Ross Gay

Ross Gay’s books of poems include Against Which (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, MARGIE, Ploughshares and many other magazines. He has also, with the artist Kimberly Thomas, collaborated on several artists’ books: The Cold Loop, BRN2HNT and The Bullet. He is an editor with the chapbook press Q Avenue, whose recently published books include Chromosomory by Layli Long Soldier, Amigos by Matthew Dickman, Ad Hoc by Chris Mattingly, and Dolly by Kimberly Thomas and Simone White. Ross Gay received his M.F.A. in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and his Ph.D. in American Literature from Temple University. He teaches in the low-residency M.F.A. program in poetry at Drew University, and in Indiana University’s English department.


FOR SOME SLIGHT I CAN’T QUITE RECALL

Was with the pudgy hands of a 13-year-old
that I took the marble of his head
just barely balanced on his reedy neck
and with the brute tutelage
of years fighting the neighbor kids
and too the lightning of my father’s
stiff palm I leaned the boy’s head
full force into the rattly pane of glass
on the school bus and did so with the eagle of justice
screaming in my ear as he always does
for the irate and stupid I made the window sing
and bend and the skinny boy too
whose eyes grew to lakes lit by mortar fire
bleating with his glasses crooked
I’m not an animal walking in place
on the green vinyl seat looking far away
and me watching him and probably almost smiling
at the song and dance I made of the weak
and skinny boy who towering above me
became even smaller and bizarre and birdlike
pinned and beating his wings frantically
against the tines of his cage and me probably
almost smiling as is the way of the stupid
and cruel watching the weak and small
and innocent not getting away.


When was the poem composed? How did it start?

I think it was composed about five years ago. It started just from a recollection of a bus ride from childhood, just remembering an incident, or some incidents. That was sort of the start.

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

If I remember correctly, I hammered on this poem for about six months, trying to get the sounds right, the telling right, and the story right. I know the poem was quite a bit longer, I was sort of invested in getting that speaker out of being so stupid, so cruel. But after several drafts, that went away.

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 tuning in—inspiration always makes me think of something else, the muses or something. I guess I occasionally get that kind of thing, but more often I feel like I’m tuning in, listening real good, real hard, real clearly. Like I’m actually hearing what it is that I need to explore, and how to go about it. That said, this was a poem that probably had something like ten false starts (I can see them in my memory, and the titles were so weird and bad), then a fairly messy first draft, some of which remains, some of which is long gone.

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

I know I was consciously trying to make the poem go quickly, feel sort of out of control, and the language I think makes that happen—a kind of accumulative language, lots of “and”s pushing the poem ahead, and an absence of punctuation, or those kinds of breaths or pauses. And the poem is one sentence, which also, sometimes, can help with that push forward.

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

I think it was about two years later, maybe a little less.
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?

There’s no set rule on this, though I think I often like a poem to sit for a good while, to lose its luster for me—or at least to have time for that to happen. I also like to read a poem out loud to an audience, if I can, before sending it off. Also, I find, there are poems I’m not all interested in sending off to magazines—I kind of prefer them being shared with a reader in the context of the book.

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

The poem takes as its subject an interaction between two people that probably happened in 1988. But that’s not its subject at all. Its subject is violence and the ways that individual and childhood violence can be so similar to a state violence—not in scope, necessarily, but in its genesis and justification or rationale. That is a fact, I believe. The metaphor of the poem is a fact.

Is this a narrative poem?

I think so. And a lyric one.

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

I don’t know the answer to that question. But I like the question. I think, if I were to really go far down the road on that one, I’d come up saying that, yes, all good poetry (in my little world) is just. Or ethical. Which does not at all mean the opposite—that all ethical and just poetry is good. Nope. But poetry that is unethical, that is unjust (I wonder what kind of poem that would be? A poem that’s careless and flippant about something I care about? A poem that asserts an attitude that feels dangerous? A poem that suggests I ought to kill my neighbor?), is, I hope, going to be poetry that is not good to me—poetry that I don’t care for. I like poems to offer me moments, brief or extended, of transformation—I like to be changed by a poem. I like to know the world, and be in the world, anew. I like to think that a poem that might move me this way would not be unjust or unethical.

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

I think I was reading Aracelis Girmay and Steve Scafidi at that moment—if I wrote this while I was living in a soggy basement in Pittsburgh, which I think I did. I was also reading Gerald Stern’s book Everything is Burning, I recall. Maybe his pace is in there, the “and and and.”

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

I don’t think I do. I have specific people who I’m in conversation with (in the poems), and some of those people are my close readers—they might be some of that. But as far as an ideal reader, I don’t exactly know what that would mean. I could imagine a really generous reader, or a really enthusiastic reader, or a reader who understands everything you’ve written as though she wrote it herself (which, in the sofa of one’s imagination, she did). But, no, I don’t think of that as ideal. I think of that as nice. I don’t know what ideal is. Though nice could be ideal just fine.

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, I have a few good friends who offer really valuable feedback on drafts when I ask them. That’s a joy.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’m not sure. I don’t think I’m the best one to ask.

What is American about this poem?

It’s violent, it’s fast, it’s the story of something awful. It also glitters, and there’s a bird in it and a cage. It’s also about children, who are not yet formed—in other words, it’s not quite over.

Was this poem finished or abandoned.

Finished.

Deborah Landau

Deborah Landau is the author of Orchidelirium and The Last Usable Hour (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Best American Erotic Poems. She lives in New York City, where she directs the Creative Writing Program at New York University.



ALL ELSE FAILS

*

I'd rather watch you doing it than do it myself.
I'd rather hear about it. I want to be told.
I'd rather read about it. I'd rather just sit here.
Hold the mask over my face
while you do it to me.
I'll put on some music.
Now see how we grow aglow
so young and beautiful
all our capillaries lit up.

*

Days, weeks, months,
why not use them for something?
I’m heading for a head on.
I’m revving up my so-called self.
I know my life is meaning
less. Strutting around
for awhile until poof.

*

Everything gets more and more absurd.
The office and deskchair, the skin on the neck
eye cream, love, the handholding and bungled
attempts, watching the clock all night—2 am, 4,
then daylight, sitting in my dress again
with cup and plate.
To work to work then back again
to bed, another night.

*

I read Pessoa and he confirms
my worst suspicions.

I read the entertaining novels
and they make me happy.

I sleep beside the river.
The river often sleeps when I’m awake.

Sky, water, I have not had enough of you.
Better be shoving off again and into the night.

*

More and more it’s deliciousness I want
but all the time there’s less it.
What the hell do you think you’re doing?
You should find something definite to subscribe to
so as not to keep drifting tossed aimless through the world like this.
At the party Stanley said for now factor in
gratitude, narrow the zone and see your life
which is what we call it as if it were a real thing.
I wear my street clothes. I accept the parameters.
Don’t shout drink some wine at night
work is what is offered and sometimes love.
Another time there was ecstasy
though many things went laughably wrong.

*

Those who don’t feel
are happy
says Pessoa.

Those who don’t think.

The night has advanced.
We figure in it so slightly.

Down the ice chute we go.

Say goodbye to your eyes in real time.
Get ready, get set. Say good bye

to your synovial fluid. Your knees
will wear out in no time

won’t hoist you nowhere.

*

In the middle of my wood, I found myself in a dark life.
The day was going toward the narrow place the blank.
No matter how many glasses of gin
it will get dark on this platform of earth.
When with your milk and fruit
when with your wine
when with your mirror and your little book
you sit tableside in the candelit clearing
when with your warm breath
are you sick
are you all done flirting
have you lost your appetites
no longer a girl but slinking around nonetheless.

*

He keeps me waiting
and I start hysteria just a little bit.
I start hysteria against everyone's advice.
I go into the street to drink air.
I've never been so thirsty in my life.
Another mouth, some fresh minted lips.
See, I can feel blue on half a bottle of jewels.
Sleep then wake then this then that day
and another night back on the bed
lying in an eros dumb and slackjawed.
The sound of hustling advances and retreats
as if someone were shuffling money
or unbuttoning a blouse.
Can you put that taffeta away now, please?
Please put it away.

*

As soon as he sits down I can tell I want to.
How long can I sit here not doing the thing
I want to do. All the youngish men all the etceteras
of desire etcetera.
There's a little hole in my boot.
Could you put your finger in it?
There is power in breathing.
There is power in a silent beat
before answering a question, in a leaning in.
Across the table his mind right there
behind his talking face.

*

We’re in a dirty place now
when we get together.
We made a nasty city
and have to live in it.
Before we were wider wilder avenues
but we made it too
cramped and ugly.
Nowhere to go to tea.
Only gin here,
and no god at any gate
and no goodness.

*

Now our bed is not ample not fair. Now
we don't have a bed
only this corner blackred and backlit.
Something of me is a blind point, something of him, too.
There's a little edge of pain here and we walk along it.
Don't cry, don't kiss me either, and also don't stop.
That's the way he looks when he wants to watch.
Why don't you go swoon yourself into some fantastic
mood music. I am a small cup with a twist
and you are liquid. A drink.
Another drink.

*

An emptiness of shoes, enough to overdose on,
some faded solitudes, fields,
wardrobes of dead people, wideleaved froth,
cool liquor, its quiet swirl in Andrew’s glass,
my desire to drink from it.
Remember the cleft of summer
how lithe it all looked, how august.
December is the season of which
the many facets and flats are made.
The flood of the dull with its million holes
interwoven with the honeysweet.
The return of the approaching year.
Now see what can be made into a narcotic goblet,
what can be made of dusk, its many openings.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

About a year ago (February 2010). Like most of my poems, this one began with agitation.

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

Many revisions. The first published version wasn't the final version. I've just finished revising it in time for The Last Usable Hour to go to the printer (so the time elapsed between first and final draft was about a year).

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 a combination of inspiration and hard work. The emotional state that initiated the poem (and the first frenzy of writing it) were "received." Then there were the many necessary revisions - the poem was worked and reworked over many days and months.

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

I love the long sequence form. It allows exploration of the same subject from many different angles and the final result is prismatic - larger than the sum of its parts.

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

I gave a reading last spring at which I read this poem for the first time (just a few months after writing it). Mark Bibbins was in the audience and solicited it for publication in The Awl after the reading.

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 rarely submit poems these days--but when I do, it's only after working them as far as I can. I'll send them out when they feel finished.

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

The emotions in the poem are all true; most of the narrative details are fiction.

Is this a narrative poem?

I would say it's a sequence of lyrics that form a kind of narrative.

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

Pessoa (as noted in the poem), Emily Dickinson, Anne Carson. I'm sure there were others, but it's been awhile.

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

It's always someone different, depending on the circumstances under which a poem is written.

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. I'm fortunate to have a number of trusted readers (most of them poets) who read early drafts of my poems. I've come to rely upon the supportive criticism of these readers.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It's more expansive and audacious in tone, and the lines are more clipped. The rest of the poems in The Last Usable Hour are wispier and more dreamlike, with very few capital letters and virtually no punctuation. This sequence is composed largely of short declarative sentences. It feels more prose-like to me, though it's perhaps too compressed and elliptical to count as prose.

What is American about this poem?

Hmmmm....it was written by an American? To me the sequence has a particularly New York feel, in its tone, setting, and attitude. But perhaps that's simply because it was written in New York.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I abandoned it when it felt finished.

Thomas Lux

Thomas Lux's most recent book is God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). He has two books forthcoming, a collection of poetry Child Made of Sand (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and From The Southland (Marick Press), a book of nonfiction. He is Bourne Professor of Poetry at The Georgia Institute of Technology.



A LITTLE TOOTH

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem over the summer of 1987 in the first few months of my daughter's life. I think it's safe to say it was her birth that started it!

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

Maybe ten to twelve revisions over about three to four months.

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 particularly believe in inspiration. I believe you need to feel something intensely enough to need to write a poem that might be telling you you need to try to write it.

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

I'm not sure at what point I decided to write the poem in pretty strict tetrameter nor when the rhyme scheme emerged.

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

Probably by the second or third draft. It was a long time ago: the baby is now twenty-three years old! And I'm happy to report she has fallen in love with cretins, dolts, etc. but never for too long.

Not sure how long or where it first hit print but the best place it appeared in print was on NYC subway cars, as part of a project called Poetry in Motion. Neither my publisher nor the sponsors of the project informed me about it so the first time I heard (no kidding) about it was when my daughter saw it in a NYC subway car and called me.

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 do like to let poems sit—between working on them and after I think they're finished, because they're usually not.

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

Facts are irrelevant. A poet’s job is to try to tell the truth. You can bend, change, invent facts all you want to try to do so.

Is this a narrative poem?

You could say it's a narrative poem: a guy is talking. You could say it's a lyric poem.

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

Can't recall who exactly I was reading then but it was history, nonfiction of all sorts, poetry. My influences are too many to name.

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

The ideal reader is any reader who gets a little pleasure or, depending on the poem, gets pissed off.

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 probably showed it to a few poets friends then: Michael Ryan, Mary Karr, Stephen Dobyns. I remember reading it to my daughter when she was about three months old: she was unimpressed!

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I think this poem is pretty much in the ballpark of a lot of my poems.

What is American about this poem?

What's American about it is that's it's in American English.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This one was finished.

Wesley McNair

Wesley McNair’s latest book is Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems. He has held grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, two Rockefeller Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship in literature, and two NEA fellowships. In 2006 he was selected for a United States Artists Fellowship of $50,000 as one of "America’s finest living artists." Other honors include the Devins Award for Poetry, the Jane Kenyon Award, the Robert Frost Award, the Theodore Roethke Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry magazine, an Emmy Award, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal. A guest editor in poetry for the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology, his work has appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition and The Writer’s Almanac, with Garrison Keillor; two editions of The Best American Poetry; and over fifty anthologies. He has authored or edited eighteen books, including poetry, nonfiction, and anthologies.


HER SECRET

Why he must cover every counter top, table
and chair with his things, she no longer asks,
knowing he will only answer as if speaking
to someone in his head who’s keeping track
of all the ways she misunderstands him

and wants to hear over and over that he’s sick
and tired, though that’s just what he is,
and how can she resent him for that? – so sick
he has pills for his bad circulation, bad heart,
and nerve disorder scattered around

the kitchen sink, so tired after staying up
all night at his computer feeding medication
to the stinging in his legs, he crashes
for one whole day into the next. "Thurman?"
she asks, coming home from work to find him

lying on their bed in his underpants, still
as the dead, his radio on to tape the talk shows
he’s missing, and then the old thought
that he really is dead comes into her mind
all over again, so strong this time she can’t

get rid of it, even after she sees him with her
own eyes just above the partition in the kitchen
making coffee in the way he’s invented,
boiling grounds, then putting in more grounds
and a raw egg, his bald head going back

and forth under the fluorescent light like
the image of his continuous obsession,
which she can’t escape and can never enter,
though now it’s her own obsession
that troubles her. Stupid is her word for it,

the same word he always uses for the crazy
things she gets into her head, and it was
stupid, still thinking Thurman was dead
though he was right there in front of her,
and then, when she tries to make herself

stop, her heart starts pounding until
she can hardly breathe. "It is nothing more
than simple anger," the pastor tells her
after the Sunday service she attends
with the other women who live nearby,

and he recalls with disappointment
the anger he discovered in her heart
during their talk a year ago. How,
she wonders, could she have forgotten
that after she wiped away her tears

in that conversation about Thurman
leaving things he wouldn’t let her touch
on every surface of the house, even
the couch and chairs, the pastor made her see
the malice she had carried so deep inside

not even she understood that all this time
she had been gradually filling the spare room
and the closed-in porch with her own
discards, broken figurines, old mops
and mop pails and Christmas decorations,

out of a secret revenge, and now,
the pastor shook his head, this thought
about her husband, whom she had pledged
to honor, lying in his underpants, dead,
the day before her fortieth anniversary.

When she returned home at last and opened
the door to find the two pairs of sneakers
next to the recliner with the ankle brace in it,
and old videos on top of the half-read
magazines and newspapers by the TV,

and the bathrobe and shirts and pants folded
over the backs of chairs, she did not feel,
as she sometimes did, that she might suffocate,
but instead, a relief that Thurman hadn’t
risen yet. He wouldn’t mind that she used one

of his sticky notes when he read the words
she wrote on it, I still love you, meaning
how sorry she was for blaming him behind
his back to the pastor, and for the secret
anger she had kept so long in her heart, yet

because, unlike most things in that house,
it was hers alone, she continued to ponder
the anger and keep it, even after Thurman took
the note from the screen of his computer
with a smile, and got his camera out

to take the anniversary photo he always took
for his emails of her holding plastic flowers,
mocking her because she never could
pose right, then sitting down among the wires
and the stacks of cd’s and computer paper

to Photoshop it, going over and over her teeth
and eyes to whiten them and taking all
the wrinkles out of her face until she looked
like an old baby. "Oh, I like what you did
to it, Thurman," she said when he brought

the picture to her, sitting on her rocker in the only
clean corner of the house, and she almost meant it,
she had become so calm in her pondering, calmer
than she could ever remember as she looked
out the window and through the other window

of the closed-in porch, where a flock
of the migrating birds she loved lingered
for a time under the roof of her feeder,
and in an unaccountable moment, lifted
their wings all together and flew away.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in 2009, after pondering a couple of old marriages I knew in which couples had somehow settled for the relationships they had, despite the limitations of those relationships and the conflicts that festered. In one case, the wife seemed to have reached a point of desperation about life with her husband. She became the protagonist of my poem.

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

My poems always require dozens of sessions, and this one was no different. I began, as I always do, with pages of free-listing -- images, thoughts and feelings, phrases, whatever comes to mind about the poem I’m trying to write. Then I go back to the fragments and see where the hot spots are, and they often become the source of my poem. The trick then is how to start it. My notebook for this poem shows I tried different ways, and looking back, I see that I wanted to give my reader the sense of entering the wife's process of thought, which is disorganized and a bit frantic. Though she doesn't know it, she's in an emotional crisis, overwhelmed by all the stuff that her husband, a hoarder, has filled their house with, leaving no place for her, literally or figuratively. She’s being smothered both by the layers of clutter and by his narcissism and need for control.

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

My poems always begin with a feeling I want to explore. They don't begin from "out there," which is what I think of when I hear your words inspiration and received, but from inside myself, as I follow the implications of that feeling in my own emotional experience. My allies in this exploration are wonder and curiosity, the why and the how of my story. In this case, for instance, I asked myself why the wife might be having such a crisis having stayed in her marriage for forty years, and exactly how she might deal with the crisis. There were tears, yes, tears for this woman. What drove me was my compassion for her, the need I felt to give her a voice.

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

I wanted long sentences that jumped across stanza divisions as if disregarding the form of the poem itself – a wildness that suggested the wife’s state of mind as well as her process of thought. The poem has twenty stanzas but only six sentences, each with a range of twists and turns. Another thing the long sentences do is to gather up the detail of the poem as it goes, throwing meaning ahead of themselves, to paraphrase Frost, so you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop, even when the sentences end. This preserves the immediacy of the poem despite its length, or so I hope, as if it were spoken or thought in one intensified moment.

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

Not every editor likes long narrative poems like this one, which devote their space to how people in the third person feel and think and behave. Editors today respond better to poems that are shorter and autobiographical – or not explicitly narrative. But I was in a hurry because I wanted to put "Her Secret" in Lovers of the Lost, my new and selected, which was then scheduled with Godine, and I wanted to publish the poem first in a magazine. So I sent it to Robert Nazarene at Margie, knowing he liked narrative work, and sure enough, he accepted it. The whole process, from completing the poem to publishing it in Margie, took about a year.

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

The original version of the wife, so to speak, lived with a hoarder who was also a bullying narcissist and was troubled by these things. She also attended a church led by what I imagined was a patriarchal minister with a male-centered view of the bible and its teachings – a man not so different in his assumptions from her husband. What I invented were the details of her observation and the rising action of her desperation. I took from life the outlines of her situation and the sense that my story could actually happen. As always, the connection between life and art were vitally important to me.

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

I’m not really the sort of poet who gets ideas for a poem directly from reading. Writers are often asked who their influences are among other writers, but I think they’re influenced most of all by their own work. If you’re reasonably ambitious with your poems, choosing subjects that make you stretch and grow, you’re teaching yourself how to be a poet every time you set out. The reading of other poets is not irrelevant to your development, but it’s more at the edges of it. I became interested in how long sentences and unfolding syntax could serve a poem way back in my second book, The Town of No, and the work of that book led to the even longer sentences of my extended narrative, "My Brother Running." I suppose my interest in syntax came initially from Dickinson and Frost, who made a strategic use of the delayed verb. But the syntax of W.C. Williams and other modernists is also interesting. If there’s a weakness in contemporary poetry, I think it’s dull and predictable syntax.
Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

One reader I don’t write for is the literary specialist. I write for a general audience, I guess you could say, including those who don’t think they like poetry. Never mind that these readers may never look at my poems or go to my readings. My feeling is that if I don’t write to them and for them, choosing to speak only to literary types who are clued in, my vision as a poet will shrink. My readers, I tell myself, may not know who T. S. Eliot is or even the poetry of John Keats. But they have done their homework by living a life. My task is to speak to that life.

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 show a poem first to my wife Diane. One reason I married her is that she likes poetry and understands it. I knew even then how rare it was to find this quality in a mate, and I must also have known, even though I hadn’t published a thing yet, that I’d need her one day as a reader. She goes with her gut – either likes a poem or doesn’t. If I can get the poem by her, I know it has possibilities, even if it isn’t ready yet. Don Hall has been enormously helpful to me in the details of my poems. He reads line by line, literally and by a poem’s language, and he is seldom wrong. I’ve used other poet friends as readers, too, reserving the final judgment for myself. Lately after I’ve shown a poem around, I’ve been putting it away for a couple of months or more, then getting it out for final revisions – which in the end may prove not to be final after all. For me, revision is nearly endless. If you’re a poet, you’re driven by the need to create something perfect in an imperfect world. Lord knows, we seldom do that, but I want to give my poem a decent chance.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’ve written lots of poems about older and elderly people, but I’ve never given this glimpse of a home and the old, habituated marriage that takes place inside it. I’d guess there are many thousands of relationships like this in rural locations or cities, though they are largely invisible. The coercion and abuse the wife of my poem suffers over years in her own home are not dramatic. They’ve happened by a slow accrual until she’s reached the breaking point. Yet because she’s come this far into her marriage and her husband’s view of who she is, she doesn’t know what to do about her situation. This outcome wouldn’t make a very successful TV episode, but I’ll bet it’s closer to the truth of actual experience.

What is American about this poem?

There is the America of Britney Spears and CNN and the so-called mainstream culture, and there’s the America of those who live around us in what we call the margins of our society, though there are far more of them than the term implies. These are people whose lives don’t conform to the American before-and-after story of personal transformation. Yet they are much more American than we think. Whitman once advised us to "stand up for the stupid and the crazy," but to this day, the underprivileged or unacculturated haven’t found their way into our poetry. Forgive the sermon, but I think that when they do, and when we find ways to speak to them in our work, we will have the kind of poetry Whitman wanted.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. I think.

Jehanne Dubrow

Jehanne Dubrow was born in Italy and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She is the author of Stateside (Northwestern UP, 2010), From the Fever-World (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2009), and The Hardship Post (three candles press, 2009). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The New England Review, and Poetry. She lives in Chestertown, Maryland and teaches at Washington College.


EASTERN SHORE

Talking about distance is a way to close
the space. Consider the bridge that curves above
the Chesapeake, which when we mention it,
becomes a child’s toy. Or that the Beltway
is not a contest of families wrapped in steel,
speeding toward collision, demanding it,
but just a road that circles on itself.
Remember when we touched at twenty-two,
so willingly aligned in one twin bed,
your spine pressed up against the wall and mine
about to break over the edge? These days,
we’re greedy in our king, spread wide although
we barely scrape together in our sleep.
We’re isolates with only water in between.
Closeness, you used to say, closing your arms
around me like a measurement of rope.
We fell asleep to Billie Holiday,
a long, sad looping of her voice that warned
not everyone is lucky in this world.
And I remember when you dressed for work,
how I hated watching as you tied each shoe,
the tight finality of laces cinched
in bows. It’s been a while since I said
the buttons on your shirt reminded me
of afternoons and evenings spent in bed,
hours now indistinct as the facing shore,
our backs like metal arches, our words moving
from mouth to caverned mouth and mouth again,
the river of our bodies murmuring.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I first started drafting this poem halfway through the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, in the summer of 2008. I had met with one of the faculty members, Daniel Anderson, who suggested that I give the poems in Stateside a little “breathing room” by writing about distance and loneliness without addressing military life directly. Up until that point, the manuscript in-progress focused explicitly on the experience of being a “milspouse,” a military wife. “Eastern Shore” became the first of several poems that broadened the project’s scope.

It was midnight. I sat on the carpeted floor of my dorm room and tapped on my laptop. It seemed like madness to be writing a new poem, when there were people in the hall laughing and drinking something southern out of plastic cups.

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

I revise as I’m drafting. By the time I reach the end of a poem, most of the lines have undergone about thirty to fifty revisions. This one came together quickly, and I completed a draft in one sitting: maybe three or four hours later. By the time I left Sewanee, I had the basic shape of the poem down on paper. I spent the next two months adding a comma on Tuesday and removing it on Wednesday.

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 believe the Muse descends and pours poems into our heads. But I do believe that, when I write every day, I increase my odds of drafting something easily and effortlessly. It’s that feeling of effortlessness—when the poems seem to arrive inside us—which we call “inspiration.” I think it’s actually muscle memory; with daily practice, our minds warm up more rapidly, and the drafts feel as if they happen almost by instinct. Or magic.

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

The poem is the ghost of blank verse, with a few stricter lines thrown in for spice. I’m a big fan of uninterrupted pentameter spilling down the page: no stanza breaks, no fancy indentations. There’s something so clean and naked about that shape.

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

The Birmingham Poetry Review accepted the poem in November 2008 and published the piece early the next year. The poem was drafted quickly, submitted quickly, and accepted quickly. Nice when that happens.

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 do look fully formed early on, and I just feel their wholeness, even if they’re also quite green. Those I send out within a few weeks (damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead). Other poems, the ones that take a lot of chipping and polishing and Super Glue, will usually sit in my computer for six to twelve months.

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

True things: that some people are afraid of the Bay Bridge, that the Beltway around DC is scary too, that my husband and I used to fit into one very small bed when we were college sweethearts, and that I went through a Billie Holiday phase.

Fiction: the giving up. “Eastern Shore” is an elegy, a what-if. What if this happened to my marriage? In the poem, the marriage has become an erotic figure itself. The lovers see the sad gap between their current feelings and what they once felt; that space is Eros.

Is this a narrative poem?

I had a teacher who often said poems should have “both roots and wings.” So, “Eastern Shore” is rooted in the story of two people who have become distant, almost without realizing it. And I hope the images of water, circles, and bodies make the poem a little bit winged as well.

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

The secret of this poem is that it’s built on the scaffolding of “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Some of my favorite poems by Robert Hass are those ones in which big chunks of language spill down the page, conversational but also musical (“Between the Wars” comes to mind, also “The World as Will and Representation”). I typed out “Meditation at Lagunitas,” then began drafting my own poem on top of the original text. I often use this technique when I want to understand another poem’s rhetorical structure. The most obvious theft in my poem is “Closeness, you used to say, closing your arms / around me like a measurement of rope.” It’s an echo of that lovely joke in “Meditation”: “Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.” Of course, I hope that “Eastern Shore” is its own poem.

At the time, I was also reading and rereading Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife, which felt like an important model for Stateside, as did Glück’s Wild Iris.

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

Audience changes, depending on the project. With Stateside, I wrote the poems to and for my husband. We discussed every poem in the manuscript, sometimes even mid-draft. I wanted to make sure that the language I used, the images, the tropes, accurately reflected what it means to be “married to the military.” My second, intended audience was other military spouses. As soldier-poets have long demonstrated, poetry gives weight to an experience, making it seem worthier of intellectual examination. Military spouses deserve to be heard too. Their world merits art.

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?

Again, my husband is often a first reader. I also have a “poet’s lunch” with a friend here in Chestertown. The rules are simple: a little literary gossip, some good food, and a new draft of a poem every week. And, I have several friends who live in other parts of the country; I’ll often email them when I’m in a panic about my work.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

At the time, this felt like a departure from my usual voice; the ending was more open, the images more loosely woven together. I love working within the rigid boundaries of fixed and received forms. “Eastern Shore” taught me that a poem can reveal its ending, if I don’t push too hard. Not every poem needs to click shut with a rhymed couplet. I’m working on a book of prose poetry now. Perhaps, that wouldn’t have happened without “Eastern Shore.”

What is American about this poem?

All that open space and distance. We have such room for our loneliness in America.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. I hope (lot of hoping in these answers of mine).