W. Perry Epes

W. Perry Epes was born in Alexandria, Virginia, and graduated from the Episcopal High School. He received degrees in English from the universities of Virginia and Chicago and an MFA in Poetry from George Mason University. He has taught in boarding schools for many years and coordinates the Jacklyn Potter Young Poets Competition for The Word Works. His poems have appeared in Phoebe, Negative Capability, GW Forum, and Innisfree. His first book of poems, Nothing Happened, was published in 2010 by The Word Works, Washington, DC, in the Hilary Tham Capital Collection.


AMERICANS HIT THE BEACHES

(in loco parentis, on the Greek isle of Hydra)

This was the day I finally told the Stanley twins apart.
We filed off the cruise boat, fanned out through town,
fending off vendors and guide books, aiming straight as possible
for beaches beyond the basin of the harbor.
Two days of old rock piles in Athens and Mycenae,
and now it’s all isles and sun; no more need for awe
at spears and shields and helmets
hammered out upon a time, or buckled on
with no thought that we would travel in coaches
to jog through the museums in shorts and Nikes.
Time now for stripping down to bathing suits,
being ourselves and looking each other over,
filling the lungs with open air, and shouting them empty—
our own music at outdoor dancing on the sand.
No such beach—where a sign in pidgin
said “This is the place swimming,” only a moderate cliff
and piles of surf-lashed rocks. A dip in the sea
meant backing gingerly down one ladder
till one of the Stanleys climbed the cliff unnoticed, and jumped.
We gasped at the plunge and splash, held breaths till the head bobbed,
and cheered. The other Stanley matches the feat exactly,
then all the boys, and even one of the girls. Stakes mounting—
Stanleys add twists and gainers, others jump in tandem.
A crowd of tourists gathers, the real draw being
the chance to see a body brained on the rocks.
I ask one Stanley to cool it. He asks for just one more.
I leap on this concession. “All right, but nothing fancy.
Just jump, and wrap it up.” But why one more?
As they climb again, I chew me out, rehearsing
the orders I should have given. Their every step
is a station of the cross I have to bear.
You could say they never were meant to live—
conception “complete surprise”; three pounds each at birth;
incubated brawn, motherlove hovering for years.
And I, in loco, know nothing of hatching youth
but cracking shells on rocks, like gulls with oysters.

They’re up, radiant in height. What’s left but prayer?
the last resort of Dads. They jump,
arms locked and all for one, with nothing fancy—
John on the left, and Wade on the right. My burden
melts to a thick joy you could cut with a knife
for sharing round. Even before the double splash
I believe in their last jump: one more just for me
so I can learn to bears these pangs
for the length of each plunge in the wine-dark sea.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

“Americans Hit the Beaches” was composed in the summer of 1981, about two weeks after the incident which it depicts. My wife and I were helping chaperone a student trip to Europe. After working our way across Greece and Italy from mid-June, we arrived in southern France by early July and were faced next with a fourteen-hour drive one day to the Loire Valley in three vans on the autoroute. My wife drove one of the vans and was terrified of having such immediate responsibility for the lives of seven of the students; I followed her in another van and used my turn signals to make space for her in the passing lanes, keeping an eye out in my rear view mirror for those charging overtakers at 160 kph in Citroens and Mercedes who loom up before you know it and flash by like an impatient wind. During one of those passings I flashed back to my own in loco parentis anxiety over the boys’ cliff jumping on the Greek isle of Hydra, and the first line about telling the Stanley twins apart came to me unbidden.

I worked on the poem the next couple of nights, and then finished it on the road to Chartres (a bit like Wordsworth composing “Tintern Abbey” while he walked back to Bristol). That night, in the shadow of the cathedral, I showed the first draft to my wife, who sobbed with gratitude—my naming the fear imposed by our responsibilities served to brace her for the next day’s ordeal in Paris traffic (she later wrote a powerful prose memoir of the trip called “Fear Itself”).

Just last fall, I read the poem aloud to my eleventh-grade class after one of the students had asked about the photograph in my classroom of a Stanley twin doing a gainer from the cliff (I was fortunate to get permission to use the picture for the cover of my book, Nothing Happened). It turned out that not just one, but two of the girls in the class have aunts who were students on that very same trip!

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

Not many. Other poems of mine have required infinite revision, but this one moved from first to final draft in three days of intense work around sightseeing and driving. In the years since, I have made a few minor revisions—tightening of phrase, clarification of metaphor.

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 succeeded by perspiration, just as Julian of Norwich spent thirty years interpreting her visions. My first line arrived like a vision, but then the rest of the lines needed to be hammered out to embody it. The composition process involved saying the lines over and over as I was driving or walking to and from great tourist sites. While repeating my internal recitation I would back and fill until the cadence sounded right, and then write it all down at night. That required some sweat but not too many tears or agonies of the blank page (which I’ve certainly experienced with other poems). I think again of Wordsworth, walking it out after re-experiencing the landscape around Tintern Abbey. By the end, the lines were virtually fixed in memory.

Finishing the poem was a great relief after sustained effort, not so much in triumph as in gratitude for a great gift of inspiration to which I had responded with due diligence instead of ignoring it as we so often do in the aftermath of intense experiences, or letting it lie around in our imaginations while we procrastinate over our good intentions of writing it all down to preserve it.

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

Once I had received the first line—“This was the day I finally told the Stanley twins apart”— I scanned its metrics as loosely iambic after an initial trochaic foot. I then tried to maintain the conversational movement, similar to that of blank verse but with one or two extra feet per line. At times it felt almost like the old “fourteeners” in which broadside ballads used to be printed—compressing the four-line stanzas of 4-beat/3-beat, 4-beat/3-beat lines into long couplets with 7-beat lines that sprawled almost to the margin—though only a few of my lines are as long as fourteen syllables (after the first one). As the speaker’s relation of the events rolls on, lines that are end-stopped tend to feel like a teacher’s or dad’s pronouncements, but the extra length of the lines seems to add a little reflection, as if we had to venture, from this experience, beyond mere certainty into radical questioning of our custodial skills.

But the greatest opportunity for energy and discovery comes with enjambement, when the sense spilling over the line end creates a propulsive movement in tension with a slight pause of suspense. Wordsworth is absolutely brilliant at this sort of thing; in “There Was a Boy,” after the owls have momentarily ceased their “jocund din” in response to his “mimic hootings,” the Boy of Winander feels a gentle shock of mild surprise “in that silence, while he hung/ Listening,” and the voice of mountain torrents and all the solemn imagery of nature would enter unawares into his mind and heart. There is nothing so remarkable in “Americans Hit the Beaches,” but the most frequently quoted lines do balance on suspended moments of possible double meaning created by enjambement: “My burden/ melts to a thick joy you could cut with a knife/ for sharing ‘round.”

This interplay of suspense and relief that nothing bad actually happened undergirds one of the implied themes of my book. So often, when kids are asked what happened, they’ll shrug and say, “Oh, nothing.” It’s as if they are under an imperative not to look back on those formative experiences that might well have killed them, but forward to the next adventure. As we live on, we go on blithely through more such experiences and then, when we come to shepherd others, we discover with a shock of surprise that becoming a “grown-up” seems mostly to be a lucky survival of this gauntlet, gaining strength (we hope) from what hasn’t succeeded yet in breaking us. Sooner or later something will happen to break us, and then we will look back and see how much already has happened in those moments of suspension.

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

About three months after I finished writing the poem, it appeared in the school newspaper at Woodberry Forest, on a full page like a broadside or poster with the text embedded in an extraordinary photograph by Steven White, another student on the trip, of Wade Stanley leaping from the cliff, in the mid-flip of a gainer, his outstretched fingers touching the sun. The picture provided an allusion to Icarus without the poem’s having to say a word, which might have sounded too admonitory. Steven very kindly gave me an enlarged color copy, which I have hung in my classroom ever since, and even more kindly granted me permission to use the picture on the cover of Nothing Happened.

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 with every poem; with some it has been longer than the proverbial nine years. Some I have tinkered with after they were published, so in general letting a poem “sit” for awhile is the better policy for me.

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

This is a fascinating question which really gets to the heart of what I’m trying to do in poetry. Virtually all of my poems draw from experienced fact, and they strike some readers as surprisingly, indeed vulnerably autobiographical. And yet what fiction makes of the facts is what the poems are really about. None of the students were particularly aware at the time of my indecision and self-critique as a chaperone. At dinner that night in Athens, Wade told me that his hand brushed the cliff face as he was coming down out of his last gainer. But his telling me that nothing happened was not just bravado; it was said in a tone of bemusement, a kind of awed realization of how fortunate all the students had been. And that was the better part of a wisdom he would carry into his next adventures. When I gave copies of the poem to him and his brother (and to his parents), the boys could learn something about caring for themselves with due regard for the way others cared about them. That was not something we ever had or even could have had a direct conversation about. Such are the lessons that fiction and poetry can teach—always telling them slant, of course.

Is this a narrative poem?

Another essential question. This poem is not exactly a completed narrative, but more a “spot of time” in the sense of Wordsworth’s term for those moments of experience (mostly in nature, but also in the midst of social interaction) when the movement of the universe is suspended, like the “stationary blast of waterfalls” in Simplon Pass, and we see into the heart of things. I have written a few truly narrative poems which seek to resolve a conflict between different characters’ points of view, but this one is more lyrical in the sense of raising and ultimately cherishing the questions that a single point of view may be left with.

Perhaps lyrical essentially means bemused. Of course great narrative can and must be richly ambiguous; I’m not suggesting a didactic view of narrative, simply conclusive or even complacent in its lessons, as a straw man to shed light on poetry by contrast. But a lyric poem is something like a soliloquy in the midst of the action, a still point in the turning world.

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

Certainly Wordsworth—I’d been teaching him regularly for ten years. But my manner of writing at that time was also part of a larger movement away from tight formal concerns (the result of an early infatuation with Yeats) toward a more direct response to immediate experience, with looser, unrhymed lines and a more realistic, even frank conversational tone. It was almost like moving from something liturgical to something more secular, though I retained a sort of liturgical concern for rhythm.

During this time Galway Kinnell’s Fergus poems hit me hard, and I really admired William Matthews’ nuanced accessibility. Baron Wormser’s blunt, precise eloquence conveyed a clear assurance I aspired toward, Sharon Olds’ honesty was breathtaking—oh, and Seamus Heaney, and a hundred others. And Henry Taylor’s reminders of form beautifully wrought with frankness.

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

I’ll answer this one in an oblique way. My mind is habitually allusive, and one friend joked that a reader has to know as much as I do in order to understand one of my poems. It would be a genuine bind if the audience I aimed for could only be just like me! I was attempting to escape this difficulty with the more accessible style of “Americans Hit the Beaches.”

So I’ve concluded that my ideal reader is someone a lot smarter than I am, someone able to use allusive detail, not getting bogged down in it but seeing through and beyond it. In this matter, Peter Klappert, my mentor at George Mason University, taught me a lot about what to leave out.

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 poem was mostly finished even before being written down, so it was close to a final draft that I first showed to my wife. And it has escaped major restructuring in subsequent workshop sessions.

But usually I will show earlier drafts and make substantive revisions in response to trusted readers’ suggestions. For many years I have benefited from the support and inspiration of fellow George Mason MFA alumni Naomi Thiers, Jane Schapiro, Jonathan Vaile, Romola D, and Elisabeth Murawski. More recently, local poets Judith Freeman and Katherine Smith of the Potomac Review have joined our writing group.

Also my editors at Word Works—Karren Alenier, Miles David Moore, and Nancy White—gave the manuscript of Nothing Happened the sort of close, informed, supportive scrutiny I had received from Peter Klappert and Susan Tichy at George Mason.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This poem is perhaps my most direct response to and rendering of experience. It rings true immediately, I think, as well as upon further reflection, and that is why it is a favorite with my readers.

What is American about this poem?

This poem captures a boisterous aspect of American innocence and its impact, both positive and negative, on the outside world. The energy and optimism are appealing, yet violence—the threat of seeing a body brained on the rocks, and the morbid draw of that danger—is never quite out of sight. It is as if we Americans, acting as though we were eternally young, are constantly having to learn about consequence.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Though this poem arrived in a more finished state than most of mine, it was abandoned in the sense that I did not seek to answer all the questions raised. The poem knew better than to try.

Dana Gioia

Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed poet and critic. He is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, and three collections of criticism, most notably Can Poetry Matter? (1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. A best-selling literary anthologist, Gioia has edited or co-edited over two dozen collections of poetry, fiction, and drama. He has also written two opera libretti and has collaborated with composers in genres ranging from classical to jazz and rock. For six years (2003-2009) he served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts where he gained strong bipartisan support for the previously imperiled agency and helped launch the largest literary programs in federal history, including The Big Read, Poetry Out Loud, and Shakespeare in American Communities. He was twice unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate. For two years he directed the arts and culture programs for the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C. and Colorado. He is currently the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California. A new collection of poetry, Pity the Beautiful, is forthcoming this Spring from Graywolf Press.


THE ANGEL WITH THE BROKEN WING

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,
The one large statue in this quiet room.
The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut
Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.

The docents praise my elegant design
Above the chatter of the gallery.
Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—
The perfect emblem of futility.

Mendoza carved me for a country church.
(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)
I stood beside a gilded altar where
The hopeless offered God their misery.

I heard their women whispering at my feet—
Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.
Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,
And I became the hunger that they fed.

I broke my left wing in the Revolution
(Even a saint can savor irony)
When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.
They hit me once—almost apologetically.

For even the godless feel something in a church,
A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?
A trembling unaccounted by their laws,
An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.

There are so many things I must tell God!
The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high.
But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,
A crippled saint against a painted sky.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem started, like most of my poems, with a first line and some sense of the character speaking. It came to me in an airport. I jotted down the opening line with a few notes. A busy airport was not a place where I could do much more than that.

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

I don't have the drafts here in Washington, but I'd guess it went through about fifty or sixty drafts--not necessarily drafts of the whole poem but of various lines and stanzas. Probably a year passed between jotting down the first line and actually having the time to work on the poem seriously.

I finished the poem in one extended period of work, which is unusual for me. (My daily life tends to be full of obligations and interruptions, and at this point I was Chairman of the NEA working six days a week.) I started drafting the poem on Waldron Island and finished it after two weeks of work. I had sequestered myself alone on this beautiful but remote place, which had neither electricity nor phone service, to escape my public life. I needed real silence and solitude to write in a life that was otherwise quite destructive for a poet.

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

Of course, I believe in inspiration. That's what makes poetry so difficult. You can't will a good poem into existence. The basic idea either comes or not. But then a different sort of work begins in trying to realize the idea in words. Inspiration is powerful, but it is also vague and elusive. A great inspiration can turn into a lousy poem. Mediocre poets have inspiration, too, but they lack the skill and fortitude to embody it compellingly in language. It is interesting to see Yeats' first drafts. They mostly aren't very impressive. But the final versions are, of course, amazing. Part of his genius was in shaping the initial impulse into something unforgettable.

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

I wanted the poem to sing, so I knew almost at once it would rhyme. Everything else came later as I started working on it. Yes, I "consciously employed principles of technique." If you use a major form like rhymed pentameter quatrains, you'd better know what you're doing. But I didn't impose the form on the poem. I listened to the poem as it emerged and gave it the form it wanted. That's what critics don't understand about form. It has to be inherent in the material. The poet only does what the poem itself suggests.

Was there anything unusual about the way in which you wrote this poem?

Actually, there was. Much of the poem was composed aloud without being written down. On Waldron I could walk for miles without meeting anyone. I would work on lines and stanzas by reciting them to myself. I might go through two or three dozen different versions of a line or stanza before I jotted anything down. As I did this over a period of days, the poem gradually emerged in its present shape. Then I began reworking the draft on paper. That is one reason why the poem's sound has such physicality. I could feel in my tongue and mouth when I finally had a line exactly right.

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

Five years. When I wrote it, I was Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and I decided it was inappropriate for me to publish. I didn't want to complicate the agency's already problematic position, so I put aside my personal career for the duration of my public service.

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

I have no set rules, but it's always wise to let a poem sit. I usually let them sit for a couple of years. Sometimes I will make small changes in the interim. If a poem is any good, it can wait to be published.

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

I almost never write strictly autobiographical poems. I usually create a fictional voice or character to speak the poem, even if this is not obvious to the casual reader. My poems are personal but not autobiographical, and that gives me a certain imaginative freedom and objectivity I would lack if I were writing confessional verse. It's hard to be entirely truthful about yourself. It's easier to be truthful in fiction. And poems should be truthful.

Is this a narrative poem?

It is a lyric poem with a loosely narrative structure. It is a lyric poem because it mostly explores a single escalating mood. But even in a lyric poem, there needs to be some narrative arrangement of the material. The order of the images is almost as important as the images themselves.

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

I had probably just read the newspaper. After all, I was waiting in an airport lounge. So there was no literary source for the poem. But I had just been in Santa Fe where I had attended Spanish Market where the santeros ("saint-makers," as these traditional Southwestern woodcarvers and artists are called) were selling their wooden statues of religious figures. I had been haunted by these statues since I first saw them in New Mexico, and I had just bought one, a statue of the archangel Raphael by a young santero named Jacob Martinez.

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

Yes, the alert, the curious, and the creative. Most of these folks no longer read poetry, but that doesn't matter. The poems will be there if they need them. And oddly enough, over the years, they often find them.

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

Since I wrote "Angel" when I was on Waldron Island, which is really very isolated, no one saw it until it was done. I could have shown it to the composer Morten Lauridsen, whom I saw each evening, but I didn't know him well at that point, so I felt a bit shy about reading a poem in progress to him. And he and I were usually busy talking about other things. Generally, I don't show a poem to anyone until it seems pretty much done. Then I can benefit from their comments without losing the poem's individuality.

Curiously, when the proofs arrived from Poetry, I worried about one word. In line fifteen should "shadow" be singular or plural? I happened to be at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and Tobias Wolff sat down at the picnic table where I was working. I read the poem to him, and we decided it should stay singular. A silly story to tell, but I share it to say that in a poem every word matters.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It took me into a subject--both in general and specific terms--that I had never explored before. It also achieved a certain tough, formal music that was a little different from any previous poem I'd written. Most interesting for me was that it went into my own Mexican roots. My mother was Mexican-American, and I was raised in a Mexican neighborhood. I had mostly written about that indirectly in the past. This allowed me to explore that part of my background more overtly as well as the deeply Latin Catholic milieu in which I had been raised.

What is American about this poem?

The subject, the author, and the treatment are all American. Perhaps what makes it most American is that the statue itself is a Mexican immigrant of sorts--an artifact brought from his native village to be displayed in an American museum. It is also a religious poem. That's very American, at least in a contrarian sort of way. No one in England or Europe writes religious poetry nowadays.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

When I had finished the poem, I thought that it still needed another stanza, though I wasn't sure what it would say. But once I read the poem to a friend, I realized that it ended exactly where it should. It had finished itself without telling me. I had been so preoccupied with the details that I didn't notice until I heard it with someone else in the room.

Melissa Stein

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collection Rough Honey, winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Best New Poets 2009, New England Review, North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and her work has won several awards. She is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.


WHITEWATER

kayak flipped us and the current
dragged us through its rocks, arms sealed
at our sides, it was a blast, meeting it all cranium-first,
like academics, frothfoamgrit and the taste,
what was it, asphyxiation, psychedelic Escher
in blackwhite cubes, tableau enormous, picnic
tablecloth but undulating, spiked into color—crimson, canary—
until that last blow, ledge flat against
my mouth-hole, my whole body
condensed to one blinding exclamation point,
white protrusion of bone—white petals and light,
pearl-solid, luminous, all fourth-of-July and scattered,
pipe bombs bottle rockets Christmas crackers, oh,
what a party, annihilation, till the blue blue blue
palm sweeping my forehead, the hair from my forehead
and the ache of return, to the tenderness
of paint sable-brushed against silk, powdered
throat of the foxglove, flushed curve spiraling
into a conch, velvet crowning the doe’s nose,
arms embracing the cello’s hips, shoulders,
and what shudders from them, coaxed
or forced, distracted out of, with that bloodwhite flap
blinking at me from your cheek
and something in the eyes, maybe trout or bass or salmon
thrashing upstream, yellowglimmer and sickened,
we’re not going to make it, we’ll make it, we’re stranded,
washed up on this hurricane shore, held together
by blood sticks and mud, oh paper, oh desks, oh treatises,
we weren’t immune, on those banks, sky flat as anything,
a willowlike spider tree bending over us,
I focused on its branches, on the branches
of the branches, how comical that word twig,
surrounded by thousands of jokes as blood darkened
the silt like a cave painting


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Though I can’t say this for all of my poems, I know exactly when and how: it began on 9/11/2004 in the first days of a residency at Ragdale in Lake Forest, Illinois. At residencies I usually set myself the task of writing something every day as soon as I wake up—often a freewrite and a poem of some sort, which might be based on an exercise. Sometimes a “real” poem comes of this, sometimes not.

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

“Whitewater” was couched in a freewrite of single-spaced prose. Along the way, I found myself inserting slash marks that indicated line breaks. I did this for only a few lines so I wouldn’t lose momentum, but it told me something. Later I chopped off the opening and closing parts of the freewrite, and there was the poem. I thought of leaving it as a prose poem, but also experimented with line breaks. I have a file marked 11/14/2004 in which the poem is broken into lines and is close to final form. It also had its title by then. I tinkered with it for a while longer then started submitting it to journals the following April.

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

I would say that this particular poem was mostly received. Besides adding the line breaks, which I did fairly intuitively, I changed surprisingly little from the initial draft—it was one of those rare poems that is just sort of given to you. I cut and changed and added a few words here and there, but didn’t move anything around. One of the biggest decisions was whether to cut the very last line of the poem, which eventually I did.

As for inspiration… over the years enough lines and poems have been given to me out of seemingly nowhere—and writing them down has felt in a way like channeling—that I’d have to say yes, I do believe in inspiration. But I believe that inspiration is a result of the mind and imagination humming along subliminally, and it involves a certain kind of preparation, readiness, and receptivity. Including reading. And time and space. (When I’m overworked and overcommitted, I’m not often visited by brilliant lines I feel I have to set down before they’re irrevocably lost.)

It’s wonderful when inspiration takes care of itself, but so often it’s the hard work of revision that really makes a poem sing.

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

I suppose the only conscious technique I used was introducing the line breaks. I really liked the idea of “Whitewater” as a prose poem but ultimately decided it felt impenetrable that way, couldn’t breathe. The breaks allowed tension to build and release and build again.

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

The poem was accepted by Nimrod in June 2006, about a year after I began sending it out. It appeared in the Spring 2007 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?

It varies. If I feel certain that a poem is strong, I’ll send it off to journals as soon as it’s finished. But often I’ll wait several months, or longer, to get perspective. Because I frequently get behind on submissions, even finished poems sometimes wait a while to be sent out.

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

Much of my work is fictional, so it was interesting that you asked me to write about this poem in particular because it does have a story behind it, an incredibly sad one.

I’m a freelance book editor, and in 2001–2002 I worked with a rather extraordinary woman named Barbara Cushman Rowell on her first book, a memoir called Flying South (Ten Speed Press). The book told of how learning to fly and the attendant adventures (including flying her single-engine plane to Patagonia) empowered Rowell to emerge from the shadow of her husband, the renowned nature photographer Galen Rowell. This was one of those luxurious editing projects of the sort there is rarely time or budget for these days: we worked together closely for a year and a half, and I got to watch Rowell grow exponentially as a writer. She saw writing the book as another way to come into her own.

One chapter of Flying South describes a whitewater rafting accident while crossing a Class V rapid on the Bio Bio River in Chile. Rowell and her husband (and others) were seriously injured, and Rowell’s depiction is vivid and grisly. I can’t remember how long it was since I had last read that chapter—most likely the two years since it was published, as until now I haven’t been able to bring myself to open the book—but clearly the story stuck with me, as the poem is told from her perspective. Many of the elements of the poem’s action—the head-first plunge, the ledge, the froth and foam, the blow to the mouth, the protrusion of bone from her arm, the bloodwhite flap—are directly from her story, though rearranged a bit. The rest is imagined.

Rowell and her husband recovered from the accident; both needed many stitches and Rowell, extensive oral surgery. The tragic part of the story is that both died in a charter plane crash very close to home a couple months before Flying South’s release date. In order to become a pilot, Rowell had to cope with her persistent fear of flying and accept the possibility that she might die in the air. I wonder if it ever occurred to her that she might die at the hands of another pilot. It’s hard to think of a more horrible irony than the fate of these two chronically adventurous people, who risked their lives time and time again in remote corners of the world. I’ve never really gotten over the fact that Rowell never got to hold in her hands the book that she felt was going to change her life.

Years later, I do still feel some discomfort surrounding this poem—something akin to viewing a beautiful photograph of a disaster. I wonder what Barbara Rowell would have thought of it, and whether I would have had the same impulse to write it had she and her husband made it home safely from that final flight.

Is this a narrative poem?

It does relate an event that unfolds in time. It’s more narrative than much of my work, but also has strong lyric elements. I’ve always been interested in weaving together lyric and narrative threads.

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

I don’t remember… Some perennial influences are Gerard Manley Hopkins, Linda Bierds, early Louise Glück, Sylvia Plath, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Doty, Robert Hass, and Gerald Stern.

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

Can’t say I do. Anyone who enjoys my work and gets something out of it is ideal!

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 local poetry group every month to share work—an invaluable resource for providing both feedback and a sense of community. If I remember correctly, the group advised me to dispense with the last line of “Whitewater” (thank goodness).

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

As I mentioned above, not much of my work correlates so closely to real events. Also, the poem consists more or less of just one sentence. I do write lots of persona poems, though.

What is American about this poem?

Well, I could probably come up with an explanation involving the long literary and historical tradition of human vs. wilderness, but truthfully, I’m not sure I see anything particularly American about it besides its writer.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. I don’t think many of my abandoned poems make it into print.

T. R. Hummer

T. R. Hummer is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, including The Infinity Sessions (LSU, 2005) and The Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic (University of Georgia Press, 2006). Formerly Editor in Chief of Quarterly West, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Georgia Review, he is professor of creative writing/English at Arizona State University. Hummer is also an accomplished saxophonist.


GREEK

Hard now to remember those winters, snow scabbing the stones
Outside Gettysburg ten years after the names sank in with the carcasses.
What did I know about the unities? It was freezing, we had nothing,
We’d eaten the mules, the wheatfields were scattered with salt.
I hunched in the seminary balancing the leatherbound Euclid
Against the Homer my father had scribbled his name in once, a boy
Like me, still ignorant and alive. Outside, Pennsylvania was a hellish
Polygon of ice. The opposite sides and angles of a parallelogram
Are equal to one another, and the diagonal bisects it; that is, divides it
Into two equal parts. I imagined him repeating these things
Twenty-five years ago in a body smaller than mine.
I imagined him in the ground, the ground bisected, two worlds
Divided, the line drawn between him and me.
Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another.
I would take up the ministry that laid him down. I would speak the Word
That choked him. His body after ten years under was less than mine,
A volume of icy grit surrounding a Minié ball. We were learning. I knew
History was doing the same things others had done, being born,
Sweating, fighting, saying axioms by rote. I drew the geometry
Of fields in early spring, dead men at the plows,
Forty acres of ground chiseled and harrowed, laid out naked in the sun.
I know now they died of everything you can think of: Evisceration, shock,
Peritonitis, gangrene, malnutrition, incompetence, deceit,
Every possible loss. Then, I knew only what we copied
From the poet and translated: The spear in his heart
Was stuck fast, but the heart was panting still and beating
To shake the butt end of the spear. In the freezing house, my mother
Was sewing trousers, running her ruined fingers over the parallel lines of a bolt
Of corduroy, burning her hands on linen, stitching, shivering,
A conventional emblem of loss. If equals be taken from equals,
The remainders are equal. How could she weave him back? She had no loom.
She made uniforms for soldiers. They taught us to say these things:
My father in the underworld is bloodless, wanting nothing.
What is a nation to him? What is a son? There are rivers, stinking fires,
Ghostly pain like the pressure of starlight, emptiness, illusion,
There are six hundred thousand souls repeating their indifference every second
In the Hades of the Brothers’ War. He is a citizen of that polis now,
And I hate him in the language of the dead I am still learning slowly
For the sake of his memory, sign by inevitable sign.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem is from Walt Whitman in Hell, which was published in 1996, but took a long time to write. “Greek” was among the first poems composed for the book (it was, in fact, for awhile the provisional title poem), so I’m guessing I wrote it in 1988. I believe I still lived in Gambier, Ohio, and was editing The Kenyon Review, when it was written. In terms of a proximate cause, I had recently acquired from my late grandmother’s “library” (she owned maybe 50 books) a leather-bound geometry textbook that had been my great-grandfather’s; I was struck by the fact that it was nothing more and nothing less than Euclid’s Elements. There were no concessions made for young minds, no pedagogical material, no answers in the back of the book. It was straight Euclid. I should also add that I knew my great-grandfather, T.W. Jackson; he was born in 1860 (he remembered the Civil War; his father died in a prison camp) and died in 1957, when I was seven years old. The material for the poem, then, was at hand—though my great-great-grandfather fought on the Southern, not the Northern, side. During that phase of my writing I was pushing myself beyond “personal” material, toward what I was then thinking of as “altered centers of consciousness” for poems. I had come to the conclusion that much of the sentience of my own poems—and the poems of many of my contemporaries—was as traditional, and as inherited, as fixed forms like the sonnet. I wanted to get outside what I had assumed was “original” and “my own material,” and found that for me this feat took quite a lot of work, discipline, and thought. All the poems in Walt Whitman in Hell are the result of that particular impulse, and “Greek” is an early example.

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

It’s difficult for me to remember exactly, but I know that the writing at that particular time was very laborious for me, almost to the point of self-injury, as if I was insisting on doing so much heavy lifting that I was in danger of incurring a spiritual hernia. It was a bit like learning geometry straight out of Euclid—especially if the Euclid were still in ancient Greek. I remember laboring over this poem, and several others simultaneously, for about six months: how many drafts, I cannot say. Many. Part of the work I was doing was convincing myself that the voice was authoritative—for me if for no one else. I was busy convincing myself that the “project” I had undertaken was worth doing, that it wasn’t a dead end—and that, on the other end, I was capable of doing what I envisioned. A lot of imaginative weightlifting ensued.

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

This cluster of questions strikes several nerves for me. I do my best, for instance, not to “believe in” anything at all, though of course I fail. I am by conviction and constitution what I think of as a radical agnostic, by which I simply mean that I’m convinced that “belief” is poisonous. To be convinced is another matter entirely. That said, I am convinced that almost everything a poet does is “received”—whether from poetry itself, or from life, or both; whether muses or gods breathe poems into us remains unproven, but it’s possible. In writing Walt Whitman in Hell, I was on the front lines of a personal war with cultural reception: I did not want to accept anything the tradition of poetry, or my own life, offered me simply on faith. On the other hand, I did not (and do not) want to throw out the poetry with the bathwater. I “received” the book of Euclid from my family (and in another way I received it from western culture, and from Euclid himself); I “received” stories about the Civil War from my great grandfather. I “received” Homer from my education. I “received” a truckload of ideas about poetry from an abundance of sources. What was to be done with all that? I had “received” so much that I was in danger at that point of being crushed by it. In intervening years I have learned how to be ever more conscious of the negotiations of cultural reception and their translation into poetry, and to deal with it with ever-increasing magnitudes of negative capability. At the time I was working on “Greek,” and the other poems that were written around the same time, I was cutting new paths through the underbrush for myself with the exceedingly dull machete of my mind. It was sweaty, bloody work.

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

In hindsight, everything is technique. In the moment, everything is panic and reaction. Does a tennis star employ “technique” to hit an especially difficult shot? Of course she does; but the subjective experience is of nerves and reaction, not the conscious application of what has been consciously learned. I wanted an austere voice that could match the frozen plains of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in winter. I wanted a voice out of Hades (not the Christian Hell, the Greek Hades). I was already playing around with the idea that the altered centers of consciousness of the poems I was writing had their sources in the dead—the kinds of voices Odysseus accesses by letting the shades in the underworld drink from his bowl of goat’s blood. I spent years and years absorbing the western (and some non-western) prosodic tradition; when I was in graduate school, I trained myself to carry on conversations in iambic pentameter. When I was writing the poem—when I write poems generally—I do not think about any of that unless the poem particularly demands it; I trust my ear, which is both trained and primal.

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

A couple of years.

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. Now—because of digital submission—I tend to submit poems more quickly than I used to; but I am also, for better or worse, more sure of myself than I used to be. Early on in the process of writing Walt Whitman in Hell, I sat on poems for quite a long time, unsure of them.

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

In a strict sense, this poem contains not a single “fact”—nothing that could be journalistically or scientifically verified. In a different sense, it depends entirely on facticity, defined in the usual sense as “the state of being factual.” I don’t think there’s any poetic contradiction between these two statements, or anything unusual about being able to say such things about a poem. How many “facts” are there in Browning’s “My Last Duchess”? Yet the poem depends on its ability to cast a spell of facticity upon the reader. Art traffics in this kind of magic constantly: the movies, photography, painting. Only instrumental music is entirely free of the demands of the fact. And as we know, all art aspires to the condition of music. The narrative/dramatic facets of a poem purvey the “facts” in the poem; the lyric/rhetorical facets want to transcend fact. The tension between the two can be the driving engine of a certain kind of poem—the kind that “Greek” is.

Is this a narrative poem?

Aha. No. And yes. The poem has narrative facets. But it does not so much tell a story as refer the reader to one—or several. If a reader comes to this poem with no knowledge of the War Between the States, I wager that much is lost. “Greek” riffs on the master narrative of American history the way John Coltrane riffs on the melody of “Lush Life,” when he plays that gorgeous tune in his utterly individual way. But the poem is no more a strict narrative than Coltrane’s “Lush Life” is strictly melodic.

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

The most immediate influence, probably, is The Iliad, in Richmond Lattimore’s translation, which I fell in love with decades ago. I was also reading Walcott (of “The Schooner Flight,” middle Walcott), Adrienne Rich, and Robert Penn Warren, a poet on whose middle and late work I sharpened my eyeteeth for years. I had also just begun serious delving into Czeslaw Milosz about the same time. I had read at Milosz off and on, spottily; a couple of conversations with Robert Hass convinced me to pay very serious attention there. And I was also beginning to assay Yannis Ritsos, a poet from whom I was to learn some pretty important lessons.

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

I could write a book on this subject. My sense of audience is deeply internalized, but that does not mean that I write for myself; I don’t. The art of writing activates the writer’s primal connection to the species. Part of me reads over my writing shoulder from that point of view, saying things like Can we eat it? Does this crap matter? Another part stands back and speaks Miloszian: What good is a poetry that does not change nations? For me the fundamental issue is this: how does an individual in his or her little body communicate with the leviathan of the body politic? How does one cell in the elbow communicate, through the brain, with the entire body? Poetry participates in the “biology” of the culture, the anatomy of the body politic. Beyond this point, things become deeply complicated.

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?

Not so much any more. I used to. David Baker in particular used to see everything I wrote, when I wrote it, and vice versa. He would have been the first reader of “Greek,” and he would have given me detailed feedback and advice; he’s an excellent and generous reader. Now, though, I want to finish the book before I or anyone evaluates what I’m up to; I don’t want to be interfered with, so to speak. I send the poems to magazines, of course; that’s different. And I send the ms to my editor. But all the people I’ve worked with closely in the past (in workshops and elsewhere) and all the poets I love are installed in my mental software, and advise me constantly.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I rarely commit this kind of historical set piece. This work represents a phase (nearly twenty-five years ago!) in my thinking about what I called above “altered centers of consciousness.” I still work that way, but I have learned more subtle means of alteration.

What is American about this poem?

Its subject, its language, its soul. Other than that, it is entirely a Greek poem.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both. I abandon poems always, but only when they are finished: by which I mean, when all the questions I had about them in the beginning are answered, or more precisely, exhausted.