Mathias Svalina

Mathias Svalina is the author of one book of poems, Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), one forthcoming book of prose, I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur (Mudluscious Press) & numerous chapbooks. With Zachary Schomburg he co-edits Octopus Magazine & Octopus Books.

WINTER STARS

I’ve been through this

before in my imagination,
since you were never predicted
to live this long.

The ambulance.

The hospital.
The white cotton gloves
left on top of the coffin.

Now

that it’s the body twisting
itself to death
rather than simply
turning off
as the doctors
predicted,
all of my prepared
expressions are useless.

I’m left

like the amateurs,
wondering what
makes the trains sound
so beautiful
in the distance
in the twilight.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in 2009. I think I was at The Tea Lounge in Brooklyn, because I wrote a lot of the manuscript that it comes from at that place. The manuscript is a record of my reactions to my father’s cancer and his impending death.

The title of the poem is a reference to a Larry Levis poem, of course. It is a poem about his dad. As for the content of my poem, my dad had a congenital heart defect and throughout the years we always assumed he would die as a result of this. When he was diagnosed with terminal cancer it seemed odd and surprising that this ailment he’d been born with, that we’d always assumed would be the death of him had been displaced by cancer.

There are few things less surprising than the fact that the people we love die and yet it doesn’t keep us from having the reactions that we do. The poem is trying to get in that space somewhere, a poem about my dad’s death and a poem about the presumptions and cliché pretensions we have about epochal emotion-points in our lives.

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

While I’d hesitate to tell this to a creative writing student, this poem was probably written in about five minutes and I think I have changed maybe a handful of words since then. I’ve changed a few pieces of punctuation and one or two words since the version that is on Blackbird, which is slightly different than the one above. So while the final tinkering might have taken a few years (and it might not be over) the essential poem was written in minutes.

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

I believe that inspiration is ubiquitous and therefore unimportant to my writing. All one has to do is see a tree and then see something else and one has inspiration. Any juxtaposition is inspiration. Though, as I said above, this poem came quickly to me. If that is inspiration then I believe in that, but I think I’m begging the question there.

I have a harder time with the second part of the second question. Part of the phenomenology of being a poet at this point in the art’s history is that one enacts a belief that one's time is better spent writing a poem than reacting meaningfully against the horrors of human oppression. Which I think is wrong. I don’t think this poem had a lot of struggle to it, or whatever "sweat and tears" means in relation to writing poetry. In my opinion, writing poetry is fundamentally not work and never struggle. When I hear people claim that they struggle over poetry, that poetry is "work" it sounds like the language of a piggy bank to me.

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

I wanted this poem to be plainspoken and directly connected to my real life, which is something I don’t do normally. I wanted it to sound like a poem written by someone who loves William Stafford. Any revisions I have made have been to try and make it more plain and clear.

I wanted it to be in a rhetoric of "honesty," which doesn’t really have anything to do with "honesty" in the sense of telling the truth, but more like "honesty" in the sense of paving the streets when they need to be paved.

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

I think it had been about two years. I wrote the whole manuscript in 2008 and 2009. Then my dad died and I did not look at the manuscript for a while. I sent one batch of poems from it out before he died, and this was to Blackbird. They were the first journal to publish poems from that manuscript.

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 think this one "sat" for about a year. In general my practice varies. Often when I think something is "done" I usually go ahead and send it out. Sometimes it gets taken immediately, sometimes it sits around, sometimes I give up on the poem or forget about it.

But I write a lot of stuff. Some of it I send out rapidly, some of it, conversely to what I said above, I hold back. As I mentioned before, since this manuscript was emotionally important to me and written in a way that I typically don’t have much interest in, my reaction to it was different. I think I’ve only sent out maybe three batches of poem from this one.

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

This poem is as close as I can get to factual in a poem, which is not very factual. My view of reading literature doesn’t allow much space for facts. Literature doesn’t have a truth value. Which is essential to its uses and failures. I don’t think anyone who reads this poem would know anything substantial or true about me, but they might know something about the poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

Nope, just a little meditative piece.

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

I was reading a lot of Jay Wright and Boccacio when I wrote this, as far as I remember, in addition to the thousands of poems and hundreds of books one is constantly in the process of reading or coming to an understanding of at any moment when you’re a poet. I think I was modeling the approach to information in this manuscript on Wright. This poem is a direct response to a kind of thinking about how a writer goes through commonplace steps of their lives, as evidenced by Levis’s poem about his father and any number of other typical white guys writing about their dads. So Levis is, as he so often is, an influence.

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

Usually I write imagining how my friend Zach or my girlfriend Julia would react. But with this manuscript I think I was writing to someone who wouldn’t be interested in most of my poems.

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

I showed this manuscript to my friend GC. I think he was the only one I showed this poem to. I regularly share work with a variety of friends. Their reactions are interesting and instructive, but ultimately, their reactions are usually less important than reading the poems out loud to myself and trying to gauge my ear’s reaction.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Most of my poems are either in an absurdist style or a tersely imagistic style. This one is closer to the latter, but attempting a more direct clarity of emotional intent, a more closed control of the meaning-making. It’s also about Mathias John Svalina, which my poems usually are not.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It was finished. I had a specific, though limited, goal for it and I think I accomplished it so I considered it done.

Keith Taylor

Keith Taylor’s most recent collection of poems is If the World Becomes So Bright (Wayne State University Press, 2009). A longish chapbook of short poems, Marginalia for a Natural History, will be published by Black Lawrence Press around the end of 2011. He has published some eleven other volumes of edited books, translations, poems and stories. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for the Arts. He coordinates the undergraduate program in creative writing at the University of Michigan, works as the Poetry Editor of Michigan Quarterly Review, and directs the Bear River Writers’ Conference.
　

THE DAY AFTER AN ICE STORM

When it dawns crystalline, blue,
the air sparkling with prisms
reflected off oak and spruce,
off every twig, branch, or limb,
even off trees cascading
over fences, trees uprooted
by the splendor of ice—
the day lifts us, takes us out-
side ourselves, outside the news
of a nurse driving back home
last night, at the blackest hour
of the ice storm, when I was
watching electrical arcs
illuminating the yard.
I heard trees break apart
and was thrilled with fear. She stopped
to help at an accident—
it looked far worse than it was—
and a young man, twenty-three,
leaving work in his truck,
spun out on the ice killing
the nurse, who, in a brief moment
of faith, might have imagined
today dawning crystalline,
brittle, gloriously cold.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem started in the moment, in the tragic irony. I forget which year it was (probably sometime in the late '80s or early '90s), but we had a tremendous ice storm, a beautiful ice storm, frightening and wonderful. Even as it was happening, I knew my response was aesthetic. I was thrilled. And then, the very next day, we heard the reports of the nurse dying as she tried to help someone. The contrast in the emotions that were present in our town on that night seemed important, somehow. It still does.

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

Hard to say. I know this poem was around twenty years or so before I published it. A dozen revisions? Twenty?

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

Yes, I believe in inspiration, although I think there is probably a very mundane, even materialist explanation for it. This poem was received and revised. I think they all are.

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

Once I had the rush of the first long sentence easily contrasted with the short second sentence, I must have gone back to count syllables. Although inconsistent now, there is still the strong skeleton of the seven syllable line in the poem. Like many poets I will often try an early version of a poem, particularly one that at first seems dominated by prose rhythms, in syllabics. The counting forces us to look for new words to fill the syllable count and often presents us with new and interesting diction and enjambment. Once the poem has mellowed a bit, I occasionally don’t feel as committed to the arbitrary count and can go back and revise with the usual considerations of free verse. This poem, however, carries the clear imprint of the count.

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

Perhaps the length of time the poem stayed on my work table is unique. Usually I will give up on a poem after a while. This one stuck.

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

I am going to guess that this poem was around from ten to twenty years before it appeared in 2009 in my collection If the World Becomes So Bright. I always liked the poem, but never could find a magazine that wanted to publish it. Finally it appeared in the 2008 Bear River Review, which is a small journal some of my colleagues put together to help promote the writing done at The Bear River Writers’ Conference. Now I direct that, so I can’t really claim that as a publication.

Since the book has come out, it is a poem that several people have commented on positively, and I find that gratifying. I was also pleased that it was the poem picked for this web site. Odd how that happens, isn’t it? I couldn’t find anyone to like it for a couple of decades and now it seems to have found its audience.

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?

The practice varies from poem to poem. Sometimes I’ll send a poem out, then get it back, and let it sit for a long time, years and years, before I try again. That often teaches me something about the poem, and it’s usually a lesson worth learning.

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

This is a narrative poem that recounts an incident that really happened, although I know little more about it than what appeared in the papers. I have recognized the possibility that the victim of the crash might have the same response to the wonders of the storm that the speaker has—even while she is acting bravely and in a way that distinguishes her from the speaker of the poem.

The facts of the matter get more complicated though. Months after the accident I discovered that the young man in the truck was actually drunk, driving on an expired license, and that he went to jail for a very long time for causing the death of this woman. I had imagined that he too was a kind of victim of the weather, of these forces that were so much larger than any individual. I may have been very wrong about that.

So the poem has a basis in fact that gets changed for the purposes of the poem. I hope that results in a poem that provides imaginative and emotional engagement with the world but that does not violate the importance of the fact behind it.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes. There’s a story to this one.

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

I would like to think that there is an obvious imprint of James Wright on the poem—somewhere in its studied simplicity, in its acceptance of the beauty amid the horrors that surround us.

But, formally, I learned that syllable counting from a very different poet. Kenneth Rexroth often counted syllables to control his narratives, to give himself a kind of distance. And, yes, he often used seven syllable lines. An odd number because it kept him, I’m guessing, from falling into any easy iambic rhythms. And a short line because it creates a great contrast with complicated syntax of the longer sentence. It’s formally quite simple, yet allows for an interesting register of tone and emotion, particularly in a narrative.

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

What was it James Wright said? "I’m looking for a few intelligent readers of good will," or something like that? Me, too!

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?

For a decade I had a strong and committed writing group of four writers. We met every other weekend and worked quite rigorously on each other’s work. I finally dropped out of the group because I wanted to force myself to find a bigger audience than that group of readers.
For a couple of decades, the wonderful poet Marc J. Sheehan helped me organize books and revise poems. He did a fabulous job. But I had to pull back a bit from Marc’s help so I could be sure of finding my own poems rather than his. For the last decade or so, I have depended on editors who have helped the process along. For my last book, Annie Martin of Wayne State University Press did a fabulous job of editorial input.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

The first person has become more muted in my poems recently. Now I realize the first person is pretty quiet in this poem. It may be important only as some kind of Emersonian observer, so perhaps this poem was a harbinger of work to come. Maybe that’s why I always liked it.

What is American about this poem?

An odd question for me, since—legally—I am not an American. I’m a Canadian, although I have lived most of my adult life in the States and most of my influences are American. But, yes, this feels like an American poem. There’s something in the direct narrative and the simplicity of the diction that seem to me to grow from a particularly American place. Even though there is ice in the poem, it doesn’t sound Canadian. I don’t think Americans hear this distinction much, but I’m pretty sure Canadians do. A student asked me a similar question recently and I responded "I’m a Canadian citizen and an American writer." After I thought about that for a while, I realized that it was exactly the kind of statement that would just piss off everyone, even though it might be true.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

So far this poem has been abandoned into its finished state. I might go back and make it more finished . . .

Melissa Range

Melissa Range’s first book of poems, Horse and Rider, won the 2010 Walt McDonald Prize in Poetry and was published by Texas Tech University Press. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a "Discovery"/The Nation prize, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and VCCA. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, The Hudson Review, Image, New England Review, The Paris Review, and others. Originally from East Tennessee, she is currently pursuing her PhD in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri.


ACHILLES WALKS THE BEACHES

The Iliad, 24.1-16

These mornings, while my men sprawl beneath dead
stars, their dreams unarmed, I trawl gray sand and sky
for my tall boy. I stalk the stark sea, the black sails—

in the dark, I shadow Dawn, lest she bloody the beach
with light before I can find and touch the grain, the drop,
the ground where your glory resides. Patroclus,

surely your brawling heart bides somewhere near my hands:
in the shoreline gored by spears, knives, my pacing tread;
in the waves that slowly lap the ships to threads;

in the salt the moon washes back to Thessaly.
Fair Thessaly—a realm palled and failed
as the love shades bear for the living,

love which has no rest, no home, no gain.
Thessaly without you, Patroclus, lies slain,
its cliffs mauled by the assailing blue. It is no more

noble than this galled plain, which Helios gilds
so that men believe they fight for gold,
not land that they will never own. Poor Ilium—

when set beside your bright hair, my warrior,
how dull it seems; how dim its king’s howls,
its white walls, its bereaving fires.

And yet in this dark, when only kites and jackals
share my untired watch, I could almost pity it;
while the living and the light both cleave

to sleep, I could almost rest
my mouth against the city’s eaves
in hopes of touching you within one stone.

One stone, and I could turn away—alone,
awake, I crawl the sands, and I nearly believe.
But I do not steal to the city. Nor do I slumber.

I shine my greaves. I mend my helmet’s strap.
I watch flies plunder bowls of wine
I can’t remember pouring. I watch them drown.

And before Dawn skewers everything with light,
I plead the Muses for one grace:
that blood not be the only song that’s sung of you.

But Patroclus, my dagger and my harp—
the laughing gods bark and spar,
the pantheon warring in my throat

so that I cannot cry aught but battle;
though the shields of all Troy’s armies shatter
behind my eyes, only Pallas Athena is kind.

Now behold the thundering Achilles:
I am a captured ship, a sundered citadel,
a lioness whose pride is torn apart.

Before my men awake and see me here,
before day drives a shaft again into my eye,
I do for you what I know, and what I can.

I whet my spear. I clean my sword.
I pace and curse the Dawn, and Priam’s land.
Patroclus, my pyre, my boy,

these are the labors of Achilles the grand—
I walk the shore. I fit my blade into my hand.
I take the reins. I sweep a sweet prince through the sand.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem was written in the summer of 2004. Although I had been living in Atlanta for five years, I still had (illegal) Tennessee plates and a Tennessee license. My Tennessee license was about to expire, so I decided to stop being so trifling and become a law-abiding Hotlantan, which meant that I had to stand in line at the infamously grimy and always entertaining Moreland Avenue DMV (since closed down, alas) for a couple of hours to get a Georgia license. I took Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Iliad with me to read while I waited, which was a good idea, because I stood in line that first day for nearly three hours. When I got up to the front of the line, the no-nonsense lady behind the counter informed me that I had not brought enough forms of proper identification--so I had to come back the next day. Over two days, I plowed my way through a lot of the poem, which I hadn't read in about eight years. I'd always found the bond between Achilles and Patroclus the heart of the poem. I guess after two days at the DMV, I was feeling loopy enough to try my hand at my own interpretation. (I hadn't read Christopher Logue's War Music in 2004. I'm not sure I would've tried my own version if I had!) My version focuses on how Achilles expresses his grief. I was interested in the idea of a man who would rather write a song or a poem about the loss of someone he loved but who can't--his power is in his strength, speed, and violence, as he himself acknowledges in this poem. Ritual does not help him grieve, either. So he has to grieve the only way he can, which is by killing Hector.

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

I wish I could remember! But if it's the same as most of my other poems, I revise each line so much as I'm writing it before moving on to the next one that it's hard to tell how many "drafts" I go through; I suppose it depends on how one defines a "draft." A lot of times, the poem's working itself out in my head or on scraps of paper or in my journal for weeks or months (or even years in some cases) before I actually sit down to write a full draft. Once I do settle down to write, a draft might take me a week to write, or it might take a few hours. I don't save each tiny change as a separate draft (I hate lots of cluttery documents, and my cantankerous old laptop would prefer I keep her cleaned up, as well). Because of this practice, I am usually (and somewhat blissfully) unaware of how many drafts I do of most of my poems.

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

I definitely believe in inspiration--there's no question about that. I believe in the Muse. I believe in the white heat of the process where I don't consciously know what I'm doing--where something else is in charge. I also believe in toil--making deliberate choices, consciously crafting the poem--and there's no question about that, either; because I often write in traditional forms, I'm always aware that what I'm doing is (pleasurable) work.

At least one phrase of the poem was "received" in a very literal way--the lines "the shields of all Troy's armies shatter / behind my eyes" were adapted from something my friend Dominick had said that summer. I can't quite recall the exact context--I believe he was talking about how people's eyes look when they're in pain, as if glass is shattering behind them. I'm pretty sure we weren't sitting around talking about shields--though you never do know.

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

It seemed to tend toward tercets from the first couple of stanzas, so I just went with it. Mostly I was proceeding according to internal rhyme and slant rhyme--"trawl," "sprawl," "brawling," "palled," "galled," "mauled," etc., though those rhymes give way to other sounds about 2/3 through the poem. There's no structure to the rhyming--just intermittent chimin' (my debt to Hopkins is always apparent, I reckon). I typically construct poems by ear, so this practice isn't unique to "Achilles." I did feel strongly that I didn't want a received form or an end-rhyming form for "Achilles"--I wanted his speech to be looser and longer than the more strict forms I often write in would have allowed. Though there's still a lot of music in Achilles's speech, that's simply because the musicality of words is the element of language I never can resist.

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

This poem wasn't published until my book was, in 2010, so the interim was close to six 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?

I've sent poems out after five years and others after a few months--just depends on how I feel about them (and how lazy or proactive I'm feeling about sending things out; it's usually the former, alas, for I am a very haphazard submitter).

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

Not really, but I do think that ideally, when I write a poem, I would want Emily Dickinson to read the poem and not hate it.

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

I'm pretty free and easy about showing people drafts--I'm not very private about my work. Who sees drafts of poems depends upon whom I'm hanging out with at any given time. I don't have a regular group I show work to, but I do have a great poet-friend I've known for nearly twenty years; we've been regular readers for each other since college, so I'm sure she saw this poem. My boyfriend, who's a wonderful poet, is a great reader and editor for me now, but we didn't know each other back when I was writing this poem.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It's longer than most of my poems, and somewhat looser with respect to its form. It's also something of a love poem, which I don't tend to write very often.

What is American about this poem?

I've never thought of this as a particularly "American" poem, I guess because it's set in a mythological time and place. I think the knee-jerk emotional and violent reaction of Achilles--the bottomless grief that moves him to immediate and bloody retaliation--might be seen as "American" by some, particularly post-September 11th, but I think the desire for revenge after a great loss is not confined to one set of borders. It's a dark human feeling that seems to me universal. And obviously, grief is universal.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Like most of my poems, this one was abandoned.

Dave Lucas

Dave Lucas was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and is the author of Weather (VQR, 2011). He is the recipient of a Henry Hoyns Fellowship from the University of Virginia and a "Discovery"/The Nation Prize, and his poems have appeared in many journals including The Paris Review, Poetry, and Slate. He lives in Cleveland and Ann Arbor, where he is a PhD candidate in English language and literature at the University of Michigan.
　

SUBURBAN PASTORAL

Twilight folds over houses on our street;
its hazy gold is gilding our front lawns,
delineating asphalt and concrete
driveways with shadows. Evening is coming on,
quietly, like a second drink, the beers
men hold while rising from their plastic chairs
to stand above their sprinklers, and approve.

Soon the fireflies will rise in lucent droves—
for now, however, everything seems content
to settle into archetypal grooves:
the toddler’s portraits chalked out on cement,
mothers in windows, finishing the dishes.
Chuck Connelly’s cigarette has burned to ashes;
he talks politics to Roger in the drive.

"It’s all someone can do just to survive,"
he says, and nods—both nod—and pops another
beer from the cooler. "No rain. Would you believe—"
says Chuck, checking the paper for the weather.
At least a man can keep his yard in shape.
Somewhere beyond this plotted cityscape
their sons drive back and forth in borrowed cars:

how small their city seems now, and how far
away they feel from last year, when they rode
their bikes to other neighborhoods, to score
a smoke or cop a feel in some girl’s bed.
They tune the radio to this summer’s song
and cruise into the yet-to-exhale lung
of August night. Nothing to do but this.

These are the times they’d never dream they’ll miss—
the hour spent chasing a party long burned out,
graphic imagined intercourse with Denise.
This is all they can even think about,
and thankfully, since what good would it do
to choke on madeleines of temps perdu
when so much time is set aside for that?

Not that their fathers weaken with regret
as nighttime settles in—no, their wives
are on the phone, the cooler has Labatt
to spare; at ten the Giants play the Braves.
There may be something to romanticize
about their own first cars, the truths and lies
they told their friends about some summer fling,

but what good is it now, when anything
recalled is two parts true and one part false?
When no one can remember just who sang
that song that everybody loved? What else?
It doesn’t come to mind. The sprinkler spits
in metronome; they’re out of cigarettes.
Roger folds up his chair, calls it a day.

The stars come out in cosmic disarray,
and windows flash with television blues.
The husbands come to bed, nothing to say
but ’night. Two hours late—with some excuse—
their sons come home, too full of songs and girls
to notice dew perfect its muted pearls
or countless crickets singing for a mate.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This is one of the earliest poems to survive for my first book. I wrote it as a graduate student at the University of Virginia, in the fall of 2003, when I was twenty-three. The poem started with an image of a yard sprinkler ticking "like summer’s metronome," an image that did not survive for the final draft but which certainly provided a main theme for the eventual poem.

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

I wrote the poem over the course of a month or so, and since I tend to revise as I go, I don’t remember how many revisions I went through. I do remember spending too much time staring at the half-written poem in a notebook, wondering what was coming next. I spent as much time waiting as I did revising.

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

Writers’ processes are mysterious, I think, even to the most self-aware among them. When I couldn’t find the right line, I felt utterly present—sweaty and teary—in the poem’s composition. When the right line came, I felt like I had had nothing to do with it. Maybe science will one day demonstrate exactly where in the brain inspiration happens, what electromagnetic or biochemical stimulation activates the muse. But then, I take science on faith too.

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

As far as I know, it’s a nonce form, and one that grew out of necessity. I wrote myself into a "Venus and Adonis" stanza and then sensed that something else needed to happen. The last unrhymed line of each stanza became a strategy of variation but also a logic of transition from one stanza to the next. By the time I reached the end of the poem, it seemed right to close with an apparently unrhymed line that still recalls its opening rhymes.

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

I finished it in the fall of 2003 and it appeared in print, in Poetry, in August 2004.

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 depends on the poem. My satisfaction with a poem depreciates like a new car driven off the lot, and this only increases once a poem is accepted for publication somewhere. Horace says to put a poem away for nine years before publishing it. I admire his patience.

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

I don’t necessarily see fact and fiction as two opposites through which one needs to steer a steady course. At their etymological roots, both words refer to something made, and of course the root of poetry does too, so I’m content with that. At the risk of being obtuse, however, I will say that the poem attempts to breathe some life back into the clichés of suburbia—events that one imagines or remembers happening even if they are not happening currently—and that I’m pounding on those clichés in the hope that they’ll start breathing on their own again.

Is this a narrative poem?

I don’t know. Categories such as "narrative"—or its workshop antithesis, "lyric"—have never held much water for me. Any poem that’s ever moved me enough to read it more than once demonstrates elements of both narrative and lyricism. So yes, it’s a narrative poem, but it’s also a lyric poem that wants to be an epic.

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

I was reading The Poems of W. B. Yeats and experiencing one of the great revelations of my reading life. I don’t know that the poem betrays that influence, given its subject matter, but reading Yeats certainly stoked some ambition in the younger writer I was. I was also attracted to the rather mystical portrayal of suburbia in Mark Strand’s "The Continuous Life."

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

In my grandest delusions, readers skeptical of poetry find themselves converted, and the living and dead poets and friends I love nod in approval.

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

My then-girlfriend had to put up with so many announcements of new lines and laments for the abandonment of others that I am both grateful and mystified she ever agreed to marry me. She remains the first, last and best reader of my poems.

When I eventually shared the poem in Charles Wright’s workshop, I remember it being well received and thoughtfully, helpfully critiqued—Charles was particularly kind to it, which was a great encouragement—but it was not met with the full Roman triumph I had been expecting.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

At the time I wrote the poem it was quite similar indeed to other poems of mine. In the eight years since, though, I’ve moved away from this poetry of the suburbs and toward a vatic, incantatory voice more applicable to the sort of industrial mythmaking that occupies me now. I’m sure this shift in my thinking parallels a literal move from the suburbs to the city of Cleveland as well.

What is American about this poem?

This is tricky. The poem attempts, as I mention above, to animate some of the clichés of American suburbia, of teenagers in suburbia, and in particular of male teenagers in suburbia. But too often those clichés are labeled "American" to the exclusion of other American experiences. The word "American" means too many things to too many people—and it should—for me to feel justified in claiming it for this poem.

I do think (or hope) that the poem exhibits a spirit of both expansiveness and lonesomeness, which I have found to be true of my experience of the American landscape, and the suburbs are no exception.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished, then abandoned.

Steve Kistulentz

Steve Kistulentz's first book of poems The Luckless Age was selected by Nick Flynn as the winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award and was published by Red Hen Press this February. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The Antioch Review, Barn Owl Review, Black Warrior Review, Caesura, New England Review, New Letters, Quarterly West and many others. Individual poems have also won recognition from such noted poets as former Poet Laureate of the United States Mark Strand, who selected "The David Lee Roth Fuck Poem…" for the 2008 edition of the Best New Poets anthology, and by Mark Doty, who included the John Mackay Shaw award-winning poem "Bargain" in the ninth volume of its Helen Burns Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. He currently is an assistant professor of English at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, where he teaches courses in creative writing, literature, and popular culture.


FIXING

What I did
I did in the dark,
nightclub bathroom door
held shut by my bulk,
a 20-dollar descent
into the uproar
of mad stupidity.
At least I used
a fresh needle,
and before I went
sick, drew the plunger
back, pressed it down
four times, filling
and emptying, and
filling again with blood.
I used a needle
only once, the night
before I married.
That ought to be enough
to convince anyone
in omens. Let’s resist
moralizing here, just
say it was wrong,
meaning incorrect,
a subtle offense.
They call it fixing;
you do it because
you are broken;
and you hope
it will help,
and still later
you talk about it, this
one thing no one saw.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Despite the relative darkness of the subject, this poem came from wordplay. I was thinking about the slang that surrounds heroin, a subject the book returns to in the poem "Wild Gift." At a friend’s funeral, I’d overheard someone say, "I didn’t know he was back on the horse," and I’d obsessed over that phrase for maybe three months, knowing that in conversation, the speaker had meant exactly this: despite pretentions to the contrary, our dead friend had never really kicked drugs. But even in that phrase, there is this hint of hope, this peculiarly American urge to confront and defeat failure.

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

The version in the book is probably draft three. The first two contained slightly longer lines, and a joke: "A subtle offense/ like men wearing black socks/ with sandals at the shore." I’m grateful for whatever voice told me to cut that. It might have worked in some version of the poem itself, but that moment of levity was contrary to the movement of the whole first section of the book.

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

Barbara Hamby pointed me to an answer that Picasso gave. "Inspiration exists, but it must find us working." When I am not working on any particular project, I find myself combing through favorite books, my journals and notebooks, magazines, anything, just looking for words that trigger some secret association. The myth of inspiration causes otherwise ordinary people to believe that they too can write a novel or a collection of poems, if they only had the time. Which of course they can; it’s the great and saving illusion of democracy and graduate school. And while I do not necessarily want to be the voice that extinguishes someone’s faith, I think it is important to demystify process. I don’t get inspired; I work. When I write, what I am putting on paper is the sum total of all the reading, thinking, ruminating and previous writing that I’ve ever attempted. Said another way, I find my inspiration in the act of working. It may not produce results today, but it lays a foundation for tomorrow’s work.

How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique? Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

I remember going through a phase where I was reading poets who were mostly absorbed in their own reporting of these little domestic scenes; I’d been deep in to C.K. Williams at the time. I envied the scope of those long lines but mostly I envied the kind of voice that could say to the reader something like, "The only time I ever fell in love with someone else’s wife…" I had to learn how to be that fearless, and though I might seem comfortable with the public aspects of the writing life, it’s an acquired skill. To me, it’s a shame that Williams often channels that ambition into poems about infidelity and the bourgeois limits of conventional morality. So perhaps Williams was an influence in that I was responding negatively to the people who populate his poems and their relative affluence in the world. "Fixing" is like the antimatter to the poems in a book like Flesh and Blood.

A number of poems in The Luckless Age were also written as part of my effort to be aware of the speed of sound; I’d been playing bass for a friend who is a wonderful singer-songwriter, and he would record these elaborate demos using an old Boss Dr. Rhythm drum machine. At rehearsal, he could tell the rest of us that the click track was, for example, set at 108 beats per minute, which is a pretty moderate tempo for rock and roll. I pretty much always wanted the songs to go faster. Those clipped lines are my effort to distinguish "Fixing" as a much more visceral jab than the rather panoramic lyric narratives that precede it in the book.

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

C. Dale Young took this poem for the New England Review and it appeared in the Spring 2003 issue, so it was probably about a year old by the time it came out.

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?

Generally it’s a poem-by-poem decision. I don’t always know when I have succeeded, but I am acutely aware of when I have failed. I have a few trusted readers, and we tend more towards trading larger blocks of poems, a cycle or a whole manuscript. But my relationship with those people is such that we tend to only raise our voices if something is seriously awry. If the poem in question feels particularly risky to me, I might wait a tad longer to send it out.

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

Are you asking why the Library of Congress categorizes poetry as a distinctly non-fiction endeavor? That’s always been a great mystery to me. I am by no means a genre loyalist, and I like to push the limits of what we think of as discrete categories. In this particular poem, the owner of the first-person voice is almost inconsequential. I’m much more interested in a sense of emotional authenticity than I am in whether or not something is literally true. Of all the poems in the book, "Fixing" is the one that people most often assume springs from some sort of impulse to practice a type of documentary or post-confessional poetics. And perhaps it does, but the poet isn’t necessarily the subject of that documentary. Interestingly, in the few poems in my book that do spring from a documentary impulse, I do not feel any obligation at all to the literal truth. My obligation is to a sense of unflinching honesty that convinces the reader to make the investment in the book. Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote that criticism’s goal was to complete the text, but since I am a writer first and scholar second, I have an extraordinarily ambivalent relationship to the practice of biographical literary criticism. To me, trying to map the actual life of an author or a poet on to a text not only defeats the purpose of reading, but it’s a perverse and lazy way to approach a text. Biography informs the text, but it doesn’t complete it.

Is this a narrative poem?

Perhaps. If it is, it contains narrative only in the sense that it is an extended synecdoche and the reader is invited to complete the narrative. Though I return to the subject matter later in the book in a poem called "Wild Gift," and that poem is more a traditional narrative. The original title of "Wild Gift" was "Fixing (Reprise)" but I already had a poem in the book called "Luckless Age (Slight Return)" so I thought maybe I was better off limiting myself to one inside reference to 1960s classic albums per book.

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

Again, the answer varies. When I was eighteen, I had this horrific summer job raising money for progressive political organizations. One night after work, a few of us went out for beers in the Georgetown section of DC, and my boss, his name was Pete, said to me on the walk home, "You know, no one ever knocks on your door at three in the morning with a twelve-pack once you’re married and 26." And he said it with the most complete air of defeat I’d ever heard. Many years later, as a grad student at Iowa, those 3 a.m. visits and phone calls were a part of the landscape. After one particularly brutal workshop, a guy named Thomas Derr came up to me and quoted a sentence from one of my stories back at me. And he said, "Anybody who can write a sentence like that is going to go a long way." Of course, there might have been beer involved in this discussion, but I took it to mean this: if one person can read this and want to share it with someone in the middle of the night, then maybe I’ve done my job. Also, if you are knocking on the door at 3 a.m., you damn well better not come empty handed.

What is American about this poem?

It’s pretty much all-American I think, with all the contradictions that implies. For all of the contemporary discussions about what America is and isn’t, I think it’s important to remember that we are a nation built on a foundation of shame. When John Winthrop gave his sermon to the members of the Massachusetts Bay company, he wasn’t speaking to victims of persecution or even idealists who saw themselves as the foundation of the American project. Rather, the Puritans were people who believed that the Church of England and the Crown were possessed of a decaying moral authority that would soon be insufficient to govern. Even at the remove of four centuries, we are still shackled to that shrill Puritan voice in our national dialogue. The voice that tells this poem struggles with his own shame, but in his heart, he knows everyone else has such secrets, too.

Alexandra Teague

Alexandra Teague’s first book, Mortal Geography (Persea 2010), won the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2011 California Book Award. Her poetry has also appeared in Best American Poetry 2009, Best New Poets 2008, and many journals. She was a 2006-08 Stegner Fellow and the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. After years in the Bay Area, she will begin in the Fall as Assistant Professor of Poetry at The University of Idaho.


ADJECTIVES OF ORDER

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering

streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard,
she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade

is essential to bread. He copied this down, but
he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before
older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern

downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern.
When he first arrived, he did not know enough English
to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part

of Lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic
leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color.
Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding

and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal.
After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years
of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

A colleague at City College of San Francisco had told me this story about one of her students, and it really resonated with me; I was working on a series of grammar poems, and I hadn't yet written anything about this kind of situation (which is fairly common): a teacher and student trying to navigate difficult emotions and history, while simultaneously navigating the challenges of language acquisition itself. So I wanted to write about the story, but I waited about a year before I tried. I actually began with the current opening line, which was my entry into the story: the thing that I knew most clearly about it.

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

The poem went through about three main drafts, though I also revise a lot line-by-line as I'm going. I wrote a draft, but the pieces weren't quite fitting, and I realized, after setting the poem aside overnight, that I didn't know enough about the fall of Saigon to really imagine the student's physical experience. So I did a little research and added some of the images in the first few lines, and also spent more time with a grammar book finding specific usage samples. Then I workshopped that draft in Eavan Boland's Stegner workshop a week or so later and got feedback--including some wonderful suggestions about cuts and ways to get more energy between the sentences and lines, and a few parts that I should invert or otherwise alter. I also received a few suggestions that I didn't take: such as cutting the teacher out of the poem entirely! I think I did the main revisions within a week or so of receiving feedback, which is pretty quick by my revision standards, but I was lucky that the critique had helped me to clearly re-see the poem.

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

I think my poems (or at least the ones that end up somewhere) are always a combination of "received" surprises, and sweat and tears. And also, as I said above, sometimes good advice from others. I think that people often think about inspiration occurring at the start of the poetic process—with some brilliant idea for a poem. But I feel as if the words and images and thoughts in the poem inspire me as I get into the poem: that they lead me places I wouldn't have expected. That's a lot of the joy of writing for me, really. And, of course, in order to have those moments that feel as if I'm being led, I have to try a lot of things and have them not work, and generally muck around in the language and emotions and ideas for a long time.

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

Based on the feedback in the Stegner workshop, I consciously jarred some of the pieces against one another more and made a few parts more elliptical. I can't remember what I originally wrote, but I know that "He wanted to know why the order could not be altered" was a streamlining.

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

No, the drafting process I described above is fairly typical. Some poems arrive faster than others, or begin with a line that I have in mind or have read somewhere, but others, like "Adjectives" come from a story that has stayed on my mind and that I'm exploring by writing about it.

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

The poem was accepted by "Slate" maybe about six months after I wrote it.

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

Sometimes a poem feels ready enough to send out within a few days of finishing the final draft; sometimes I wait for a year or more. In this case, the poem felt ready pretty quickly.

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

Well, the basic story about the student is true. And the examples of teaching grammar are from real grammar books and my own experience as a grammar and composition teacher. But the exact conversation between those two parts is invented; I wasn't really there when my colleague was teaching this particular student, so I had to imagine and distill the interaction.

Is this a narrative poem?

Definitely, though it's also a poem about the slipperiness of language, which in some way works against straight narrative.

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

I don't remember specifically; I was reading pretty voraciously throughout the Stegner workshop, but I'd be wary to point to a particular influence on this particular piece. It's definitely been shaped by Eavan Boland's critique, as I said above, so maybe I should list her.

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

I don't have a specific audience in mind, but I do think (particularly in later drafting) about the voices of peers and teachers—what they would be likely to ask me, or not let me get away with (because it's good to have people stop us from getting away with things that we really suspect we shouldn't be getting away with—easy lines, weak descriptions or structure, etc.). And I really listen to my poems as I write them; I write a lot by ear in terms of rhythms and what sounds true to me. And I ideally try to write poems that I could read aloud to smart, emotionally-engaged listeners, and have them feel a connection.

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, as I said, I workshopped it with the wonderful Stegner fellows; I still get together with some of the former fellows every few months to critique poems. And I show my work to my partner, the songwriter Dylan Champagne, who is also a wonderful critic.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This poem's biggest distinction is probably in the attention it's received. It's the poem I'm most often asked about, or asked to read—the one that the most people seem to connect with. This means a lot to me since it's a story that matters to me as a person, and as a teacher and writer who is really interested in language's capacities and limitations. In some ways, I'm still surprised that this poem speaks to the experience effectively—since it's not my personal experience, and I certainly worried about its accuracy and about representing a Vietnamese man who had gone through these experiences that are so far removed from my own (though emotionally resonate for me, both as someone who is concerned about war and violence, and as someone with several close friends who are Vietnamese and whose families went through the war).

What is American about this poem?

This poem seems very American to me in its story: a teacher who is a native speaker of English working with an immigrant student who is struggling with the language and with expressing really powerful experiences that the teacher only knows about through history books. The community college system in this country is fairly unique in the range of ages and backgrounds that its students have, which allows this sort of intersection of languages and cultures.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This particular poem feels more finished; actually, most of my poems that I send out or otherwise show to people feel fairly finished, though there's a fine line. There's always another way the poem could have been written. And sometimes I think for years that a poem is finished, only to revise it later. Or I think it's "abandoned," only to later decide that it was really finished.