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.”
