William Wright

William Wright is author of seven collections of poetry, including Tree Heresies (Mercer University Press, forthcoming in spring 2015), Night Field Anecdote (Louisiana Literature Press, 2011), and Bledsoe (Texas Review Press, 2011). Wright is Series Editor and Volume Co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, a multivolume series celebrating contemporary writing of the American South. Additionally, Wright serves as Assistant Editor for Shenandoah, translates German poetry, and is editing three volumes, including Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry (with Daniel Cross Turner). Wright won the 2012 Porter Fleming Prize in Literature, and has recently published in The Kenyon Review, Oxford American, The Antioch Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Poetry Review.

BARN GOTHIC

Red as a cardinal in winter, it leans ruined
in the gray field, form falling against a sycamore,
its older, wiser wife.

Closer in, a fox den
in the hay tunnel light where green eyes haunt
the nearby woods and stars cast silver

glyphs on the rotting floor:
Rain has felled the structure’s roof.
Here horses pitched and leaned

into chaff, awaiting work,
this room still alive in smells of oil, dung,
and cedar-heart. Swallows twig

warped boards, black widows
float, wait
in corners to wrap and gore what passes.

Wasps caulk the loft’s cracked seams,
and mice hide from owls, eyes,
their lives the barn’s heart

beating behind the walls.

What to name it but beauty
this world craves, but will never allow,

not wholly,

the horsemint scent that finds
the barn’s chinks. Moonflower

gripping, twining

the rusted scythe and the burled
yawn of the caved-in door. Or the beauty earth

sculpts of us without consent,

remnants hallowed, restored.
Autumns, when the air shucks

summer rain to hollow starriness,

the moon strikes the barn just right:
White moths hoard here where hanging

lanterns have long been snuffed,

where the only fires are the moths themselves,
their flock  come to love this place and perhaps
the stars, too, all pure, radiant, dying.

When was this poem composed? 

The final draft of the poem was completed on 8/10/2012.

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

About fourteen drafts – approximately a month.

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 that something inexplicable lies at the center of our creative selves, though I believe mostly that to write good poetry is difficult; I feel the same about any good writing. Nonetheless, parts of me during the process seem to fade: I liken it to staring at something for so long that it takes on an otherworldly luminosity—the world that surrounds it seems to diminish.

But in order for the poem as a whole to glow, I have to go back and stare at it—and every word that makes it—until it seems complete.  

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

I am a huge fan of sonic lushness—of even excessive explorations of sound. I am also haunted by the fact that a poem is only as good as its weakest line. So even in short-lined poems such as “Barn Gothic,” I’m perhaps overly conscious of imbuing each line with sonic dynamism. The result is often that my poems, relative to other the work of others now being published, appear (or sound) antiquated. 

One fellow poet recently wrote to another fellow poet that I was a poet of “old traditions.” I’m not sure what this means, other than to suggest that I am conscious of form to the degree that my work sounds “old” not in its lack of originality (I hope), but in its prolixity or its ornamentation.

I don’t subscribe to any notion that I’ve found my “voice,” if one ever finds such a thing, but in “Barn Gothic,” as in most of my work, I do think of each line as its own micro-poem. I want the lines to be more than coherent units of syntactic meaning—I want them to be evocative in and of themselves. This isn’t anything groundbreaking or original, but it is the current center of my technical application.

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

My process involves symptoms of very real neuroses—part of which include pacing around and biting my nails, nodding my head, and uttering to myself. “Barn Gothic” involved a lot of this, as I remember.

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

Eight months in journal form. The poem will appear in Tree Heresies (Mercer University Press), which will be out in spring of 2015, about three years after I wrote “Barn Gothic.”

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, but with “Barn Gothic,” I revised every day. Often with poems, though, I let them sit for months and even years. Some I come back to and think, “I wrote this? I’m impressed with a self that no longer exists!” Most of the time I come back and think, “I wrote this? Wow, I was a really bad writer! Perhaps I still am!” Then I ball the latter poems up and throw them in the ever-overflowing wastebasket.

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

The factual element of the poem lies in its sensory images: There are old, rain-warped barns in the middle of a fallow fields in Edgefield County, South Carolina. I used to take walks at night there, and I came upon one that seemed especially spectral. 

During clear nights in autumn and winter, when the atmosphere is dry and the sky is strewn with stars, these barns are illuminated with an intensity that resembles bioluminescence—or, more threateningly—the glow we associate with intense radioactivity. I was once (and only once) brave enough to walk into such a place, and I heard things—scrapes and squeals behind the walls. 

The factual begins to decay in this poem, though, when the imagination implants the horses and the sensorial engagements with another time: the oil, the manure, the cedar tang in the air. The scrapes and squeals and little pops and tics of the structure falling slowly, slowly, but inevitably, led to the imagined work that took place in the barn a century earlier—the metal scrapings and all the agrarian sounds associated with another time. 

Is this a narrative poem?

I would say so, yes—or at least it could be argued that the narrative element plays as important a role as the language that renders it. It’s a story about time—or Time with a capital T, if I might borrow the motif from Robert Penn Warren—and the characters—the barn, the sycamore, the horses who are no more, and the creatures that inhabit the abandoned structure now, as well as the moths, all play important roles in the story, of course, but the presiding character that acts just behind the perception is Time—the character that introduces and is the beginning and the end.

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

I was listening, every night, to a relatively rare reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, one of the few novels I’ve read more than twice. During this time, I was revisiting poems from Earth Elegy by Margaret Gibson, as well as James Wright’s Above the River: The Complete Poems. Finally, I was engaged in translating Ernst Stadler’s poetry, a German contemporary of the Austrian Expressionist Georg Trakl. Stadler’s poetry, like Trakl’s, is often populated with dark imagery; however, unlike Trakl’s dreamlike image clusters, Stadler’s work is far denser, with more explicitly emotional resonances. He’s not quite the poet Trakl is, but he has a baroque quality that’s nonetheless very interesting. Something of these elements must have combined to create a bit of “Barn Gothic.” I’m not sure.

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

I want an openminded and openhearted reader. I want a reader who understands that contemporary poetry need not necessarily be completely free of ornament. Most readers of poetry are ideal—at least those I’ve encountered. There are lots of kind people out there.

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 work with three other poets during “marathons” of writing—which take place three or four months every year. During these months the four of us write poems every day, and to be accountable, we send the daily poem to the other three. None of us are obliged to send comments about each other’s work—just the work itself. “Barn Gothic”—at least its first draft—came during one of these.

To be honest, I don’t get much feedback on my poems at all, but I do share the poems with a small group of folks who are self-destructive enough to write poems every day during 1/3 of the year. 

During the months between these marathons we all revise at our own paces. 

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours? 

I think it’s a bit more kempt than other poems. The lines are meant to be a bit “quicker,” and I want the end words to be evocative such that they are a smaller poem within the bigger form. This is a bad answer, though, as the latter point is something I strive for in every poem. 

What is American about this poem? 

The poem attempts to capture another time in American life—one (on the surface) perhaps partially indistinguishable from other agrarian cultures.

 “Barn Gothic” attempts to acknowledge our history, but it’s an ideal history if only read in that interstitial way. It’s more concerned with the elemental. It attempts to capture and re-awaken something of the past while acknowledging that all moments—moments long to come—will be re-scripted as history. And that the notion of the past itself will be consumed. 

Is that American? I don’t know. 

Was this poem finished or abandoned? 

I’m one of those guys—for better or worse—who believes a poem is never finished, and so, alas, “Barn Gothic” is constantly being abandoned.

Katie Peterson

Katie Peterson is the author of three collections of poetry, This One Tree (2006), Permission (2013) and The Accounts (2013), which won the Rilke Prize from University of North Texas. She has taught at Bennington College, Deep Springs College, and Tufts University. She is currently teaching courses on Jane Austen and Homer at Deep Springs College. She starts teaching at UC Davis in January of 2015. 

CONFESSION

A stripe of asphalt keeps the pond,

at the municipal park

in the capital of the state, in check. I went

there, going and coming

from your dying, to watch the ducks. 

I mean I went there

to see a friend. On the way

to him I stopped at an orchard

and pistachios the color of oranges

are what I bought.

Kindness to those who keep

the sweetest secrets and long

life. Now that you

are dead, I can tell you

he was not a friend. 

When we met, I could forget

you would not be.

Elsewhere the orders

kept their orders through the fall. 

I rose from the bed, the spring dismantled, he and I met

in secret and we spoke of how we wanted

to die like it was work. 

Awake, I said, yes, driving him

on a road through green fields.

Painlessly, he said. 

When was this poem composed? How did it start? 

Looking over the poem, I hear my friend Kayla’s voice saying “those pistachios are the color of oranges!” She drove with me from my parents’ house in Menlo Park, California, to Deep Springs College in Inyo County where I was teaching. The drive crosses the Central Valley (where I live and work now, interestingly) where abundant fruit and nut stands dot the highways. What she said stuck in my head for obscure reasons. Years later, I think it was Spring of 2010, I wrote this poem in Cambridge, Massachusetts, staring at the orange house behind mine on Walden Street. That detail came first and that experience. I had a sense it could be used in some story, almost like Persephone’s pomegranate seeds - a fairy tale detail, a ticket. When I began working with the detail, the memory, and a poem, leapt up around it. 

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

In my head the poem still undergoes revision. I question the efficacy of the third stanza. My trusted readers advocated for its removal (and I agreed and yet left it in, both of and against my will somehow). The third stanza has nothing to do with the narrative of the poem. But the speaker addresses the “you” and tells that person “you are dead.” “Now that you are dead,” the speaker says. How can she say this? How dare she? How is it possible? How can one address someone who isn’t there? It is the only moment in the book where the speaker admits the “you” is dead. To say it more contextually, it is the only moment in the book where I call my mother “dead.” But the poem taken apart from the book, it doesn’t matter who the “you” is, it feels like some demented love triangle out of context. In a sense this is the most important stanza in the whole book. How casual and callous the speaker is, “now that you are dead.” How dare she. 

I think it got written rather quickly in 2010 and then the tinkering took hold. That’s how I think about revisions of syntax, like tiny semi-incompetent elves with outdated tools trying to beat gravity back into the top or straightness back into the train track. But I always print the poem out again and do revisions in pen, even if it’s just one phrase or a comma, it’s such a waste of paper, but I have to see myself correcting myself to hear myself correcting myself. I remember pulling out some prepositional phrases and putting some back in. And then, at the end, the problem of this stanza in the middle, which kept me from shutting down the poem into final form for one long week in the Fall of 2012. Some friends weighed in, I think, about this stanza problem. I remember that we agreed to cut it, and then we agreed to disobey ourselves and leave it in. 

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

I wonder if now when we think of “sweat and tears” in poetry what we mean by that is diligent crafting. But there is another form of this – the experience that went into the poem in the first place, the sweat and tears of everyday living. And the sweat and tears of that which you need not search for, life experience, which seems to find you, wreck and ruin you, and then expect you to get up in the morning. And so many people are simply at the mercy of the way the world makes them feel, they don’t need deaths or love affairs to feel a little wrecked. I fear I am starting to sound Romantic and maybe I am. But a tiny poem cannot hope to measure up to the depth of life for the poet. It may be true for the reader in a different context, the way the right song can be a balm on experience, the way the right poem can become like a prayer. But for the poet – the sweat and tears of experience can feel greater than the slim volume in front of you. My friend Katie Ford reminded me of Flannery O’Connor’s thought in her recent Prayer Journal, that many writers wish for the writing that would come from suffering, but not as many wish for the suffering. I would substitute the word “experience,” I suppose, and maybe not assume suffering to always be the current of it, but this sense of things feels true to me. 

As for inspiration, it’s never meant much to me in terms of the account I myself make of writing poems, maybe because it’s a religious word and I’m essentially still a religious person (I was raised Catholic and continue to practice, if haphazardly). I relate more to the sense that poems can occur like dreams, sometimes, with their coordinates born in some place your imagination has outsourced its labor to, so it doesn’t feel like yours, and there’s some lovely and strange ease about that. This poem’s details don’t belong together in real life and never did, but they found themselves together here. 

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

At the time I was working on poems with at least two currents of voice, poems I called “arguments” because they had two sides (there are several of these in The Accounts). But they were not necessarily two sides of the same argument. The compulsively self-correcting, authentically evading movements of the poem have some kinship with this. I like using stanzas because they imply containment, they feel natural to me, like paragraphs, but the containment usually doesn’t exist, as it doesn’t here. 

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

I remember I was sleeping with someone who slept late. For whatever reason it enraged me that he did that. Those hours of my resentment turned into this golden writing time, between the time I woke up and the time he woke up. Funny how something so upsetting at the time feels now like a gift. 

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

I finished it as I finished the manuscript, though clearly I am not finished with it (see question #2 above). I published it in the book but not in any journal, at least I don’t think so. Chicago took the book pretty quickly. Honestly, I’m not sure I would have sent it out to a journal. My feelings about self-disclosure had such defense and tenderness then, which I feel like I’ve gotten over, though who knows. 

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? 

As long as possible? Is that an answer? I should probably send out more work, I’m working on it, it’s a resolution. It’s really not something to do with not wanting a final form or not wanting to commit, it’s more to do with sending things out interfering with the state of writing which is for me a state of private pleasure and meaningful freedom. I have been honored this year that people have asked me for work (Maureen McLane at GREY, Elisabyth Hiscox at Third Coast, James Allen Hall at Cherry Tree, Robin Ekiss at Zyzzyva) and I think I feel accountable to people, and desirous of making them happy, and in need of their respect because they are really good poets, all the people I mentioned, so it made me happy to send them work, and further delighted me that they actually took it. I don’t have any rules about this, I go into it haphazardly with a complicated mixture of desire for privacy and desire for recognition. It confuses and bothers me. 

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

After New Issues published my first book, I was having dinner with my parents and they wanted to talk about the poems. In one of the poems my mother is asleep and as I remember I say “I very well may have been happy then.” It was one of my earliest memories, my mother being asleep on a green quilt in the yard and me being awake. My parents both insisted on questioning the truth of the facts in several of the poems, including that one. Finally, my mother said to me, “You know that poem where I was asleep? I wasn’t asleep in that poem.” I considered this a victory; she realized she had to battle me inside my poem as opposed to outside of it. 

Is this a narrative poem?

I often write poems where I try to tell a story and fail. I suspect this poem falls into that category. One of my favorite poems is “Directive” by Robert Frost – I admire the way that poem keeps saying it’s going forward (progress! American productivity! history marching on! joyfully moving forward into a better world!) while psychologically going backward, staying unhelpfully put, until its conclusion is gorgeously complete and chastened and strange: “Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” I am aware of a philosophical position in which lyric poetry must somehow resist or fight against narrative. But a fragment of a story has always seemed to me the most resonant and romantic thing, like a love letter or a lock of 19^th century hair or a trapped butterfly or something. In fiction the story itself has the meaning. In poetry the story gets schooled by music, and the predicament is whether the story can stand up to music, make music, whether the story squares with language’s own story. Often it doesn’t. It’s the struggle between the mind and the body in a sense, the struggle between narrative and form, or maybe more truly, the struggle between will and reality, thinking and matter. Narrative poems tend to ask us to live in ruins and they foreground memory not just as a requirement of the poem but as an anxious concern. Another way of explaining this is that I love stories but I hate plots. 

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

I was on the same fellowship as Jericho Brown when I wrote this poem, and his sense of melody based on repeated syntactical patterning, and the correction of errors by the self or by others may have schooled my ear here. 

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

This question is so difficult, it makes me feel like kind of a difficult person to answer it the way I want to. But don’t you think the reader is obsolete to the poet? Not to the poem, of course, surely not. But to the poet? This poem is addressed to my dead mother and concerns a love affair, but is that the point of the poem? Is my dead mother my reader because I have addressed her? Surely not. And yet she’s addressed. So what do I want from my reader regarding this poem besides his or her prurient curiosity, that overhearing of something? I am reading Spring and All this fall with some good friends out here at Deep Springs, and Williams writes, “I love my fellow creature. Jesus, how I love him: endways, sideways, frontways, and all the other ways – but he doesn’t exist! Neither does she. I do, in a bastardly sort of way,” and he goes on, “To whom am I addressed? To the imagination.” I’ve been thinking lately about poems where the reader is kind of obsolete, kind of not relevant, but that still includes the reader somehow, not as his or her self but as a more capacious and intimate imagination of whom he or she could be. I think of Dickinson who seemed to have an imagination of a past for her poems and of a future as well but not necessarily, and not always, a present for general readers other than her correspondents, or herself. And now, her poems have such an electric present, a constant and real present tense. The poet and critic Walt Hunter and I were talking about this and Walt speculated that maybe, right now specifically, 2014, we’re so invested in an idea of our own contemporaneousness, we like too much the idea of a reader right in front of us in time we forget that sometimes we make the possibility of a reader present, instead, in the space of the poem, in history or in the future. I hope for readers for my poems after I am dead; I adore the thought of people who are long dead (like Dickinson, or my mother) participating in my poems somehow even though they’re gone. When someone who is alive and present responds to one of my poems it seems like a lucky break, like fortune, a sudden and even random correspondence. 

I heard Louise Gluck once say that she imagined her reader as an individual, reading her book in one sitting. I think this is a beautiful idea and reveals more about her poems than it does about reading poetry books. In her work, there is a sense of companionship in solitude, the private life, what is invisible. There is something that feels disappearing to me in this vision of having the time and space to read an entire book in solitude. But poems have the ability to preserve forms of attention in this way, and to remind us they’re endangered. 

I suspect I must think about the reader under the radar of my imagination. I suspect I have a notion of providing for another person’s secrecy and solitude, of preserving a space for that provision within the poem. But it’s done selfishly, as a way of preserving a form of my own. 

I know there are other traditions of how you relate to a reader but this is mine. It comes from prayer and has one foot in silence. Saying who my reader is exactly feels to me like breaking the anonymity of someone in program, or outing someone, or telling someone else’s secret. If they want to just overhear the poems without telling me they’re reading them, if they don’t want to admit to anyone they’re reading them, if they’re ashamed of reading poetry at all, that’s all right also. To be included is a form of being addressed, and for many of us being included is far better than being broadcasted. 

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?

About this poem, I can’t totally recall. But first, I showed many of the poems in this book to Eli Schmitt, who took great care with their emotional content while also pushing me towards a better version of their music. Good friends Walt Hunter and Lindsay Turner, without whom I cannot imagine continuing to write, are often my first readers, and, in the case of this poem, my last. The playwright Brighde Mullins, luminous in her intelligence. And brilliant Sandra Lim, who held my hand through some last minute edits of individual poems. Now that I am in California these are all long distance relationships (though many of them were before). 

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours? 

I don’t know, but it might be more “confessional.” Though the title kind of keeps that from being true. If you call a poem “Confession” it can hardly be confessional. 

What is American about this poem? 

It’s about various lost places in the American landscape, and I am now noticing that it tries to fit a lot of landscapes in. It doesn’t really make sense that this is all one country but it’s what we’re stuck with unless various wacky splinter groups have their way and break us up. There’s some notion in the poem about bringing all the landscapes together. For a small poem, there’s a lot of space in it, an appetite for space. 

There’s a candor in the voice I think of as American but the candor is fake and faked and maybe that’s American too, the tone of talking like you’re only interested in the bottom line but you refuse to see the bottom line actually. A bluntness in the voice (and even the rhymes are blunt) I call the Californian accent, the vowels dropped and the consonants clipped. 

The lovers believe they can hide in the landscape somehow. They also believe they can orchestrate their own deaths like “work,” like something produced and effective and focused. And they are not even the ones dying. They are so dead to the world, luxuriating in each other and pistachios while someone dies. I did not write this as a fable about America but now, as the poem’s obsolete and irrelevant reader, rather than as its creator, I see how their affair happens in a ruined and beautiful place and they don’t care. Their desire is for secrecy not recognition. This may be our current political failing – we are always preserving individual rights at the expense of national needs, or at least, it seems so to me – but love is ruthless, and maybe American love is the most ruthless of all. 

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Definitely abandoned, though as the one who did the breaking up, I prefer to lie, and say it was mutual and amicable, our parting.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum’s first book of poems, Ghost Gear, was published in 2014 as a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize with the University of Arkansas Press. His anthology, Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days, was released in 2012, and he is series editor of the Floodgate Poetry Series: Three Chapbooks by Three Poets in a Single Volume. He is Founder and Editor of PoemoftheWeek.org, a freelance editor, and teaches college writing in Denver, CO. Read his work at AndrewMK.com.

SINGING 

What do I know of God but that each winter

I thank him for it? No spider webs

snagged in the bluestem, no horseflies at rest

in cones of henbit, no slug trails penned

to the cooled hoods of cars. We are creatures all,

stillborn to the language of split pine rails

standing in their pickets, ice glazed to bone

in every rut, the stealth tracks of jays a sleepless

ideography in the snow. But we are not

entirely alone between the mountain ranges,

in these hours condemned to darkness

before the sun gyres open the face of February

and the red flare of Mars grows dim.

Just outside my door, the burr oak is wintered

full of grackles— hundreds of coin-

eyed scuttles ornamenting its branches. Here,

my breath plumes gray. In the distance,

brush catches fire. The wind, if you watch,

is calligraphy; the stars in winter,

a weightlessness. The grackles are doors,

rasping their flight plans limb to limb.

The grackles are doors, some limned with light,

others black. Rising, my arms have long

been open. Stepping across these thresholds,

I step across these thresholds. Singing, I sing.

When was this poem composed? How did it start? 

"Singing" is one of the only "intentional" poems in Ghost Gear. By “intentional” I mean it's one of the few poems I wrote in the book with a specific goal in mind. It's also the last poem I wrote for Ghost Gear even though it's the book's opening poem. 

I wrote "Singing" with the goal of announcing to the reader much of what Ghost Gear is about: that desire to know how the world functions while recognizing that this is probably impossible—thus this notion of only knowing God in the face of absence, thus the notion of stepping (as I step) from the human world to the animal world, from the world of the present to the world of the past, from the world in front of us to the world of the imagination, the world within. 

"Singing" also does the job of letting the reader know from page one the sort of poet I am. I love music. I love the image. I love metaphor. I love tension. I call poems like this "thesis poems." Whenever I say this aloud (or even now in the student center over a McDouble sans pickles), I instinctively duck, fearing some poet across the room will have slung a piece of rotting fruit in my direction. "Thesis poem?" Oxymoron. Heresy. Sacrilege! But why not? Ghost Gear is a book of poems, not a collection. Like a thesis in an essay, I wanted the first poem to let the reader know what they were in for and what to expect. 

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

I wrote "Singing" in fifty eight drafts over the winter of 2007/2008 when I was finishing up my first draft of Ghost Gear. After that, I revised it somewhere around fifty more times as I revised the book itself. The last significant edit to "Singing" looks to have been made in early 2012, right before the book was picked up by the University of Arkansas Press. And I of course made a few micro-edits to it before the book went to press. 

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

Well, I certainly believe in inspiration, but I really don't care much about inspiration either. I was definitely inspired to write the poem, and I was certainly inspired by the poems I was reading around the time of its creation (Eric Pankey and Christianne Balk, in particular), and I was certainly inspired by the weather and those damned noisy grackles, but blood, sweat, tears, and lots of throwing shit at the wall is what made the poem. I think that when we receive a line (I have no idea, for example, where the first 1.5 lines came from), it's the result of the hard work that has come before. When we revise a poem, we're not rewriting it, we're practicing to write what eventually becomes the final version. You really can't "receive" practice; you have to actually go out there, put on your sleeve, and shoot three pointers until, in a game, you receive the made shot you've been working so tirelessly toward. I'd say inspiration is the byproduct of getting out there, of the blood, the sweat, and the tears. It's a tool just like all the others. 

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

"Singing" was always in these short, somewhat enjambed lines, and it was always one page. This is for two reasons: 1) I wanted a shortish poem of shortish lines to open the book, and 2) I absolutely loved the rhythm created by the break after "winter" and the repetition in the rhythm of "but that each winter / I thank him for it" somewhat indebted to that break. Once I had the first line set, it made perfect sense to work toward making each line similar in length. It's a quiet poem. It's a poem in which structure is crucial yet subtle. And it's a poem I wanted as many readers as possible to be drawn to, so I tried to keep its shape as simple and elegant as possible in order to attract as many eyes as possible. 

If we were to dig deeper into the poem and the individual lines, we'd see that each line operates like a little form in and of itself. While the poem overall is definitely free verse, the lines themselves and the play from line to line pays much more attention to form. Sam Hamill recently informed me this is called "organic verse," verse that grows out of some sort of structure but isn't just plain ol’ "free." That's how much of Ghost Gear operates. In the book, there isn't a single poem written in received form (unless you want to call a fourteen-line poem with a volta near the end a sonnet), but the guts of the poems reside in the shadows of form.

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

Here's how I write a poem: I start with something about which I have very little understanding. Then I write, write, write, revise, revise, revise until I do know what the hell is going on. Then I'm done. This one, like all the others, worked just like that. The only unusual thing was that I knew what I wanted it to do, but how…that was as mysterious as every other damned poem I try to put together and, in this case, finished.

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

Man, that took forever, and I remember being really baffled (and still am) by this. I was baffled because it seemed to do all the things people typically say a poem should do: It's short. It's simple. It's got beautiful language. It's clear. It's minimalistic. Yadda yadda yadda—it seemed to do everything everyone always told me good poems did but no one wanted it. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying I agree with any of this, but there’s no doubt that these sorts of poems get published more often than longer, more immediately complex poems. 

Anyway, it was picked up by Ascent in the Winter of 2012 after well over one-hundred submissions, which I'm very proud of. Good things often come to those who wait or, in my case, those who wait while they submit it over and over and over to endless frustration. But why some poems strike editors right away and others take however long they take is almost as mysterious to me as poetry itself. Luckily, I don’t worry about that so much anymore. I just try to write poems that do the things I think good poems do. Eventually, I/the poem fools someone into agreeing with me/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? 

It totally depends on the poem. Poems often feel finished one day only to need tweaking or major revision a few days later. I really don’t consider a poem “done” until it’s published in a book. Once it’s in a book, that’s sacred, that’s the poem you put out in the world with your name on the cover. Everything else is a little more fluid and anything can happen to a poem before that time, so I only send out poems I would be proud to publish. If anything in me says, “This poem isn’t ready for human eyes,” I wait until that voice shuts up or, occasionally, says the opposite, “Yo, dumb poet, I’m ready.” 

Just because a poem gets picked up by a journal doesn’t mean it’s finished or even that it’s any good. At the same time, I don’t think you have to think, “This poem is one-million percent done!” “This is the best poem I’ve ever written!” before you seek an audience for it either.

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

I’m not sure fact has much place in poetry. Facts are mostly bullshit anyway. For how many years did we publish textbooks that said Pluto is a planet? That was a fact; now it’s…something else. 

Clinging to facts or trying to reproduce factual reality doesn’t make much sense to me, and I’m not sure facts speak nearly as well to human experience as fiction anyway. Much of my poetry is fictional. Sure, the whole idea, the whole story is based in fact (usually…) but the details….who knows? And honestly, who cares? I don’t read poetry for factual truth; I read poetry for emotional truth. Emotional truth is just as slippery and incalculable, but I think it has a little more humility. It recognizes and pays homage to its innate inaccuracy. And it’s certainly more interesting. 

As for “Singing,” it’s actually pretty factual. There really was a burr oak full of grackles in my front yard, and I really do like winter and the silence it brings. And I really do wonder about God—this thing I don’t believe in literally but often find myself speaking to for reasons unknown. But are grackles really like “coin-eyed scuttles”? Emotionally, sure. Factually? I’m not sure there’s any way to determine that.

Is this a narrative poem?

Depends on what you mean by narrative. I consider this poem what I call a lyric-narrative, a poem that utilizes elements of narrative (the character of the speaker, setting, speech itself, etc…) as well as lyric (assonance, alliteration, imagination, etc…). Judy Jordan introduced me to this notion my first semester of graduate school, though I think I came up with the actual term. She learned it from Greg Orr’s essay, “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry,” which argues that all poets have a basic instinct (temperament) when it comes to the types of poems they write:

Different poets are born with different temperaments, and the nature of their temperament is shown in the work. Needless to say, since the sense of wholeness is perhaps the most essential defining quality of a poem, this form-giving gift is more important than any other a poet might possess. (269)

The notion of lyric-narratives is nothing new but placing a hyphen between the two terms (thus turning it into one term) and removing the s from “narratives” is a little different. It goes, more or less, like this: Sometimes, when we say “narrative poem,” we’re really saying “a poem that tells a story,” but narration doesn’t always tell a story. Narration is a mode of expression that uses narrative tools (characters, setting, conflict/resolution, other story-telling devices) and that tends to tell a story. In a lyric-narrative, a poet can deploy these tools to tell a story, but they can also use this stuff to meditate on, say, a blade of grass, without being purely lyrical. Adding narrative elements to a lyrical poem is a lot like writing a prose poem: most audiences recognize and are comfortable with prose. As a result, a prose poem is often more approachable. A lyric poem with zero narrative is, at least these days, pretty alien to most readers, even many poets. So adding narrative elements to a lyric poem can really open things up for the poet, the poem, and the reader.

Lyric-narrative works the other way as well, of course. A poet can take a straight narrative and utilize lyrical tools to make it resonate in a more visceral way, to get at that emotional truth we’ve been talking about in a way more similar to song, prayer. This is how many of the poems in Ghost Gear operate, and it’s what I think a large majority of really good poems do. They’re not 100% lyric or 100% narrative. They’re a cocktail of the two mixed just right.

This poem certainly doesn’t tell a story, but it uses narrative tools most readers recognize. Lyric-narrative, you could say, is a sort of little magic trick: the narrative tricks the reader into absorbing the lyric. This, above all else, I believe must be the primary mission of the poet: to get our lyrics down and to find a way for people to read them.

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

I always read while writing. I’m a bit of a method actor; if I can find some books to read that are in the mood/tone of what I’m writing, I’m all over it. In this case, I was reading Eric Pankey and Christianne Balk quite a bit. Both write about the natural world in lyric-narratives that are approachable yet mysterious and beautiful and meaningful at the same time. I was also reading Robert Wrigley, James Kimbrell, Judy Jordan, and Davis McCombs quite a bit, all poets who work a bit more in narrative like myself but are clearly in love with the short lyric as well. 

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

My ideal audience member is someone who thinks they hate poetry. I challenge every single poem I write to be clear and to be transformative. I want my poems to make basic, logical sense and to transport the reader from their subways, living rooms, classes. But I also challenge each poem to be, you know, an actual poem, not just a collection of easy-to-read lines that may or may not take the reader somewhere beyond themselves. It’s the complexity of the line and how each line works together that I think has the power to truly move and relocate the reader. But if the lines are too esoteric for the general reader to follow, I think you’ve lost the war before the battle’s even begun. What cracks me up about all of this is how often people say they don’t like poetry when they haven’t read a poem since sophomore year of high school. I’d hate poetry too if I stopped reading it at the age of sixteen. But it’s our job to thwart such beliefs. It’s our responsibility to, with our work, change minds. So it has to stand on its own, but it can’t just stand there. Am I doing that? Probably not. But I’d think myself a fraud if I didn’t try.

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?

Oh yeah, I workshopped this quite a bit with my peers and professors at Southern Illinois University Carbondale where I got my MFA. Judy Jordan was my primary mentor. Her fingerprints are all over Ghost Gear and “Singing,” but Rodney Jones and Allison Joseph and many of my peers (particularly Martin Call, Jenna Bazzell, Alexander Lumans, and Aaron Wheetley) helped me put this poem (and all the others in the book) together. 

I really believe that poetry is a collaboration with the world. The notion that we create this stuff in a vacuum is ridiculous. Could this poem have been written without me? Is “Singing” “my” poem? Sure. In a way. Some fool has to actually write down the words and make them work and such. But a poem doesn’t exist without a reader, and this poem wouldn’t have come to exist without SIUC’s MFA program and all the amazing people who fostered and supported me. So I rarely say a poem is mine. I much prefer to say a poem is ours. 

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s pretty short compared to most of the poetry I write but, otherwise, I’d say it’s pretty indicative of the Ghost Gear poems. I just finished the thirteenth draft of my second manuscript last Friday. It’s the first draft I’d really say is “complete” though I imagine it has quite a long way to go. Hell, it’s in all likelihood a total mess, but this draft is the first I’ve not felt queasy about. “Singing” really wouldn’t fit in this book, so I guess it’s different now that I’m working on a different book with a different tone and set of modes.

What is American about this poem? 

I couldn’t say. I’m an American writing in America about America, but I think this poem could take place anywhere. Sure, I imagine some of it is more American than, say, Lithuanian, but I’m no expert in either!

Was this poem finished or abandoned? 

Finished. I wouldn’t try to publish a poem I’d abandoned!

Emilia Phillips

Emilia Phillips is the author of Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013) and two chapbooks. Her poems appear in Agni, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She's received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, U.S. Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center. She is the 2013–2014 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, the prose editor of 32 Poems, and a staff member of the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

READING OVID AT THE PLASTIC SURGEON'S 

I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.

No one else with a book, the slick

weeklies gossip amongst

themselves on the side

tables as the ticker rolls the Dow

Jones down down down under

a profile of the marathon

bombers (the older, a boxer). Jove

argues for the removal of a race

of   peoples that do not please

him: What is past

remedy calls for the surgeon’s

knife. They will take a hunk of my

cheek (cancer) & though I can’t

see during the procedure, I imagine

the site as an apricot, bitten.

This is a survival mechanism —

romanticism. David says,

If you’re out

in public & you don’t want anyone

to talk to you, bring a book

of poetry. Even as I enter the confidence

of   the room, I avoid my reflection

in the window, for there, most

of all, I see myself as only I can,

as only the eye will have me —

as light, as light alone.

When was this poem composed? How did it start? 

I started the poem in June 2013, the same week I had the minor surgery referenced in the poem. While I was in the waiting room, the fraught juxtapositions (patients of cosmetic surgery with the marathon bombers with the rage of Jove with my own cancer) sent up a flare of meaningfulness. The first notes for the poem began with the line from the Metamorphoses. The first draft was only six or seven lines.

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

Two, and that's a rarity. I let the six or seven lines sit for a month. In July, I opened a new Word document and wrote the rest of the poem in one go.

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

"Inspiration" is a tricky word because it harbors mysticism, as if something external breathes an idea into us. 

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

The poem began in a single stanza and then moved into couplets. 

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

Well, other than the fact that it was written in so few drafts, no. 

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

Six months.

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

This poem didn't sit for very long. In fact, I sent it off later in July and Don Share accepted it within a couple of days.

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

Did I look at my reflection in the window? I'm not sure. It was a cloudy day and I looked out at some landscapers while I waited on the surgeon. I believe I invented that whole part about looking at my reflection in the window. But who knows?

The poem does leave out another incident that happened that day that I wrote into another poem I eventually scrapped. He injected lidocaine into my cheek and began to cut, but I could feel everything! He had to do two more injections before my face went numb. My mouth could barely move and yet he kept on talking to me. He asked me what subject I taught. I tried to say "poetry" but couldn't sound the "p" or "t." He couldn't understand me. I kept trying. Finally, when he understood, he burst out laughing, scalpel next to my cheek. Then he realized I was serious. "Oh," he said, "I didn't know anyone taught that anymore."

Is this a narrative poem?

It's narrative in the sense that there's a clear dramatic situation and there's a progression of moving from the waiting room to the exam room, but I think the poem's rooted in lyricism in that it shows how the mind works to create associations and reflects on oneself.

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

Besides Ovid? Otherwise, I don’t recall what I was reading.

David Wojahn is the “David” in the poem. 

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

Myself. (Is that navel gazing?) I guess I best know how I read and therefore try to address my own concerns and hope that appeals to others.

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?

It depends on how confident I am about any given poem. I tend to share things around when I feel less sure about the moves I'm making. I have several friends who are prompt and decisive readers with whom I share drafts. This poem wasn't shared until it was accepted for publication.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours? 

I don't often write poems that overtly begin out of a reading experience. It's a subject that I fear others find boring, but this one seemed so charged because of its context that I couldn't help but write it.

What is American about this poem? 

Boob jobs, CNN, and a sample of a population that doesn't read? I doubt I would have this exact experience elsewhere.

Was this poem finished or abandoned? 

I've always had difficulty with this distinction. I felt that I was done with the poem. Is that finishing it or abandoning it?

Jon Davis

Jon Davis, Director of the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Preliminary Report (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). Two chapbooks, Thelonious Sphere (Q Ave. Press) and With (a collaborative poem) (Firewheel Editions) were released in 2013. He is also co-translator of Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan's book Dayplaces, which is forthcoming from Tebot Bach. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Lannan Literary Award, a G.E. Younger Writers Award, and a Lavan Prize. He is currently the City of Santa Fe’s fourth Poet Laureate.

GIRAFFE

When the midnight phone rang,

my friend’s voice kept trying

to say the word hysterectomy, that

one-word melody with ancestors

stalking the madhouses of nineteenth-

century England. I was, of course,

moved, more by the simple

failure of elocution than the illness —

which was a factoid in a slick

magazine. Like learning that a giraffe

has seven neck bones, that a bat

will eat a ton of mosquitoes

in an average year. Hysterectomy.

Abstract as a memo from the President

of Nocturnal Congestion. The dishes

shifted in their dishwater nest. The refrigerator

hummed its cryogenic folksongs.

The budgerigar honked and chittered

in its night-shrouded cage. I wrapped

the phone cord around my finger

like a man wrapping a phone cord

around his finger. The voice

in the telephone. The voice in

the telephone. I kept hearing

appendectomy, lobotomy, laparoscopy.

The sadness soaking into the words

like hand cream. The words thick with it,

bloated. Seven neck bones. Imagine.

Like you. Like me. But the miraculous reach.

When was this poem composed? How did it start? 

This poem was composed around 1997. I don't remember too much about the actual composition, except that it began as a parody of a certain kind of poem of which I disapproved and thought too formulaic, too clever, too superficial. I had actually invented a persona, Chuck Calabreze, to compose such poems. (Though "invented" is too strong a word; Chuck shambled up the walkway one afternoon and offered his services.) "Giraffe" was composed, along with four similar poems, in one morning, in about an hour. I allotted myself (as Chuck) fifteen minutes for each poem. The poem started with the impulse to demonstrate how easy it is to write such poems, the formula for which is to enter into an associational state, indulge a kind of "household surrealism," and move quickly to an ending that seems both beside the point and to the point. 

To my surprise, two of the poems I wrote in that hour eventually appeared in Preliminary Report. (For those keeping score, "Black Spaniel & Drunk Parents" is the other.) I kept coming back to "Giraffe" because of the surprise of the ending and the sounds of the lines, "The dishes/ shifted in their dishwater nest. The refrigerator/ hummed its cryogenic folksongs./ The budgerigar honked and chittered/ in its night-shrouded cage."

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

I changed nothing. This is the first draft. I allowed myself fifteen minutes from typing the first line, to finishing it, to affixing the title.

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

Although I'm typically a reviser, I'm mainly a tweaker and a tightener, a line-breaker and a refiner -- not an overhauler. I believe absolutely in inspiration. I suppose if I thought there was a problem with American poetry it's that beginning poets believe too much in inspiration and experienced poets believe too little in it.  This poem was entirely received. No sweat. No tears. No loss of bodily fluids at all. I think of Andre Breton speaking of surrealism: "The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him." And: "The ease of everything is priceless."

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

The technique was all in the twenty years of practice prior to the poem's arrival. For me, craft is learned on the practice court. The poem is the game. You catch the ball on the wing and you know you can hit the jumper, drive left or right, hit the runner or take it to the rack, or make the quick pass to the cutter. If you've been practicing, all the options are there, the skills sharp. Of course, no matter how well prepared you are, you make bad decisions, bad passes, or--you're open, your form is solid, but you still clang the rack rim. In those cases, luckily, in the slow-moving game of poetry, you can revise--and I typically do. The small adjustments usually continue for two or three years.

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

The fact that it began as parody and turned out to be a real poem was unusual, though it happens occasionally. The fact that I did not revise a word is highly unusual.

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

I think about four years. It appeared in the Iowa Review in 2001. For the longest time, I didn't know whether it was a "real" poem or not, so it just floated from stack of papers to stack of papers. I'd install it in a book manuscript, then remove it, then reinstall it. At some point, when I got enough distance from what I thought I'd done, I began to see what I'd actually done and accepted its poem-ness. 

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

I don't have a rule. I wait until the the poem is ready, and that varies from poem to poem. I don't feel a strong impulse to publish until I get close to having a finished book manuscript. I always have Donald Hall's curmudgeonly admonitions from Horace in the back of my head: "Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years." The opposite of Breton's permissiveness. And also necessary.

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

Giraffes indeed do have seven neck bones. Bats do, indeed, eat a ton of mosquitoes in an average year. Everything else is a fiction, though the fictions do have emotional correspondences in the real world. I've gotten all sorts of terrifying telephone calls, late night and otherwise, over the years.

Is this a narrative poem?

I suppose there is a deflected narrative at the center of it. My friend Dana Levin says I engage a "Poetics of Avoidance." I keep telling her it's a "Poetics of the Cautious Approach." I think Dana is correct. Dana is usually correct.

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

A group of poets who shall remain nameless, since the poem began in parody. The lesson I wound up relearning was to trust inspiration. To accept the gifts. To trust the associative imagination. To trust Breton's "incredible ease"--at least sometimes. My concern about the "incredible ease" became an embrace of the "incredible ease." Or at least a recognition of how often the poems I love best are the ones that occurred despite my intentions, not because of them. (It's interesting now to note that the line about the phone cord is a much diminished version of a famous Pablo Neruda line.)

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

An intelligent reader who finds 90% of what passes for "culture" to be too blustery and extroverted? That might be the reader I think of. Someone on a crowded bus staring into the pages of a book as if the real world could be found, could be somehow reignited, there. 

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 tend to work over my poems mostly in isolation. When I'm close to finishing a book manuscript, I usually run the whole manuscript past Arthur Sze, Greg Glazner, Dana Levin, and Santee Frazier. 

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours? 

My poems are, to my ear and eye anyway, so various that there's no central style or form or voice to differ from. Some of my poems let the dog off the leash, let it romp a while, then clip the leash back on and head home. This is one of those poems. Not all of my poems are so permissive. Not all of them end up at the dog park. Not all of them romp in the wet grass.

What is American about this poem? 

The obsession with fact. The telephone call. The focus on individual, local tragedies, because we've been largely exempted from many of the concerns that other populations face everyday--trying to find enough food and clean water, trying not to be killed by another group of angry or hungry or fanatically religious people, etc.

Was this poem finished or abandoned? 

Chuck Calabreze left it on the doorstep. I discovered it. Gave it a good home. An education. A snappy outift. 

Rebecca Hazelton

Rebecca Hazelton is the author of Fair Copy (Ohio State University Press, 2012), and Vow, from Cleveland State University Press. She was the 2010-11 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and winner of the “Discovery” / Boston Review 2012 Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Southern Review, Boston Review, Best New Poets 2011, and Best American Poetry 2013.


Book Of Memory

In my seeing there was a blank and he filled that blank
with words, there were words for darkness which made it lift,
there were words for cover which ripped them off,
there were legs that crossed and hearts that crossed,
promises red and read, and the pluck of banjo had a name
for that twang, and the way he called the world into notice,
that had a word, too. Once I saw I couldn't unsee
and the worst was that the light glaring from the letters
left blue haze under my eyelids. There are no photographs
of this time and I can only go by what others
tell me: I was blurred and erratic, I drew a circle
of white chalk around me and called myself inviolate,
I watched for horses on the horizon, my walls
were under siege from smaller men who called themselves
heroes. They say I reached over the balustrade and picked
up the tiny ships and threw them over the edge of the world.
I tore my hair, cut one breast from my body and plattered it
as around my fortifications one man pulled another man
behind his chariot. If they say that's how I was,
that's how I was. I have no words for the one in the mirror
who apes me every morning. She's not the one I remember
imagining as a young girl. There must be a way to unsee
how I tap the glass and she taps back, and which wall,
which Cassandra weeping—everything I saw I spoke to his ear,
and the wall crashed into place between us, the horse
had a bellyful of it, the blank was full of small soldiers,
and he turned from my beauty and said my name.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem was composed during my fellowship year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, when I was the Jay C. and Ruth Halls poetry fellow. I was overdue for a gathering and was trying to rush out the door when I got the idea. So half the poem was written standing over my desk.

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

This poem is a little unusual for me in that it didn't go through many drafts at all. The few changes it had were mostly in terms of punctuation, and a bit of compression here and there. Between the first draft and the final was a year, but you wouldn't see substantial changes between those drafts.

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

I don't believe in "inspiration" but I have had the experience, as with this poem, of having a poem arrive almost fully formed. But what looks like inspiration is entirely the result of sweat and tears—if I hadn't spent my time tearing apart other poems, revising, scrapping, recasting, then I wouldn't have the skills necessarily to write a successful poem in a go. Besides, that sort of occurrence is a rarity—if I sat around waiting for it to happen again, I wouldn't have much to show for myself.

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

It wasn't conscious at first, but eventually I knew I wanted the poem to function as a kind of avalanche, to overwhelm the reader with history and image. That's why the poem is long-lined, and one thick column—it's monolithic.

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

Not really—I spoke it aloud as I wrote, which is typical for me if the poem is sonically driven, as this one is.

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

I'm not certain—sixth months? It was picked up by AGNI fairly quickly after I sent it out, which was very happy for me, as I admire AGNI a great deal.

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 wouldn't say I have rules about this. When I write something I'm proud of, I'm very full of myself immediately afterwards, and I have on occasion let that feeling get the better of me, and sent out work that wasn't fully formed. But editors are smart—they reject that work. As I've gotten older, I do that sort of impulsive submissions less—both because I have a little less energy to throw at submitting, but also because I've come to recognize the value of polish and thought. Poems might sit several months, get a revision, and then get sent out, or, poems might sit for a year. Some poems don't go out, of course, because I never feel they are up to snuff.

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

It's a poem that is interested in myth, which are fictions we find useful in illuminating and explaining ourselves. The actions of the Trojan War have always fascinated me, but I've always wanted to know more about the women caught up in it—Helen, Cassandra, Briseis. Their untold stories could make the stories of "heroes" look small in comparison.

Is this a narrative poem?

Apparently not. I once met up with a poet I admire a great deal, and who tends to write along narrative lines, and this poem made the poet … uncomfortable? I'm not sure what the reaction was, exactly, because she was far too classy to let it really show, but this was not a poem that made her happy, nor did she really know how to respond to it. To me, it's narrative, but it's a very associative narrative, one that flits across memory and legend. A lot of the book is concerned with there not being a true story, and this poem hints at those concerns.

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

I was reading Richard Siken, Inger Christensen, D.A. Powell,  and Julianna Spahr, among others.

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

Sometimes I'm writing a poem to a particular person—especially if it's an intimate or emotional poem. But most of the time, I'm not thinking of anyone in particular. The poems in the latter camp typically turn out better.

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 been fortunate to have a number of generous readers—Matthew Guenette took at look at this, as did Nancy Reddy, Jacques Rancourt, and Brittany Cavallaro once it was in manuscript form.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

 It's designed to be a bit of a deluge—images stacking and stacking until it all breaks over or down. That's not my typical tactic with a poem, but something I do on occasion, especially when I'm interested in conveying a certain kind of simultaneity.

What is American about this poem?

An American wrote it.

Jennifer Habel

Jennifer Habel is the author of Good Reason, winner of the 2011 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. Her poems have appeared in The Believer, Blackbird, The Common, Gulf Coast, LIT, and other journals. Her chapbook In the Little House won the 2008 Copperdome Prize. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro, she’s the coordinator of creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.

THE AGE OF TONE

I can’t stop talking about the moon,

for example. Tipping the stroller to watch

them smile at the sickle.

How she wants to find dead butterflies

beneath the nonindigenous flowers

as Mosaics and Cloudless Sulfurs

dodge our camera phones.

Or the dozen piglets nursing from                 

their enormous mother, tugging                                 

and stomping as she snorts with pleasure.      

Some grandparents don’t see well,

I read aloud in the doctor’s office.

Or hear. Or walk. Or breathe.

She knows her toys aren’t alive. She thinks

when our dog dies he will become a toy.

I wanted to watch the piglets

so I found the disk in the unlocked safe. 

We filmed swarming chickens, insatiable goats,

a donkey with a dorsal cross.

No pigs, but a long afternoon

on our weedy lawn. Celestial

skin segmented by shade. 

Wanting a memory, I booked

a room in the strange chalet.

Tell your husband to lift the painting

and throw the breaker, the old Frau said.

Mold, the rain never stopped. In the painting

a chaise supports a woman’s arms

which support her forehead.     

I love Vermont! they screamed, jumping

on the bed. We ate cold fries,

held our books beneath the one lamp.

All night the heat clicked on. One woke,

woke the other, woke again.

No one in the whole invincible world knew

where we were.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Probably in 2009. The poem began unusually (for me) in that it began with an idea. Something to do with a way of characterizing a time of life—the time of being a parent to young children—and something to do with tone. I can’t remember more specifically. Tone felt like a problem to be solved in writing about motherhood.

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

There were a lot of drafts. I probably wrote it over the course of a few weeks, but was tinkering with it at least a year later.

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

The analogy of the writer to an in- or out-of-shape athlete works for me. When I’m writing regularly I have moments of what I think could be called inspiration. These are flashes or clearings that feel “received.” When I’m not working regularly those moments don’t occur.

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

I always felt the poem as a single stanza with lines of the length it has.

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

Nothing was unusual about the way I wrote it, but it did begin unusually (see what I said earlier about being prompted by some sort of an idea).

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

It appeared in my book, which was published in 2012. So about three 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. I’ve settled into not thinking about submissions during periods when I have time to write. I used to send things out sooner than I do now.

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

Much of what is described in this poem actually happened, but I don’t think that matters. The poem doesn’t seem to be gaining any energy or charge from the fact that its contents may be “true.” On the issue of fact and fiction in general, I like Louise Glück’s essay “Against Sincerity” in which she distinguishes between “the actual” and “the true.” The artist, she writes, “surveying the actual, constantly intervenes and manages, lies and deletes, all in the service of the truth.”

Is this a narrative poem?

Not primarily, though it’s one of the most narrative poems I’ve written. I’d say there’s a story inside the poem—the story of a night away—but that the poem itself holds still.

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

Years ago I consciously tried to learn how to use fewer connectives in my poems. I remember studying single stanza poems in Olena Kalytiak Davis’s And HerSoul Out of Nothing and Jorie Graham’s Erosion in this regard. I wasn’t reading those poems when I wrote this one, but I think they influenced it in terms of movement and form.

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

This may sound weird, but my audience is myself. I’m trying to make the poem sound right to me, trying to make a poem that I can live with. When I’m done writing one, I’m also done being its audience. The poem recedes and eventually seems almost unrelated to me. I love that.

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 husband, Chris Bachelder, reads my poems. I needed, and got, help on my manuscript from poet friends, and I’ve learned certain things about my poems from certain people over the years. MariaHummel, for example, taught me about my openings, and Lisa Olstein taught me about my endings. Earlier versions of this poem had extraneous lines at both the beginning and the end. I credit Maria and Lisa with my knowing to lop those off.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s longer than many of them and, as I said before, more narrative. Those two qualities might not be unrelated.

What is American about this poem?

Looking at the poem now, I notice examples of commodified experiences in it. People paying to self-consciously experience something.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I’ve over-thought this one. I think the answer is “both.”