R. T. Smith

R. T. Smith is Writer-in-residence at Washington and Lee University, where he edits Shenandoah. His most recent collection is Outlaw Style (Arkansas, 2007). He has twice received the Library of Virginia Poetry Book of the Year Award and is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Alabama State Arts Council. Smith was raised in Georgia and North Carolina but taught in Alabama for nineteen years before moving to Virginia in 1995. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, three editions of The Pushcart Prize and five volumes of New Stories from the South. In 2011 Stephen F. Austin University Press will publish his fourth collection of short stories, Sherburne.


DAR HE

When I am the lone listener to the antiphony of crickets
and the two wild tribes of cicadas and let my mind
wander to its bogs, its sloughs where no endorphins fire,

I will think on occasion how all memory is longing
for the lost energies of innocence, and then one night –
whiskey and the Pleiades, itch from a wasp sting –

I realize it is nearly half a century since that nightmare
in Money, Mississippi, when Emmett Till was dragged
from his uncle Mose Wright’s cabin by two strangers

because he might have wolf-whistled at Carolyn Bryant,
a white woman from whom he had bought candy,
or maybe he just whispered “Bye,” as the testimony

was confused and jangled by fear. The boy was not local,
and Chicago had taught him minor mischief, but what
he said hardly matters, as he never got to testify,

for the trial was for murder after his remains were dredged
from the Tallahatchie River, his smashed body with one
eye gouged out and a bullet in the brain and lashed

with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan whose vanes
might have to him seemed petals of some metal flower,
had Bobo – as friends called him – ever seen it. And why

this might matter to me tonight is that I was not yet eight
when the news hit and can remember my parents at dinner –
maybe glazed ham, probably hand-whipped potatoes,

iced tea sweeter than candy, as it was high summer –
shaking their heads in passing and saying it was a shame,
but the boy should have been smarter and known never

to step out of his place, especially that far South. Did I
even guess, did I ask how a word or stray note could give birth
to murder? He was fourteen, and on our flickering new TV,

sober anchormen from Atlanta registered their shock,
while we ate our fine dinner and listened to details
from the trial in Sumner, though later everyone learned

the crime occurred in Sunflower County, and snoopy
reporters from up north had also discovered that missing
witnesses – Too Tight Collins among them – could

finger the husband Roy Bryant and his step-brother
named Milam as the men in the truck who asked, “Where
the boy done the talking?” and dragged Emmett Till

into the darkness. His mother Mamie, without whom
it would have all passed in the usual secrecy, requested
an open-casket funeral, so the mourners saw the body

maimed beyond recognition – his uncle had known
the boy only by a signet ring – and Jet magazine
then showed photos, working up the general rage

and indignation, so the trial was speedy, five days
with a white jury, which acquitted, the foreman
reporting that the state had not adequately established

the identity of the victim, and I don’t know how
my father the cop or his petite wife the Den Mother
took it all, though in their eighties they have no love

for any race darker than a tanned Caucasian. I need
a revelation to lift me from the misery of remembering,
as I get the stigma of such personal history twisted

into the itch of that wasp sting. Milam later told Life
he and Bryant were “guilty as sin,” and there is some
relief in knowing their town shunned them and drove

Bryant out of business, but what keeps haunting me –
glass empty, the insect chorus fiercer, more shrill –
is the drama played out in my mind like a scene

from some reverse To Kill a Mockingbird – or worse,
a courtroom fiasco from a Faulkner novel – when
the prosecutor asked Mr. Wright if he could find

in the room the intruder who snatched his nephew
out of bed that night, and the old man – a great uncle,
really – fought back his sobs and pointed at the accused,

his finger like a pistol aimed for the heart. “Dar he,”
he said, and the syllables yet echo into this raw night
like a poem that won’t be silenced, like the choir

of seventeen-year insects, their voices riddling strange
as sleigh bells through the summer air, the horrors
of injustice still simmering, and I now wonder what

that innocence I miss might have been made of –
smoke? rhinestones? gravied potatoes followed
by yellow cake and milk? Back then we called

the insect infestation ferros, thinking of Hebrew
captivity in Egypt and believing they were chanting
free us, instead of the come hither new science

insists on, but who can dismiss the thought
that some fifty years back their ancestors dinned
a river of sound all night extending lament

to lamentation, and I am shaken by the thought
of how easy it is for me to sit here under sharp
stars which could mark in heaven the graves

of tortured boys and inhale the dregs of expensive
whiskey the color of a fox, how convenient
to admit where no light shows my safe face

that I have been less than innocent this entire
life and never gave a second thought to this:
even the window fan cooling my bedroom

stirs the air with blades, and how could anyone
in a civilized nation ever be condemned for
narrowing breath to melody between the teeth,

and if this is an exercise in sham shame I am
feeling, some wish for absolution, then I have to
understand the wave of nausea crossing me,

this conviction that it is not simple irony
making the whir of voices from the pine trees
now seem to say Dar he, Dar he, Dar he.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I think it was the spring and summer of 2005. I had twice before tried to write poems about the wolf whistle episode and aftermath, abandoning the first because Lewis Nordan published a novel based on it, the second because I began to have doubts about the whole enterprise. I was working in quatrains of simple pentatonic lines, seeing the actual murder scene with an omniscient eye, filling in from the historical record concerning the murder of Emmitt Till, and I began to wonder if it was my business to be meddling here, invading to invent and interpret just to satisfy my need to speak out on the righteous side. I wanted to write a poem of witness against racial atrocity, but I was not really a legitimate or significant witness. Then on that Sunday afternoon—my wife off traveling, me on the sofa watching the news alone—I learned it was the anniversary of something, the killing, the verdict, something, and my memory lurched back to where it had not dared go before. Where I was when I first heard about the killing, and who I was with, how we ate our nice dinner anyway, tsk, tsk. I knew I had to try again and that I needed to work it out for myself and face full-on a fact about myself and my family that I have long tried to get shed of. The cicadas or jarflies appeared out there as soon as it went twilight. I scribbled and they seemed to urge me on. I didn’t start off with a glass of whiskey, but it got involved later. I was going through the whole lower case register of shame, trying to decide to what degree I was complicit or permissive, and to what degree indicted. It was a hard night all around, but I felt something pushing me, a wind, a whisper, an insistence.

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

I wrote fast that evening, not pausing to check facts or dates, a reeling off of layers, lending little attention to line length or rational connection. By bedtime I had the rough draft, and it was prose with a few salvageably intense and lyric moments that must be recognized as gifts. With the second draft, I went from notebook to computer, and then it all goes murky, as I just changed and rearranged, trying for an iambic line but giving up. The thing wanted a longer reach, a harder utterance, class four rapids. You make big changes one day and small ones the next, and the history of composition disappears into the hard drive. It’s impossible to count drafts or sessions unless you use the computer with more expertise and fluency than I do.

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

If there’s such a thing as valuable inspiration, it has to do with full attention and energy. The muse involves “use,” and I was using all my resources in that first session. The whole process was so compelling and scary that I seldom had trouble in subsequent sessions receiving that faint whispering radio signal that dares us to fine tune to it. It’s an inconvenient and demanding kind of consciousness, and even those of us who say we live for it probably don’t want it all that often, as it wrings you dry. A lot of this poem was received, as was a lot of what couldn’t be part of the poem. And I had to go back and read the historical documents. I know Picasso’s comment that art is a lie that tells a truth, but the lie has to be that imaginative spin you put on the ball, not the ball itself. Just the desperate lying of extrapolation where you nearly remember. When I write a historical poem, I want it to stand up to both imaginative and documentary scrutiny. There’s pleasure in working toward that, but it’s sweat pleasure.

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

I decided pretty early on how many lines per stanza, but I only slowly came to an understanding of how I wanted to interweave the re-enactment of the killing, the courtroom testimony, the narrator’s dinnertable discovery of the crime on TV and the narrator’s position as he unscrolls this story. I didn’t want it to be so much neat and intellectual as associational, psychological. Haunted, I suppose. The gangly, enjambed sentences are intentional, as are the internal rhymes and assonance. I wanted it a kind of driven exhortation, an exhausting poem to read aloud, and if nothing else, it is that.

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

Nearly two years, I think. I kept delaying any attempt to get it published, asking myself questions about my rights to this testimony, worrying that some folks might say I had, like many white writers, tried to usurp the victims’ voices, to make them my sensitivity badge. But I knew this was a poem I had to write, and that my refracted experience and the way the story occupied my imagination wouldn’t be denied. It was quickly rejected by a couple of magazines, but Ploughshares took it and then awarded it their annual prize. It’s been Pushcarted and anthologized since, but the Ploughshares people have been very kindly sponsors of it, nominating here and there, which I appreciate. Then it appeared in Outlaw Style from Arkansas in 2007, if I recall correctly.

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 or very much continuity of method. Sometimes my job makes writing very difficult and pobiz as impossible as it is unpleasant, so I lie quiet for long spells, then gather up the work from half a year and send it out. The production line at my desk is about as reliable as a snake.

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

Maybe I’ve already answered this, but I should add that I moved the family back to Georgia in the poem, but I can’t recall if we were in Griffin or Charlotte when I heard the story. My visual memory says Griffin, but my reason responds, “Did we have a TV in Georgia?” If the scenes of remembering – twilight, evening drink, insects – and the dinnertable are milky in my mind, I have invested extensive research and meditation in trying the summon fact from the results.

Is this a narrative poem?

I’d say this is a story within a report within a narrative. Man with whisky remembers boy at dinner who hears of atrocity and tries to place it in his understanding of the world. Time passes, histories get written, facts fade, memory monkeys with things, the world spins. Narrative is always a relative question, but I don’t think this is borderline.

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

This is reaching back a spell, but I think I was reading Cormac McCarthy. Maybe listening to endless disks of Moby-Dick in the car. When I’m writing poetry, I try to read fiction, and the reverse. It’s easier to quarantine my work from the big winds that way, and I like to read those big winds.

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

At some point, I was convinced this one was just for the home team. It’s long and convoluted and maybe not appropriate, certainly not “pleasing.” Poetry as catharsis, though. I thought it might be too ungainly and associative and maybe too politically incorrect to find much of an audience.

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 believe I did. My wife Sarah Kennedy is the most likely person to see my work when it’s raw. She probably saw it in that stage when I’m confident I’ve done the best I can, but a couple of snags still trouble me. She always makes my poems at least a little better. In a more finished state I’m likely to send a few things to Claudia Emerson, too, but when I’m writing, I mostly do it in secret, the old readers having fallen away long ago.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’ve revealed here a less idealized, more historical version of my family, and I’ve appropriated without permission voices I might have preferred to consult with, though that wasn’t possible. I suppose this is a poem of witness, but a cautious one, seeking to speak truly and clearly, when I’m not sure I’ve earned the podium. I also think its twining of past and present, personal and public is more bold than I’m accustomed to. It may be trespassing, and in that sense, I guess it’s right at the center of what seems to be my imaginative project. It does wear its literary allusions on its sleeve, which I’m not normally inclined toward. I hope it requires a reader to get a second wind, which I’m usually cautious of.

What is American about this poem?

“Only in America?” as they say. Not exactly, as racist atrocities abound, but we have our special brand, and the monkeyshines that follow as the perpetrators puppet the system to protect themselves, well, we’ve nearly perfected this. I think about William Christenberry’s paintings and constructions, and I’m tempted to say it’s as American as the Klan.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Neither, I think. I still look at it and say, well, why not cut this, shift that, correct this? I fiddle with it, fret with it. It seems a poem not to have gotten wrong, so I keep doing random tests on it, midnight surprises, to make sure it’s not shamming, but there it is in the book, no way to get in and change all those copies. If the possibility of a Selected Poems ever arises, I believe it will be slightly different there.

[Author's Note: Although most historians now concur that Mose Wright said not “Dar he,” but “There he is,” the former is the way his testimony was universally reported in the media, and it has remained so in the public mind.]

Keetje Kuipers

Keetje Kuipers is a native of the Northwest. She earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Oregon Literary Arts, and Soapstone. In 2007 she completed her tenure as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, which provided her with seven months of solitude in Oregon's Rogue River Valley. She used her time there to complete work on her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published in March 2010 by BOA Editions. It contains poems previously published in Willow Springs, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and AGNI, among others. You can also listen to her read her work—which has been nominated five years in a row for the Pushcart Prize—at the online audio archive From the Fishouse. Keetje has taught writing at the University of Montana and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She divides her time between San Francisco and Missoula, Montana, where she lives with her dog, Bishop, and does her best to catch a few fish.


FOURTH OF JULY

If I have any romantic notions left,
please let me abandon them here
on the dashboard of your Subaru
beside this container of gas station
potato salad and bottle of sunscreen.
Otherwise, my heart is a sugar packet
waiting to be shaken open by some
other man’s hand. Let there be another town
after this one, a town with an improbable Western
name—Wisdom, Last Chance—where we can get
a room and a six-pack, where the fireworks
end early, say nine o’clock, before it’s really
gotten dark enough to see them because
everyone has to work in the morning.
I’m not asking for love anymore.
I don’t care if I never see a sailboat again.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem was written while I was the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, and I actually spent that 4th of July alone, completely off the grid, in a cabin two hours down a dirt road from the nearest town. I drank that six-pack by myself, barbecued a whole chicken, and then shot the gun off my porch in lieu of fireworks. However, I'd spent the weekend before the 4th with my then-boyfriend in a little town in eastern Oregon, and that was the experience I was trying to talk about in this poem… I think I actually wrote it in the car as I was driving back to the cabin. Sometimes I'm able to figure something out or admit something in a poem that I'm not ready to be privy to yet in my actual life. That was the case with this poem: that relationship was loveless and doomed, and I knew that fact in the part of my brain and heart that were allowed to express themselves in a poem. However, at that point, they weren't thoughts or feelings that I could admit to anywhere other than on the page.

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

Most of my poems undergo countless revisions, and generally take months (if not years) to come into their final form. However, I will occasionally write a poem that's finished the moment it first hits the page, and those are generally my strongest poems. This was one of them--I don't think I changed more than a few words.

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

I believe in inspiration as a trigger or a catalyst. I can't sit down on any given day and write a good poem just because I want to. I do need to be moved in some way, by a feeling, an experience, or an image. But I also believe in writing as a daily practice and a craft, and like any skill, those hours of practice pay off in moments of seemingly effortless accomplishment. This poem didn't demand a lot of sweat and tears in the twenty minutes I took to write it, but I could never have written it without all the sweat and tears I poured onto the page in the previous years. Good craft demands that we continue to practice and learn and expand our skill set, but it's very rewarding when some of what we've practiced becomes, for a moment or two, second nature on the page.

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

I wrote the poem in the summer of 2007 and decided to wait until the fall submission period to send it out. I got it in the mail to magazines in October of that year and heard back from Willow Springs right away. They published it in their Spring 2008 issue.

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

When I first started sending out to magazines, I didn't have much of an understanding of how publication worked, so I approached it in a very regimented fashion: I kept a spreadsheet of which poems had been sent where and I mailed off batches of four or five poems to fifteen or twenty magazines every four months. I kept myself on a schedule so that I wouldn't quit, no matter how many rejections poured in (and boy, they did). This meant that I wasn't usually sending new work off right away--I was producing new material and revising old material simultaneously, and as the older poems were polished up, they would be entered into my submission queue. I didn't send out anything that hadn't been thoroughly vetted by both myself and my small community of writers who I counted on for good editing. I think all that ended around the time I sent off "Fourth of July." Now I'm more comfortable with the idea of publishing a poem that might still go through a number of revisions before appearing in a book. I don't mind the idea that drafts of my poems (good drafts, ones that have had careful attention and revision, but drafts all the same) are appearing in journals and magazines. In some ways, it gives me a lot of pleasure to think that I'm sharing that process with a wider audience, and that people may have the opportunity to encounter a single poem in widely varying incarnations by the time it appears in a book.

Is this a narrative poem?

It's a lyric. It's concerned with sound and music, and a very fleeting point in emotional time. Because I often write in my head as I'm driving or hiking, sound and musicality are very present and motivating factors as I compose. Because I also consider almost all of my work as coming out of the elegiac tradition, I think of many of my poems, like this one, as songs of longing and loss and unquenchable desire. For a while, I was reading a lot of Lacan, and he says that desire comes out of the imbalance between what we perceive--language and images--and what actually is: la réelle. He argues that this constant state of imbalance or vertigo, rather than eros or sexual desire, is our main motivator, and that it's impossible to satisfy because we don't actually know what it is we're longing for. So this longing is displaced--trying to fill the void of desire, we long for everything else instead: the six-pack, the motel room, the town with an improbable Western name. Whether articulating lust or lamentation, the source is always longing. It is this kind of longing that I'm attempting to articulate in constructing an "elegy" like "Fourth of July." So, no, this is not a narrative poem.

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

The summer I was living in the cabin I really only had contact with the outside world through my P.O. box in town, which I'd check on every week or two. I sent poems to friends, and it was intensely pleasurable to receive their letters, comments, and own poems in response. After I returned to civilization, I kept up that correspondence with a few of my friends, like the poet Natalie Diaz. However, these days, I'm back in a workshop setting at Stanford as a Stegner Fellow, and that experience is both more and less intimate than the exchange of letters. While I have this built-in community of peers who I can bring my new work to now, I still rely on my most trusted readers--those who've been reading my work for years and have an understanding of where it's come from and where it's trying to go--to nurture my work and give it a smack on the butt when necessary. I'm currently reading The Delicacy and Strength of Lace, which is the collection of letters that James Wright and Leslie Marmon Silko exchanged. It reminds me of how important correspondence can be for a poet in that it gives the poem time to change and the space and distance in which to do so.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

What's interesting to me about this poem is that it's essentially a poem of denial, where the speaker is clearly lying to herself. While denial is not a huge theme in my book Beautiful in the Mouth (in which "Fourth of July" appears), it has ended up becoming a major part of the current manuscript I'm working on, which is titled The Keys to the Jail. I see this poem as the bridge or the entry point to that work. My current poems are interested in the various shows we put on for ourselves, the voices and personas that sometimes give us confidence and that other times give us a good dressing down. But because those personas are only a small sliver of who we are, they're ultimately very unreliable narrators to employ in a poem. But I'm enjoying listening to their voices, trying to hear what they have to say, and ultimately pitting one against the other. In my earlier work, I was searching for my one authentic voice, now I've happily realized there's no such thing.

What is American about this poem?

Being from the West, my ideas of what's "American" have a lot to do with frontier mentality, manifest destiny, water rights, and the historical appropriation of land. So when I'm using landscapes to talk about loss, which I often do, I'm generally examining a landscape that someone thinks they own, that has been laid claim to multiple times, that has numerous names, that has been "conquered" and coaxed and loved and beaten half to death with a saw or a plow. The speaker in "Fourth of July" is thinking along those same lines: She wants to get somewhere that's hers, a place and a love she can name and call her own. She believes that nothing more than a devoted work ethic and a shunning of frivolous pleasures like sailboats and late night fireworks and romance can get her there. This speaker is utterly delusional and utterly American, and her poem is trying to live the dream.

Sydney Lea

Sydney Lea's ninth and tenth collections, Young of the Year and I Was Thinking of Beauty, will appear from Four Way Books, respectively, in April of 2011 and in 2013. Lea was founder and for thirteen years editor of New England Review. Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Fulbright Foundations, Lea was a poetry finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. He has published a novel, A Place in Mind, and two collections of naturalist nonfiction. In 2011 he'll retire after forty-two years of teaching at various American institutions: Yale, Wesleyan, Middlebury and Dartmouth Colleges, and for thirteen years, the Vermont College MFA program. Lea is active in conservation efforts in Maine and Vermont, and is a longtime board member of Central Vermont Adult Basic Education.


FATHOMLESS

I remember that store, and the nasty redneck whose stink
seemed a challenge to everyone in it. The scene
is decades old, but I’m still confused that no one
took up the challenge—including me, though I liked
an occasional fight back then. The prospect of pain

meant less to me once, I guess. An aneurism
had just killed my brother, so the pain I’m talking about
was my body’s. I breathed up another pain that day.
I checked the man’s beat pickup; why would he want them,
those skunks knee-deep in its bed? I left the lot

still more confused, my sweet retriever shivering
on the seat beside me. The godawful smell still clung
to the dog’s wet coat, and my own. There’d be no more hikes
for us that morning: rain had arrived, bone-chilling.
If you killed a skunk, why would you keep the thing?

To kill some time, I stopped at The Jackpot View.
We’ve always called it that. Five mountaintops bled
into mists to my east in New Hampshire. The sudden squalls
spilled leaves on the woods-floor’s pall of nondescript hue.
Now he was dead. Now my brother was dead.

I can’t define any God, but only this morning,
I caught a whiff of road-killed skunk and thought
I could speak of Him or Her or It as surely
as I could tell you the slightest thing concerning
the man I’m remembering now, the one who shot

or trapped or clubbed those miserable reeking creatures.
The smallest enigmas we ever encounter remain
as hard to explain as all the epical ones.
I’ve failed for years to fathom the death of my brother;
but it’s just as hard to understand why a scene

in an old Vermont store should linger like dead-skunk odor,
which if you’ve lately been tainted comes back to scent you
whenever a rain blows in—or like some pains
you may have thought you’d forever gotten over,
but which at some odd prompting come back to haunt you.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I look back into my 'Draft Copies' folder, and see that I began the poem in May of '09 and got it to the version above in March of 2010. It began in the way I suggest in stanza five: "only this morning, I caught a whiff of road-killed skunk." I was just driving down to the village when I passed the roadkill, and the odor—isn't smell the most suggestive of the senses, the least willed?—I thought, as I had for many years off and on, about the guy who, strangely as strangely can be, had all those dead skunks in his truck; to recall that episode was to recall that it followed hard on the death of my younger brother. The poem at large ensued from that association.

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

That same folder shows twenty-four stabs at getting it right. Above is number twenty-five. To be sure, some of the changes from late draft to later were pretty minor, a word here, a phrase there, etc. But that much revision is not uncommon for me.

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

What we call “inspiration” is for me really the operation of selective memory. Certain experiences suddenly come back to me, one often having nothing, apparently, to do with the other. The poem is “about” what in fact they do have to do with each other, which has to be something after all, merely because I'm the one to have recalled them.

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

I have no interest in the formalist/free verse debate, because the fiercer it gets, the stupider. The formalists accuse the free-versers of sloppy thinking and craft, as if such a slur applied to Dr. Williams, say; the free-verse zealots accuse the formalists of being ‘establishment’ figures as if vers libre were somehow something new, and hadn't been the establishment mode for eighty years or so now, and as if the greatest of American formalists, the Delta blues musicians, were somehow so many little Newt Gingriches.

That said, I am a formalist, period, even when it may be unobvious, when, for instance, I use eccentric meters or nonce forms. It seems obvious enough here: five-line stanzas, five-stress lines, and rhymes or slant rhymes in lines two and five. I wrote, as always, a very quick draft of what came at me. Then I noticed X number of lines (more than are here now) and fooled around with finding a common divisor that would break the draft into stanzas of equal length. (I should interject that two of the meters, tetrameter or pentameter, come at me much more effortlessly than any free-verse mode, a fact that even I don’t quite understand.) Then I noticed that lines two and five rhymed, or sort of, in one of the stanzas, and I fiddled around with making that true of them all. And so on. Mere doodling.....

Which may sound mechanical as hell, and could well be for someone else. For me, this sort of monkeying around is a way of engaging in play, and abandoning myself to what are, a bit fuzzily, sometimes called the “musical” properties of language, but above all of getting over any too strenuous effort to mean something. For me anyhow, this non-method allows the language and the formalities to lead me by the nose, as it were; I just tag along wherever they take me—sometimes to a poem, sometimes to a mess, but I usually like the ride in any case.

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

Without looking the matter up, I’d guess eighteen months.

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

That varies with every poem. Usually I revise sporadically for a long, long time, leaving the poem in Desk Drawer Land for considerable spell between revisions. But all of us know that there is, now and then, the poem that seems a freebie, that arrives, it seems, at no cost to our energies. This is the Muse’s way of rewarding us for all the hours we put into the non-freebies.

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

Everything in it is fact, or at least that’s true—to use circular logic—of the factual parts. If I say in a poem that I lost a brother, for instance, that had better be verifiable. I don’t know that this is a moral stance, though I do have some contempt for people who fake experience by way of making themselves look admirable or (pleeeeease) sensitive, so much as it is a stance that enables me. I am, I guess, a capital-R Realist Poet, to use a reductive label.

Is this a narrative poem?

It does tell a story, so maybe yes. But that’s not the whole enchilada; I think of myself as a poet who, no matter what he addresses, does have an interest if not necessarily in plot, then in other narrative values: character, setting, what have you.

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

I can’t recall what I may have been reading. My principal influences are 19th-century ones, especially Wordsworth and Keats. My principal American influence is Frost, though—not at all patently—Dickinson must be in there somehow too. More recent influences are, again, quite different poets: Robert Penn Warren and Donald Justice.

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

Yes, the reader whom I envision is sometimes one neighbor, sometimes a composite of several. These are people—crusty, feisty, laconic and sometimes even xenophobic Vermont hill farm stock, or what’s left of it—who are dear friends, but who will never read a word of mine, unless maybe something in prose. Again, to picture these neighbors as I start to write is a trick that enables me; it makes no sense on earth.

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 knows me better than anyone, so she’s my best critic. She can tell me when I am faking it, maybe even trying to make myself look “sensitive” in that phony way. I tease her that she’s a recovering lawyer; in fact, she’s a professional mediator. She is brilliant and literate, but—and this is important to me—she is not literary. One of my favorite poets and friends, Fleda Brown, also sees almost all I do; and so does Stephen Arkin, who’s not a poet (he taught literature for four decades at San Francisco State and was my closest grad school pal) but is exquisitely attuned to language and is another keep-him-honest reader, knowing me as thoroughly as he does.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I'm not the one to judge that.

What is American about this poem?

It is set in America, for starters. And, despite its formalism, it seeks to sound like actual speech, which is a very American concern. My dear friend Marjan Strojan, a Slovenian poet, informs me, for example, that that’s not a consideration at all among his compatriots.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Auden was right about that. I got it as good as it was going to get, given such gifts as I own. Then I moved elsewhere.

Annie Boutelle

Founder of the Poetry Center at Smith College, Annie Boutelle teaches in the English Department there. She has published in various journals, including The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, and Poetry. She has published two books of poems: Becoming Bone (University of Arkansas Press) and Nest of Thistles (Morse Prize, UPNE). Currently she
is the Grace Hazard Conkling Poet-in-Residence at Smith. For more information, please visit her website.



“VIENNA, SPRING 1962”


Likely my email header startled, shoved him
back through time, like a birth canal in reverse,
shuttled him to a place where his whole body
was strange, slim and eager, in those stiff jeans,
and somehow innocent, despite the Bennington
girls he’d once seduced on their clichéd green
lawn. His mission, to learn four new languages
as the first step to becoming writer—who gave
him that idea? Not me. Though I was intrigued
by it—just like how I lapped up all he could
teach me about the French existentialists, one
shimmering day, at the foot of a heroic statue
on the Ringstrasse—could I ever find it again?
And his room, up that iron circular stair, where
we had to tiptoe, as he’d slept with his landlady,
who tended to be jealous. And he used to buy
me Whiskeyschnitten at the bakery near his pad,
and make me laugh. And on the avenues, the
chestnut trees flung forth their white blossom,
organ music boomed out of each cathedral, and
I was not in love with him, though fascinated,
ready to do almost everything he wanted, and
he was a patient man. He took my clothes off
in the moonlight, and I loved the smell of him,
and how earnest he was, he’s the only man I’ve
known to be curious about menstruation and
what it feels like, and he said “to speak of love
is to make love”—an assertion tested and found
true—and I let him lick my blood, and knew
I’d journeyed far from Oban, with no ticket back.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I would guess about two years ago—I’m not good at keeping track. It started when I located a former lover and sent him an email. We sent messages back and forth, and then stopped. But it got me thinking back to the time when I was seventeen and in Vienna for the spring semester—a thrilling time in my life with the cheap standing places at the State Opera several times a week, and a cadre of international students from all over the world, so German was our common language.

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

It had very little, if any, revision. Its shape was clear from the start (longish lines and a block look), and I knew I wanted a kind of tumbling-forth pace, with lots of “and”s, and with each memory leading to another one.

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

I don’t think inspiration was involved, or sweat or tears, just an opening to the person I was in Vienna all those years ago, and the excitement of being there.
How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print?

About a year and a half.

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?

Occasionally I’m so excited, I send it straight off. But mainly I’ve learned that is super dangerous, and usually I live with it for at least a month before sending out.

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

It’s entirely factual.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes! But also, I would hope, lyrical.

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

I read widely, all the time, and hence I really can’t remember. But undoubtedly Lucille Clifton gave me permission to write about menstruation. For me, she was, and continues to be, a constant source of courage.

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

While, especially in revision, I’m thinking hard re my audience and whether what I’m putting down on the page will reach them, mostly during the writing process I think I’m writing purely for myself, and gauging whether it pleases me, or not. (Iain Crichton Smith, the Scottish poet, was my high-school English teacher, and he constantly emphasized the need to murder one’s darlings.)

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 meet with a monthly critique group, composed of Ellen Dore Watson, Amy Dryansky, Mary Koncel, Diana Gordon, and Maya Janson. They keep me on track.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s more intimately personal than most of my poems, and very different from my current project, which focuses on Caravaggio.

What is American about this poem?

The lover character. . .

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I’ve made one small change—the “with no ticket back” in the final line has become simply “no ticket back.” And now I'm finished with it.

Richard Tillinghast

Richard Tillinghast is a poet, translator and essayist. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, he now lives in rural County Tipperary, Ireland. He is the author of ten books of poetry including Selected Poems and Sewanee Poems (2009) as well as The New Life (2008). A recent book of essays, Finding Ireland: a Poet’s Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture, was also published in 2008 by the University of Notre Dame Press and received ForeWord magazine’s Book of the Year Gold Award for travel essays. His poetry has appeared in Irish, British, and American periodicals including the American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Irish Pages, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, and PN Review. Poems of his have been selected for both The Best American Poetry and The Best of Irish Poetry. In 1995 the University of Michigan Press brought out Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur, a critical memoir; Lowell was Tillinghast’s teacher at Harvard, where he received his PhD in 1970. With his daughter, Julia Clare Tillinghast he has translated from Turkish the poems of Edip Cansever, which were published in 2009 by Talisman House under the title Dirty August. He is a 2010-11 Guggenheim Fellow.


WAKE ME IN SOUTH GALWAY

Wake me in South Galway, or better yet
In Clare. You’ll know the pub I have in mind.
Improvise a hearse: one of those decrepit
Postal vans would suit me down to the ground—
A rust-addled Renault, Kelly green with a splash
Of Oscar Wilde yellow stirred in to clash
With the dazzling perfect meadows and limestone
On the coast road from Kinvara down to Ballyvaughan.

Once you’ve got in off the road at Newquay
Push aside some barstools and situate me
Up in front by the door where the musicians sit,
Their table crowded with pints and a blue teapot,
A pouch of Drum, some rolling papers and tin
Whistles. Ask Charlie Piggott to play a tune
That sounds like loss and Guinness, turf smoke and rain,
While Brenda dips in among the punters like a hedge-wren.

Will I hear it? Maybe not. But I hear it now.
The smoke of the music fills my nostrils, I feel the attuned
Box and fiddle in harness, pulling the plough
Of the melody, turning the bog-dark, root-tangled ground.
Even the ceramic collie on the windowsill
Cocks an ear as the tune lifts and the taut sail
Of the Galway hooker trills wildly in its frame on the wall,
Rippling to the salt pulse and seabreeze of a West Clare reel.

Many a night, two octaves of one tune,
We sat here side by side, your body awake
To a jig or slide, me mending the drift of a line
As the music found a path to my notebook.
Lost in its lilt and plunge I would disappear
Into the heathery freedom of a slow air
Or walk out under the powerful stars to clear
My head of thought and breathe their cooled-down fire.

When my own session ends, let me leave like that,
Porous to the wind that blows off the ocean.
Goodbye to the company and step into the night
Completed and one-off, like a well-played tune—
Beyond the purified essence of hearth fires
Rising from the life of the parish, past smoke and stars,
Released from everything I’ve done and known.
I won’t go willingly, but I’ll be gone.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Sometime in the late 90s. I was thinking that one of the few privileges a writer has is to write his own life story, and in this case, to say how he would like his funeral or wake to be conducted. Not that I expect for even one minute that all this will happen after I’m gone. I wrote it in the pub described in the poem while listening to Irish music, then revised it.

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

I revised and revised, but I don’t remember how long it took, how many drafts, etc. You just keep working away till you’ve got it right.

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

If I may rephrase your question, I don’t exactly “believe” in inspiration, because it is a reality for me. I live by it. I experience it. The poem was received and then it had to be written.

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

At some point early on it was clear that the poem needed to be in rhyme and meter and organized into eight-line stanzas. So I employed all the technique involved in composing lines in a rough iambic pentameter, with what are called partial rhymes. You can see how stringent the rhymes are. But the musicality of the poem wanted a lot of music in the words.

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

Don’t remember. It probably took about a year, which is par for the course.

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?

Once it feels finished I start sending it out.

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

Every thing in this poem is real.

Is this a narrative poem?

I’m not sure that term would apply. It is more a wish, a set of wishes, a set of fanciful requests to my survivors.

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

I don’t remember what I was reading. But anyone for whom Yeats is a living presence would be thinking of him and his big block-like eight-line stanzas.

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

Normally I don’t. But people who were in the pub that night asked to see the poem when it was finished, and so I showed it to a few friends in the west of Ireland.

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?

In those days I didn’t share my work with other writers, I just tried to get it the way I wanted it by myself. Now, however, Alan Williamson and I have started critiquing each other’s work. We have known each other since we met in graduate school in 1963.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It may be more heartfelt. In form there are others it resembles. Sometimes I write in rhyme and meter, sometimes I write in free verse.

What is American about this poem?

Nothing. Except perhaps that it was written by an American. I think nationality is not as important as some people do.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.