Jeffrey Skinner

In 2006 Jeffrey Skinner was awarded his second Creative Writing Fellowship ($20,000) from the National Endowment for the Arts. His fifth book of poetry, Salt Water Amnesia, appeared in 2005 from Ausable Press. He has published four previous collections: Late Stars (Wesleyan University Press), A Guide to Forgetting (a winner in the 1987 National Poetry series, chosen by Tess Gallagher, published by Graywolf Press), The Company of Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series), and Gender Studies, (Miami University Press). Four of Skinner’s plays have been finalists in the Eugene O’Neill Theater Conference competition. His latest play, DOWN RANGE, was produced at Theatre 3 in New York City for a limited run in October and November of 2009. Skinner’s poems have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Bomb, Fence, Diagram, and The Georgia, Iowa , and Paris Reviews, and his poems, plays and stories have gathered grants, fellowships, and awards from such sources as the NEA, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the state arts agencies of Connecticut, Delaware, and Kentucky. Over the years Skinner has made his living in a variety of ways, including work as social psychologist, actor, waterfront director, factory stock man, and private detective. He currently teaches at the University of Louisville.


ELEGY WITH YELLOW BOAT

To Ann Byers

The inconsiderate gulls came early
each morning, crying like old hinges.
Tom had trouble sleeping. But you
slept soundly and when you woke
sat with coffee, stealing a little time
on the dock before the children
commenced their litany of need,
your two-handed grip tilting
the mug to your lips, your eyes
squinting happily in the brightness–
blue above translucent green.
Turn: calmly as I approach
with the camera, click: your skin pale
as the white mug, your black hair
lifted by wind to the brim
of your straw hat. Jack, bitten by
a horsefly (the infected wound
ballooned his arm until it seemed
the arm of an older, fatter child), played
a round of miniature golf,
his hand raised in the air as if
perpetually waiting to be called on.
This was long before any hint
of your illness. We all felt sad for Jack.
At night you and Tom and Sarah
drank wine while I, newly sober,
made do with cranberry juice
and soda water, all of us talking/
flirting/teasing on the glassed-in porch,
light comedy played against the sun’s
hammy death-scene, neon-orange
and purple sinking down
behind Horseshoe Island. And
Tom, remember? looked like a giant
in the little yellow boat;
when he stood and tried to fix
the mast, thirty yards out
then swamped–Christ, we laughed!
And: picking cherries in the orchard
outside Fish Creek; the cherry-
pie making-mess that filled the kitchen
with white dust; our children’s voices
spiking off the bay’s surface . . .
Ann, it’s hard to talk to you
now. When I’m with your husband
and children your absence whelms,
I feel submerged, and see you
with my latent eyes
stroke Anna’s hair, Jack’s cheek.
You are someplace, sure.
And I don’t mean that swarm
of atoms giving you form has found
other form, or will. I mean woman
we would recognize, a place
that is a place. Where
is it then . . . We took a sail
on the little yellow boat, you and I
one dusk when the water smoothed,
careful stepping in, pushing off,
so as not to follow Tom.
I don’t remember what we said
though we must have joked–
your dry wit straight-man to my
absurdist bent. Or was it only that
I loved your laugh? I do remember
the wind was off and on
and we drifted, becalmed, watching
gulls wheel over Anderson’s Dock,
small waves fold in beneath
the hull. Also, I remember our families’
impatience at our return, because
we’d kept dinner waiting: squalls broken
out among the children, meat overdone,
etc. All came right before sleep.
This is what I remember.
Now you have drifted out alone
and we are still on shore, if you’ll
excuse the beaten metaphor.
But maybe you won’t. Maybe
I should say you died and let it go
at that, the distance too far
for any language, common, or rare.
Besides, you knew the difference
between true feeling and sentimentality–
knew then and must know now
where you stand. But, listen: I’m glad you
have not left us, entirely.
I’m glad love is too enormous
to follow rules of time and space;
glad you can read this now without glasses.
And: I’ll see you, when I see you.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

It was written in the late nineties, soon after my friend Ann Byers died of breast cancer.

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

Fewer than most. I believe I finished this poem very fast; perhaps a week between the first and final draft.

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, and pray it visits me often. But always it comes in its own unpredictable time. And one goes on writing in any case. This poem happens to be one of those “received poems,” largely because, I think, I was not writing for any reason but my own grief. I wanted to make something that would hold the memory of my friend, and not thinking a whit about publication. Really. As to sweat and tears—I remember the poem arrived with relative ease. The tears came before, and after, but not during composition.

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

With my narrative poems, of which this is an example, I generally begin by re-placing myself within the perceptual space of a memory. In this case I remembered a joint vacation on Green Bay with Ann (and her husband Tom and their kids Jack and Anna) and began with Tom’s complaint that the seagulls woke him. From there a string of associative images unrolled like a scroll painting. I looked, and the words came more or less simultaneous with the images. Our time there was brief, like all vacations, but had a kind of laid back intensity, so that the details had a searing brightness. Or perhaps Ann’s death suddenly cast all memory of her in the dramatic light of mortality. In any case it was fun, and the deep value of friendship casually apparent. During composition I also followed my mind, as it shifted, allowing naïve questions we are perhaps not supposed to ask (Where was “Ann” now? What had happened to her essence, her Ann-ness, her soul?) to enter the moving scroll. Speaking of which—the poem, now that I think of it, pays homage to Wang Wei and others of his period.

Well, I’m no longer sure what technique is in reference to poetry. I know, I think, how to write a line with leanness, and to focus the vision so that irrelevance is excised. I know how to tune an image, a verb, an adjective, etc. —to maximize freshness and surprise. I think I know how to do
these things. But I’m not conscious of doing them. Is this technique?

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

I think this poem appeared in the Southwest Review a year or two 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?

My practice varies. I like to let poems sit, generally, a year or more before sending them out. My judgment about new poems is crushingly suspect. On the other hand, patience is not one of my natural virtues, and occasionally I send things out the week after composition. (Note to self: Do I have any natural virtues?).

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

The emotionally charged fact is what I wish to find and use to build the larger fiction of a poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes. Though I like to think I write more of a narrative/meditative kind of hybrid. Narrative poetry has become unfashionable just now. But in fact story is neither in nor out of fashion, but above it.

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

No, I honestly don’t remember. I’m always reading something, of course. But as I said, I hear Wang Wei in this, and maybe the Rexroth of Signature of All Things, and, oh, a hundred
others . . . .

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

Not when I’m writing. Then I am only writing. But I think all I do is eventually aimed at people like my father—those who came from the working class and, by dint of awareness, intelligence, invention, compassion, and sweat, work themselves out of it.

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

I’m very lucky to have married a superb poet/writer named Sarah Gorham. She reads every poem I write, and is my best editor. I try to return the favor.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It sounds very like my other good poems, I think. It is one that people seem to react to strongly, though. I wish such reaction for all my poems; but one can’t just write elegies. The cost to those around one would be too dear.

What is American about this poem?

It is big-hearted, and both blunt and precise.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. You would not be interested in my abandoned poems.

Betsy Sholl

Betsy Sholl’s seventh collection of poetry is Rough Cradle (Alice James Books, 2009). Her previous collections include Late Psalm and Don’t Explain (University of Wisconsin, 2004 and 1997) and The Red Line (University of Pittsburgh, 1992). Her awards include the Felix Pollak Prize and the AWP Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of grants from the NEA and the Maine Arts Commission, and was named Poet Laureate of Maine in 2006, a five year term. The Spring 2010 issue of Brilliant Corners includes an interview with her. She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program.


THE SEA ITSELF

Here, on solid ground, a blue jay lands,
beautifully and shrill, looking right at me,
banging a seed over and over, as if

he’ll never get it right—another creature
I once crudely dismissed. I'm sorry
for all my old arrogant thoughts,

for the man who followed me
one whole summer, a grabber, swallower,
a devil in Bermuda shorts. But really,

his hands were so thin and shaky,
it was easy to slip through,
all it cost me was an old blouse,

the buttons flying off into the pine needles
and white sand of our struggle.
I left him on his knees weeping,

my blue shirt dripping from his hands.
Of course, I said No. But I’m sorry
I said it so fiercely that day

there wasn’t room for pity or anything else.
I’m not sorry I said No to the storm tide
that dragged me out, then tossed me back

like an undersized fish, an hysterical teenager
flung on shore. Thick quilted clouds overhead,
sand blowing through tufts of beach grass—

such a total No, it became a kind of Yes,
so the world was suddenly everything at once,
solid and shifty, stormy and calm.

For years I told this story all wrong.
Even now, my words are just a net
holding fish, while the sea itself slides through,

that slippery, unfathomable
Yes & No, that everything-at-once
impossible to name—

even if you were spared,
even if you have many more songs
than the harsh one you learned so well.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I began this poem several years ago, and had to let it sit for a long time. It began when I watched a young (small, at least) blue jay at the feeder, and the first few associations came quickly. At some point, the poem stalled out; I just couldn't see how to end it.

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

I’m guessing this one went through several dozen revisions. I got it so far, and it wasn’t working. Every ending I tried seemed strained, forced, pretentious. I put the poem into and then took it out of a book manuscript that was published in 2004. But something about the poem kept haunting me, so I looked at it again some time later, and it finally appeared in a book in 2009.

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

I do think things can come to us in a way that feels like a gift, when everything aligns—receptivity, energy, the right language, the appropriate memory or experience. I also think that inspiration can come at any point in the process, not just in the initial draft, but after much head banging and tears. Maybe that’s where hard work and inspiration meet, in the dogged attention to drafts, which can suddenly take a surprising turn. I’m not sure about this one, but suspect the beginning and end were more “received” and the middle was more a matter of sweat.

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

I was trying to be as loosely associative and subjective as possible. I didn’t want the poem to take its narrative too seriously. There was something bigger than the story of a girl being molested or nearly drowning, something about how our interpretation of experience can change over time, our sense of meaning shift or enlarge. I wanted to get at how the world shifts and becomes more complex, also at how the self becomes complicit in its reactions to experience.

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

I don’t remember, really. The poem was fluid, in process for so long, I’m not even sure it was totally finished when it first appeared in print.

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?

Some poems take longer than others—this poem took considerably (miserably) longer than most. I probably let most poems sit a good six months, even after I’ve shown them to friends and pretty much decided they’re done. I don’t have rigid rules about that, but just know that a poem is usually done six months after I first think it’s done. Some poems come much faster than others and need less labor, so they get sent out sooner.

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

I often think memory operates like fiction, looking at events from a limited point of view, emphasizing some elements, dropping others, shaping a narrative out of the fragments; so even what we tend to think of as “fact” may be fictional as well. In this case, I was molested as a young teen and I did almost drown around the same time. The drowning comes up in several poems; it’s become a bit of an obsession. But I didn’t feel particularly interested in those facts as much as the more subjective response to them, that watery way the sense of an experience changes. I definitely remember blacking out in the water and coming to on shore. I can still see the beach I woke up on in detail. In-Between is all invention. My interest was in how that sort of experience shapes or misshapes a person, and has to be continually reconsidered.

Is this a narrative poem?

It definitely has narrative elements, but I’m not sure it’s primarily narrative. I think the imagination tends to take over in a more lyric way, making associative leaps. Magical realism would be too strong and too lovely, a term, but I’d say it was partially inspired by that concept. In many of the poems I love narrative and lyric elements work together, so what’s mysterious and inexplicable bumps up against what’s recognizable, and the two aspects transform each other.

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

I remember that I had been reading Adelia Prado's Alphabet in the Park, translated by Ellen Watson. I think the freshness of her voice, her use of wild associations definitely played a part in the first drafts of this poem. Beyond that, I started this so long ago I don’t remember who else I might have been reading.

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

With this poem, I was trying to learn something through the writing, so maybe it was written more for my own edification. But I like Mandelstam’s sense of the reader being like a stranger who walks along the shore and finds a bottle with its message inside, the stranger to whom we might say more intimate things than we would to someone we actually know. Sometimes I find myself imagining a reader who is utterly unsympathetic, unwilling to cut me any slack at all. I argue with that person in my head, and sometimes in the poems. So my imagined reader, when I have one, usually late in the process, alternates between someone who might share my sensibility and someone who is critically severe.

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 know I showed an early draft to my husband, and I know the poet Ted Deppe read it more than once and offered excellent counsel. I’m pretty sure David Jauss, poet and fiction writer, would have read this. I usually run poems by a small group of local poets and several other individual poets—whose response is usually somewhere between the two imagined readers above.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I think it’s the only time I’ve referred to that experience of being molested. It may be a little more subjective than a lot of my poems, given that the speaker imagines herself a blue jay at the end.

What is American about this poem?

Well, I had an American jay in mind—as opposed to a European jay. I think the notion of rethinking one’s take on the world is particularly characteristic to my generation of (once) American youth, who were taught to see the world through textbooks which whitewashed our society’s more egregious and violent policies. We had a big awakening during the civil rights and anti-war movements. How much of that informs this poem, I’m not sure, but I wonder if rethinking an experience, apologizing for misjudgments is something my generation is familiar with. Perhaps too that sense of having been spared is connected on some level to being an American.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I’d say abandoned, after many attempts at resuscitation. Hopefully, with enough life support to not gurgle and croak in the street.

Joel Brouwer

Joel Brouwer was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1968. He is the author of Exactly What Happened (Purdue University Press, 1999), Centuries (Four Way Books, 2003), and And So (Four Way Books, 2009). He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at The University of Alabama.


LESSER EVILS

After a morning of work in separate rooms
she said she was going to the municipal pool
and he said he would walk along the river
for a while before they met back for their lunch
of tomatoes and cheese. But in fact she went
to the lobby of the Hôtel du Panthéon
to read the Herald Tribune and drink a cup
of the Irish tea she liked and he to
the little church of St. Médard. A couple
old women in housedresses knelt in the first pews.
He sat in the back, with the drunks or alone.
And at lunch she said terrible, the lanes
were filled with kids from the elementary school
or terrific, I had it to myself. And he said
a barge full of oyster shells. Then quiet sex
with the curtains drawn against the chemistry
students conducting their experiments in the building
across the street. Incremental triumphs
of exactitude and necessity. In the evenings
they liked to fire champagne corks at the vast
darkened laboratory windows. Imagining the mice
startling in their cages, imagining catastrophe.
Turning back to their tumors with relief.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Like most of my poems, this one began with me combing through notebooks, pulling out a couple handfuls of lines, images, and phrases that seemed to me not completely boring, then arranging them on the page and filling in extra language to connect them to each other.

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

I can’t say how many revisions there were. I work on a computer, not a typewriter, so there isn’t a neat archive of versions of the poem. The poem endured countless tiny cuts and augmentations, and a few major surgeries. The oldest phrases in the poem predate its publication by around twelve years.

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

If by inspiration you mean receiving energy from angels or anything along those lines, then no, I do not believe in that. I do think (as opposed to “believe”) that intuition plays a major part in composition. In the early stages of writing this poem, I had the couple telling white lies to each other, and I had laboratory mice in their cages at night, recovering from the day’s depredations and dreading the morning. Putting these two ideas together was the result of intuition. Connecting them took some labor.

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

The poem is about a strained relationship and it uses tumorous mice as its metaphor. These are dangerous choices which could easily lead to cliché and/or melodrama. It was my hope that I might minimize those risks through formal means, namely by deploying an affectless tone, flattened syntax, and tick-tock parallelisms throughout. I hoped too that keeping a tight lid on the poem’s structures would reinforce the sense of repression that defines the couple’s relationship. I don’t know whether I’ve succeeded or not. If someone were to accuse the poem of being melodramatic I wouldn’t argue.

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? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

When I get to a certain point with a poem and decide it’s acceptable to me, I start sending it out, but I’ll keep returning to it and fussing with it right up until the final moments before it’s published. Once it’s in print, though, it’s dead to me. You’ve got to de-cathect at that point, lest you enter an endless melancholy of revision.

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

This poem began as a combination of autobiographical and imaginary details. At some point, the people in it were no longer the people I knew in real life; they’d become characters instead. I never understand how that happens, exactly, but it always does. Many of my early drafts of this poem and other poems have real people in them, but none of my published poems do.

Is this a narrative poem?

The moment in this poem I’m proudest of is the switch from past tense to the imperfect: “they liked to fire” instead of the expected “they fired.” At that moment what had appeared to be the recounting of a narrative is revealed to be the description of a condition. It is my tiny homage to Flaubert’s use of the imperfect in Madame Bovary. What a pretentious bastard I am! But you asked, so I’ve answered. I’m comforted too by the certainty that no one else has noticed or will ever notice that little shift. Do all poets have tiny triumphs of exactitude and necessity buried in their poems that bring them little bubbles of pleasure but which are almost certainly all but invisible to anyone else? I’m guessing probably.

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

The writing of this poem probably took about twelve hours, but they were stretched out over as many years, so a lot of different books passed under my nose during that time. I remember I was reading Bruce Chatwin when I started it, but I don’t think that matters.

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

Nothing very specific, no, but your asking that makes me think it might be a good idea to dream up such a reader. I remember how much pleasure I experienced as an undergraduate reading poems in the pillow room of the Sarah Lawrence College library. My ideal reader might be the student who’s there now in my place. Or maybe it’s the me from then?

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

Yes, there are four or five friends whose poems I read and who read mine, though in recent years we’ve exchanged less.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’ve written a number of poems with strategies similar to those in this poem, and a bunch more that are different in pretty much every way imaginable.

What is American about this poem?

More than meets the eye, probably. The characters are Americans in France, and their deracination is part of the drama of their situation, but I don’t think you could make a convincing case that it’s part of the drama of the poem, since there’s nothing on the page that puts any pressure on that aspect of their condition.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Abandoned; they all are.

Don Colburn

Don Colburn is a freelance journalist and poet in Portland, Oregon. His third collection of poems, a chapbook titled Because You Might Not Remember, came out in 2010. During a 33-year career as a reporter, he worked for four newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Oregonian, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. He became interested in poetry while on a midcareer Knight Fellowship at Stanford University and later earned his MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College while working full-time as a newspaper reporter. His first chapbook, Another Way to Begin, won the Finishing Line Press Prize, and his full collection, As If Gravity Were a Theory, won the Cider Press Review Book Award. His poems have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest and Southern Poetry Review. His many writing awards include the Felix Pollak Prize, the McGinnis Award, the Discovery/The Nation Award and the Duckabush Prize for Poetry. He is a board member of Friends of William Stafford.


IN THE WORKSHOP AFTER I READ MY POEM ALOUD

All at once everyone in the room says
nothing. They continue doing this and I begin to know
it is not because they are dumb. Finally

the guy from the Bay Area who wears his chapbook
on his sleeve says he likes the poem a lot
but can't really say why and silence

starts all over until someone says she only has
a couple of teeny suggestions such as taking out
the first three stanzas along with

all modifiers except "slippery" and "delicious"
in the remaining four lines. A guy who
hasn't said a word in three days says

he too likes the poem but wonders why
it was written and since I don't know either
and don't even know if I should

I'm grateful there's a rule
I can't say anything now. Somebody
I think it's the shrink from Seattle

says the emotion is not earned and I wonder
when is it ever. The woman on my left
who just had a prose poem in Green Thumbs & Geoducks

says the opening stanza is unbelievable
and vindication comes for a sweet moment
until I realize she means unbelievable.

But I have my defenders too and the MFA from Iowa
the one who thinks the you is an I
and the they a we and the then a now

wants to praise the way the essential nihilism
of the poem's occasion serves to undermine
the formality of its diction. Just like your comment

I say to myself. Another admires the zenlike polarity
of the final image despite the mildly bathetic
symbolism of sheep droppings and he loves how

the three clichés in the penultimate stanza
are rescued by the brazen self-exploiting risk.
The teacher asks what about the last line

and the guy with the chapbook volunteers it suits
the poem's unambitious purpose though he has to admit
it could have been worded somewhat differently.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote the first draft during the Centrum Writers Conference in Port Townsend more than twenty years ago. I had signed up for my first open-mic reading, and I was very nervous. The reading was at the old Back Alley tavern, now long-gone. I remember having a hard time reading the poem because the paper was shaking in my hands. But I was lucky to have a receptive – and somewhat inebriated – audience.

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

Dozens, over more than a year. I revised toward specificity, pushing the tone as far as I could without crossing into sentimentality or rant.

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

Yes, I believe in inspiration even if I can’t define it. I usually introduce this poem by saying it “never happened – exactly.” Of course, actual experience in various workshops “inspired” a few of its moments, but each is embellished. It says something about the workshop experience that no matter how absurd I tried to make these moments, they ring frightfully true to somebody in the audience.

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

It started out as a big clump of lines. At some point, it settled out in three-line stanzas, as I realized that the narrative fell into “scenes” of roughly three lines. That helped me tighten the phrasing, while also giving the poem some breathing room.

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

About two years. That was sooner than I expected, and this was the first poem I ever published. With a robust sense of irony, I brought it to a writing workshop a year after I drafted it. One of the participants, who happened to be an editor at The Iowa Review, liked it and asked me to submit it after I finished revising. When they accepted it, I told the editor I would be glad to change “MFA from Iowa” to NYU or Bennington or Houston – it was just a gratuitous poke at prestige. “Oh, no,” she insisted, “that’s our favorite line.”

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. I revise obsessively, but the older I get, the less time I leave a poem sitting around if it feels ready.

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

I’m a longtime newspaper reporter, so I feel pretty strongly about the bright line between fact and fiction – in the newspaper. In a poem, the line blurs constantly. Which is part of the fun, and the challenge.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes. It tells a story and even proceeds chronologically through the hypothetical trashing of my hypothetical poem in the hypothetical workshop.

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

I know I was reading William Stafford, Mary Oliver and Stephen Dunn, among others. But I won’t implicate them, unless I already have.

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

At the time, it was an anxious, would-be writer whose poem had been “workshopped” that afternoon and was now on his second beer at an open-mic in a local dive. Now it’s probably someone dangerously like myself – a skeptical but empathetic wordslinger.

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

This one, yes. Because of its topicality, it made the rounds. Usually, I share drafts with a few trusted fellow travelers.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It gets more consistent laughs. At a reading, I know from experience I’ll have to pause to let the laughter die down, so it won’t smother the next line. The poem’s occasion and easy appeal to poet-readers may also be its limitation, so I hope it speaks as well to anyone who must listen quietly while their life work is judged – in a courtroom, say, or a political debate or a book review.

What is American about this poem?

I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s not French.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I think finished. And it’s a hard one to abandon, because it keeps coming back. Even before Facebook, it achieved a life of its own. It has been thumbtacked on English department bulletin boards and taped to professors’ office doors. I’ve heard of teachers handing it out to “break the ice” in the first meeting of a writing workshop. It’s in several anthologies and writing handbooks. A guy from Ohio emailed last year to thank me for writing the poem; he had tracked it via Google to my Web site after hearing a young student read it during a poetry gathering at Larry’s Bar in Columbus. Apparently, it keeps hitting nerves and funny-bones. Recently, a new acquaintance was astonished to find out I had written this poem; she had come across it years ago and still had a copy.

Jean Monahan

Jean Monahan is the author of Hands, chosen by Donald Hall to win the 1991 Anhinga Press Prize, as well as Believe It or Not, published by Orchises Press in 1999, and Mauled Illusionist, Orchises Press, 2006. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts, with her daughter. She is not a witch.






BELIEVE IT OR NOT

For fifty years, the man ate eggs.
Not one a day, sunny-side-up, or ten,
but eighty each morning, raw.

This takes a discipline few have.

Elsewhere, an Irishman yodeled for ten hours straight,
a New Yorker with 31 million in the bank
owned one dress and ate her porridge cold.

He was 7 feet, she was 8.
They wed in the shade of a large oak.
Across the world, a man wrote

letter after letter, envelope after envelope,
until two letters shy of four thousand
his pen ran dry.

How does anyone have the courage to lie down at night?

While we sleep, somebody dreams
the world's longest recorded dream;
while we snore or lie awake,

lips meet
underwater in breathless kisses,
a man cracks jokes

to himself, hour after
hour, plates spin
on the ends of sticks,

thread passed
through the eye of a needle
thirteen thousand times.

No part of the world is not in the contest.

A bee hummingbird is smaller than the eye of an ostrich.

Deep in the Niger desert,
thirty miles from the nearest
tree, a recluse baobab

lived by its wits
until the day a jeep
accidentally backed into it.

Nothing, not even posterity,
will protect you from
your singular destiny.

The man struck by lightning seven times
in the end died
by his own hand.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I began work on this poem over a holiday break in 1996. I wanted to write about Ripley’s Believe It or Not but didn’t have a copy, so I went to the local library and inquired if they had anything in the Ripley line. The librarian indicated – with some indignation – that they had no such thing on their shelves, but offered me The Guinness World Book of Records instead. Both books mine the American love affair with contests and the extra-ordinary.

I started by typing some of my favorite Guinness records onto a page. I also inserted a story I had been told about a man with a penchant for eating raw eggs every morning….not one or two eggs, mind you, but scores of raw eggs. This visceral image deserved to start the poem off.

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

The answer above outlines what I was reading for this particular poem, though it isn’t my usual source for inspiration! My deities in the poetry world, to name just a few, are Bishop, Moore, Stevens, and, although not usually considered a poet, the great Bruno Schulz.

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

I believe perhaps a week elapsed between the first and final version. The process of bringing it forth was not as excruciating as other poems! I do not recall how many versions existed but I do recall that the turning point in the writing of the poem was when I inserted a line about a person whose pen ran dry when he was two letters shy of his goal of writing four thousand letters (with the same pen, presumably). That opened up the dimensions of the poem to incorporate the longing and loneliness behind these aspirations, the emblematic act of writing letters, telling jokes to oneself, hour after hour, the solitary seamstress plying her thread….

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

Inspiration is crucial for my writing. I need to follow a lure. Sometimes the lure is an opening line, sometime the last line, sometimes it is a feeling I want the poem to evoke, sometimes it is a singular image. Of course, received poems are very rare. Most of my poems are the result of turmoil, obsessive rewrite, and a lucky thought that finally arrives to grease the poem-wheel.

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

At a certain point in the process a poem begins to feel genuine and that’s when I start to shape it. As I wrote out statements from the Guinness book, I noted the natural rhyming possibilities in the given text. So the word “cold” ended one sentence and when I wrote the next Guinness record, which involved the wedding of a couple who were seven feet and eight feet tall, I had them wed “in the shade of a large oak” in order to get a half rhyme (cold, oak), immediately following that image and sound with the tale of a man who wrote envelope after envelope, for more “o” rhymes. I have always favored half-rhymes and internal rhymes to end rhymes.

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

I think two or three years elapsed before the poem appeared in my book of the same name. I was puzzled as to why other poems were taken by journals but not that one, since I considered it one of the better poems I had written.

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 never wait long to send a poem out if I think it is finished.

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

My Believe It or Not book is all about the evolving standards by which “facts” and “truth” are recognized in a society. Poems in the book were inspired by everything from the New York Times on through to Star Magazine, News of the Weird, Ripley’s and Guinness Book of Records. My poem “Believe It or Not” regards these world records with a straight face, but wraps a fictional detail or two around them when it is to the poem’s benefit.

Is this a narrative poem?

This poem resolves with a cautionary tale but it’s not exactly a narrative. I guess it’s a concatenation of mini narratives.

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

My ideal reader loves to laugh, appreciates allusion, and probably tells a good story her or himself. When I am in the act of writing, however, I am not thinking of an ideal reader. I am mud wrestling with a pig.

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 used to send what I hoped were nearly finished drafts out to friends by email. As soon as I hit send I would start tinkering again. Sending out was a ritual I needed to do. More recently, I have not regularly shared unfinished work.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This poem differs in the extent to which it incorporates other texts.

What is American about this poem?

In the land of opportunity superlative adjectives reign supreme: most, best, greatest, tallest, richest, etc. As the poem says, however, no part of the world is not in the contest. So maybe it isn’t so American after all.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I have abandoned many poems, but this one worked well from the get-go and so was not jettisoned.

Patrick Lawler

Patrick Lawler has published three collections of poetry: A Drowning Man is Never Tall Enough (University of Georgia Press, 1990); reading a burning book (Basfal Books, 1994); and Feeding the Fear of the Earth, winner of the Many Mountains Moving poetry book competition (2006). In addition, he has received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, two grants from the New York State Foundation for the Arts, and an award from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Lawler’s poetry and fiction have appeared in over one-hundred journals including American Letters & Commentary, American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Ironwood, Shenandoah, and Hotel Amerika. He has written numerous plays and has been involved with experimental multimedia pieces, art installations, and performance art. An Associate Professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, he is the former director of the ESF Writing Program where he teaches environmental writing and nature literature courses. He is the ecopoetry and drama editor of the journal Many Mountains Moving.


HOW TO B A MAN (ASSEMBLY)

Fearful I will be led in
directions I never intended,

I think of my father
being lost in New Guinea.
It was during World War II.
He was on a mission--a patrol.
For a week he wandered in the jungle.

Only two of them came back.

My father said he could
not remember any of it.
Amnesia he said.

Sometimes, when my father wasn't drunk,
he'd wake up shaking and screaming.
And we knew New Guinea
was trying to get out.

Joseph Campbell tells of a New Guinea
ritual where six or so boys
in their initiation into manhood
make love to this woman dressed as a deity
under a roof of enormous logs.

I often wondered what happened
to my father for those seven days.
Suppose everything I ever was
came out of what was hidden
in my father's head.

He would show us pictures of aborigines.

He also had this one picture
of a man who just had his head
cut off. It lay in his lap
with two spurts of blood
shooting from his neck.
A decapitated Buddha.
He could never tell us much
about the picture. Who was the victim?
Who was the man who swung the axe?

We looked at the picture
the same way we looked at our father:
with disgust and awe--
with a kind of reverence.

According to Campbell, while the last
boy was making love to the woman,
the heavy log roof would collapse
killing the couple--a union of beginning
and end, of begetting and death.

My father always wanted me
to write a novel about his life.
But the only thing I ever cared about
was what had happened in New Guinea.
How many people died? How did they die?
What did my father do? What did he see?

My father's whole life collapsed
in those buried memories.

Later, according to Campbell,
the couple who had made love
and died are pulled out from
under the heavy logs and eaten.

That's what we do with the great
mysteries that surround us.
We devour them or they devour us;
we make them part
of us or we're lost inside them forever.

If I were to write that novel,
it would be about death and sex and time.
It would occur in the middle
of a rainforest--in a sacred spot
where death could occur at any moment.

And it would begin and end with these words:
"All my life I will be afraid I'm lost.
All my life I will be afraid I'm found."

And I am there
in my father's life, sitting crosslegged
with my head lying in my lap.
Maybe I am a man
who has just made love to a deity.
Maybe I am a man
whose head has fallen off.

The whole mystical green world
spins around me. Confused with fever,
my father arrives, dazed, jittery.
I want to offer him something to eat
and tell him it is ok to be afraid. I want
to warn him not to leave this place.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

First, I want to say blogs scare me.

Second, I want to thank Joe and Chenelle Milford for publishing this poem in Scythe. I also want to thank Jeffrey Ethan Lee for including it in a manuscript that will be published in the near future (Under Ground, Many Mountains Moving Press).

Here are some questions:

Did the poem start when the picture of the man being beheaded was taken?

Did it begin when my father showed the picture to my brother and me?

Did it begin after the picture and after the writing—when the poem was performed?

In a very real sense this poem did not begin until this very moment when I am writing about it as I am preparing for a trip to Boston where a hurricane with my father’s name is approaching. On the TV Al Roker is being blown around on the Outer Banks as he talks about Hurricane Earl.

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

In some ways poems tumble around and then tumble out. This poem didn’t tumble around for long, but it didn’t tumble out till years later.

In many ways revision is the essence of this poem—mostly through a process of accretion—writing as palimpsest—where the butterfly drags around the caterpillar.

As I watch the Weather Channel, a woman named Stephanie is on Kill Devil Hills. Her hair is whipped under a windbreaker as she is being blasted by beach sand.

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

I am inspired to say I do not believe in inspiration. However, I do believe in Coleridge and I also believe in NPR’s I Believe series. I also believe in something I call out-spiration. I believe in kaleidoscopes and periscopes and telescopes, but I do not believe in microscopes.

The poem was 1/3 received (the gift from father to son), 1/3 sweat (hammering and tinkering, twisting and shrinking), 1/3 tears (the emotional connections that result in revealing deeper places).

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

The principle of cutting and stitching. The principle of weaving. The principle of strapping a poem to your back and jumping.

As I write this I am in a car heading toward a hurricane with my father’s name. And I wonder why the Weather Channel has sent poor Al Roker out to stand on a beach in a hurricane.

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

At least ten years. Probably closer to fifteen.

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 a poem crawl out of itself. I usually have to apologize to my poems for not releasing them earlier—but they don’t seem to mind. They seem to like hanging out together in unpublished manuscripts.

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

Facts are my favorite thing to lie about. One of my favorite web sites is the web site for The Museum of Jurassic Technology. I also love the web site for the Museum of Quackery. Both of these sites reveal weirdness and strange desires and imagination—but mostly they reveal our need for hope.

At one level, poems are polygraph machines recording several physiological, emotional, and psychological indices. The more the poem relies on the distances and similarities between deception and truth the more interesting are the patterns formed by the jagged lines on the graph paper.

Is this a narrative poem?

For me all poems are stories told with cracks. Insatiable, prismatic, they negotiate unfamiliar territory—crypto-manifestos, pantheistic love poems. They combine the Deleuzian principle of rhizome and the Bakhtinian sense of the carnivalesque with the Freudian battle between eros and thanatos.

“How to b a Man (Assembly)” is Oedipal and edible combining character and conflict. How could it not involve story?

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

I know I was reading Neruda, and I was also going through a stage when I was fascinated with Performance Art for its intensity and urgency, for its power to engage and its power to critique. I was also dabbling in Campbell and mythology from a variety of cultures—particularly the Mayan and the Australian Aborigines.

This poem was originally part of a series of poems “How to b a Man” which has since become part of a chapter in an unpublished poetry book—Exhalation Therapist. In collaboration with installation artist/sculptor Kim Waale, the whole “How to b a Man” section was performed in a variety of venues—using different techniques and approaches each time (slides, audience participation, music, singing, etc.).

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

I imagine an individual, probably younger, who has no real interest in poetry—but who is willing to be amazed.

Sometimes I imagine someone sitting in an audience (maybe a bar) who says. “Come on, show me why I need to listen to you.”

Sometimes I think of a child entering a magic show.

Sometimes I need to think of a head listening intently in someone’s lap.

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 blessed with a number of perceptive and critical readers, who give me feedback, criticism, and inspiration, including Linda Pennisi, David Lloyd, Jeffrey Ethan Lee, George Kalamaras, and Paul Roth. I owe these individuals far more than a suggestion about a line break. Each of them has become essential to my creative, personal, and emotional development.

After I arrive in Boston, Hurricane Earl is reduced to a category one. The Weather Channel is running a series of specials on hurricanes. In Galveston the houses are crying. In New Orleans the saxophones weep over the balconies.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’m not really sure. I know I like my poetry to be layered, and this poem seems to achieve that. I also like a poem to present unexpected connections through juxtaposition and dreamlike leaps. I want poems that allow the reader to go on a journey through contradictory emotions and tensions.

My father also appears quite frequently in my poems—but here I feel I am more honest with the emotions than I am in some other poems. This poem is slightly different because it deals rather specifically with his request to write his memoir of his WWII experiences. I know I disappointed him because I would not do it. Here, after many decades of saying no I cannot do it, I finally have written it.

What is American about this poem?

Though none of these themes is exclusively American, “How to b a Man (Assembly)” is an American poem because it considers war, patriarchy, and initiation. These subjects are prominent American themes in literature and movies from Red Badge of Courage to Catch 22, from Huckleberry Finn to Catcher in the Rye.

Relating the experience of a WWII soldier fighting in a foreign country considered through the lens of Campbell’s Eurocentric views of myth and anthropology in some ways cannot help but capture at least some aspects of American consciousness.

Now that everything has calmed down, I wonder what Al Roker is doing. I hope the weather will be kind to him.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Probably neither. Somehow the poem continues its life even as I am not writing it. It evolves and alters as it is read. I think all poems do this. They transform at the cellular level as they are experienced by others.

I also need to share this: I have lost the picture the poem was based on. For many years I have looked for it, and at this point it is hard to even imagine it. I suspect if I ever do find it, the poem will somehow be altered again.

Did I say blogs scare me? What I really meant to say was that poems scare me. And it doesn’t matter whether you write them or read them or live them. They are like holes you fall down and you can find someone who looks like you waiting at the bottom.

When I first performed this poem in public, I wore a large mud mask created by installation artist/sculptor Kim Waale. Dwelling inside that mask for the time it took to read the poem I began to grasp where the poem came from. I think this poem and maybe all of my poems need to be read inside mud in order to understand the visceral, the unholy, and the sacred.

Dave Newman

Dave Newman is the author of the novel Please Don’t Shoot Anyone Tonight (World Parade Books) and four chapbooks, most recently Allen Ginsberg Comes to Pittsburgh.








EMPTY

Mark wants to get drunk
so he goes to Al’s Tavern.

There’s unemployment,
and after that, savings.

He likes the time off,
but he still wishes for his old job.

In 1983, he made sixteen
an hour as a machinist.

That was good money,
but there were Japanese cars.

The cars were red and blue
and their doors closed nicely

and they got 30 mpg around town
and Mark tried not to hate Japan,

the Japanese people,
which was easier than he imagined.

The bar is packed.
Two people wear Burger King uniforms.

After the mill shut down,
Mark worked at McDonalds for three days

then got fired because he wouldn’t mop
up the puke in the bathroom.

He went to school for a year,
then quit to paint houses.

During the summer, the hair on his legs
gets knotted with drips of paint.

It’s winter now. When a woman
asks to buy him a drink, he says, “Sure.”

No one has bought him a drink in five years.
“I’m Elizabeth,” she says.

She wants to shoot pool so they do.
She buys the next round, and the next.

Mark says, “Seriously, let me.”
She refuses. It’s her boyfriend’s credit card.

Ex-boyfriend. She doesn’t mention him
at all one way or the other. She hates him.

She’s wearing her denim skirt, short,
the sexiest thing she owns,

which sort of makes her sad.
In high school, she did slutty.

In college, she did not.
Now, showing a little cleavage feels bold.

Mark says, “Do you always
drink like this?”

She says, “Yes.”
If he wants to fuck

he has to make the move.
Otherwise, she goes home.

Her boyfriend, ex, is somewhere
on business. She thinks he’s gay.

Not in a mean way, but in a factual way.
She knows she can’t change him

but she’d like to. She’d like to
change all the gay men, to have that power.

Mark says, “I used to work at McDonalds.”
He doesn’t know why. He’s drunk.

“Me, too,” she says.
“I had pimples for three years.”

Elizabeth gets him to bum a cigarette
from another guy. She likes his ass

and his back, his neck,
the way it’s shaved clean and neat.

She likes neat men. Not gay men.
There is a difference.

“Take me home?” she says and smiles.
He goes for his jean jacket.

She wanted him to ask,
but so what. He’s hard in her hand.

The bedroom light is dim.
She has to pee, but it can wait.

Then it can’t.
“One second,” she says.

It takes more than a second.
When she comes back, he can’t get hard.

She blows him for a minute
and it’s like sucking a gummy worm.

He takes her head and says,
“Maybe we could sleep for a little bit.”

She says, “I have to be up for work.”
He says, “On Saturday?” He says, “Oh.”

She doesn’t have to be at work.
She needs to be alone and cry.

She knows it’s not her,
that if she didn’t have to pee

he would have stayed hard,
and she could have climbed on him

or he could have climbed on her,
and there would have been something there

after so many months of being empty.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I don’t remember exactly, but most of my poems start with language, not a narrative or a character or even an idea. I used to walk around the house singing the word Elizabeth, a fine if slightly sophisticated name, so I finally put it on paper. I had that, and the word mop. Later, in a bar, I heard a woman compare a man’s soft penis to a gummy worm, and she was very sad when she was making the comparison. So I had Elizabeth, mop, and a soft cock.

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

I don’t know how many revisions any of my poems go through because it’s more important to me to have time between revisions. Generally, I write a poem. The poem will be all images and fancy-pants language then I’ll try to imagine what those images and words mean to someone living in the world (either a character or a speaker). I’ll work until I find something. I’ll take that something and work on it for a couple months (while I work on other poems or some fiction). I’ll look at the poem, realize my own genius and set the poem aside for a year. When I come back the next year, I realize how lacking I am in genius and start working again. Eventually I get the poem to where I’m not ashamed.

That wasn’t the question, though. I saw a woman on your site say she revised her poems hundreds of times and I think my poems are better than hers, so I’ll say I revised this poem like ten million times, at least.

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

I’m not a big inspiration person. I believe in work. Work includes writing, but it also includes thinking and finding a place to think. I like to walk in old mill towns, places like Braddock and Wilmerding. I read as much as I can. Between the reading and the walking, I can usually find something to say.

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

I ended up using couplets, which gave me something to push against.

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

Maybe a year or so.

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

I don’t have any rules but the longer a poem sits, the better.

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

I read all creative books (fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction) as works of imagination. The idea of fact vs. fiction seems to belong either in the marketing world or the academic world. What’s important to me is what’s on the page. I grew up reading Black Sparrow books before the Internet era. John Martin, the publisher of Black Sparrow, didn’t put anything on his books but a title and the author’s name. No blurbs. No book description. If the books were good—John Fante and Wanda Coleman, Diane Wakoski and Charles Bukowski were always good—I believed what they wrote. So I guess I’m interested in believability. I hope my poem is believable.

Is this a narrative poem?

Uh huh.

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

I remember reading Nazim Hikmet’s Human Landscapes when I was in my very early 20s, and that was the first time I’d ever seen narrative poetry with strong, fully-developed characters, characters written in the 3rd person, and poetic insights. That had a huge impact on me. Stephen Dobyns was another poet who wrote great 3rd person character-driven narratives.

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

The guy who loves the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” and has the Robert Johnson box set but not the time to listen to it.

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

My wife, Lori Jakiela, reads everything I write. She’s a great writer and a great reader. I agree with everything she has to say about my poems until I don’t, then I get drunk and stomp around the house and mutter terrible things.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s set in Herminie, PA. Some of my novel is set in Herminie, PA but I’ve never set a poem there.

What is American about this poem?

Guys losing their jobs. Hard dicks, limp dicks. Women who believe cleavage is sometimes necessary. Working for McDonalds, and the inability to clean up puke for minimum wage. The sadness we all feel when we’re desperate to connect.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I’ll say abandoned. It’ll be finished when someone pays me a million bucks for the film rights.