Jack Ridl

Jack Ridl's latest collection is Losing Season from CavanKerry Press. The book explores life during a long, hard winter in a small town that is obsessed with its high-school basketball team's losing season. Ridl's previous full collection, Broken Symmetry, (Wayne State University Press) was co-recipient of The Society of Midland Authors award for best book of poetry published in 2006. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins chose his collection Against Elegies for The Center for Book Arts (NYC) Chapbook Award. He is also author of the chapbook, Outside the Center Ring, a collection of poems based on his childhood experience with the circus. Ridl is also co-author with Peter Schakel of Approaching Literature and of Approaching Poetry, both from Bedford/St. Martin's Press. In 2008 The Institute for International Sport named him one of the 100 most influential people in sports, and the Institute named Losing Season as best sports education book for 2009. The book has been featured on NPR’s “Only a Game,” “The Writers’ Almanac,” and “The Story.” Ridl, professor emeritus at Hope College where he founded the college’s Visiting Writers Series, has had more than sixty-five of his students go on to complete their MFA degrees and to publish nationally. Jack was twice awarded outstanding professor awards from the Hope College students. In 1996 The Carnegie Foundation named him Michigan Professor of the Year. You can connect with Jack at his web site.


THAT’S ENOUGH

At times like these, we should
sit down, maybe pet our dogs,
or listen to the way even Bach
left out notes. We should have
a sandwich, something light,
thick tomato slices, lettuce,
slather on the mayonnaise.
I wonder how fish let their
impulses settle in their cells.
Sit down. Just sit, there,
on that end of the couch. Let
your arm drape over the side.
Imagine the wind has come
through the window, has turned
itself into a garden monk who is
opening his sack, flicking his
bamboo fan in front of your face.
Let every word in the world
become a vireo. Let them
overrun the yard. We'll count
back into yesterday, the widower
knocking at the back door.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I started writing this one about ten years ago. It started with the title. Most of my poems start with some trigger, inner or outer. I then let something associate itself with that trigger. The trigger this time was something about the aggressive command often heard as a kid that puts an end to something. Then off I went in my usual way of thinking of such, of thinking of "that's enough" in a different way, even a comforting way.

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

It's a bit hard to say because when I looked at the poem just now I saw some places that could be adjusted. There are lots of alternative possibilities here because it's that kind of poem where in one sense you could insert anything. "Let every word in the backyard / become a tulip." for example. Revision for me is not something where I do a different version of a poem and have the versions mount up to the ceiling. I change something, take a long look at it, keep it, discard it right on the computer. The usual time lapse between first draft and sending out a poem is about a month to six weeks. When the poem comes back rejected, that leads me to look further. I often find something to change, so rejection is a kind of prompt for a closer look. I didn't go to grad school and have never been in a workshop so I don't have that kind of experience of knowing exactly what to do with anything I've written.

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

I do and I don't believe in inspiration. I've studied zen for more than forty years and this practice has enabled me to sustain what I guess I'd call a kind of inspired way of being in the world. Anything can inspire me, but I hasten to add that it's not inspiration in the common usage of being overcome or having a kind of higher consciousness experience. I probably work to have a lower consciousness experience! This poem is a pretty good example or embodiment of this. Our daughter when she was a little kid would always say about just about anything, "How can that be!" To this day she does. That's pretty much how I am as well. It's that kind of inspiration. After that, in the writing, no sweat and tears. I always say that I have enough of that stuff in my days. I don't want poetry to be just another thing to "Deal with, cope with." Nope. The "work" is a joy. It always rewards, brings realizations and surprises. I'm a basketball coach's son. You learn early that work is not tedium. It's a profound form of play, joy. You learn to play the game. I loved to practice. I'd practice all day. Same with poems. And it's not to be misunderstood as taking things lightly or just messing around or settling for. I love the revision part. It's practice. "Let's see if I can crossover dribble and hit a fadeaway."

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

Well, I really don't know if it's in its final form. How would one know. Is the Mona Lisa "finished"? However, my techniques for hoping it's in a final form are:

1. Checking the effectiveness of the rhythms of the lines and how they work with one another.
2. Making sure any shifts or jolts in tone or focus or material are purposeful.
3. Checking to see the timing of the arrival of every single thing is right.
4. Reading the poem out loud.
5. Making sure the poem is not a "faulty lawn mower." When it starts up, it should keep mowing.
6. Cutting what needs to be cut. Adding what needs to be added.
7. Making sure that if there are any surprises, that they are not pretentious.
8. Deciding if the poem is a turtle crossing a highway.

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

I don't remember. I think it went through several rejections and then it found its home.

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

I'm not one to set a poem aside for years, months. I read all the time that this is what I should do. But I'm not smart enough to think that after a certain amount of time I'm suddenly going to have insights I didn't have from the start. What I do is take the poem to two other poets. We meet every three weeks or so and have them look at it. Then I'm kinda like the parent who tosses a kid into a swimming pool hoping the kid will swim or that the kid will get pulled out safely.

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

I'm so confused about the difference. Does that come from being in an English department for thirty-seven years? I guess my stumbling response is that I try to use facts in a fictional way. This poem is full of facts, but put together they form a fiction that I then hope becomes a fact.

Is this a narrative poem?

If narrative means story, then yes. I tend to think everything is or has a story. If narrative means "sequence of events" then I guess it fulfills that notion in that "this follows that." But the narrative is there to serve or create a lyrical experience.

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'm an old Presbyterian guy who grew up in a small town full of right and wrong so I would imagine that the moral, the ethical is embedded in the poem. But I am lousy at the good poem/bad poem argument. Students were always frustrated by my Tai Chi evasion of their question, "Is this poem any good?" I'd like to think that a "good" poem is one that brings out the best in us. But that certainly depends on the "us" who is reading the poem. So I'm trapped there. I do think there are bad poems. Those are the ones that deceive, obfuscate, lack Pound's sense of sincerity in the craft, hurt those who do not deserve to be hurt, cynically dismiss what may be keeping someone walking on. I guess I'm kind of like a parent saying to that poem, "Go to your room. Come out when you are ready to treat people with kindness."

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

I was reading the poems of Mary Ruefle, Bob Hicok, Heather Sellers, and James Schuyler.

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

This may sound pretentious, but I try to write for the one who just might need the poem.

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, two wonderful poets always look at my poems and help me immeasurably. They are Jane Bach and Greg Rappleye. I hope everyone who loves poems gets to read theirs.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

In some ways it's more chatty and laid back. But I've written several that way. It feels so good to just sit back and let the breathing slow down and feel cheerful and feel like "It's okay to interrupt me. No. Nothing special, just writing a poem. Come on in. Grab something from the fridge. Let's hang out."

What is American about this poem?

What a wonderful question. I'm tempted to say everything is. There, I said it. At the same time it's difficult to discern anymore. We've had the blessing of having poems from so many eras and cultures come to us in the last number of years. I suppose it's a stereotype of an American poem, that "Hey, Dude, chill" side.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both.

Rebecca Foust

Rebecca Foust’s books include All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song (Many Mountains Moving Book Award, 2010), Mom’s Canoe and Dark Card (2007, 2008 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prizes). Her recent poetry appears widely in journals including Hudson Review, Margie, North American Review, and Spoon River Review. God, Seed (Tebot Bach Press), a book of environmental poetry with art by Lorna Stevens, is forthcoming in September 2010. Foust received her MFA from Warren Wilson College in January 2010. For more information, please visit her website.


ALTOONA TO MARIN

Go ahead, aspire to transcend
your hardscrabble roots, bootstrap
the life you dream on,
escape the small-minded tyranny
of your small-minded Midwestern
coalmining town.

But when you’ve left it behind, you
may find it still there, in your dreams,
your syntax, the smell of your hair,
its real smell, under the shampoo.
Beware DNA; it will out or be outed,
and you’ll find yourself back
where you started, back home,
unable to refute the logic of blood and bone
you’ll slip, and pick up Velveeta
instead of brie. It’s inexorable.
Kansas one day will turn out to be Oz
and Oz Kansas,

with the same back porch weeping,
the same husbands sleeping around,
addiction, cancer, babies born wrong;
the same siren nights pierced
with stars seeping light, all that
gorgeous, pitiless song.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I did not begin to take my writing seriously until 2007, the year I turned fifty and it was in the summer of that year that this poem came to me. I’d gone back and read some of the poems written (and shoved into a drawer and forgotten) in my teens and early twenties. The first in my working-class western Pennsylvania family to attend college (on scholarship), I’d left town, gone on to Stanford Law School and then settled 3,000 miles away in the golden state of California. Anyway, I was re-reading those old poems and mulling over how things had changed—and how they hadn’t changed—since then. The poem started with that very first line, the challenge of the older, wiser speaker to the younger, idealistic speaker, to “Go Ahead” and try to break out of what seems like an imprisoned life. It is unusual for me to start with a the first line—generally, I think of a poem’s ending first and then write towards it, like a fisherman pulling in his net, but this time the first line came to me and the poem unfolded from there.

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

I often put a poem through a hundred or more drafts and some poems get put away for a year or more before I can bear to look at and revise them again. Not this one. It started out pretty much the way it now appears, except that I cut a few extra lines in the last stanza. I wrote the poem early in the summer of 2007 and it got accepted by The Dos Passos Review in August, the second acceptance I had received in my life up to that point.

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

Yes, absolutely I believe in inspiration. But I think of it more in terms of a river that flows about or above us at all times such that when we raise our net, we snag and catch the ideas and poems that are floating by. The trick is to always have your net with you and to always have it out. That is harder than it sounds—so many things in life can get in the way. When I am able to tap into that current of what is real, what matters, then poems come to me in a spontaneous, whole way that feels like epiphany or something close to religious experience. Only a handful poems have come to me this way. I have heard other poets call them “gift” poems. But I think of them as the true found poems—as if all the poetry is already written, and we have only to figure out how to find it again.

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

Just in deciding where to break the lines—I did play around with that a bit, trying to make the music right and my technique here was breaking the lines in different places and then reading the poem aloud over and over to see what sounded best.

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

It was a few months—the poem was written in early summer 2007, accepted in August, published in the fall.

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

It varies with every poem. I write poems as they come to me and put them in seasonal files. Then I go back to those poems when time allows and work on the ones that interest me. When a poem feels finished, I move it to a file where I keep work ready to be sent out. Every time I send a poem out again, I look it over to see if I can revise it to make it stronger. If I am having a problem with a poem and know it, I will run it by other poets in my critiquing groups for their comments. The process varies from poem to poem. I have had poems that felt finished after just a few drafts, written within a few days and others that I have been working on for years and are still not finished.

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

Well, my poetry is rooted in personal experience in the sense that if I write about flowers it is going to be the ones I grew up with or see now on my morning walks, and if I write about cheese it is going to be Velveeta. And brie. But my poetry is not memoir and the “stories” and “people” in them tend to be amalgams not actual people or necessarily true events. I hope to tell a larger truth in my work than just recounting the story of my own life and, as Picasso famously said (or words to this effect), you must lie to tell the truth. So I might talk about my grandfather buying corn on the cob with his dentures in his pocket, and perhaps an aunt or cousin might protest that it never happened, and my answer would be that I was not writing about Papap so much as about the indomitable human ability to—in the face of all evidence to the contrary—hope for the experience of joy. So, the stories in my poems are not “literally” true but yes, they spring from my life experience, plus what I’ve seen and read in my life.

Is this a narrative poem?

I suppose you could say it tells the story of the prodigal son or daughter come home in the metaphorical sense; come to the realization that home is what inhabits you no matter where you live. But I hope that it has lyrical moments and that it moves the reader to a new place; I hope that it sings. So my ambition was for it to be a lyrical poem.

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

I don’t see the specter of morality in this poem—just the speaker’s stunned realization that no matter how far she has traveled, “improved” her station, run away from the place of childhood memory, she understands in the end that she cannot escape all that, for two reasons. One is that what she came from is what she is; and the second is that all places are fundamentally the same and the things that make us happy and not have more to do with the universal human condition than with the specific place or class we inhabit. And I think that there is a sort of redemption in realizing that—it ameliorates the implicit judgment that Altoona was a place to be escaped from and also, it acknowledges that as pitiless as life can be in its various subtractions, it is also staggeringly beautiful.

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

I’d not written much in the twenty years before 2007—was very busy practicing law, raising three kids and then, when one turned out to have autism, with volunteer work and grassroots political organization for kids with learning disorders. So except for one class I took in my forties, my study and practice of poetry really waned for about thirty years. The year I turned fifty I signed up for a writing class at a local bookstore and from that point on it was like turning on a spigot. It did not take long for me to figure out that if I wanted to grow as a poet I had to read like my life depended on it—every second I could—to make up for all those lost years when I was not reading poetry. I had not read much past Yeats, so there was a lot of catching up to do! That was the entire rationale for deciding to pursue my MFA—and with Warren Wilson, because I’d heard theirs was the most rigorous reading curriculum among the low-res programs. But to answer your question, I was probably at the time this poem was written reading poets that my teachers in various workshops were suggesting to me: Louis Simpson and Sharon Olds are two that come to mind.

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

Someone who is willing to do a bit of work, who appreciates complexity and layering and who likes music in poetry. Someone who loves language the way I do.

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 am part on an online group and also an in-person group that trades one poem a month. I tend to use these groups as a way to vet poems that I know have problems, that I am stuck on and need some ideas for solving the problem. Very often I do not follow the advice given to me in these settings, but the questions raised get me thinking in ways that are fresh and can lead to me solving the problem on my own. The vast majority of my poems, though, begin and end in the solitude of my desk. Like all poets in workshop, I’ve had the experience of one group hating a poem while a second group loves it, or of having a poem thoroughly dissed in workshop only to come home and find some editor’s acceptance of it in the mail. This has taught me that most poetry criticism is highly subjective and that the point is to develop that inner voice that tells you yes, yes, you’ve got it, or rather, no, this one is just not happening.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It is less structured than most of my poems, especially my more recent ones, many of which reflect a recent obsession with form and a preference for extreme brevity.

What is American about this poem?

Well, it is specifically set in two places in America—Altoona, in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania and Marin County, near San Francisco, California, and it mentions others—Kansas, the Midwest. To some extent, it recounts the classic historic American impulse to push westward. The poem also incorporates elements of popular culture—Velveeta cheese, The Wizard of Oz, back porches.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It feels finished to me. Every now and then I may tinker a word here and there, but by and large it says what I wanted it to and is a very fun poem to read to an audience—the line about Velveeta versus brie usually elicits a laugh and so is a good set up for the lines that follow.

Zachary Schomburg

Zachary Schomburg was born in 1977. He is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007), Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), and a dvd of poem-films, Little Blind Thing (Poor Claudia 2010). He is also the author of several chapbooks including two that are forthcoming: From the Fjords (Spork Press), and Feelings Using Wolves (Small Fires Press), a collaboration with Emily Kendal Frey. His poetry translations from the Russian of Andrei Sen-Senkov are in The Agriculture Reader, Aufgabe, Harp & Altar, Circumference and others. He has co-edited Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine since 2003. He lives in Portland, OR. For more information, please visit his blog.


SCARY, NO SCARY

You’ll return
to your childhood
home

after a lifetime away
to find it
abandoned. Its

red paint will be
completely weathered.

It will have
a significant westward lean.

There will be
a hole in its roof
that bats fly
out of.

The old man
hunched over
at the front door
will be prepared
to give you a tour,
but first he’ll ask
scary, or no scary?

You should say
no scary.


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

I wrote "Scary, No Scary" in June of 2006. I was working in a cornfield in Nebraska at the time, breeding corn hybrids, digging irrigation troughs, and was constantly overheated and burned and bored. This is an ideal environment to write a poem. I was hallucinating these little nightmarish narrative moments most of the time, listening to Godspeed! You Black Emperor on my new pollen-dusted iPod, tying silks off with brown paper bags of pollen. When I got home I would transfer the poems from my head onto the word processor. I dreamt this poem more than wrote it. This poem in particular still appears exactly as it was first written. So each line is as it spilled out of me. I guess I wrote it in about two minutes. After I wrote this poem, it felt so pure to me, so unmanipulated and unmanipulative, that I began to write an entire manuscript from this world. I wanted to live for a year or two in this dark nightmarish journey through the woods. And so I did.

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

My favorite poems of mine feel more "received" than worked. "Scary, No Scary" feels entirely received. Sometimes I find myself in this place where my brain and my heart are talking to each other, and I have nothing to do with it. I'm dead. And those two parts of me have forgotten about me. This is when I'm at my happiest, when I'm dead in this exact way.

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

It was published in Typo #8 that summer. Adam Clay and Matt Henriksen heard me read it and they asked me for it. Typo had rejected my poems a few times before that, so I was pretty sure I was taking a break from submitting to them. So, it was pretty nice to be asked. Typo is solid.

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 never sits. I don't have the patience for that. Usually, the poem I just finished writing feels like the best poem I've ever written and the world needs it before the morning comes. I don't want to wait until I see all its flaws in the morning. Why does this sound like I met the poem in a bar?

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

There is a very emotional sincerity at the heart of this poem (and others in the manuscript) despite a clear logical insincerity. This poem, like the rest of the poems in that manuscript are about loneliness, self-discovery, choice in the context of a search for home, whatever home might mean. Its of a dream, and as an admirer of Breton, I would argue that that doesn't negate it from being non-fiction. I have hardly written a poem any truer.

Is this a narrative poem?

Is what a narrative poem?

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

I think I was just starting to read some French poets, Breton, Eluard, Reverdy, Char. And I was reading Graham Foust. It looks like a Foust poem, if you blur your eyes a bit. And Simic and Tate and Mary Ruefle. And I remember listening to a lot of Neutral Milk Hotel, Beirut, Magnetic Fields, Smiths, and Richard Buckner (and Godspeed, like I said earlier) that summer.

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

No, not exactly. This is kind of like asking do you think about an ideal writer as you read? I think about writing as a slow reading, the kind of reading you can get just right. I want to read the best poem. I want my life to bounce off of it just a little, send my path askew if only a fraction. I want it to put its fingers in my eyes.

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 did actually, yes. Look at what I did, I said.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Well, many of my poems are prose poems. "Scary, No Scary" is a departure from that. I like to tell stories. I like the poem to be about the sentence and not the line. But when this one spilled out, it came in lines. Each line told a story. It wouldn't work as a prose poem. This poem inspired me to write that entire first section of SNS just like it. I've now returned to the prose poem and feel quite comfortable and happy there.

What is American about this poem?

Nothing. There's nothing American about it.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.

Connie Voisine

Connie Voisine is an associate professor of English at New Mexico State University, where she directs the creative writing program. Educated at Yale University, she received her MFA from University of California at Irvine and her Ph.D. from University of Utah. Her book, Cathedral of the North, was selected winner of the AWP Award in Poetry and was released by University of Pittsburgh Press. Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream was published by University of Chicago Press in 2008 and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico with her husband, writer Rus Bradburd and their daughter.


SORRY I DON’T LIKE YOU

It’s old fashioned, struggling
with grace. Last night in the movie version
of “Portrait of a Lady,” Isabelle will not reveal
that Osmond is cruel. Provoked,

she might, at the most, weep into her hands.
O white skin and narrow
fingers lit by tears, all that money
was supposed to set you free.

Those days it was enough to worry
about marriage—it was fate. End up
with an Osmond and the rest of your life
equaled grief and its awful seductions.

These days marriage’s not enough
so this world delivers
lessons everywhere about humility.
The doctor sends sound waves

dyes, and tubes into you. A benign tumor
is measured, your car fills with rain, a neighbor
asks for money.
There’s a dark night and the edge

of what you feel is possible, a call
to grace while the days give up their
black yolks, the smudge that opens up
nothing so dramatic as not living,

only the likelihood of doing without.
The landscape shimmers with
fear. You try to stay unemphatic.
The oleanders are blooming

and heavy with hummingbirds
and you should not have, ten years ago, done
all those things which leave you
hands empty now. On a Zen tape, the master says

when I was young I was a tiger
and now I am a cat. It is better to be a cat.
I think of the brutal tiger,
the slung hips and thumping tail,

the coiled rump, that mouth.
I think of my ex-cat, neat whiskers
patient at the door. What glamour,
the tiger in all its teeth. I think I have

made a mess. I was reading
some poems, a series addressed
to the poet’s friend who fell into a coma
while traveling in China, one from which

he never awoke. The poems are
about kindness: the times they carried his body
to the garden to sleep in the trees, the music
they played and the stories they told

what was left of a man named Steve.
They are poems I cannot recall without weeping
because if I were to stop living now—what regret
I feel. It soaks me like a fog

imperceptibly heavier each day. The burden,
what I should have done better, the opportunities
I pissed away, like Isabelle Archer, given fortune
(of a sort), beautiful youth

and desire. Am I Isabelle Osmond
who now knows better as she kisses
her dying cousin? Maybe regret is the final rebellion
of the puny, the only grace we can manage,

the edge we worry between despair and stepping
through. Maybe I should not have done it is how
we can say to the ways things are now
sorry, I don’t like you.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I was driven to write about regret, classic lyric poetry fodder, but I wanted to question its function. How does regret work? How does it serve a person?

Because I am a slow writer this one took a long time, they all do.

I find that poems often start with a particular constellation of information that seem connected intuitively but the poem emerges as the connections become a little more conscious. I write to understand why and how all the parts fit: Portrait of a Lady, medical testing, my mellowing into wanting peace rather than drama, the sudden death of someone I did not know, but could not forget, etc. All the parts have been there since the beginning but I didn’t know how to join them.

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

I am, as I said, a slow worker. The first draft is dated 2004, while I did not work on it daily, I only finished it for my book deadline, in 2007. I did at least 30 drafts, but that is usual for me. I am slow, and, furthermore, I don’t write unless I need to. And I have a small child. And a job. Things take time.

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 that a particular sensibility organizes, culls, winnows the world in a unique way. Is that inspiration?

I also know that there are some writers who, whenever I read their work, I want to write: Szymborska, (Zbigniew and George) Herbert, Frost, Bishop, Ross Taylor, Stevens, etc. Is that inspiration?

I don’t think I have been “given” many poems. Poems are hard work in my world, and if they aren’t, I don’t trust them. Because I love revising, most of the work of writing for me happens there. Actually, I hate composing poems, so I constantly troll notes and old drafts for scraps that I can recycle, therefore, parts of this poem are probably even older.

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

For me, the trick of this poem was finding the proper compression to give it the energy it needed once I started burying the anger. It’s an angry poem, for all the speaker’s desire to become a cat, not a tiger. The anger was much more overt in early drafts in a way that was too screechy for a poem about regret. The speaker needs to be somewhat surprised at the end by her own statement “sorry I don’t like you.” But once I had toned down the anger, the poem felt flat. Compression and a certain quickness is what I then worked for, to keep it lively, I hope.

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

Less than one year later, in the book…

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 not one of those ardent seekers. I don’t send work out often—since I find a lot of that business stuff a little soulless and bad for my writing. I had a wise teacher, Jacqueline Osherow, once tell me “You can write a poem that someone will publish—send this one off now. BUT, what would happen if you wrote and wrote that poem until you knew it was done?” So my poems have a long time to grow in darkness, that interior space where they stay until they are ready to come out. Usually a couple of years.

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

At one point in my writing life, I had a strong desire to write about intellectual events or events surrounding art, since a lot of my life is organized around thinking about and experiencing art. Needing to revive the autobiographical lyric, I decided I should figure out a way to get what I read in books, saw in galleries or in movies into my poems. It is true that books, movies, art have changed my life. The quest was to figure out how to make those private events seem exciting or dramatic.

Is this a narrative poem?

What poem isn’t? A poem, even a lyric poem, crystallizes around a narrative. When the reader finds it, the poem sparkles that much more.

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?

Oh, yes, absolutely. Maybe it’s my Catholic background, but I believe we poets are not here to know ourselves better, or to gain self-knowledge, etc. The poet’s personal journey, the eye turned inward, isn’t as important to me, unless it is about the difficulties of being a moral person, one who then turns the eye outward. I believe poetry amounts to a pile of beans when the writer isn’t figuring out how to do what’s right. The freedom that Isabelle Archer is given and mispends, well, we all squander daily.

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

Anne Carson gave me permission to be a bit more explanatory, less pretty with my lines, my friend Sheila Black encouraged me to think in a dramatic way, and Louise Glück who always reminds me to be pitiless, especially about myself.

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

Absolutely, my ideal reader is the writer who pushed me to write. Whoever made me put down this poem, through their own poem/s is who I imagine listening when I write. There are a couple of mentors who inhabit that reader space: Jacqueline Osherow and James McMichael will always be in that conversation I have inside my head as I write.

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 am pretty private, though I do show poems to my learned poet friend, Sheila Black, who also lives here in Las Cruces.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s not that different, part of series of poems I have been writing where another text (poem, movie, play) provides the metaphoric or philosophical impetus. It’s a precursor to the book I am working on now, where the autobiographical aspect is nearly gone—where the ideas, images, metaphors take the stage and the speaker’s identity is what I call the “Citizen I.”

What is American about this poem?

Isabel Archer is American and hopeful and foolish for it. That is what the speaker sees in herself—naïve choices based on a silly American optimism. The French in me should know better.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I usually finish poems. No one sees the abandoned ones…

Gary Young

Gary Young is a poet and artist whose books include Hands; The Dream of A Moral Life, winner of the James D. Phelan Award; Days; Braver Deeds, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; and No Other Life, which won the William Carlos Williams Award. His most recent books are Pleasure, and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California. His New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from White Pine Press. He has received a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He edits the Greenhouse Review Press, and his print work is represented in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty Center for the Arts. He teaches at the University of California Santa Cruz. For more information, please visit his website.


[THIS TUMOR IS SMALLER]

This tumor is smaller than the last one, he said. I’m going to cut it out, and then do my best to stitch you back together. He leaned forward, and pulled a blade across my leg. Smoke rose from the open wound as he cauterized the tiny veins, and while he worked, he spoke to me. Every body is a machine, he said. When they break, I fix them. But there’s an art to it, he said. We have to coax some kind of magic or luck out of the body. Some patients die, he said, and others find a way to beat the odds. That’s what I expect of you. Do you know what I’m saying, he asked? I nodded while my breath kept pace with the morphine drip. Good, he said, and he put his knee on the table for a better purchase. I watched my leg jump and fall as he jerked on the sutures. That should hold, he said, but you’re going to feel it for a while.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in early 2007, although I had carried the germ of the poem for more than twenty years. In my late twenties, I was diagnosed with a level-four melanoma. My chances of survival were slim. My surgeon, Dr. Fred Tomlinson, told me he would have to remove most of my scalp, some muscles, arteries, glands . . . I stopped him mid-sentence and asked, “Just how much are you going to take?” He said, “As much as I can without killing you.” It was the beginning of an interesting relationship. Tomlinson had spent twenty years as an army doctor piecing maimed Vietnam vets back together. He was a no-nonsense surgeon with great skill, a subtle wit and an inquisitive intellect. Over a period of twenty years he operated on me more than two dozen times, removing recurrences of tumors, and carving out anything that looked suspicious. Generally when I was under the knife I was given a sedative, morphine, and a local anesthetic. While the good doctor worked his magic, he and I invariably got into interesting and often heated debates. We discussed human nature, politics, the limits of love and the nature of courage among many other topics. It’s a curious business, talking with someone who’s cutting you up with a knife. It leant a certain urgency to our discussions.

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

This poem went through some eighteen printed drafts, and each of those was subject to considerable hand edits. All told it took about two months to complete, although I did tweak it in a couple of places several months later.

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 put my trust in hard work. It’s like Arnold Palmer once said, “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” Inspiration for this poem was unnecessary; a life experience was all that was needed. Inspiration may have come into play when I tried to find a compelling form for the experience, and in this particular case, when I chose what to put into the poem and what to leave out.

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

My last five books have been prose poetry. I started this poem in prose, and never really considered any other form. The technique I employ in my prose poems is the same one I employed in my books of lined verse: eliminate the inessential.

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

It appeared in the journal Quick Fiction later that year.

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

I let poems sit for a while before I send them out, and I always send them to a few friends for a final check before I publish them. I usually work on poems over a fairly long period of time, so when I think they’re done, they usually are.

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

I don’t rely much on invention in my poetry. I have no quarrel with invention, imagination, inspiration or whatever else you might want to call it, but my poetic project, such as it is, has been to render intelligible my own personal landscape. Having said that, I have to admit that I’m no slave to fact; I’m more interested in the truth. Sometimes they’re one and the same, but quite often they are not. This poem is factual, but it’s still subject to the vagaries of memory, and to artistic manipulation.

Is this a narrative poem?

Insofar as it tells a story, however slight, it’s a narrative. What I’ve tried to do in this poem and in many others is to write a lyrical narrative—one in which a narrative arc is condensed so that it can be employed the way an image might be.

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

I agree with Thomas Aquinas, who says that art exists outside of morality; that’s one of its chief virtues. This doesn’t mean that art gives license to amoral behavior, only that art cannot be judged by the same measure as a person’s actions. I don’t believe that all good poetry is necessarily ethical or just. There are many wonderful poems that take delight in savaging a fickle lover, or imagining some horrible vengeance. Even so, I’ve been persuaded by Elaine Scarry’s contention that beauty encourages a sense of justice and moves us toward a greater attention to, and a concern for justice. This begs the question of whether a poem is beautiful or not, and whether a bad poem can be just, but I do like to believe that poetry is somehow a force for good.

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

My reading is haphazard, and my sense of time is horribly fluid. I was probably reading four or five books simultaneously in fits and starts while I worked on this poem, but I couldn’t begin to remember what they might have been.

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

I never write with any particular reader in mind, although there are two or three people that I hope will be pleased by what I write. I do have an ideal reader, although “idealized reader” might be more precise. I like to imagine a young man in his twenties reading my work in a library or a classroom; he’s Chinese, and he lives 200 years from now. I try to write poems that might move him.

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?

Like most poets, I have a group of close friends with whom I share my works-in-progress, and my poems are better for their kind attention.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This poem is fairly typical of my work, although there is a strange patina to this poem that comes from my carrying it so long in my head. It may only be evident to me, but I can see an evolution in my thinking manifested here, a kind of poetic palimpsest.

What is American about this poem?

The idiom more than anything. The dialog in particular is distinctly American. I frequently utilize bits of speech in my poems, those poetic gifts that we offer each other in conversation. There is a great deal of wisdom and emotional depth inhered within the most common colloquial expression, and I’ve tried to tap into that here.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I had fantasies of writing a novel or a short story about the circumstances described in this poem, but I’m not a fiction writer, and so I had to abandon that particular strategy; it was simply beyond me. For better or worse, this poem is finished. I could make it different, but I don’t think I could improve it.

Gabriel Spera

Gabriel Spera’s first collection of poems, The Standing Wave, was a 2002 National Poetry Series selection and subsequently received the 2004 PEN-West Literary Book Award for Poetry. He received a 2009 fellowship from the NEA. He lives in Los Angeles.




IN A FIELD OUTSIDE THE TOWN

Three days later, Suljic was finally given a drink
of water and marched with a dozen other men
onto a small livery truck, one of two, fenced
along each side by wooden planks,

the back left open to give a clear shot
to the automatic weapon poking out the window
of the red sedan that followed, the squat nose
trained on them, ridiculously, as if they'd any thought

of hopping off a moving truck. Suljic peered
vacantly through the slats. He'd missed the yellow flowers
of Spring and by now saw a landscape taken over
by Summer, the grasses closing behind them as they veered

from the road and lurched across cow paths. They drove
to the center of a wide field and stopped. Old sweat,
without the breeze of movement, prickled in the heat.
A metal smell drifted, an untended apple grove

baked on a hill, and the weeds droned, motory with bees.
But Suljic noticed none of these, fixed instead
on the gaps in the field where bodies, all dead,
matted down the wild carrot and chicory, their khakis

splotched darkly, like a fawn's dappled haunches
obscuring them. The men clambered down into the tall grass
and lined up at gunpoint. Suljic was sure the last
good thing he'd ever see would be the apple branches

drooping with fruit, but the man beside him grabbed
his hand, and looked him in the face, as if
Suljic, just a bricklayer, had any assurances to give.
He squeezed the hand back, hard, and felt a scab

crossing the man's knuckles. He saw, too, a thin scar
worrying the arch of his left eyebrow, much older,
perhaps from a fall as a child from a ladder
picking fruit. His hand was like a clump of mortar,

and three nights without sleep had webbed his eyes red.
And Suljic suddenly stuttered to ask his name,
what town was he from, his job—anything—but there came
the crackle, like sometimes thunder, undecided

whether to begin, that starts, stalls, then trips
over itself, the sound crinkling from one
end of the sky to the other. The sound took possession
of his face until it, too, crinkled, his grip

pulsed, and he fell forward. Suljic winced
in the tackle of bodies, and splayed down in the dirt
flattening himself like a beetle, not hurt
in any new way, not yet convinced

he wasn't dead and didn't feel it. He heard the click
of fresh clips sliding into place, and shut
his eyes lightly, sure someone had seen he wasn't shot
and would come finish it. But no one came. Another truck

rolled up. The men climbed down, and lined up, docilely.
He recognized, solely by rhythm, a prayer, cut off
by the crackle, the hush of crickets, the soft
whump of bodies folding at the knees

and knocked by bullets shoulder first
into the grass. No one yelled. No one tried to run.
Another truck, another group, falling like a succession
of bricks sliding off a hod. Suljic finally pissed

where he lay, and blended in all the better
with the others. The noise stopped, and he cracked
his eyes enough to see, across the backs
like bleeding hills, a man strolling along the scatter

of bodies with a pistol, putting a slug
into the skull of anyone that still twitched
or mumbled. Then came the snort and low-pitched
rumble of diesel engines as two backhoes dug

a trench along the margin of all the collapsed
bodies. Impossibly, the crackling started anew,
and when darkness finally settled, the squads continued
in what light the backhoes' headlights threw. Perhaps

the shooting was over long before the sound
left him, the crackle to his eardrums
was like the rolling of a boat to his limbs
echoing long after he'd reached dry ground.

The soldiers left. Still he didn't move, but eased
his eyes full open. The moon above the orchard
was shrinking higher, its light glossing the awkward
pale forms that stubbled the dry weeds,

glinting off teeth and eyes. He scuttled from beneath
the arms and legs flopped sleepingly over
his own, as though by drunkards or lovers,
and rose like a foal to his numb feet,

seeing throughout the field no man not touched
by three dead others. He stood for a moment, trying
to guess, even roughly, their number, multiplying
bodies per square yard, but the math was too much,

the count too huge. He stared at the faces beside him
in the grass, like a man leaving something he knew
he would someday have to return to,
looking for the landmarks that would guide him—

the crooked teeth, the welted cheek, the pale eyes eclipsed
by half-shut lids, lolling upward, inward, swollen
as though with weeping, blood from an unseen hole
glistering down a chin line, crusting on lips.

How could he explain his life, what could he say
to those who weren't here to see, to the mothers and wives
who'd swear for years their men were still alive,
somewhere, the bodies never found, bulldozed into clay—

would he tell them how he tiptoed, unable to avoid
stepping on hands and ankles, or how the tears
like a secret he'd harbored through three years
of siege shook loose, and how he let them, no longer afraid

of being found out and cut down by gunfire,
or how he ran anyway, when he reached the open, quick
as his bum leg would let him, without a look
back at the faces turned like gourds in the dark mire.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

It must’ve been written some time around 1995–1996. (Hard to believe that’s nearly fifteen years ago!) I was living in Oakland, CA, at the time, and was working (minimally) as a freelance writer, so I had more time to devote to longer pieces such as this one. These days, my poems tend to be much shorter—a reflection of the increased demands of my day job and family life.

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

Paper is cheap (I know that’s not the most ecologically enlightened thing to say). I go through reams of revisions. I still work longhand, with pen and notebook, and just keep rewriting and rewriting the whole thing until I no longer need to consult the previous draft. At that point, it’s ready for the keyboard. Also, by rewriting without consulting the previous draft, nonessential elements tend to drop out. I do recall that this poem started out much longer, but I decided that the first several pages did more harm than good, so I dropped them. The result was a rather abrupt start, but a start that also conveyed a sense that a great deal of suffering had already been endured.

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

For me, it’s not so much inspiration as obsession. Something sticks in my mind, and eventually forms that basis of a poem. In this case, that something was the testimony of the only three survivors of this incident, which I’d read in the newspaper. So, some of the details were based on their descriptions.

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

I made a conscious decision to compose in abba quatrains, the basic form used by Tennyson in In Memoriam. It seemed appropriate, though I didn’t adopt his strict iambic tetrameter. I need more room in a line. Also, while form provides a useful scaffold, I’m never dogmatic about it. A lot of my rhymes are extremely slanted.

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

About two years. It was rejected by six journals before Poetry picked it up, and it later appeared in the Best American Poetry. I never include any biographical info when I submit material to a journal. If my poems get noticed in the slush pile, then I know they’ve got some merit.

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 typically let a poem sit for a few months at least. It’s wonderful to pick up a poem that I’d nearly forgotten about and find that it surprises me. But much of this delay simply stems from the fact that I’m not a prolific writer, and most of what I write ends up in the trash, so it takes me a long time just to get together enough material for a respectable submission.

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

Well, I’ve never been to that part of the world, so everything is fiction, or fictionalized. But one of the virtues of art is that it helps prevent the powerful from rewriting history, from recasting the truth. Documents can be destroyed or manipulated, witnesses can be silenced—but its impossible to eradicate a work of art—particularly poetry—once it has found its way into society’s collective imagination. This will sound odd, but I’m more concerned with honesty than truth. In a poem like this, I can’t portray the scene truthfully—factually—but I can forge an honest connection to the subject. Too much knowledge is the death of art. Poetry, like faith, thrives in the places where knowledge leaves off.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes.

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?

Art, as a mirror, can be neither ethical nor just in a world that is neither ethical nor just.

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

I recall reading Mark Doty at the time, but I don’t think he influenced me very much. More importantly, I was reading Schopenhauer, and Isaac Babel, and Chekhov, and I’d say they’ve had a far more enduring influence on my work and life.

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

I don’t write to be read—that comes later, if at all. (See next comment.)

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 never share my work. Even my closest confidantes rarely see a poem until it appears in a journal. I start each poem with the assumption that it will end up in the trash can, and that no one will ever see it. Without that assumption, I don’t think I could really be honest in my work.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Actually, it’s fairly representative—the narrative mode, the third-person voice (I loathe Confessional poetry), the extended metaphor, the rhythm and form, the subject matter. I suppose what’s different is that someone noticed it!

What is American about this poem?

Everything.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It was finished. Closure is important for me. Poems that get abandoned really do end up in the trash can, never to be seen (though I like to think that any element worth saving will stick in my head somewhere and show up in another poem where it’s most needed).