Can I say it began with the experience—with working in the yard with my family as an adolescent? Sometimes a poem is composed in a single, specific moment, but more often my poems are composed bit by bit with no particular linearity.

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

Lots of revisions… several years of revisions. Can’t say exactly for reasons I stated above… Time. I love when the writing happens outside of Time.

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, but that has nothing to do with actually making something worthwhile. (I’ve written lots of “inspired” slop.) The poem was the result of sweat and tears because it was based on an actual experience/memory. For me it’s harder to write about a (mostly) real experience than something that’s (mostly) imagined.

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

Who can say? Maybe this is related to its publication. I probably would have continued changing/revising it until it was published.

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

I can’t recall. Probably a few months.

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

How long the poem sits varies with every poem. I do what I can to forget about the publication process while I’m writing. Sending work out happens usually when I’m producing less.

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

The poem is rooted in fact and experience. But if you think of metaphor as a means to enlarge experience, any liberties the poem takes with fact grow out of metaphor. I’m reluctant to call any part of fiction. Figurative, but not fiction.

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?

Well, I’m always reading and rereading multiple books. Larry Levis is a constant influence.

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

No… maybe my wife.

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 can’t recall. I send poems to friends from time to time, but my most “rigorous readers” don’t usually see the poems until they’re part of a manuscript.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I like to pretend they’re all different. Though it may be truer to say they’re all the same.

What is American about this poem?

Its subject.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Abandoned though there’s no such thing as abandonment when the writing happens outside of time. They don’t start; they don’t end…

Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond’s collections of poetry include Peal (Etruscan Press, 2009), Blind Rain (Finalist, TIL Best Book of Poetry Prize, LSU, 2008), Cinder (Finalist, TIL Best Book of Poetry Prize, Etruscan Press, 2003), The Throats of Narcissus (University of Arkansas, 2001), Radiography (TIL Best Book of Poetry Award, BOA Editions, 1997), The Anteroom of Paradise (Colladay Award, QRL, 1991), and Independence Days (R. Gross Award, Woodley Press, 1990). His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Raritan, The New Republic, The Virginia Quarterly, Poetry, and many other journals, and he has received numerous honors including fellowships from the NEA, Texas Commission on the Arts, and other organizations. Presently he is Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and Poetry Editor for American Literary Review.


WAKE

One day now since my father last tried to speak,
since the outer provinces of his body shut
down like small cities when the power goes,
just the enormity of starlight to guide them
on their cold journey into dawn. I am writing
at the edge of the other half of life, the part
without my father in it; I feel the strange

sure pull of the earth I walk here,
the polish of the grass, the distance between me
and my students who look up and wait
for my first questions, knowing so little
of my life, just as I know so little of theirs,
only a poem at a time to hold us together
like children before a fire in the woods.

These months I have heard him steadily
fading in my telephone, his breath gone
short, just the occasional brush of wind
and language, here and there an angry stutter
and release, the little sighs that resign themselves
to his own deep and smoldering basin,
his own coastal reaches tossing in their tides.

The living too leave their ghosts behind.
And his, clearly, always the first to rise.
Somewhere a fork beats a metal bowl;
a strip of bacon crackles like paper at Christmas.
These days moving from room to room
I feel the shadow of this house begin
to lengthen, to feed the other pools of dark.

It’s a mystery still, how vast the valley
inside a body. Blood. It’s what you hear
when you cover your ears, that far surf
where life first sprouted its legs and crawled
ashore to dry its tail in the morning sun.
It’s what sparks beneath a nurse’s mercy,
a red gem brightening in a sting of air.

It’s what calls you to a father’s ragged breathing.
Somewhere a lung fills with water.
Somewhere a great and weary muscle
beats the tender drum of the sky.
It’s the father who knocks on the door
at daybreak, the knock that says, it’s time
son, rise and shine, it’s time to go, it’s time.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

It was composed in February of 2003, the night my father died. I was in Texas at the time while my father was in California. I worked all night on it, and in the morning when it was pretty much finished I got the phone call from my brother telling me the news. Then I fell asleep.

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

Not many revisions. Some tightening here and there. There was another stanza which Terry Hummer at the Georgia Review encouraged me to cut. I think that helped the poem considerably.

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

Sure, I believe in inspiration, though I’m also a big believer that the imagination need not vanish once our critical intelligence becomes engaged. It’s possible to imagine critically, though it remains a mystery how this happens. In any case I remain open to the notion that there is an integrity to our unconscious, a wisdom that is often a couple steps ahead of the critical mind. With this poem, I wrote under the force of an immense weight. I know the results are not often good when this happens. Often we need distance. But I also think that emotional turmoil sometimes overtakes the mind in strange and meaningful ways. Sometimes hard times give us a waking life of dreams. The underworld appears. I don’t really care much if some people think that this process of writing about hardship exploits suffering selfishly in the cause of art. Art redeems us, redeems the moment, in part because it transfigures suffering, and of course there is something self-preserving in that. We give it form and so bear loving testament even as we declare ourselves, in some humanizing measure, free.

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

I did use the sense of breathing in the line and stanza, a somewhat elusive musical intuition, to propel me, but other than that I was pretty swept up in discovering what the moment had to teach me. This said, technique is something I am constantly working on, I suppose, even when I am not consciously thinking of it as technique—that is, part of my enthusiasm and reverence is, and must be, for the word and its capacity to surprise meaningfully and musically. A poet’s technique properly understood is no different from that of a musician’s or a carpenter’s. It makes of our heightened intimacy with our medium a means to channel vital energies which in turn reinvent that medium. We bring mind to matter. All the poetry we have written in the past, all the close reading we do, hopefully prepares us for the moment of emotional urgency when it comes, so we do not relax into the authority of the situation we are in, so that we seize the opportunity to remake the world as both an imaginative and an authenticated construct.

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

Not too long. I think I sent it out fairly soon after I wrote it, and soon after it got accepted at Georgia Review.

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

I am horrible at being patient, though I’ve gotten a bit better lately. I don’t advise anyone to be as impetuous as I am when it comes to sending out work. The result is that I’ve sent a lot of bad, unfinished poetry across the desks of editors. Luckily for everyone involved most of it gets rejected, though I feel bad for wasting the time of editors. I am fortunate that by the time my books are finished, poems have been around for a long time, a year or more, so I am more likely to see them clearly.

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

This poem is clearly rooted in factual experience, though I hope it offers some emotional and imaginative resistance to the literal. That tends to be what I aim for.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes and no. I often feel trapped in a poem that is too flatly narrative. I crave openings, speculations, lyrical intensity, gestures that complicate a tidy and obvious chronology. At the same time, narrative constitutes a powerful way of authenticating a poem, provided the language and consciousness of the writer remain animating forces of inwardness and surprise.

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

No, I don’t remember. Alas.

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

No, not really. I feel lucky to have any readers at all, though I’m not immune to the human greed for more. My ideal reader is not any one kind of reader, necessarily, though I think the poem has a better chance of succeeding if I write for someone like myself only smarter. I say “someone like myself” since I’m not sure I can do otherwise without cutting myself off from whatever imaginative resources and instincts might deepen the poem at the level of feeling and idea.

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?

Basically I show my work to my wife. She responds very honestly and is immeasurably helpful.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’m not sure. It is written is one of my more lucid modes, I guess.

What is American about this poem?

I’m not sure about this either. I don’t identify very strongly with being American, though I unmistakably am in ways that are invisible to me. I don’t doubt that.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Abandoned, as with all my poems.

Rodney Jones

Rodney Jones, born in Alabama, is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He has published eight books of poetry, including Salvation Blues (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Among his many honors, Jones was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award, and a Harper Lee Award.



GROUND SENSE

Because I have known many women
Who are dead, I try to think of fields
As holy places. Whether we plow them

Or let them to weeds and sunlight,
Those are the best places for grief,
If only that they perform the peace

We come to, the feeling without fingers,
The hearing without ears, the seeing
Without eyes. Isn’t heaven just this

Unbearable presence under leaves?
I had thought so. I had believed
At times in a meadow and at other

Times in a wood where we’d emerge
No longer ourselves, but reduced
To many small things that we could

Not presume to know, except as my
Friend’s wife begins to disappear,
He feels no solvent in all the earth,

And me, far off, still amateur at grief.
Walking the creek behind the house,
I cross to the old homeplace, find

A scattering of chimney rocks, the
Seeds my grandmother watered, the
Human lifetime of middle-aged trees.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The first draft that I have found is from a journal that I was keeping in 1986, but that does not much resemble the poem that was published ten years later.

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

I did not count the drafts. I know that I went through at least a hundred sheets of paper and looked at the poem on many separate occasions over a period of eight or nine years as the thought behind the poem mutated. Like many of my poems, “Ground Sense” came from a long meditation. As for the poem that was eventually published, it went through only a few drafts. Arriving at those drafts constituted the difficulty.

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

Inspiration, yes. I do not believe that anything good will be forced by work alone, and some days, as I work, something rises up that seems like revelation, actual insight, passion, the new thing, or, more frequently, part of a new thing. In poems like “Ground Sense,” the grail, the quality I’m after is a fresh and beautiful articulation of an old idea.

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

I was not happy with any of the previous forms because they did not seem to realize the intuition. Frequently, when I’m unhappy with some technical aspect of a poem, it’s a signal that voice or tone is false. It’s less the revision of a line than a revision of voice that is necessary, and perhaps sometimes, as Rilke put it in another context, “You must change your life.”

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

Rod Smith printed it in Shenandoah, and it must have been a year or more after the poem was finished.

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 ideal would be never to send anything out as long as there remains any doubt about what the poem is doing, but, in practice, I find that I often send things out before they are finished and I always regret it, especially if they are published or rejected.

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

Even in a work as inventive as Borges’ “The Circular Ruin,” fiction depends on fact. The mind stirs a weird brew. This poem postulates a vision of an afterlife that resembles the natural processes as opposed to the more conventional imaginative furniture; this is ground sense, literally and figuratively, and it is derived from actual places and people though I don’t draw a map or present a detailed biographical sketch.

Is this a narrative poem?

No, though a number of narratives inform it. If a narrative is a stream, this is a lake, a gathering of the trickling of many narratives.

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

I especially remember admiring W.S. Merwin’s Travels, which seems to me perhaps his strongest book, but I read hundreds of poets during the time I was working on this poem. I think there was less a singular influence than multiple influences: maybe bits of the thirteenth chapter of Ecclesiastes and shards of Wallace Stevens and William Stafford, maybe a sprinkling of Thoreau and Emerson.

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

Publishers always ask that question, and it’s not rhetorical. They want to find a market. While I think about the ideal reader a great deal, and it’s an interesting thought, it’s not a thought that necessarily helps me to write poems. Sometimes I write a poem for one person. Sometimes I write a poem to a stick or a bush. I do not want to beg, or to give orders, or to simply entertain, but I have done all those things, I will do them again. A poem speaks to one person or to no one.

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?

In this case, no one saw any version but the finished one. Over the years, many poets have read my book manuscripts in earlier drafts and offered good and often contrasting suggestions, most notably, Peter Davison, who was my editor for many years. Donald Justice offered invaluable criticism on The Unborn, my second book, and Philip Levine helped me with Elegy for the Southern Drawl. More recently, Michael Collier has been a wonderful reader.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Though I am a creature of habit, it seems to me that all true poems differ from each other—though it may just be a matter of the same mushrooms growing out of different logs.

What is American about this poem?

Transcendental stuff probably.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I won’t take any of it back or add to it, so, from my point of view, it’s history.

Fady Joudah

Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic won the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 2007. His translations of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry are collected in The Butterfly’s Burden (Copper Canyon Press) and, most recently, If I Were Another, a collection of Darwish’s lyric epics (FSG, 2009). Joudah is a physician in Houston, TX, and was a field member of Doctors Without Borders in 2002, and 2005.

ATLAS

The end of the road is a beautiful mirage:

White jeeps with mottos, white

And blue tarps where the dust gnaws

At your nostrils like a locust cloud

Or a helicopter thrashing the earth,

Wheat grains peppering the sky.

For now

Let me tell you a fable:

Why the road is lunar

Goes back to the days when strangers

Sealed a bid from the despot to build

The only path that courses through

The desert of the people.

The tyrant secretly sent

His men to mix hand grenades

With asphalt and gravel,

Then hid the button

That would detonate the road.

These are villages and these are trees

A thousand years old,

Or the souls of trees,

Their high branches axed and dangled

Like lynched men flanking the wadis,

Closer now to a camel’s neck

And paradoxical chew.

And the villages:

Children packed in a hut

Then burned or hung on bayonets,

Truck tires

Anchoring acacia limbs as checkpoints.

And only animals return:

The monkeys dash to the road’s edge and back

Into the alleyways,

And by a doorstep a hawk dives

And snatches a serpent ― your eyes

Twitch in saccades and staccatos:

This blue crested hoopoe is whizzing ahead of us

From bough to bough,

The hummingbird wings

Like fighter jets

Refueling in midair.

If you believe the hoopoe

Is good omen,

The driver says,

Then you are one of us.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I can’t remember now. Its composition took a while because of the complexity I felt the narrative images demanded; the risk of being sensational and moralizing is there. But it was finished in 2007 a year or so after my last field mission with Doctors Without Borders. It was the result of certain accumulation of images and experiences that would not go away.

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

Several revisions happened over a year or eighteen months perhaps. There is an earlier version in Bat City Review. But the revisions are not significantly different from the final version. Two main issues I recall: the opening stanza seemed to want constant editing of the tone, a prelude of images, a difficult opening of the book; and some deletions here and there in the body of the poem, to reduce unnecessary distraction or avoid excessive drama. The latter was easier to manage.

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

Inspiration is an inexplicable, mysterious gathering of a being’s sensibilities as one relates them to experiences, and how those experiences mingle with memory at first encounter or in recurrence. Nothing is “received” in that the separation of the external from the internal is not necessarily as demarcated as we’d like to believe. The illusion of “arrival” or “inevitability” serves to distract the mind into some ancient belief of “revelation.” To be ready for what may come, to “listen,” to allow what overflows to become “you” and “I,” these are, to my mind, different things than to “receive.” The external is equally within.

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

The juxtaposition of images into distilled narratives, fabular or otherwise, that offer to the mind several syntactical possibilities with which to proceed to the poem’s end: that is the only technique I can think of in this poem.

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 am either impatient or indifferent about this. Each time I “release” a poem or manuscript out there, I am able to edit it better, because for a brief while it is truly no longer mine. Still, some poems have to wait a long time before I think they are ready for this dispossession and repossession process.

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

Mahmoud Darwish says in one of his poems “the real is the certain imaginary.” Why would the negotiation process here, as you call it, be any different? Is there really much difference between the “confessional” and the “witness” outside our fascination with nomenclature and certainties?

Is this a narrative poem?

I have mentioned “narrative” above already, but I am not sure what you mean by it. If by narrative one means the presence of chronology then every poem is narrative, even in the sense of absenting time, as in some lyric mystic poems, for example. Are dramatic monologues narrative or lyric? If by narrative one means the element of story and voice, then which poem does not have these traits, to one degree or another: a story of the self, a voice for a self? (“Un-self me” says Nietzsche). I don’t mean all poetry is narrative. I mean to say that an essence of poetry is Time. I don’t understand the importance in the distinction.

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 think it is tempting to read the poem this way, but I do not see it this way. The poem’s final lines are about inclusion and not exclusion, which often ethics and justice connote. Justice has its own slippery slope: vengeance. Ethics are easily corrupted by their sense of power. If the poem provokes these questions or obsessions, then the poem has done well aesthetically, I think. If it is “morally” clear, however, and strikes a certainty for so many readers, it has failed, or the reader has failed. I think you are right in introducing the word “specter.”

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

The influences are many, of course. But for this poem they are not specific, cannot be pinned down, not “immediate” in that sense of cause and effect; perhaps because the poem was completed over a longer period?

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

Sometimes “you are one of us,” other times it is just me.

What is American about this poem?

Why should it be one thing and not another, that is American or not?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

A finished thing is abandoned. But many poets return to rewrite certain poems (if by that one means themes or crises or visions) over and over again, because one could not write them well (enough) to begin with. Is “Atlas” such poem for me? I don’t know.