Judson Mitcham

Judson Mitcham's work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Georgia Review, Hudson Review, and Harper's. He has published three collections of poems: Somewhere in Ecclesiastes, which won the Devins Award; This April Day; and A Little Salvation: Poems Old and New. His novels, The Sweet Everlasting and Sabbath Creek, were both awarded the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Mitcham has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and he has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. He taught psychology at Fort Valley State University for many years, and he now teaches creative writing at Mercer University. Mitcham is the current poet laureate of the state of Georgia. He lives in Macon with his wife, Jean. They have two children and three grandchildren.


THE MULTITUDE

The woman in the airplane wanted
to talk about Christ. I did not.
I raised my magazine. She continued, saying Christ
promised heaven to the thief
who believed while nailed to the cross.
The clouds looked solid far beneath. She began
the story of her life, and I stopped her
as politely as I could, saying please, right now,
I’d simply like to read. And for a while,
she did keep quiet, then she asked
if I’d ever really given Christ a chance, so I tried
telling her a joke, chose the one
about the Pope and Richard Nixon in a rowboat.
She discovered nothing funny in the story.
Jesus fed the multitude, she said. 
I looked around to find an empty seat.
There wasn’t one. She asked me if I knew
about the sower and the seed; about Zaccheus;
Legion and the swine; Mary Magdalene;
Lazarus; the rich young ruler. And I did,
I knew about them all. I told her yes,
sweet Jesus; got the stewardess
to bring another bourbon; tried to buy
the missionary one, but she declined. 
And when the plane set down,
I’d escaped up the aisle, made the door,
and started walking fast toward the baggage claim,
when I saw them, all at once, on the concourse:
thousands I would never see again, who'd remain
nothing in my life, who would never have names;
and I realized I'd entertained—strangely,
and for no good reason I could see—
the hope of someone waiting there
who loved me.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem came together when I combined elements from two other attempts at poems, neither of which ever seemed right, so it began as a reworking of other material. It appears that I first put it into my computer in 2002.

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

I write poems in longhand, and they exist first as prose fragments. I don't concern myself with lines until I have some sense of what the language of the poem might be and where it might be going. I don't mean by this that I hack up the prose fragments into lines, but that I tend to think things through in prose and then think things through again, but this time trying to find the right music for a poem. When I start putting the poem into lines, I tend to rewrite over and over from the beginning, so it's hard to know exactly what constitutes a draft. By the time I come up with something that might be called a whole poem, I've usually gone through many versions. Then I'll type it up and revise it on the computer. In this case, from the first typed draft to the published version, there appear to be eleven revisions.

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

I've always liked Pasteur's "Chance favors the prepared mind." I'm not sure I know what inspiration is. The feeling of inspiration has proved notoriously unreliable for me, and has not given me my best results. It seems to me that if you work hard at writing, work hard at seeing what language can discover, you are in the habit of trying out connections to see if they might mean something on another level. Sometimes such a connection comes to you, and perhaps you feel inspired, but it's probably unlikely that you would have made that connection if you had not been in the habit of working and looking at things in a certain way.

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

I didn't employ any formal technique. I tend to write lines of three or four beats. James Dickey talked about his "thump-loving American ear," and I guess that’s what I have. This poem seemed to work best without stanzas. Most of the lines end on words of one syllable, and in this poem, as in most of my poems, the last word of the poem recalls an earlier sound somewhere in the last few lines.  

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

I finished it while putting together the manuscript of my second book, This April Day, which had been taken by Anhinga Press, and I decided to include it in that book, which came out a year later.

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?

Well, I stuck this one right into a book, and it seems to have worked out all right, but my experience is that my poems are almost always significantly improved by my taking a fresh look at them after some time has passed. I go through long stretches of sending out nothing, even when I have poems that I think are finished. I'm under no pressure to publish, and the world is not clamoring for more poems from me.

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

I grew up in the Baptist church, reading the Bible and listening to sermons. My family would discuss scripture at length. We loved the old hymns, which are still a source of comfort and strength for me, as is the King James Bible. I’ve never encountered a proselytizing woman on an airplane, but it is true that many, many times in my life I have been presented with the Good News in an aggressive, accusatory way, a sort of hectoring piety. I did draw on the experience of sitting next to a woman on a plane and listening to her and her companion exchange smug assertions about the true nature of God. And I do remain, as I've been all my life, strangely dismayed by the understanding that the inner lives of other people are bound to be as vast and complicated as my own. William James has a wonderful essay on this phenomenon, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings." The mystery of otherness is greatly multiplied in crowds, and where better to see a crowd than the Atlanta airport? Many times, I've exited a plane, walked out into the multitude, and felt an acute aloneness.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes.

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

I don't recall. Too many influences to name.

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

I think of other poets whose work I care about.

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've found it helpful to have one good reader look at poems that I think are finished, but not at early drafts, when the poem is still trying to become something. When I've shared early drafts, I've tended to become defensive, but if I think the poem is finished, if I think I have done my best, then I'm able to listen. I may not agree, but I'll listen to that trusted reader, and if changes are needed, I'll probably make them.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don't think it differs in any significant way.

What is American about this poem?

That might be for someone who is not American to say. I'm not sure I can step back and look at it in that light.

Dora Malech

Dora Malech is the author of two books of poems, Say So and Shore Ordered Ocean. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Letters& Commentary, Poetry London, and Best New Poets, among other publications. She has served as a Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College of California, in addition to teaching at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters in New Zealand, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards that include a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Writers’ Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.  In addition to writing and teaching, she makes visual art and directs the Iowa Youth Writing Project, a language arts outreach organization.


MAKEUP

My mother does not trust

women without it.

What are they not hiding?

Renders the dead living

and the living more alive.

Everything I say sets

the clouds off blubbering

like they knew the pretty dead.

True, no mascara, no evidence.

Blue sky, blank face. Blank face,

a faithful liar, false bottom.

Sorrow, a rabbit harbored in the head.

The skin, a silly one-act, concurs.

At the carnival, each child's cheek becomes

a rainbow. God, grant me a brighter myself.

Each breath, a game called Live Forever.

I am small. Don't ask me to reconcile

one shadow with another. I admit—

paint the dead pink, it does not make

them sunrise. Paint the living blue,

it does not make them sky, or sea,

a berry, clapboard house, or dead.

God, leave us our costumes,

don't blow in our noses,

strip us to the underside of skin.

Even the earth claims color

once a year, dressed in red leaves

as the trees play Grieving.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote “Makeup” in Fall 2003. I went back to the notebook in which I was writing at that time, and the poem keeps company with other lines and drafts of poems that grapple with similar materials (mortality, a shifting season, artifice, expectations, family).

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

I’m glad I went back and looked at my notebook to verify my response to this question, since I completely misremembered. Most of my poems (especially at that time) are the result of a magpie’s process of collecting shiny bits of language and observation. I go back through my notebook and begin the process of revision by piecing together these fragments, puzzling them into form. That was how I misremembered “Makeup” happening, but in fact, I basically wrote the first draft of the poem from beginning to end. It was definitely a rough draft, but its motion was there in its entirety. I think it must have been a month or so before that first draft went through a few more drafts to reach an almost-final draft, and I always keep worrying at individual word choices and so forth long after that.

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

I do believe in inspiration, but not in the sense of the poem as a “gift” from elsewhere (though I won’t rule anything out; I just don’t want to flatter myself that whatever or whoever’s “elsewhere” would give me the time of day). I suppose I think of inspiration as an incredibly active kind of attention, a radical receptivity. So while certain poems, like “Makeup,” come to me in a rough form but whole, I think they still require revision and work to live up to whatever “inspiration” or impulse occasioned their beginnings. I also think that “Makeup” in particular was a poem that I had been “working” on in my mind for pretty much my whole life, in the sense that its concerns came directly from my life. While we think of the “first draft” as the first words written on the page, a poem often starts gestating in the life and the mind and the body long before a word makes it to the paper. 

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

I don’t know how consciously I was making formal decisions, but I was definitely concerned with questions of form in general at that point in my writing life, and I’m sure that those concerns shaped the poem. Actually, I was just about to transition into writing much more “formal” poems (in the sense of “received” form or “traditional” prosody) a few months later, and I feel like I was already starting to explore in that direction. In my notebook, I have some notes a few pages before “Makeup” about stichic poetry versus strophic poetry, and I think the move to a stanzaic form in revision was something that was important to the intentions of the poem, in terms of exploring art and artifice, and employing rhetorical moves to build an argument of sorts.

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

Four years. The poem first appeared in the May 2007 issue of Poetry.

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

It varies. I often wait for poems to have company before I send them off into the world. I don’t necessarily need to write three or four more poems “like” each other, but I kind of like to send poems out together that, if by some stroke of luck, got published alongside each other, would resonate in some way. So one poem might sit for a year or two waiting for kindred poems, but I don’t have any strict rules, just practicality and instinct in this regard.

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

I see this poem as fact. I mean, there’s personification, metaphor, and so forth, but I don’t know what to say besides that there are the way in which I tell the truth.

Is this a narrative poem?

No, I feel like it’s more in the kind of lyric, conceit-driven tradition of the Metaphysical poets. That said, there are definitely “characters” with needs and wants and fears and desires, there are conflicts of sorts (between individuals, between individual and nature, between individual and society), and there’s some sense of “resolution”; many of the “traditional” elements of narrative are there.

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins. ElizabethBishop. John Donne. William Shakespeare. Federico García Lorca.

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

Well, if this poem is “fact,” as I just claimed, I’m talking to God about cosmetics. So there’s that.

Really though, an ideal reader for me would be anyone open to the possibility of pleasure in language and attention and uncertainty.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s less “dense” in terms of language and imagery than some of my other poems. It risks certain sentimentalities (writing about my mother; talking to God) that I should probably risk more often.

What is American about this poem?

The questions of artifice, presentation, and cultural expectations feel American to me. Also, I think Americans (and yes, this is an overgeneralization), are squeamish about accepting death and decay as part of a life cycle. We hide death away like it’s shameful. We pretty it up if we have to look at it at all.  Of course, there’s a loss and an estrangement there. That said, I don’t think poetry’s strong suit is getting up on a soapbox and espousing a firm opinion like “artifice is bad.” I write poetry to complicate my point of view, or dignify the world’s inherent complications. This poem entertains the possibility of a kind of redemptive artifice. (I mean, I think perhaps poetry’s a kind of redemptive artifice?) I’ve had people read this poem or hear me read it and tell me stories about a loved one who insisted on red lipstick on her deathbed; there’s often an eye roll or a smile that accompanies the story, but there’s something there that’s worth noticing. Now that I think of it, those stories haven’t all been from Americans, so perhaps it’s generational? Or simply human? “American” is as complicated as “artifice,” or anything else worth thinking about, I suppose.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

A bit of both.