Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson’s four books of poetry, Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997), Pinion, An Elegy (2002), Late Wife (2005), and Figure Studies (2008), were published as part of Louisiana State University Press’s signature series, Southern Messenger Poets, edited by Dave Smith. Late Wife won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, New England Review, and other journals. An advisory and contributing editor for Shenandoah, Emerson has been awarded individual artist’s fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and was also a Witter Bynner fellow through the Library of Congress. She was awarded the 2008 Donald Justice Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Currently serving as Poet Laureate of Virginia, she is Professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. For more information, please visit her website.


PHOTOGRAPHER

It began with the first baby, the house
disappearing threshold by threshold, rooms

milky above the floor only her heel,
the ball of her foot perceived. The one thing real

was the crying; it had a low ceiling
she ducked beneath—but unscalable walls.

Then she found with the second child
a safer room in the camera obscura, handheld,

her eye to them a petaled aperture,
her voice inside the darkcloth muffled

as when they first learned it. Here, too, she steadied,
stilled them in black and white, grayscaled the beestung

eye, the urine-wet bedsheet, vomit, pox,
pout, fever, measles, stitches fresh-black,

bloody nose—the expected shared mishap
and redundant disease. In the evenings

while they slept, she developed the day's film
or printed in the quiet darkroom, their images

under the enlarger, awash in the stopbath,
or hanging from the line to dry. Sometimes

she manipulated their nakedness, blonde hair
and bodies dodged whiter in a mountain stream

she burned dark, thick as crude oil or tar. The children's
expressions fixed in remedial reversals,

she sleeved and catalogued them, her desire,
after all, not so different from any other mother's.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I believe I began drafting this poem in early 2007 or thereabouts. I was working on a book (Figure Studies, LSU Press 2008) that I knew would include a lyric sequence featuring girls in an imagined boarding school as well as poems about women in isolation, refusing to “school”—a hoarder, a cat lady, an elevator operator among them. The photographer I conceived as being isolated or isolating herself in the camera, or behind it, and in this way she survives the implied chaos of her children.

My ex-husband is a fantastic black and white documentary photographer, so I lived around the equipment and observed his creative process for twenty years. I never learned to take a decent photograph, but I was always fascinated with the medium. I adore the work of Edward Weston, Annie Leibovitz, Constantine Manos, Richard Avedon (particularly In the American West), Sally Mann, and Diane Arbus. I am in awe of the photographer who captures the unexpected, the moment, object—or the face that might appear ugly or even freakish to many, but who makes, frames, and renders such realties into powerful, beautiful works of art.

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

I don’t really remember, though I typically revise a lot, as many as fifty revisions if you count the smaller repairs toward the end of the process. My memory is that I stewed over the idea for years, actually, but when I committed to drafting the poem, it went fairly quickly, a week or so.

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 think most of inspiration simply comes about by never being bored, by paying attention to what’s going on around you. And I have to admit that I don’t see a big difference in the something “received” and the “sweat and tears” since I do not despise all those revisions. Once I am enthralled in the writing, there’s profound joy in that particular loss of self in the work.

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

I had settled on couplets for the girls’ school sequence, so that choice impacted how I envisioned the form of everything else. Because I have tended in the last couple of books to think in sequences, once I write a poem or two toward it, the sequence then determines the form of the remaining poems.

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

The poem was published just a few months after I finished it, appearing in November 2007 in The Cortland Review, an on-line journal, and the issue was guest-edited by R. T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah.

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 tended to wait a little bit, a couple of months or longer, to make sure I am still committed to a “final” version. I know, though, that I am not alone in revising poems that have already appeared in magazines before they go in a book.

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

The photographer, like a lot of the figures in this book, is from my imagination, though she was inspired, the way all characters are, by a variety of people I have known or known about, as well as by the directions the book eventually wanted to take. I am very loyal, however, to the fact of photography—and made sure that I understood the technology thoroughly in order to make the character (and the extended metaphor) believable even as she is unique and surprising.

Is this a narrative poem?

The poem to my eye and ear has an implied narrative, but that’s not the marrow of the poem. The lyric impulse lies for me in how the woman uses photography to control, to artistically manipulate chaos.

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?

Not all, but a lot of what I consider good poetry grapples with some emotion or situation of urgent or persistent importance—and many such poems will be engaged with morality on some level.

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

I was re-reading all of Emily Dickinson at the time I was writing this book. Research and an immersion in my poetic “obsessions” will lead me to read more than poetry, so I was also re-reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography, as well as other articles about the history of photography.

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

I try hard not to think about a reader or audience when writing. Because my work has had a surface level clarity, I like to think I can attract the kind of smart fiction reader not living in the academy, one who enjoys the art in carefully crafted language and will look for the layers in meaning.

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?

Oh yes! I talk about my ideas and show drafts to my husband (not much help because he likes everything I write), my mentor, poet Betty Adcock, as well as poet friends Rod Smith, Sarah Kennedy, Catherine MacDonald, and David Wojahn.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

The book itself is different in its woman-centered focus, as well as its avoidance of much narrative. I also disallowed myself the first person singular in the entire collection, an attractive decision for me since my third book Late Wife is so intensely personal.

What is American about this poem?

I’m not sure the poem is particularly American, unless Americans are more photography obsessed than any other nationalities. Sontag writes about the anxiety she believes lies in the obsession to be behind a lens and record everything instead of living the moment. My photographer would rather record the children, manipulate the images and save them as a defense against actually interacting with the human beings she has “created.”

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

A little of both, I guess. I loved being able to use so much of the vocabulary of photography—and to be able to focus on the room/body/camera interstices. I struggled with the ending—but wanted to close on the idea that while what she chooses to photograph might depart from the typical images most mothers choose to shoot, in the end, the difference is not so great.

She also dovetailed nicely with the other poems about women in solitude, since her solitude lies in the act of photographing, developing, and printing.

She did not, however, satisfy my ongoing interest in the metaphoric possibilities of photography in my poetry, and I continue to be drawn to the medium—photography’s vocabulary, technology, and history. I have already drafted several poems since “The Photographer” that touch on photography or respond to a photograph for my next book, still in progress.

J. Michael Martinez

J. Michael Martinez’s work has appeared in Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, on NPR, and most recently in Quarterly West, Eleven Eleven, Copper Nickel, and Parthenon West. He is the recipient of the 2006 Five Fingers Review Poetry Prize. His first collection of poetry, Heredities (2010, Louisiana State University Press), was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award. For more information, please visit J. Michael’s website.


HEREDITIES (I) ETYMOLOGY

When she was seven, my grandmother suffered from fever and swollen glands. The doctors believed her tonsils were inflamed, that she needed surgery. Instead, she went to a curandera. The curandera divined that a jealous relative had cast a curse on her and, now, her language of kindness was bound to her throat, the unspoken swelling her glands.

As a child my grandmother spoke to santitos with a voice like a chestnut: ruddy and warm, seeds dropping from her mouth. The santitos would take her words into themselves, her voice growing within them like grapevines.

During the tonsillitis, when the words no longer fell like seeds from her lips, the santito’s vineyards of accent and voice grew vapid, dry as a parched mouth. They went to her tongue and asked why silence imprisoned the words of the child, why lumps were present under her chin, why tears drew channels down her cheeks.

I asked my grandmother how her tongue replied. After touching my cheek, she told me she had a dream that night: She was within her lungs and she rose like breath through the moist of her throat. She remembered her tonsils swinging before her like fleshy apples, then a hand taking them into a fist, harvesting their sound. She told me her throat opened in two spots like insect eyes and the names of her children came flying through her wounds like peacocks.

Patting my thigh, she said, “That is why the name of your mother is Maria, because she is a prayer, a song of praise to the Holy Mother.” She told me this, then showed me two scars on her throat—tiny scars, like two eyelids stitched closed.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I write on a computer and, according to the file’s info, the poem was created on 7/16/04 at 3:35 pm.

My first memory of this story was at my grandmother’s home in the Spanish Colony in Greeley: sitting cross-legged in the dimly lit living room as my grandmother told the tale.

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

In his essay “Art as a Form of Reality,” Herbert Marcuse wrote, and I paraphrase, Art is only distinguished from non-Art by its attention to form.

That said, I’m an obsessive reviser and, typically, each poem I write undergoes at least thirty or more revisions (these revisions include massive overhauls and, more typically, the changing of a single term or line). This poem in particular has thirty files (I save each revision in a file and number them). The core of the poem is in the initial draft. I worked on sentence structure, rhythm and particular words in subsequent revisions, the latest being made just before its publication in late 2009.

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

When I write it takes a whole day of preparation in order to begin: reading (poetry, theology, theory) and coffee in the morning. I then lock myself in my room and churn out material for a number of hours into the evening. I never edit myself in the initial drafts of writing. (Typically, I never know what I am writing until a number of edits later.) Thus, one might speak of inspiration operating in those initial hours of writing; however, I’m more a student of Lorca than the Delphic oracle, more duende than inspiration as writing is, for me, a calling to the Jungian shadow to speak itself.

I had tried to write this particular "narrative" before. However, previous versions always failed. At the time I wrote the poem, I remember not having any idea of what I wanted and simply beginning.

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

Enjambment is important to me: fragmentation invoking metaphysical disjunction. Edmond Jabes wrote, “Only in fragments can we read the immeasurable totality.”

For this poem, the prose poem form seemed appropriate. In later revisions, any form of lineation seemed disingenuous.

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

Well, it just appeared in Copper Nickel in January ’10. So, six years? Before Jake Adam York (the wonderful editor/poet at Copper Nickel) accepted the poem, I hadn’t sent it out.

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

I don’t see the difference between the terms ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’: both are methods of description of this world. As a child I was raised to see the material world as a manifestation of a spiritual reality: the interior world is in constant dialogue with the world of manifestation, positing signs and symbols in answer/response to the deepest interior questions. The duality of fact/fiction seems to debase and reduce the provocation and re-creation that metaphor can offer to life. All this is to say, I navigate the world with a sense that a particular grace is always speaking itself outward, whether that is in a scientific study about global warming, watching a bird pivot, or with my grandmother describing her experience with spirits. Something Adorno said in his Aesthetic Theory resonates: “By their presence art works signal the possibility of the non-existent; their realities testify to the feasibility of the unreal, the possible.”

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

I wrote this in 2004, so during my studies at George Mason University: Susan Howe, H.D., Rosmarie Waldrop, Lorca, Miguel Hernandez, Octavio Paz, Lyn Hejinian, James Wright, William Blake, and a host of others. I tend to dip into four or five books at a time. David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous was important to me at that time.

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?

Melissa Tuckey, co-founder of Split This Rock, is the one consistent reader I’ve shared almost all my work with. Rebecca Stoddard is a poet whose attention to the ‘otherside’ of the poem, what it does not say, is amazing and whose opinion/critique I deeply value. I’ve also begun to share work with some new friends. Carmen Gimenez Smith has given me wonderful readings of the newer poems I’m working on (go buy her book, its gorgeous!). Recently, Roberto Tejada gave me some of the best advice I’ve received in years (go get his new book of poetry): when writing, to dwell in the conflict between the foreground and the subject.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Well, in relation to Heredities, it is one of four “narrative driven” prose poems; the other eighty or so pages of work is lyrically driven, fragmented, and invested in a different type of linearity.

What is American about this poem?

I can say what makes this poem an expression of the U.S. imaginary: I identify as a Chicano/US Latino.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both. Released.

Mark Cox

Mark Cox teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at UNC-Wilmington and in the Vermont College MFA program. His books include Smoulder (David R. Godine, 1989), Thirty-seven Years from the Stone (Pitt Poetry Series, 1998), and Natural Causes, (Pitt Poetry Series, 2004).



LIKE A SIMILE

Fell into bed like a tree
slept like boiling water
got up from bed like a camel
and showered like a tin roof.
Went down stairs like a slinky
drove to work like a water skier
entered the trailer like a bad smell
where I changed clothes like a burn victim
drank my coffee like a mosquito
and waited like a bus stop.
A whistle blew.
Then I painted like I was in a knife fight for eight hours
drank like a burning building
drove home like a bank shot
unlocked the door like a jeweler
and entered the house like an argument next door.
The dog smiled like a chain saw.
The wife pretended to be asleep
I pretended to eat.
She laid on the bed like a mattress
I sat at the table like a chair.
Until I inched along the stair rail like a sprinkler
entered like smoke from a fire in the next room
and apologized like a toaster.
The covers did not open like I was an envelope
and she was a 24-hour teller
so I undressed like an apprentice matador
discovering bullshit on his shoes.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Well, to me, the poem has always seemed more exercise than poem. It has been many years—it was written in 1993—so I don’t remember, exactly, but I suspect it sprang from an exercise I gave my students, at the time.

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

I don’t think this took very long to finish. I published it in early 1994. Sometimes poems like this appear about 90% complete, then it’s a matter of sharpening the voice and tone. It’s finding the closure that provides structural wholeness and resonance that takes patience.

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

Poems can surface in substantial, coherent form in a few minutes, but that doesn’t mean they are written quickly. I was thirty-seven years old when I wrote that poem, so it took thirty-seven years plus a few minutes to write it. I’m not being flippant. I believe everything I write stems from all the writing I’ve done prior to that point. It’s all part of the flow.

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

All I can do with a poem like this is attempt to reflect the persona’s voice and tone on the page. So, I think about sentence structure and variation quite a bit. I try to lineate in ways that encourage the eye to perceive calculated units of meaning while the voice flows through as naturally as possible.

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

A few months. Jonathan Holden at Kansas Quarterly took it, I believe.

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

It varies. It always helps me to live with poems at some length. I actually don’t submit very much anymore. I suppose I should, but I prefer focusing on books. So they sit a long time, now. A very long time.

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

The poem is true in that I was an industrial painter (bridges, tanks, towers and the like), until 1987. And this is what my job and relationship felt like at times during those years. That said, I never lived in a house with stairs during those years. And if there hadn’t been a dog, I would have invented him.

Is this a narrative poem?

No, not to my mind. Even though there are elements of story, it is really barely an anecdote— more of a vague setting staged from memory. Any success is really an issue of the dramatic voice and the vitality of figurative language.

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?

Successful poems seem to be systems of tension and conflict, whether on the surface level of language or at the level of content. I suppose those tensions are mainly reflections of human choices and possibilities, for better or worse. I don’t know that successful poetry is necessarily ethical, but I do think that the poems that mean most to me issue from sensibilities that confront complexity with an open attitude and struggle to be honest with themselves.

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

I haven’t a clue who I was reading at the time. But I’d spent almost a decade really focused on mental imagery’s function in the cognitive process. When I was younger, I liked the flashy, semi-intrusive authorial sensibilities that relied a lot on figurative language and highlighted the poems’ artifice. I don’t place Jack Myers in that flashy category, but he was my teacher and friend. My influences are eclectic and numerous. I was into the French Symbolists and Surrealists for a while. Hardy, Jeffers and Stevens were important. Robert Lowell and Frost. I found Sexton, Nazim Hikmet, Frank Stanford and Stephen Berg very inspiring

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

No, I really don’t. I suppose I hope for readers who appreciate emotional, intellectual and stylistic range.

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 doubt anyone saw it before magazine publication, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find comments about it in letters from friends who saw the book manuscript later. I certainly run book manuscripts by friends, once they are pretty complete. Myers, Tony Hoagland, David Rivard, David Wojahn, Jill Rosser—I’ve trusted them all to keep me straight over the years.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Don’t get me wrong, I still have fondness for this poem, but it’s not the deepest or most architecturally challenging poem I’ve ever written. It is more of a performance piece. And it is the kind of poem that became too easy for me. I could do it with both hands tied behind my back and a pen in my mouth.

What is American about this poem?

Interesting question. It’s unabashedly self-involved! It insists that the quotidian is as inherently poetic as high brow eloquence. It relies on a familiar sense of the tragicomic. Its formal nature is based on speech rhythms and insists on being accessible. I’m not sure.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Well, I agree that poems are never finished. In fact, I consider my body of work to be one long poem that won’t be finished until I’m dead. Individual poems are really just sections in an ongoing sequence. Generally, I stick with them until my interest in something else outweighs my interest in them.

Roger Mitchell

Roger Mitchell’s new and selected, Lemon Peeled the Moment Before, came out from Ausable Press in 2008. The author of ten books of poetry, he has won the Midland Prize in poetry and the Akron Prize in poetry plus fellowships from the NEA, Lilly Foundation, Indiana Arts Commission, and New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in way upstate New York with his wife, the fiction writer, Dorian Gossy.


VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY SEVERAL HANDS

I’m in no hurry, but I’d like to say
that I will die somewhere. Rio, maybe.
I’ve never been to Rio. Never died
either, quite. Rio in a taxi, say,
my shirt open in the heat, my palms sweaty,
having never wanted to go to Rio,
except at the end, and only for a way
they have of steaming mussels, in wine,
which I’ll hear about in Phoenix in the rain,
when I go to Phoenix for some reason
now withheld. It will be hot in Phoenix,
and, except for that particular day, dry,
and I will probably ask myself why
Phoenix, but only as rhetorical evasion,
for I will know then why. Know, in fact,
everything I need to know. And the vendors
on the street will smile and talk about the weather,
hoping I might buy some small cadeau,
not for the money it will make them, but
for the need they’ll see somewhere in my face
for something to hang loosely around my neck,
a stone perhaps, a leaf, a simple bauble,
for the ride I’ll take in Rio in a cab,
the driver asking me in broken English
the name of my hotel, whether I know
his uncle in Des Moines, not to worry
about the end—he’s given death a ride
before—last week in fact, a man in white,
a clean white suit, quite fitting, leather pumps.
He sat where you sit, leaning slightly
to the left, his hand quivering, face blue.
Otherwise, no resemblance to you.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I started this poem on September 14, 2004. I was teaching that month in Colorado. It was a concentrated course on poetry which met for three hours a day five days a week. Papers and assignments came at us with blinding speed. The poem was one I had wanted to write for a long time, years in fact, but why I chose this moment, I don’t know. It may have had something to do with being away from home, living, as I hadn’t in years, alone in an apartment. I owe the idea for the poem to several people since it’s modeled on Vallejo’s poem beginning, “I will die in Paris in the rain.” Donald Justice, of course, used it to write his poem beginning, “I will die in Miami in the sun.” When I taught at Indiana, my colleague, the poet Maura Stanton, who had had Justice as a teacher at Iowa, one day showed me an exercise she liked to give her students in poetry workshops, which was, write a poem of your own modeled on the Justice poem. Hmm, I thought, there’s an exercise I’d like to try. Fifteen or so years later I did. Right away, though, I had to face a choice. Where did I think I would die? Answer: I had no idea. Or, I was/am pretty sure it won’t be Rio. So, a part of the poem is pure, grisly play.

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

This doesn’t often happen with me, but I knew right away I had hold of something that would work. After ten or twelve revisions over the course on five or six weeks, it was ready to go. The idea seemed all but foolproof. It may be the oldest idea in the world, putting your fear of death at a distance by objectively contemplating it. Arranging your own funeral, that sort of thing. Making it seem like a ride in a taxi, common, no big deal.

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

Henry James used to talk about a story’s “donnee,” something given the author which essentially makes the story. He found these things in various ways, including in and through the writing. I sometimes know that I want to write a poem about a particular event, person, or subject, but the real mystery happens for me in the writing. I turn a corner in a sentence, and words seem to fall out of the air. Once again, so it seems, I’ve managed to lift the lid on the subconscious and found a fragment of its suppressed contents. If that’s inspiration, then yes, I believe in it. But the sweating is real. In fact, I think the sweating leads to the surprises. As they say in the theatre, you make your breaks. He who waits around for them doesn’t get them.

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

Gradually. It started as a free verse poem, one with plenty of rhythm and even rhyme, but no regular pattern of either. The first line was simply, “I would like to say.” The rhythm there is quite pronounced and probably helped lead me toward meter itself. The first draft, as it went on, started falling into whole lines of iambic pentameter, so after a few more drafts, it was easy to slide right into it. Rhyme seemed wrong for the poem right away, so the “why/dry” rhyme that’s still in the poem sticks out. I even tried to get rid of it.

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

I sent it to Arts & Letters in December of ‘04. It was accepted the following February and published in the Spring 2006 issue.

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

I have no set amount of time to wait. If I feel that a poem is good right away, I sometimes risk sending it out soon. But I’ve been burned enough by that sort of enthusiasm that I usually wait a few months. I try to forget it so I can look at it with a fresh eye. With a few poems, including one I published recently, the waiting can turn out to be as much as thirty years. Poems that get repeatedly rejected usually just go away, but in a few cases they stick with me. So I dig it out of the files and, if it still seems alive, I send it out again. It’s a little like reviving a corpse.

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

This poem is really a fantasy, but a fantasy about a very real (future) event. You could say that this poem can only be a fantasy, but it might certainly have been less of one than it was. I’ll probably die in some hospital or hospice in one of the small mountain towns near where I live, unless I bail out and go to Florida and collapse of heat exhaustion in some mall parking lot. (As you see, I’m already starting to write my poem’s anti-poem.) So, the imagining in the poem is marked by willful extravagance, elaborate subterfuge, strategies designed to try (and fail) to beat death at his own game. To even think of it as a game, in the first place. A little French (cadeau), some dancing pumps, Rio in a taxi, etc. We don’t know very much about the future, but we sure know how to pretend.

Could you briefly address the role of humor in this poem? Or is “wit” a better word?

I think invention drives the poem, humorous invention with a black edge. It plays on the difference between the invention and the likely future scenario.

Is this a narrative poem?

The poem speculates narratively, thinks or meditates by way of narratively linked images.

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

As I’ve said, the poem grows deliberately out of two great poems, Vallejo’s and Justice’s. Both of them include a glimpse, like mine of the taxi driver, of ordinary people nearby going about their ordinary business. What is it Auden says about “the expensive delicate ship” in his poem about the fall of Icarus? It “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” And, who knows, it may have helped that I was teaching an introduction to poetry course at the time and hence re-reading most of the great chestnuts of English and American poetry. One small gesture toward “tradition” hides in the use of the term “several hands,” a locution of acknowledged debt scattered thinly across English poetry in the last few centuries.

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

This is an over-used word, but I’ll use it anyway. The “music” of the language makes a huge difference to me, so I test it by reading poems aloud. I sometimes pretend I’m giving a reading somewhere, and it’s in those fantasies that I suppose I imagine ideal readers. Not one, but rooms full of the ardent as well as the skeptical who have come to get what they’ve heard (or they already know) poetry can deliver. Behind me are the professors, critics, and poets from whom I’ve learned most of what I know, and I look now and then over my shoulder at them, but in my little piece of self-theatre I face an audience of what Virginia Woolf called common readers, people who read because they know that’s where the truth is.

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

My wife, Dorian Gossy, sees all the work I think is finished (some of which is then shown not to be) plus all the work I know has problems which I’m stumped by. She is an excellent reader, has saved me countless embarrassments, and made not a few improvements. For the past several years, as well, I’ve exchanged poems occasionally with Tam Neville and Bert Stern, both of whom are very accomplished poets and critics.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

All my poems differ from one another, and all of them are “about” or “involve” the same guy pushing his way poem by poem through the thicket of the moment which is powerfully crammed with asparagus and philosophy, dread and whatever that other stuff is.

What is American about this poem?

The language. I may play around with a few fancy words (“bauble,” “rhetorical evasion,” not to mention “cadeau”), but, as Marianne Moore once said, the language is more like plain American that even cats and dogs can understand. It’s in the contractions and words like “sweaty,” as well as phrases that more or less naturalize the experience like “not to worry,” “I’m in no hurry,” “talk about the weather.” But there’s also a broad strain of internationalism in the poem, which is uniquely American, the longing to know the rest of the world, since we’ve all come from it, and so in some way come from all of it. See Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, etc., ad inf.

Kate Buckley

A ninth generation Kentuckian, Kate Buckley received her BA from the University of Kentucky and her MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, KY. The author of A Wild Region (Moon Tide Press, 2008) and Follow Me Down (Tebot Bach, 2009), her awards include the Gabehart Prize for Imaginative Writing and the James Hearst Poetry Prize. Recent poems have appeared in Bellingham Review, The Café Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She now lives in Laguna Beach, CA. For more information, please visit Kate's website.


HONESTY

There’s an honesty to planting,
in saying to seeds,
here’s what I want from you:
grow.

Grow until your heads touch
the tallest slat on the tumbledown wall
and then bud. Break open your heads
and flower, and when that’s done,
fruit.

In return, I will give you
meal, minerals, the dung of cloven
animals. I will take measure
of your soil and add what you need,
take what I
should.

In January, I will hang you
with leftover fir,
grind trees
to place at your
feet.

I’ll pluck snails from your leaves,
sluggish brown bodies loathe
to part from your
succulence.

I will water you in a slow warm
stream, the garden hose wrapped
at my feet, a gently coiled cobra
who will not
strike.

I will break back
your dead wood.
I will feed you in spring.
I will take only what I need,
and then I will say to you:
sleep.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in 2008. I’d been digging in the front garden of the house in which I then lived, and the first few lines kept going through my head. Most of my poems begin that way. They badger me until I stop whatever I’m doing and write down as many lines as are “given to me,” then—if I’m lucky—I go on writing and finish the poem, or at least a first draft. Otherwise, I scribble away until I don’t believe what I’m writing anymore. That’s my cue to put the poem away and come back to it when I’ve something more to add to the conversation.

With this poem, I think I was struck by the actual sweat-and-grime/give-and-take honesty of manual labor. Which seems an obvious fact, but when one spends most of one’s time in front of a computer, one forgets. I remember my grandfather working in his garden for hours—it was a necessity for him, but it was also a meditation. I admired that about him and hated that I’d gotten so far away from that. I remember reading over the poem after I’d finished the first draft and thinking that on one level it functioned as a sort of corollary for the biblical tale of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.

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

This started out as a much longer poem—then I carved away at it and played with the line breaks until I was happy enough to send it on its way. I titled it “A Garden Address” and submitted it to the 2008 New Southerner Literary Contest where it received an honorable mention. In addition to publishing the poem, they’ve since nominated it for a Pushcart. I’m very grateful for their support of my work.

The poem appears in my second book, Follow Me Down, under a different title. A friend and colleague, Joan E. Bauer, was kind enough to read over the manuscript prior to its publication and made the invaluable suggestion that I change the title to “Honesty.”

In reading over the version of the poem included here, I realized it’s a slightly different version than the one that appears in Follow Me Down. Apparently when going over the I-swear-this-one’s-really-the-final-draft of the manuscript, I decided it could do with a few contractions. In typical OCD fashion, I also altered the line breaks a bit and omitted the odd word (the first line of the poem in the book omits the article “an,” so it reads: “There’s honesty to planting”).

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

Yes. The first half of this poem was “received.” The sweat and tears bit was in its completion and revision. I will say that I think the “reception” bit is predicated on (a) one’s being open and (b) one having done the work—you have to till the ground before it’s ready to receive seeds. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

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

I played a great deal with the line breaks—I wanted to break up/open the poem visually. To continue with the horrid horticulture references, I wanted to turn over the poem as a gardener turns over soil; to provide several pockets within each stanza in which meaning could live and take root. Thus my decision against long lines and for irregular line lengths—notably the last line of each stanza (consisting of a single word).

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

Within 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?

Varies. Some poems arrive as fully formed as hooded seals—going from infancy to adulthood in days. Others are premature and require substantial intervention and surgery (if they survive at all).

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

Most of my poems are a blend of the two. “Honesty” is factual in that it employs natural imagery and talks about the things one would really do in tending a garden. It’s fictional in that I didn’t really do all of those things, nor did I sustain a prolonged direct address to a bunch of seeds!

Is this a narrative poem?

I once heard Charles Harper Webb talk about Narrative vs. Lyric in poetry and his assertion was that most poems fall on a continuum between the two. So if narrative is pt. A and lyric is pt. Z, perhaps “Honesty” lives between the city of M and the hamlet of Q.

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?

Interesting. But I don’t think that all good poetry is ethical or just, any more than all good music—or art of any sort. We can acknowledge the flawed—and occasionally horrific—viewpoints of notable artists (that arguably influenced their work), but still celebrate the work itself. You might loathe Wagner the man, but still appreciate one of his operas (or not). Can an opera (or painting or poem) be ethical in and of itself? And there we have it: Can art exist entirely independent of the artist? And then on to moralism, autonomism, and the ethical consideration of aesthetics. And I don’t think we really want to go there—at least not without a two drink minimum.

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

I’ve been reading widely and rather schizophrenically over the past few years for my MFA program. I don’t remember any specific influence on this poem though I’m sure there are many.

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

No. And it’s strange to me that the poems I most like of my own are rarely the ones others select as their favorites. For instance, “Honesty” has had a nice little welcome into the world (and thank you for selecting it and me for your blog), but it’s not even in my Top 10 from Follow Me Down.

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, there are several other poets with whom I regularly share work. Their feedback is invaluable to me.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Lately, I’ve been writing in closed forms. My third manuscript is comprised almost entirely of sonnets—or, as Molly Peacock puts it: “ghosts of sonnets.”

What is American about this poem?

It could be argued that it’s somewhat pioneerish in both form and content. On a personal note, it harkens back to memories of my aforementioned maternal grandfather working his land in East Bernstadt, Kentucky.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Someone once said, “A painting is never finished, it just stops at interesting places.” I think the same can be said of a poem.