Elyse Fenton

Elyse Fenton's first book, Clamor, was selected by DA Powell as the winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book award, and was recently long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Winner of the Pablo Neruda Award, she received her MFA from the University of Oregon and has published poetry and nonfiction in The New York Times, Best New Poets, and The Massachusetts Review. She’s worked in the woods, on farms and in schools in New Hampshire, Mongolia, Texas and the Pacific Northwest, and currently lives in Philadelphia with her husband and infant daughter.


GRATITUDE

Wreckage was still smoldering on the airport road
when they delivered the soldier—beyond recognition,

seeing god's hands in the medevac's spun rotors—
to the station's gravel landing pad. By the time you arrived

there were already hands fluttering white flags of gauze
against the ruptured scaffolding of ribs, the glistening skull, and no skin

left untended, so you were the one to sink the rubber catheter tube.
When you tell me this over the phone hours later I can hear rotors

scalping the tarmac-gray sky, the burdenless lift of your voice.
And I love you more for holding the last good flesh

of that soldier's cock in your hands, for startling his warm blood
back to life. Listen. I know the way the struck chord begins

to shudder, fierce heat rising into the skin of my own
sensate palms. That moment just before we think

the end will never come and then
the moment when it does.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote “Gratitude” during my husband’s deployment, sometime in 2006. I was in grad school in Oregon, he was in Baghdad, and I walked around perpetually stymied by the distance between our experiences and the difference between our daily existences. Before we realized how much it was costing us, we talked on the phone on a regular basis, usually as I was just getting up to write in the morning, and after he was done with his day. Many of the poems in Clamor were borne of these fragments of communication—shards, really, because of the way they refracted experience, the way they stuck beneath the nail beds and refused to be dislodged. After talking with him, writing was like threading glass splinters from my palms.

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

I don’t really write disparate drafts—a poem stays in a single Word document as I muck around in it—so I can’t really say how many revisions I wrote. I’d guess this poem didn’t take more than a month.

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

Sweat, tears: yes.

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

I think the poem was in shorter, more uniform couplets from the beginning, but then it breathed a little, maybe when I was able to breathe a little. It didn’t emerge into the distending-then-retracting final form for a few months.

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

About six months, I think. It first appeared in Natural Bridge with a handful of others that would eventually become Clamor.

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?

Often, I’m reckless about these things. If a poem sits too long in a Word document, there’s a good chance it’ll get waterlogged.

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

This is definitely a negotiation that’s arisen in particular with the poems in Clamor, and has led, on occasion, to mild domestic discord. On a fundamental level, these poems do originate with my experience as the wife of an army medic deployed in Baghdad. Absolutely. There’s the figure of the war-bride, the soldier, some shred of recognizable experience that I don’t mean to disavow. And because these figures are so present and because he doesn’t want to be anywhere near a spotlight, I think my husband would like a disclaimer on “Gratitude” and other poems that reads: this is not my experience. And of course he’s right. It’s not his experience at all; it could never be, and not just because he’s not a poet. But it’s not exactly my experience, either, because it’s a poem, it’s a construction. Hopefully it’s happening right there on the page.

I’m often asked by audience members in variously forthright ways whether these poems come from my direct experience. Often, I tell them, yes, yes they do, but in the back of my head, I’m thinking, well, what poem doesn’t come from some experience of the world? Even— or, arguably, especially— an attention to sonic quality comes from an attention to the world. But again, they’re poems, not reportage, and I’m much more invested in the ways that they move on or against the page, the way images and sounds catalyze each other, the potential for creating and subverting expectations or rhetoric or lyric or perceptions, or really, in just plain making something like music, than I am with recounting the experience of the modern war bride. That’s why I write poetry and not journalism.

It seems to me that the audience member’s question is calculated to gauge the level of the speaker’s ‘authenticity,’ and this is where it gets problematic for me. What I guess I want to ask is: does it improve on your experience of the poem to know that it did, in fact, spring from a conversation I had with my husband, who did, in fact, catheterize an Iraqi soldier? That there is, indeed, an insider in the action somewhere within the vicinity of the poem? I have trouble with this line of inquiry in part because of its implications, its potential to privilege first-hand witness as the only possible ‘authentic’ voice.

But then, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t an opportunist of grief. I’m thankful for the real, lived, factual experience I had, waiting for my husband to return home from war, because it made me feel human and it made me write poems that hurt, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have done that without being rooted in the cold, hard facts.

Is this a narrative poem?

No. Or yes. Or no: no.

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 initially misread this question as “the specter of mortality,” to which I’d respond, yeah, this poem’s got it in spades. But the “specter of morality” is something else. I guess I hope there isn’t the idea of right and wrong, because I don’t think that kind of dialectic—with its propensity for didacticism--really has a place in my work.

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

I spent a lot of time on Dante’s Inferno over the course of that year. Also Anna Akhmatova, Czeslaw Milosz, and to a lesser degree, Lorca. Then I discovered Michael Longley.

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

Poetry requires that I lose—or at least, loosen—myself a little, and keeping an audience in mind really gets in the way of that process. It’s kind of like cutting a blow-down with an ax (and I know I have some friends who have heard way too many of my trail-crew analogies rolling their eyes right now). It can be sweaty, exacting, perilous work, but you can’t over-think it. At some point you’ve got to let muscle memory take over, you’ve got to let the blade fly. Imagining an audience, some hapless reader, the next hiker through the woods, really throws me off my game.

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

I don’t remember when I showed my husband this one. He was running an aid station, and he used to print out copies of some of my work and tape it to the door to the bathroom where he lived (yes, the bathroom), so it would be visible to other medics. I get the feeling this one wasn’t on that door, though, as he wasn’t particularly comfortable being cast as such a central figure.

But yeah, I have some good poet friends who infrequently get mailed drafts of my work. Note the use of the passive tense there. I’m not always consistent about this process.

What is American about this poem?

What is American about a poem that takes as its backdrop the current Iraq war? I guess it depends on which population of America you’re talking about...

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.

Charles Harper Webb

Charles Harper Webb has published eight books of poetry, including Reading the Water, Liver, Tulip Farms & Leper Colonies, Hot Popsicles, and Amplified Dog. Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems was published in 2009 by the University of Pittsburgh press. Webb's awards in poetry include the Morse Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Felix Pollock Prize, and the Benjamin Saltman Prize. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poets of the New Century, Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize. A former professional rock musician and psychotherapist, he is the editor of Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, and recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, a fellowship from the Guggenheim foundation, and the CSULB Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. He directs the MFA Program at California State University, Long Beach.


THE WIFE OF THE MIND

Sharecroppers’ child, she was more schooled
In slaughtering pigs and coaxing corn out of
The ground than in the laws of Math, the rules
Of Grammar. Seventeen, she fell in love
With the senior quarterback, and nearly
Married him, but—the wedding just a week
Away—drove her trousseau back to Penney’s,
Then drove on past sagging fences, flooding creeks,
And country bars to huge Washington State,
Where, feeling like a hick, she studied French to compensate.

She graduated middle-of-her-class,
Managed a Senior Center while she flailed
Away at an M.A., from the morass
Of which a poet/rock-singer from Yale
Plucked her. He loved her practicality;
She adored his brilliance. Sex was great.
They married in a civil ceremony.
He played around, for which she berated
Herself, telling friends things were “hunky-dory.”
Resentment grew... oh, you said "life"? That’s another story.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

A few years back, I challenged myself to write twenty good sonnets. I thought—rightly—that the discipline would improve my general technique, and give me more tools to work with. I must have read or heard the phrase “life of the mind,” rolled it around in my head, and hit on the title, which sparked the poem. The form, and the story, emerged as I went along.

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

My poems all go through a lot of revisions while I try to make them seem, in Yeats' words, “a moment’s thought.” I don’t know how many this one went through, but since it uses rhyme and meter, I’m sure there were a lot.

I‘m guessing there was at least a year between the first and final draft. Most likely more.

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

If inspiration means that a good idea seems to leap out of nowhere into my mind, it happens. But I don’t depend on it. “The harder I work, the luckier I get,” as the saying goes. I work hard at writing poems. When I do that, inspiration may drop in.

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

I knew right away that I was going to try this one in rhyme and meter. I trusted the serendipity of rhyme to help flesh out the story, and hammered away until I got it done.

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

About a year, I think.

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

I have an elaborate system of folders and drafts which every poem must negotiate before I send it out. I keep this process very mechanical, to try to make my editing as impersonal / surgical as possible. I intersperse this kind of editing with intuitive, generative writing, if I need more material. I work with every poem until I either get it right, or see that it is essentially wrong, and I will never get it right.

Sending out poems is also part of this process. Acceptance doesn’t mean the poem is perfect, but it’s evidence I’m doing something right. Acceptance often motivates me to revise more.

I take the sense of narcissistic injury that comes with rejection—the anger-and- outrage-tinged-with-dismay—and try to channel it into a drive to make the poem so good that it will never face such an insult again. I may do this with the same poem many times. It’s a combative process; but, given the realities of American poetry, aspiring toward riches and eternal renown just doesn’t give the push I need.

By the way, I don’t blame or hold grudges against editors. I’ve sat in the Big E chair myself, and taken flak accordingly. Poetry editors—many of whom found and fund their own magazines—do our art a huge service. I’m grateful to them all.

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

Like all of my poems, this is a mix: things that happened to me, things that happened to people I know, things that sort of happened to me or people I know, things I’ve read about, or read about and changed, and things I just make up. I’m concerned with sound, drama, reader-interest, and psychological truth, never with what “really happened,” except if it is useful to the poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, but the story that it tells is not the one that the unseen addressee expects, if he/she expects a story at all. The speaker’s need to tell this particular story sheds (I hope) an interesting light on the speaker, and the “facts” as told by him. That’s the real story.

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

I can’t say for sure what I was reading or influenced by, beyond the fact that I was interested in sonnets, and that Kim Addonizio impressed me with her ability to sound contemporary in that form.

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

My ideal reader is someone much like me, but without my particular history—by which I mean, I don’t assume the reader has the exact knowledge-base that I do. I accept the responsibility of starting from factual scratch.

I want to write poems that I’d like even if I hadn’t written them. I hope to delight, entertain, and enlighten readers as other poets have delighted, entertained, and enlightened me. I hope my poems will appeal to other poets, but also that they’ll speak to the wider audience of people who like to read, but don’t read much poetry—i.e., most readers in the U.S.A.

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 often show my wife early drafts of my poems. She reads voraciously, has taken a few poetry-writing classes, and written some good poems, but doesn’t consider herself a poet. All of this makes her a first-rate sounding board. I also have a few trusted fellow poets to whom I regularly turn for insight and aid. Thanks to all of these readers. And thanks again.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don’t usually write in strict rhyme and meter. Also, I don’t usually hit upon the title first, as I did with this poem.

What is American about this poem?

I’m so thoroughly American, I assume everything about the poem must be. (Or do I, being so American, lack perspective?) Certainly the diction, imagery, and subject matter in the poem are American. The issues of class (including its role in sexual attraction) in a supposedly class-less society, the difficulties of maintaining a marriage in a country where the ideal of equality-in-all-things so often clashes with the facts—all of this seems very American. The ironic ending also strikes me as American—not that America discovered irony. Leif Ericson did that, right?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

All of my “finished” poems are abandoned when they reach the point where I’m pleased with them, and don’t see how I can help them any more. I admit, I love some more than others; but they’re all my kids. I want them all to do well in the world. If they need more help, and I think I can give it, I’ll gladly let them move back in with me for a while. Always, as with “The Wife of the Mind,” I’m glad to see them again.

Molly Brodak

Molly Brodak is the author of the chapbook Instructions for a Painting (Greentower Press, 2007) and the book A Little Middle of the Night, which won the 2009 Iowa Poetry Prize. Her poems have recently appeared in Field, Kenyon Review Online, Colorado Review, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Bateau. She was born in Michigan and currently lives in Augusta, Georgia.

NICARAGUA

There is an edge
between the farthest you can hear and not:
before it’s gone, everything
hums some. Here and there—

a curve around a pocked slope,
a grey camel
sky, and an evil feeling—
handless mischief,
the hard lean of time itself.

Along the way, trees screen thin roosters , homeless goats,
giant wrens. We had never been so close—
so pressed in by the horizon’s chill mantle. This tiny oyster lip

of the world is only headlight long; so, bones snap,
food rots, and boundlessness
secretly exists,
I hear.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem about a year ago when I was—yup—in Nicaragua. The base of the poem was built on the image of the animals, which I paid a lot of attention to while I was there, especially along the roadside while traveling around from Managua to San Juan del Sur, amazing things like volcanoes and crater lakes.

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

Gosh, I should hope all poets believe in some inspiration—otherwise it’s, what, a bloodless word game? Some images and phrases are “received” from the world—in this case, particularly the images from driving the Pan-American highway and concepts of distance and edges—and then I spend time arranging them so the feelings and ideas will cohere and evoke the source of inspiration accurately.

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

Once the poem is down, I look hard at line breaks and punctuation and think about balance and patterns that have emerged. Each poem is very different, and I suppose my only formula is to try and keep it that way.

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

Almost exactly one year after I wrote 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 try to make my poems sit, but of course I send poems off too soon—within days or weeks of writing them—and I know that’s not always the best thing to do. This poem I sent off about two months after writing it and it was accepted about a month following that at the Kenyon Review Online, which is all very fast. The only rule I stick to in regards to publishing is to be fervently polite, patient, persistent, and remember that it means absolutely nothing in the end.

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

In some ways, this is a very personal question. I know that what is factually accurate about this poem is ultimately unknowable to a reader, and can’t therefore “matter” to anyone but me. One core truth here for me, personally speaking, was a moment of closeness to someone I wanted to be close to while I was on this trip. It charged all of my observations with an intensity that felt both lovely and painfully temporary. In a broader sense, I think there must be something “true” about everything in a poem…otherwise, what’s the point?

Is this a narrative poem?

I don’t personally consider it to be so, as I generally find “plots” boring and unnecessary.

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

I was reading American Colonies by Alan Taylor, and had just finished books by Richard Dawkins and Kevin Phillips. When I’m really writing, I read a lot of history and science as it inspires me to be focused, clear, and precise.

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

I try to write poems I would like to read.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Normally I write on my laptop, but of course not having it with me in Nicaragua, I wrote this poem in a tiny notepad, which made the process different. As I made changes, I decided to rewrite the poem entirely so in the end I had dozens of different versions of it. The process made me realize how significant the delete button is to my usual process, and I wondered for a while about the total lack of “versions” I normally have of my poems.

What is American about this poem?

Probably its idiotic persistence in being sad over inevitable loss.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. I don’t try to publish the abandoned ones.

Matthew Lippman

Matthew Lippman’s second collection of poetry is Monkey Bars (Typecast Publishing, 2010). His first collection, The New Year of Yellow, won The Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize from Sarabande Books. It was also a finalist for The Patterson Poetry Prize in 2008. He has been a recipient of a Michener Grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant. He lives in Boston with his family and teaches at Beaver Country Day School.


MARRIAGE PANTS

I don’t know when the shitstorm of failed marriage
took off.
I’m talking about people who I went to high school with,
to college and Italian villas—
where we could see Vesuvius and if we could not see it,
imagine it,
and if we could not do that either,
played with the sound of the word
as it rolled around like horny lovers
in the backs of our throats.

There was Jack and Lucinda,
who spent three years building banjos
that neither of them ever played
but the plants flourished in their stinky apartment near Gowanus
so who cared.
The question persisted:
Who the hell am I
and what the hell have I done?

Then there was Katie and Todd who loved
caviar and sparrows.
They wanted to have a kid and thank fuck they didn’t.
When Katie left she blew up Todd’s motorcycle
and the neighborhood kids ran down the block for a second
to see the debris
then went back to their basketballs and bong hits.

I wanted them to make it
for everyone on the planet. I wanted her cancer and his insatiable desire for obese ladies
at the Target
to be beaten into death;
to prove to the 21st century TV newscasters
that nobody knew what the hell they were talking about
when they newscasted on TV
that marriage was dying like an obese lady
in the lingerie department
at the local Target.

It felt weird,
like people weren’t getting divorced,
but more, like they were dying—
crawling into the earth with the worms and roots
to hide away in horror
while their children ran to the school bus and the Batmobile
and the EZ Bake oven that, of course,
could never, ever, ever,
catch fire.

It made me want to beat up my mailman
and the woman who sold me my internet cable
and the telephone guy, Lou,
like all of this was some reflection on how we had forgotten to talk
to one another.
But it wasn’t.
It was age.
The age of worn out marriage pants,
untended. One leg torn at the knee,
the other, burned out in the crotch.
It was bad cloth, warped stitching, inseams with no in
and I knew it.

And then I got hitched.

Eight years later,
my buddy Stu said to me:
How do you stay connected?
I said:
You want to stay close, stay close.
You want to be in love,
be in love.
It’s like watching TV
Like ping pong after dinner.
You pick up the clicker, you pick up
the paddle.

But who the hell was I?

Some mornings I get up and can’t tie my shoes.
I’m forty-four years old and can’t toast the seedless rye.
My kid cries because her hands are wet;
my wife undresses in front of open windows.
What am I supposed to do?
I wake up.
I say good morning.
I put on my pants.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

There was a period last summer when a lot of people close to me started to get separated and divorced. That was the impetus for the poem. The poem was composed at night, late at night, but the first line had jumped into my head a few days before, “I don’t know when the shitstorm of failed marriage took off…” I was driving somewhere and it just popped into my head.

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

The poem when through two maybe three revisions. I work quickly. I would say the poem was done in a few days.

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 some kind of inspiration. When that line slipped out of my head it slipped out for a reason. It was received, that first line, but that’s it. The rest of the poem just followed. I tend to get into a groove when I write a poem, try and keep all of my imaginative doorways and alleyways open, accessible, so I work from that place. I think there are maybe three poems that I have ever written, out of thousands, that were received.

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

I would say, if there is any technique, it’s that groove that I get into. I work out of a groove-place. When I am deep in it, the best poems come. “Marriage Pants,” I like to think, came out of a deep-in the groove-place. So, yes, I did consciously employ this technique. I always do when I sit down to make a poem. The Groove.

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

About ten months. Wrote it in the summer of 2009 and it came out in The American Poetry Review the spring of 2010.

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?

Sometimes I let them sit for years. Sometimes I send them out the next day. I don’t have any rules. I work off of impulse and feel.

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

Everything in my poems begins from some imagined or lived truth, situation. Then, they devolve, or evolve, into a lie. That’s a crude way of saying I try and let my imagination infuse the moment to suck out the boring details and spark it up with some flavor. So, a poem is a mixture of something factual and something fictional that comes out of the factual. For me, making stuff up has become the most fun part of writing a poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes and no. There are little stories in it that play off the main conceit. The first few stanzas tell little “tales” about certain real/made up couples who eventually split up.

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

Poetry is just a bunch of language that tries to emulate dream-life. I don’t know if it’s moral or not. I do know that it is a gift that always makes people feel better. So, if that is “right” than, yes, poetry is moral. I did not mean for “Marriage Pants” to come across as some kind of morality tale. I write at the end that I don’t know anything about other people’s married lives. I just know that I work really hard at being married, at marriage, and that is very important to me even though I fuck up all the time. The poem is more about observation and reflection than anything else.

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

I was reading an assortment of poetry. We have a great poetry section at our local library that gets a ton of new books on a continuous basis. Some of the poets—Sarah Gambito, Barbara Hamby, Jim Harrison, Matt Hart—come to mind.

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

High school kids. Then, adults who I hope can access their high school selves when reading and listening to my poems.

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 is the person who sees most of my poems. I show some to Michael Morse and Matthew Dickman, two poet friends of mine, but just to show. There’s not a lot of feedback happening.

I don’t think anyone read “Marriage Pants” before I let it out of my closet.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s exactly the same.

What is American about this poem?

I don’t know. I live in America. I don’t mean to sound glib, but I don’t think there is anything in the poem that is particularly American except that there are statistics about divorce in this country that are part of my consciousness.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished and abandoned.

Elizabeth Spires

Elizabeth Spires is the author of six collections of poems: Globe (1981); Swan’s Island (1985); Annonciade (1989); Worldling (Norton, 1995); Now the Green Blade Rises (Norton, 2002); and The Wave Maker (Norton, 2008). She has also written six books for children, including The Mouse of Amherst (FSG, 1999) and I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmonson and His Stone Carvings (FSG, 2009). The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award, she is a professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore where she directs the Kratz Center for Creative Writing.

CEMETERY REEF

Grand Cayman Island

Walking down the beach, I took your arm.
The treatments were over. Your hair was growing back.
For a week, time lay suspended. And yet, too fast,
too soon, everything was changing to memory.
But your arm was real when I touched it, real flesh and blood.
We were talking about doctors when I saw the blowfish,
green as the greenest apple, puffed-up and bobbing in the shallows.
But when I looked again, it was only a pair of bathing trunks,
ballooning out, aimlessly knocked back and forth by the tide.
Ahead, the cruise ships lay at anchor in the harbor.
At noon they’d slip away, like days we couldn’t hold onto,
dropping over the blurred blue horizon to other ports of call.
The hotels we were passing all looked out to water,
a thousand beach chairs in the sand looked out to water,
but no one sat there early in the morning. And no one
slept in the empty hammock at the Governor’s House,
where workmen in gray coveralls raked the seaweed into piles,
until the sand was white and smooth, like paper not yet written on.

All lies in retrospect now: how, each afternoon,
we put on masks and fins and swam to Cemetery Reef.
The coral looked like brains and flowers, like unreal cities
of melted peaks and towers, pointing up to where the sun,
flat and round as a host, lay dissolving on the water.
Schools of fish, bright as neon, ragged as flags,
drifted directionless with the tide, or swerved
and hid from our reaching hands in beds of waving kelp.
We breathed through snorkels, did the dead man’s float,
the hollow rushing sound we heard inside our heads
our own frail breath going slowly in and out. Farther out,
the shallow reef dropped off to chasm, the waves
choppy and thick, the calm clear water darkening to ink.
How far could we swim before exhaustion took us,
before a shark or barracuda rounded a cornerless corner
to meet us eye to eye? My mind circled back to our dinner
in the Chinese restaurant: the waiter bringing six cookies
on a plate, alike in every way, except that one, just one,
contained a different fate. Wealth, long life, happiness,
the plate was passed around. Then your turn came.
You chose one, broke it open, read aloud,
Soon you will cross the great water, dropping it, as if stung.

And then, too quickly, it was the last day.
Dreaming, we all came to. We were back at Cemetery Reef,
walking a narrow path of broken shells toward the shining water.
Off to one side, a low stone wall squared off the cemetery,
the dead buried aboveground in white weathered slabs,
their plots neatly surrounded by smooth white stones.
Morning of all mornings, you swam out to the reef alone,
came back. Gathering our things to go, what made me say,
When we come back. . . . All lies unanswered now.
I remember how the flowers on the graves were red
and white plastic, the color of flesh and blood, of regret,
of paper not yet written on. Put there, In Memory.
In a colder place, we would soon—unwilling, stunned—
remember you with the kind that always die.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem was written in 1999. The inspiration for it was a trip I took with my mother and family to the Cayman Islands in 1998, two months before my mother’s death from lung cancer.

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

I can’t locate the drafts at the moment, but usually a poem takes me thirty-five to forty drafts, sometimes more. I work on a poem every day until it is finished, sometimes doing two or three drafts a day.

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

A poem for me is both. It begins in a moment of inspiration with an image or musical phrase or dramatic scene. Sometimes the first draft contains the seeds of the final version, but only in the most inchoate, fragmentary way. But it is only after days and weeks of hard work that a poem seems realized, ‘whole,’ and finished.

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

Some poems more than others depend on sound and repetition and image patterns. In “Cemetery Reef,” I was conscious of employing repeating syntax that contributed to the rhythm of the poem, of relying on internal and end rhymes, and of working with images that were related in some way. I wanted there to be a sense of metamorphosis and transformation in the poem. For example, the white sand of the beach is compared to “paper not yet written on.” Later, the “white weathered slabs” of the graves are meant to call back or mirror those earlier images.

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

The poem appeared in Poetry shortly after it was finished.

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

I usually know by instinct when a poem is finished. At a certain point, I stop revising and send it out into the world. I have no problem letting go.

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

Everything in “Cemetery Reef” is “true.” By true, I mean that it all really happened, including the scene in the Chinese restaurant. I should add that, in general, I don’t believe one has to stick to the literal facts in a poem, but in this case, the actual experience was so potent and powerful that I did not need to embellish it or reinvent it in any way.

Is this a narrative poem?

I think so.

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

I wouldn’t say that this particular poem was influenced by any particular poet.

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

Not really. I simply try to satisfy myself (which is not so easy to 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 don’t show my poems-in-progress to anyone. I have one friend, a retired professor at Vassar who was one of my first writing teachers, that I send my finished poems to before they are published. He basically has everything.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s one of the most personal poems I’ve ever written. And it’s one of the ones I’m most proud of. I can’t say why. It just feels as if all the elements came together in the way I was hoping they would.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Definitely finished.