David Dodd Lee

David Dodd Lee's latest book, The Nervous Filaments, was published by Four Way Books in March 2010. Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, The Ashbery Erasure Poems (BlazeVox) was published in April 2010. Orphan, Indiana (The University of Akron Press) will appear in late 2010. The Coldest Winter On Earth will be published by Marick Press in 2011. Lee has published three other full-length books and a chapbook, including Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues, 1997), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), and Abrupt Rural (New Issues, 2004). Recent poems have appeared in Blackbird, Field, Gulf Coast, Interim, Verse, Zone 3, Pool, Denver Quarterly, The Hat, Pleiades, Caffeine Destiny, Mississippi Review, Nerve, and Massachusetts Review. He is the editor of the annual poetry and fiction anthology, SHADE, published by Four Way Books. Lee is also the publisher of Half Moon Bay poetry chapbooks, which include titles by Franz Wright and Hugh Seidman. In the past, he has served as poetry editor at Third Coast and Passages North, and recently he guest edited issues of The Laurel Review and Passages North. He has worked as a park ranger, a fisheries technician, and a journalist (film and art critic). Short stories have been published in Sou’wester, Crowd, Green Mountains Review, and Controlled Burn. Lee’s most recently completed project is The Other Life: The Selected Poems of Herbert Scott (Carnegie Mellon, 2010), which he edited. He teaches creative writing and visual art at Indiana University South Bend. For more information, please visit his blog.


A POEM ABOUT BLUEGILLS

There are poems about bluegills. There are poems
about trout. The bluegill doesn’t give a shit.
It’ll eat a bare hook but would rather not hear
about your childhood. The bluegill’s thick headed.
It hunkers down in the weeds, thinking. The trout’s like a young girl
in a wedding gown. Touch it and it dies.
You can pull a bluegill out a pike’s ass, it might
still swim away. I’m not talking about pumpkinseeds,
those little flecks of tinsel. The bluegill’s
the stud of all panfish. People catch pumpkinseeds
thinking they’re bluegills. A pumpkinseed shivers;
it thinks it’s going to convince you it’s cold.
Bluegills are fatalists. A slab in your hand may jerk its head
twice. Once hooked it goes for the mud. By the time
it’s resting on a flotation device it’s willing to die.
It doesn’t grope like a rock bass, swallowing air,
the bluegill’s a realist. It knows it’s just a wedge of painted flesh,
heavy enough to pull you half out of the boat.
If you’ve got a big white bucket of panfish
sitting on top of the ice, the bluegill’s the one still living,
thinking, its head like a stapler, mulling things over.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem was written in late 1996, and was the last poem to be written for Downsides of Fish Culture (which appeared in 1997). In fact I wrote it (after the book had been taken) as a kind of companion piece to “A Poem About Pike.” The book is full of northern pike. The bluegill poem was a kind of addendum then, though it appears in the middle of the book and really sort of centers the whole thing. I also wrote it as a kind of response to the exceedingly common “trout poem.” As if one fish deserves a poem more than another. In particular, I recall a trout poem David Marlatt had just published around that same time (it was also a love poem—Trout, the fish of Love) and so I took the chip I had on my shoulder and brought all sorts of attitude with me into the poem. In a more general way it’s a poem for the underdog, I suppose, in society. Also, I love spin casting. Too many poems out there about fly fishing. Too few poems about hurling a Mepps spinner around, or flipping a leaf worm alongside a creek’s undercut bank.

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

I wrote a draft probably in around an hour. I remember I wrote it on an old windy computer on a big Formica table in my kitchen when I lived on Merrill Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I remember I was very happy with the first draft, having written it on the energy that comes when you know you have a book coming out and that the poem you are presently writing will be part of that book. I think I played around with a few lines a while later—as I was looking at it as part of the whole that was the book--but in the end I went with the original version. I probably changed two words.

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

I answered this in the question above I think. I was riding the crest of the wave that was the manuscript for Downsides. I’m very into the idea of a book of poems as series of related vignettes—the poems all feed off each other, and the ones that come in last for any given manuscript are written somehow based on the ones that came in first, like a big abstract expressionist painting. In that sense I was “inspired” by the body of work that so far constituted the manuscript for Downsides. (In a sense, it was like writing the end of a novel.) Other poems, earlier ones, I revised a hundred times. All that revision of course isn’t wasted, or rather the work one puts into even failed poems. The sweat and tears of those failures teach you something and the next thing you know along comes one of those gift poems, seemingly beamed down to you from the moon. I have a vague memory, for instance, of writing a catfish poem around that time—I’m not sure if it was called “A Poem About Catfish” or not . . . Either way, I have no poem about catfish in my “files” . . . I’m pretty sure I just bagged that idea and spun out the bluegill poem after getting a few other fish poems (Downsides is, after all, a book of “fish poems”) wrong first.

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

I don’t recall making any conscious choices. I knew it would be simple, flush left and one single stanza. I didn’t want the form getting in the way of the story (or portrait) and voice. But many of the poems in Downsides of Fish Culture I conceived formally before I began writing so my technique varied at that time (for that book).

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

Pretty quickly. Within nine months. I don’t remember how it all came down. I have it recorded that the poem appeared in Sycamore Review in the summer of 1997. The poem appeared in the book a few months later.

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

It varies. Sometimes I send poems out a week or so after they’ve been written (and revised) and I often realize I’ve sent the poems out too early. Part of my process can include this absurd ritual of dropping poems into a mailbox and then going home and finishing them. It happens less often these days, but it still happens. Many poems I never send out at all. It sort of depends on how much free time I have available. Not all of my poems are at their best when taken out of the context of the manuscript they are a part of. I have a manuscript that University of Akron Press is publishing in the fall of this year and I believe about six poems have been published (or will be). That’s six out of something like fifty poems. But the structure of the book is such that I’m not sure most of the poems should be published separately.

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

That’s all balled up into a composite portrait representing a large general truth or feeling in this poem. It’s an appreciation for one thing, of the bluegill, inspired in part by the poem, as I mentioned above, David Marlatt wrote about trout, a species of fish that seems to have, as I also mentioned above, its fair share of appreciation poems. Every kid has caught a bluegill, sometimes on a bare hook. But the large “Bull” gills are another matter. They are hard to hook and they can bend your fishing rod in two. There is something thrillingly noble and dangerous-seeming in the shape--the blunt wedge of it--of a bluegill’s body, the thick thoughtful forehead, especially after the fight, once you pull the dark fish from the water. They aren’t hyper little flipping things once they get that big for one thing—immediately they go somewhere very Zen and await their fate and it’s somehow an honor to gaze into that large upside staring eyeball. Fishing is very emotional. Seriously. And all this is somehow doubled when it’s just you out in the world standing on top of a frozen lake, just you and the fish. Together. With maybe a small bottle of schnapps.

Is this a narrative poem?

In a large metaphorical kind of way, sure. I know we’re suppose to feel shamefully old fashioned about keeping company with anything “narrative” these days as poets. It seems to me though that all poems are narrative in some way. I would say, though, that I don’t particularly feel like what one might call a narrative poet, and never have.

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

No, I really don’t. I recall that Robert Hass’s “My Mother’s Nipples” did a number on me and influenced the shape of “Nude With Northern Pike.” I read too variously to be able to answer this honestly. I may have been reading Kate Braverman or Lorrie Moore or Jim Harrison or Rick Bass or Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, which I had purchased around that time from C. D. Wright, an old semi-water-damaged copy of the original Mill Mountain edition (It was expensive). I remember I fell in love with James Schuyler’s “Morning of the Poem” around that time. See how I’m not answering your question?

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

No, not really. I write, as Tom McGuane said somewhere, to astound myself. Is that too over the top? Perhaps I could change it to “To entertain myself.” Amuse? Something like that.

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 shared it with no one. Herbert Scott saw it, and he published it in the book. No one ever edited it. I’ve had a few bad experiences where I took advice and edited a poem and then it would appear in some magazine and I’d immediately go back to the old, “inferior” version. I think we spend a lot of times changing poems without making them actually much better. They’re just different. That isn’t to say I haven’t experienced the collaborative thing that happens when you are engaged with a really great editor.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

In the construction that is the narrative that is the story of all the poems I’ve published (in book form) starting with “A Poem About Pike” and ending with my dictionary poems (some of which I wrote as recently as three weeks ago and hope to publish as a chapbook), “A Poem About Bluegills” is the right poem for the slot in which it resides as one part of the continuum that represents an arc of utterance, various and ever changing, arranged—one hopes tellingly—between this poet’s birth and death. May I keep adding to this arc for years (hand me the fish oil supplements).

What is American about this poem?

It’s very place oriented—so in that regard it is very much about the Midwest, its culture and its landscape.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It was finished. In fact I think I popped open a bottle of beer at one p.m. in the
afternoon—probably on something like a Tuesday--in celebration, then drove over and handed Herbert Scott the finished book manuscript. “It’s done,” I think I said.

Nicky Beer

Nicky Beer is the author of The Diminishing House, published by Carnegie Mellon University. She teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, where she co-edits the journal Copper Nickel. For more information, please visit her website.






CARDINAL VIRTUE

At first, I can't name the bird falling deliberately
from the tree's high crooks: a grey flash, tipped with carmine.
Lit on a fencepost, its wings smolder.
It might smell of ginger.
Bird, your life would terrify me.
Bones full of air, belly full of hunger,
the underbrush dense with murders.
Death is a twist, a pinfeather lost,
a stumble over a slowing pebble. This is not a life
of flight, but flight from. Perhaps you don't suppose
that there's any other way, which is itself
a kind of mercy. Perhaps you don't suppose.

Your heart's the size of a small clod and,
so I've heard, egg-shaped. I learned
to measure my own by the scale of my fist,
and my height from the distance
between the forefingers at the ends of my spread arms.
Physical logic is contrast,
ratio, degree. We know desire
by the scarcest shades on our skin:
brief flushes, bitten lips.
How could we sort anything at all
without rarity? There are acres more night
than moon, hours more sleep than dream.

Bird, when you are half-alive
in the jaws of our cats, a yellow ribbon
of innards dragging on the dirt,
remember that we dreamed our radiant dead
would become more like you,
as though the progeny of some impossible
lust between one of ours and one of yours.
Incomprehensible thing, drenched in the color
of something we call joy,
stuffed with something that we call song,
you are always first
inhuman.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The first draft was written in September 2002. I hadn’t looked at the first draft in a very long time until now, and I’m surprised at how much more bleak it is (the last line was originally “Nothing can be new.”), and how much more atmospheric and less idea-driven it is.

The poem came from the first time I saw a female cardinal, or rather, I saw a bird and described it to a birdwatching friend, the poet Sean Hill, and he suggested that what I’d seen was a female cardinal. It seems like such an innocuous event, but the revelation that what I’d seen was a bird that was familiar to me, but seemed unfamiliar because of its gender, was what first got me more interested in birdwatching myself. There’s something about that activity in which we’re driven to make the unfamiliar familiar, to give it a name, that appeals to a lot of writers, I think.

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

There were a total seven drafts that stretched over about two years. That’s astonishing to me, because I don’t have a memory of consciously grinding along with the poem for that long; I think it was just a poem that I kept picking up over time because I was never very satisfied with where I’d left it.

I think the discovery of this poem for me was moving gradually from writing about the bird and playing with it as a metaphor to examining my own impulses and motivations for why I was using the bird as a scrim upon which to project ideas. That’s certainly become a recurring concern in my work—how and why the fictions we have about nature define our senses of self—and I think this poem is very much where a lot of that began.

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

The encounter with the cardinal itself may have been the inspiration, but the drafts themselves reflect a great deal of bashing about to get something worthwhile out of that engendering moment. I guess you could say I believe in inspiration, but need the craft to buoy it up. I think the problem with the idea of inspiration is that too often it’s associated with the “eureka,” the flash, the immediate. And yet it’s so much more elastic than that; an inspiring moment may take years to pay off. But because we associate it with what’s instantaneous, we don’t always recognize inspiration. And so we despair when we don’t get the payoff right away, when we should be learning patience, faith. And of course, my use of “we” here is just a lofty, high-handed way of saying “me.”

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

It was finished in the summer of 2004, and it was published in the Iron Horse Literary Review 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?

It definitely varies. There are those poems where I can feel an audible end, a clicking-shut that lets me know I can send it out when I figure out the kinds of journals or editors that might give it a friendly reading. And then there are those problem children that I just keep picking at until I can’t see them clearly anymore, and so I kick them off the couch and shove them out the front door to fend for themselves.

Is this a narrative poem?

I think all poems are narrative, in the sense that the very use of grammar itself is narrative. But in terms of this specific poem, it’s a narrative of revelation, rather than action.

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

Czeslaw Milosz’s “Magpiety” was an influence here—here’s an excerpt:

What is magpiety? I shall never achieve
A magpie heart, a hairy nostril over the beak, a flight
That always renews just when coming down,
And so I shall never comprehend magpiety.
If however magpiety does not exist
My nature does not exist either.

While Milosz’s poem points to a kind of unity between the human and the natural, despite their mutually exclusive spheres, I think my poem broods more on that difference between the two worlds, that lack of comprehension, and how much of our self-awareness derives from delineating to the “not-self.”

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

I always envision an impulsive billionaire with a soft spot for poetry and my phone number on speed dial.

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?

My husband, the poet Brian Barker, and I pass poems back and forth. His own remarks from this blog on the subject describe our happy situation about this very well. People have observed that our styles are very different from one another, and while that may be true, we share so many of the same influences and intellectual interests that our convergences always seem very clear to me. One of the things that he’s so good at is finding those lines or stanzas that I’ve basically kept in a poem for my own satisfaction or gratification, but don’t really work. I can fool myself into thinking I can leave that stuff in there, but I can’t fool him. He keeps me honest.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I think it’s a pretty typical poem for me. Animals, meditations about perception and mortality, intimations of bestiality, disembowelment—just another day at the office!

What is American about this poem?

It loves funnel cake and demolition derbies.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It was finished. Though it may have just as easily been finished with me: “Scram, toots!”

Christopher Bakken

Christopher Bakken is the author of two books of poems: Goat Funeral (awarded the Helen C. Smith prize by the Texas Institute of Letters for the best book of poetry in 2006) and After Greece (for which he won the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry). Bakken is also co-translator of The Lions’ Gate, a selected poems of the contemporary Greek poet Titos Patrikios. His poems, essays and translations have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as The Paris Review, PN Review, Literary Imagination, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, and Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He served as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bucharest, Romania, in 2008. He is Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.


DRUNK

When William Blake came fashionably late
to parties he’d blame it on archangels,
prophecies broadcast between the leaves
of ordinary trees in the orchard:
those who restrain desire do so because
theirs is weak enough to be restrained…
As in Martinsville, Wisconsin, when we
allowed Mike Meinholz to get in the car,
surely a mistake, since the wheels would start
churning up the twelve-packs of Budweiser
he never restrained himself from drinking.
We all have our excuses for wanting
to avoid conversation with mortals,
to restrain ourselves from the fools we are
in the neon light that only darkens
with beer, fears we can never quite drown.
One hundred people trapped in one small town
with just one bar, one church, and one butcher.
Expect poison from standing water,
bewildering Blake would probably say,
if he’d been around to help drag the drunk
from my Impala, down our steep driveway,
to the back lawn where he would sleep, where we
stood that night without the assistance
of good sense, grass, or Romantic verse,
and heard, I swear, a voice come from below
where the woods dropped into the gulley:
a woman in pain, we thought at first,
which nearly made us run the other way,
but then it shrieked like a snared rabbit,
or was it some keening itch branches scratched,
or nothing but a dull thud in the chest,
nothing but what we wanted it to be, then,
some housecat that couldn’t find its way down,
some worried awe that barely held us up,
some trembling thing in a tree we couldn’t see.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

According to my notebook, my first draft was written in the second week of October, 2007. I’d spent the morning reading Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, mining his ecstatic parables. And for some reason I’d just listened to the Dead Kennedy’s “California Űber Alles” for the first time in about twenty years. So I gave myself the assignment of writing a poem containing lines from both Blake and Jello Biafra (has there ever been a stranger pair of prophets?).

Thinking about the Dead Kennedys got me thinking about my old friend Mike Meinholz, the drunk punk hero of this Wisconsin poem; then Jello departed from the poem forever, probably for the better.

How many revisions did this poem undergo? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

In the act of composition, I’m primarily a metrical writer. The poem’s first line came out in ten syllables and it hasn’t changed at all since that first draft. Once it was clear the poem was going to have a backbone of narrative, blank verse felt organically right (Wordsworthian nostalgia is a kind of foil here) and the lines filled out very quickly thanks to that self-imposed architecture. My first finished draft was almost the exact length of the poem printed here.

Since iambic pentameter felt too tidy and stately for this subject, however, I spent a good deal of time in later drafts ruffling the metrical surfaces, futzing with a lot of angular substitutions in the hope that the poem would proceed down the page with more anxious spontaneity.

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

Well, I should answer “yes,” if only because this poem is about inspiration at some level, though the primary source of inspiration in Martinsville, Wisconsin was fear: the kind brought on by isolation, religious belief (or lack of it), alcohol, and the unknown.

There’s no doubt William Blake “received” his poems, had them dictated by various daemonic sources, and he seemed to make sense of those voices. The “we” at the end of this poem is attempting to do something like that as well, with ambiguous success.

As for my own poems: beyond the occasional flash of backyard sublime, I pretty much depend on hard labor to carry the day.

How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print? How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world?

It went out about two weeks after it was written. It sent it to Ploughshares (along with a batch of two or three other Wisconsin poems) and B.H. Fairchild plucked it from the slush pile for an issue he was editing for the following spring.

Normally I let poems sit and marinate for a long time before sending them out, so that was an unusually short trip from draft to print. I don’t have any rules about this—some poems just arrive at their “finished” form sooner than others.

Is this a narrative poem?

I confess: I think it is. Though with only a beginning and middle, it’s more a meditation built upon the flimsy bones of anecdote.

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?

Terrence des Pres, distilling what many others had suggested before him, said that the poet has two duties: praise and dispraise. A certain kind of ethics is involved there, I suppose, and occasionally poets are qualified to guide others in the pursuit of what is sacred, and away from what isn’t. I turn to Dante and Whitman and Milosz (to name a few obvious examples) if that’s what I’m looking for.

But I’m not sure there is an ethics of the imagination—and I persist in the Romantic idea that the imagination (not theory, or morality, or autobiography) is the provenance of poetry.

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

Gertrude Stein said she wrote for “herself and strangers.” That about sums it up. I certainly don’t write to please anyone in particular, though I do keep in mind that my metaphysical family—comprised of the dead poets I love—is out there listening. I try not to make an ass of myself in front of them.

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 think of myself as a survivor of the workshop years. For a long time, workshop saved me time—others helped me see the mistakes I was making before those mistakes became too ingrained. Beyond that, however, I’m not sure how much it helped me to have a group of people try to come to some consensus about my drafts.

I always learned much more from individual readers I trusted, those who helped me learn to edit myself (that’s ultimately what one should learn from workshop, though that’s not usually what happens). Richard Howard helped show me how to do that early in my career.

Sometimes I share my work with other poets, especially if I’m feeling stuck. Alan Michael Parker saw a draft of this poem shortly after it was written, as did Corey Marks. Both of them have a somewhat different approach to poetry than I do, so their perspectives are often really helpful. I also show drafts to David Mason, whose ear for meter in particular I find invaluable.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours? What is American about this poem?

I’m answering these two unrelated questions together since they are related in this case. My first book, After Greece, accounted a vision of my Promised Land, one very far from my birthplace. And my second book also emerged from some imagined Mediterranean place, though its adventures in psychedelic pastoral were leading me (I see now) back toward my Midwestern roots.

I never consciously avoided writing about Wisconsin, though I never had much inclination to do it either. “Drunk” was one of the first poems in which I openly engaged my rural American upbringing and about half of my new manuscript continues in that vein.

One hundred people trapped in one small town
with just one bar, one church, and one butcher.

That pretty much sums up what it felt like to live out in the dark fields of the republic. They might be the most hard-headed “American” lines I’ve ever written.

Also, any poem with a Pontiac in it qualifies as an American poem, no?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. At least for now.

Dave Smith

Dave Smith's recent books include Afield: Writers on Bird Dogs (Skyhorse, 2010), edited with Robert DeMott; The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems 1970-2000 (LSU, 2000); Little Boats, Unsalvaged (LSU, 2005); and Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry (LSU, 2006). He is Chairman of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.


NEAR THE DOCKS

There was a fire in the night.
Across the street I slept among the others
as the ashes snowed upon small pines.
I slept owning nothing, a child ignorant
of fortune’s blistering story, the playful
flash in the dark, the unseen smolder
that would leave us revealed, unchanged.
I said my prayers for luck
but the man trying to live in two houses
answers me now, losing
neither the old one whose windows burst
with weariness, nor the one half-built
whose roofless, green timbers
he would leave unfinished like a vision.
I had climbed there all summer to smoke.

Awake, I found him sitting at his stool
halfway between the houses
where I would go each morning. The story
of the sea would be upon his tongue,
his hands weaving the wire to a trap,
making the careful seams to catch
a scuttling crab. Beyond him, his wife
already had begun to stretch her wash,
indifferent in that early light, and a dog
lapped from the ruts of the fire truck.

I believed little had been changed by fire,
only his toolshed limp as a black sail
left in a heap, and a new hole
in the landscape. This was an old place
where no one came, luckless, desperate,
eternal as guilt. In silence
I greeted that old one. But now I remember
seeing also, as if for the first time,
the shocking gray face of the sea.
It loomed up human and beautiful
as far off the figures of boats crossed,
worked, and seemed to sink
while they burned in the sullen sun.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I don’t know exactly the date of composition, but it would have been between 1970 and 1973. I used an early draft of the poem in The Fisherman’s Whore, published in 1974, which dates the composition. The poem is based loosely on a childhood experience. My grandparents lived across the street from the home of a man who made his living as a “waterman,” one who fishes nets, tongs for oysters, runs strings of crab pots, all during appropriate season, and out of season repairs such equipment as boats, motors, nets, etc. To the uninformed it may appear the waterman loafs when he is not harvesting the actual product. This particular man had a dark, mysterious workshop for his repair work and it lay behind both the old weather-worn house he lived in and a second house he was building in his desultory fashion. I must have been about ten years old, spending a summer with my grandparents, and had befriended the waterman’s son, about the same age. Once or twice, maybe more, we climbed to the loft of the workshop and smoked his father’s cigarettes in secret comradeship. One dark night my grandmother woke me to watch as fire consumed that workshop so rapidly it was left in a heap by the next daylight, all of that in enormous contrast to the wailing sirens and flashing lights. Writing the poem years later, I was an enlisted man in the US Air Force, essentially owned by all who outranked me, and it happened I was stationed not many miles from the scene and the place of that fire.

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

Again, I am unsure of the answers. Probably the early drafts were not many because I wanted to describe events as exact as memory could make them. However, my writing process is inevitably a fumbling forward as if following bread crumbs in the forest, always with the conviction something big is waiting for my discovery. The first published draft is shorter and less ambitious than subsequent drafts. The poem was revised for reappearance in The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems, in 1985; then it was revised again for collection in The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems 1970-2000, in 2000. So it was revised multiply over more than sixteen years time. Each revision seeks to understand and express the juxtaposition of violation and cultural continuity; it does so by attending to three stories—the fire in the night, the ongoing work that defines the life of a people, and the relationship of the narrator to those experiences. None of the stories is fully told, only inscribed as they set up a moment of quasi-understanding that is something like what poetry critics refer to as an epiphany.

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

These two questions reflect the antithetical ethos of Romantic and Modern thinking. Inspiration means, literally, in-breathing, but you mean the imagination’s unsought gifts. No poets actually experience “sweat and tears” but this is a metaphor for constant labor. Both, I think, are part of any composing process. But neither accounts wholly for the emergence of a poem.

What is on the page of my poem is largely accurate, even if only I am left to say so; however, some of it is entirely invented. No one ever argued the fire was caused by anyone’s cigarette; the woman of the house did not string a wash; there was no dog; I don’t recall ever seeing that waterman on a stool; most significant of all, from that place you could not see water or boats. To place such details into a narrative relationship is to seek meaning. That is what art does and what a news report does not do.

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

The poem arrived through the action of my genius, I would like to say. Silly to do that. But any poem, even the least sophisticated, employs myriad techniques, or it cannot be called a poem, only words lineated. My technique, alluded to in the three stories mentioned above, was to appear to tell a simple personal narrative which joins fragmentary details to make credible the final claim: that there is always much more meaning, or illumination, in representational moments than we readily admit. The corollary to that is that everything is mysterious and beyond explanation, though not beyond understanding. But your question really means decisions relating to line, stanza, sonic repetition, and the like. Yes, I did.

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

I don’t know. I believe it must have been within a few months because in those days I sent poems to magazines as fast as I felt they were done (which they rarely were). I was lucky enough that someone wanted to publish my poems. Remember, though, that at any given time there have always been more than a thousand poetry-publishing small magazines, which is a voracious appetite, one that will snap up even the least finished fish around.

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 had no rule over the years. I sent the poems off too quickly in every case. Publication buoyed me; it made me imagine I was better than I was. The result was that I had to revise poems before collecting them into books, sometimes dump them altogether, a sloppy and self-deceptive way of being, which also has the ill effect of causing whatever learning goes on to be done publicly. William Logan once reviewed a friend of mine and said of his poems, “Maybe now he will cease to educate himself in public,” or words to that effect. It could have been said of me, I am afraid. The worst of this lesson is that once poems have appeared in books they are painfully and permanently on display with all of the ugly scars and wens and stigmata that one did not remove.

I still have no rule about letting the poems mature. But life has its way of enforcing better practices. If I was once in a position to be attractive to editors, hence to publish a lot, age has mitigated that. I no longer write as much, or as fast, as I once did; moreover, I send poems out only when asked for them, and requests now come seldom. Thus, I have little need for any rule of restraint.

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

I have already done so above. A fire in the night burned down a man’s workshop, altering his ability to work or build his life-house. That is factual, though I do not give the date or location or name. I do not ask the reader to feel pity or send a contribution. The lack of specificity makes it possible that this is actually a fiction. What is the difference, really? Things go bump in the night, we wake and adjust and try to understand. Surely that is the function of language in general, perhaps of poetry more than for any other expressive act. The fable of the Beauty and the Beast tells us that what we love may be ugly, what we should love may be ugly, but we forget. Poetry reminds us.

Is this a narrative poem?

All poems are narratives. Some more, some less. If that is controversial, I add this: the older I have come to be the more I understand that the quality of any poem lies almost entirely in the quality of its story, how compelling, how weighty, how memorable. The best poets tell the best stories. Simply that.

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

I was a young man writing this poem, in my early thirties, and in love with any poetry I found to read. I was much drawn to Yeats, Hardy, Houseman, Dickey, but also to Frost, and maybe Auden. I responded to poets who felt the dark pressure of reality, what the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wanderer” laments because his friends are gone, his good years are over, the weather is bad, there’s no more plundering and killing and glory to be taken. And yet, life is beautiful. Sometimes, anyway.

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

Yes, me. Also the poets I have admired and with whose poems I am in competition. This is, as academic critics are now fond of saying, also a “conversation.” But one doesn’t converse to achieve superior results, one competes. James Wright said he wanted a reader who was informed and free of ulterior motive. I feel less competitive now and don’t really pay much attention to what others poets are doing. My standard is simply to tell the best story I can and reduce my reader to weeping joy. As I am that reader, I laugh at the abject futility of the one who speaks to me so.

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?

My wife may have seen it in drafts. I think I stopped showing her my poems some years later when her honesty became unbearable. Melville remarks in an essay about Hawthorne, his friend, that Hawthorne would have been a better writer if he had shown his fiction to Melville for comment. I am certain that is a good thing for every writer to do. I don’t do it. I am too thin-skinned.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It is older than many. Shorter than many. Shorter lines than many. More Romantic than many. Otherwise, not much different.

What is American about this poem?

Not much, really. However, its author is certifiably American.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

The poet to whom you allude with that dichotomy thought all poems were abandoned. If I think about the question, I am able to comfortably side with either answer, so I will say both.

Randall Mann

Randall Mann is the author of the poetry collections Breakfast with Thom Gunn, a finalist for the California Book Award and Lambda Literary Award, and Complaint in the Garden, winner of the Kenyon Review Prize; and co-author of the textbook Writing Poems, Seventh Edition. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Poetry, Paris Review, New Republic, and Salmagundi. He works as an editor and lives in San Francisco.


THE MORTICIAN IN SAN FRANCISCO

This may sound queer,
but in 1985 I held the delicate hands
of Dan White:
I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk
was made monument—no, myth—by the years
since he was shot.

I remember when Harvey was shot:
twenty, and I knew I was queer.
Those were the years,
Levi’s and leather jackets holding hands
on Castro Street, cheering for Harvey Milk—
elected on the same day as Dan White.

I often wonder about Supervisor White,
who fatally shot
Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk,
who was one of us, a Castro queer.
May 21, 1979: a jury hands
down the sentence, seven years—

in truth, five years—
for ex-cop, ex-fireman Dan White,
for the blood on his hands;
when he confessed that he had shot
the mayor and the queer,
a few men in blue cheered. And Harvey Milk?

Why cry over spilled milk,
some wondered, semi-privately, for years—
it meant “one less queer.”
The jurors turned to White.
If just the mayor had been shot,
Dan may have had trouble on his hands—

but the twelve who held his life in their hands
maybe didn’t mind the death of Harvey Milk;
maybe, the second murder offered him a shot
at serving only a few years.
In the end, he committed suicide, this Dan White.
And he was made presentable by a queer.


["The Mortician in San Francisco" by Randall Mann is from Breakfast with Thom Gunn. Copyright © 2009 by The University of Chicago.]


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

My friend Tom Halloran helped to prepare Dan White for burial, and he would sometimes mention this, would note White's small hands, note what it was like in San Francisco when Harvey was a Supervisor, and the assassination of Milk and Mayor George Moscone, and the trial of White, and the White Night Riots, and White's suicide, and so on. I was determined to write something about all this history. Also, I liked the irony: Tom is gay, as am I, and the painstaking care of a gay man is what made White look good after death, even though White killed our great gay civil-rights leader. I came up with the end-words for the sestina some time in 2005, but I put them aside until I was ready to write the poem. I wrote it during a stay in Kansas City, Missouri, in early 2006; I think the critical distance from San Francisco probably helped me find a way into the poem.

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

This poem must have gone through ten revisions, maybe more. Probably five months elapsed between the first and final versions.

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

I think this one was equal parts inspiration and craft.

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

Well, I had my end-words, and I knew it would be a sestina, so I had a formal plan of attack. I was mindful of qualifying each repetition, and trying to make each subsequent usage of each end-word surprising. Then I sent the poem to Richard Howard at Western Humanities Review, and he suggested that I take the last stanza and make it the first stanza, thereby amping up the mortician's voice, and if I liked that idea, please send it back to him. Well, I was unsure at first, but I tried out his idea, revised it a few more times, and came up with this final version. Richard's suggestion ("I should like to suggest some emergence," he wrote in his letter) dramatically improved the poem.

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

It appeared a little over a year after I finished it.

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 only let it sit about a month. I don't have rules, other than it has to "feel" finished, whatever that means.

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

There is quite a bit of true fact in this poem, but the age of the speaker, say, is not the same age as my friend Tom, and my thoughts and his thoughts about what happened are commingled, and these are neither fact nor fiction. It's important to get right, say, the exact date of the verdict of Dan White's trial, the unimpeachable. But the rest is up for revision.

Is this a narrative poem?

It's a lyric poem with a clear narrative.

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?

No. Though some of my favorite contemporary poems, such as Anthony Hecht's "The Book of Yolek" and Brigit Pegeen Kelly's "Song" and Carol Frost's "Pure," are artful, moral lessons, much of the delicious, depraved work of, say, Frederick Seidel, is not, and I love it not in spite but because of that.

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

I think I was reading May Swenson. I don't really remember.

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

I've never thought of an audience while writing.

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 think I showed it to the poets Geoffrey Brock and Aaron Smith, who provided so much useful criticism while writing Breakfast with Thom Gunn. I am forever grateful to both of them.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It's more narrative, more directly political and historical, and more personal, than most of my other poems.

What is American about this poem?

It's about a great American civil-rights leader, Harvey Milk. Also, the irony of the oppressed having to clean up the mess of those who oppress them seems very American to me, alas.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It's finished.

Lori Jakiela

Lori Jakiela is the author of a memoir, Miss New York Has Everything (Hatchette/Grand Central Books) and two poetry chapbooks: Red Eye (Pudding House Press) and The Regulars (Liquid Paper Press). Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, 5 AM, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy and elsewhere. She lives in Trafford, Pennsylvania.


WORKING THE RED EYE, PITTSBURGH TO VEGAS

The man in the emergency exit row has been drinking
from his own bottle of duty-free vodka
and because he was quiet about it,
kept his clothes on, and didn’t hit
his call button even once
no one notices until we land in Vegas
and he refuses to get off the plane.

He’s sure we haven’t gone anywhere.
“You people think I’m a sucker,” he says.
“I’m no sucker. I paid good money for this.”
He boarded in Pittsburgh, my home country.
In Pittsburgh, we have two dreams:
to go to Vegas to live
and to go to Florida to die.

The gate agents call the police.
The pilots are pissed.
The A-line flight attendant with the fake French name
twirls a pair of plastic handcuffs and says,
“These make me so-o-o hot.”

My father, who stopped drinking years ago
but never found his way, loved Vegas.
He’d carry a sweatsock full of good-luck
nickels through security
and get stopped every time.
He died at home in a rented hospital bed
in Pittsburgh, not Florida.

“Sir,” I say to the drunk on the plane
who squeezes his eyes shut so he doesn’t have to see me.
“Please put your shoes on.”

“Fuck you,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I was a flight attendant for almost seven years. When I took the job, I thought I’d write like crazy, just bang out poems in hotel rooms all over the world. It was a very romantic idea. But the reality of the job meant I was tired and jet-lagged. My feet swelled. My legs hurt. My fingers bled from popping soda cans all day. I was hung-over a lot. So instead of writing full-on, I took a lot of notes on cocktail napkins and on the backs of airsickness bags and in the margins of on-board magazines. This poem started that way. The narrative in the poem is pretty much reportage – the guy on the plane, what he does. The under-narrative is a kind of reportage, too, though the internal kind. It’s about as fashionable as a mullet to talk about narrative poetry these days. It’s probably less fashionable to admit to autobiography and reportage in poems, but, well, there you go.

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

I revise a lot. If I count the note-taking stage of the poem, we’re talking almost 10 years between the first and final version.

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

The reportage part, I think, was received. It was a gift for me to be there in that place and have this moment with a stranger. It was a gift the way that moment resonated and allowed me to make the leap between that moment and other moments, to link the external and internal narratives. That leap, I think, is something that happens in the unconscious. The crafting of those moments, turning reportage into a poem, that’s the conscious work. That’s the sweat and tears.

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

The writers I love most – West Coast poets like Gerald Locklin, Joan Jobe Smith, Charles Bukowski; East Coasters like Ed Ochester, Ed Field, William Matthews -- are so direct. Their language is plain. It looks simple. Easy. And I can’t think of anything more difficult. Is pursuit of clarity technique? Maybe. I hope so. I want to make sense. I want to be clear and say something true about the world, my world. I recently saw a statement from an editor who said “I am certainly not advocating a return to know-nothing plainspeak.” Since when does plainspeak equal know-nothing? I’m not talking about dangerously folksy politicians here. I’m talking about art. I think it’s very scary to be direct and clear – in a poem, in prose, in life -- because people will be able to see you. Really see you. It’s very vulnerable, being seen. But I’m not much interested in playing around with language for the sake of playing around. I’m not interested in toying with readers. I’m with Vonnegut on this: pity the readers. I have very little patience with pyrotechnics. We all have so little time.

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

I sent it out and 5AM accepted it a few weeks later. The editors there are wonderful.

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. Some poems, like this one, go through many phases over such a long time that when they’re done, they’re done. Others that come more quickly have to sit a while. I’ve sent poems out before they were ready and sometimes they’ve been published and sometimes I’ve regretted it. A little.

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

I have a difficult time making things up, even when I’m writing fiction. Everything I write is grounded, one way or another, in facts, though they’re my facts, my interpretations, my connections and leaps. Everything in this poem is true – that sweatsock full of nickels, the vodka, the handcuffs, the flight route, the dialogue. I worked in journalism for a bit and still write for newspapers and magazines. It’s hard to get away from my instinct to report. Reporters look at the world in a certain way – most of us look for luminous human details, those tiny things others might overlook. We look for pieces of a story. We build narratives like some people build puzzles. In poems, I try to use what I find in the world to help make sense of things, to help give shape to experience.

Is this a narrative poem?

Absolutely. And since I’ve already used the fashionable-as-a-mullet metaphor, I’ll add a terrycloth headband and legwarmers here.

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

So many influences. In addition to the folks I’ve mentioned above, I was likely reading Ray Carver’s poems at the time. Gerald Stern, that huge good heart. Judith Vollmer. Mary Oliver. And Hemingway. Always Hemingway. Hemingway keeps me grounded. Write one true sentence, then write another.

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

I hope I write for a very broad audience. I’d like as many people as possible to read my work. I’d love people who don’t read poetry or who say they don’t understand or like poetry to be able to read my poems and maybe connect with them in some way. In Pittsburgh, one of our daily newspapers runs poems every Saturday. In my neighborhood, when something in the paper is particularly moving or funny or sad, people cut it out and stick it on their refrigerators. So that’s what I want to be: the kind of writer who’d make it to somebody’s fridge.

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?

My husband Dave Newman is an amazing poet and fiction writer. He’s my reader and I’m honored to be his. I loved his writing long before I knew him. He’s very direct, very clear, very brave in his work. And he’s completely honest as a reader. He’s also a terrific line editor. On this poem, I think he made a few cuts that tightened the pacing and music of the poem.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s actually very similar to a lot of what I’m doing now. It’s different from my older poems because it’s more direct, less consciously artsy, and the speaker – me – is more present. In my older poems, I tended to erase the speaker quite a bit. I was more comfortable reporting about other people than I was with writing about myself. My speaker is much more vulnerable, more visible these days.

What is American about this poem?

As an American writer, it’s hard to say what’s American. All of this – the setting, the Vegas dreams, the interactions between people -- seems American to me. I have a French friend who says he likes Americans because we’re gritty. So maybe that’s it. This poem is American because it’s gritty.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. I hope. I don’t like abandonment, the hopelessness of all that.