Stefanie Wortman

Stefanie Wortman is the author of In the Permanent Collection, selected for the Vassar Miller Prize and published by the University of North Texas Press in 2014. Her poems and essays have appeared in Boston Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Antioch Review, among other publications. In 2014, she was a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers Conference. She currently lives in Rhode Island.

MORTUARY ART

Again my mother makes me promise

never to have her cremated, as if I could

forget how different she and I are in our

senseless fears. I am so scared of burial,

that airless allotment of space the body 

doesn’t need. But maybe she’s right 

that grief should have a place to focus it. 

You watch three pounds of ash dissolve

in water and suddenly, he’s everywhere,

the dead father, in the rivulet rain makes

on your windshield. Instead, allow

the stone’s symbolism, the highway 

memorial cross’s ruthless precision, 

even if implicating the faded grass 

along the margin is almost, no is, 

too much to bear. Who knows how 

the dead feel about our solicitude.  

Whether we fold them, gently, lovingly,

or not, into a coffin, into a box, they are

not folded, are not there, are not.

When was this poem composed? How did it start? 

I started the earliest version of this many years ago, not long after my father died. It began with an epigram that I long since discarded. It was a quote from a New York Times story about a crematorium in Georgia I think—I’ve forgotten the details now. For some reason, the people running it had not been cremating all the bodies they took on, and authorities found a large number of decomposing corpses in a shed. That story spurred the poem, but I decided it wasn’t necessary to keep a reminder of it, so I spared readers the gruesome details.

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

It went through countless revisions over probably ten years. Of course, I was not actively working on it all that time. It went through some long dormant periods.

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 necessarily believe in inspiration, but I do think that some poems arrive more whole than others. Most of the work this one required went into finding the right lines and balancing the rhetorical sense of the sentences with the rhythm of the lines.

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

I didn’t use any obvious formal constraints or techniques for this poem. I think it arrived at its final form when I was satisfied with the way the turns of mind fell. I needed to make the syntax of the poem convey its indecision—as in that long last sentence with its variations on not.

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

I’m a fairly slow writer, but even for me, the length of its gestation is unusual. I think that has everything to do with the subject matter. My father’s death was something that I felt a need to write about early on, but also that I had to learn to write about over time.

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

I’m not sure. It appeared in Smartish Pace in 2010 as a finalist for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and it’s possible I didn’t know it was truly finished until they accepted it. Sometimes I send things out that feel provisionally finished, and after they have spent a few months working their way through the submissions pile at a journal, I can see them again more clearly and make more adjustments.

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 quite a lot. With some poems it’s easier to feel when they have reached their conclusion. Again, I think in this case, the long writing and thinking process has a lot to do with the very emotional subject matter.

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

Well, as I’ve already revealed, the dead father I refer to generically is my dead father. The opinions of the mother are those of my real mother, as best I understood them. Where the poem goes beyond those autobiographical facts, it travels less into fiction, I think, than into the territory of the essay.

Is this a narrative poem?

No, I think it’s an argument poem. It argues with itself about how much it matters what we do to memorialize the dead.

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

The seeds of this poem are from a workshop I took on the ode. We were reading various kinds of odes, ancient and modern, and trying to write something public and grave, which felt somewhat foreign to the work of contemporary lyric poetry. I think that charge to write something that would feel important in a public sphere, not just in the one-to-one relationship of writer and reader, accounts for the move from my personal experience into these larger questions about proper mourning.

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

I write for a version of myself, I suppose. In some hypothetical scenario in which I didn’t write my own poems, I hope they would strike me as surprising and strange. When they’re at their best, they retain some strangeness for me, even though they are also familiar.

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?

The members of that initial workshop saw a nascent version, and because I was working on this poem relatively early in my writing life, it passed under the eyes of several teachers who were very influential on its and my development. These days, my first reader is usually my husband. He is a prose writer and an astute reader of poems.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours? 

To me, it feels more earnest. Many of my poems have a bitter kind of humor or irony that is missing in this one.

What is American about this poem? 

Maybe there’s something particularly American in the sense that customs are very fluid—that there’s no clear guide for how to send off the dead, but various ways we have to negotiate for ourselves. It would be interesting to write a poem that wasn’t American. I don’t think I can escape it.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Even after such a long process, I would still say abandoned. Maybe this is a poem that was never going to feel entirely adequate to its impulse, but it felt important to write, to revise, and eventually to include in the book.

Robert Krut

Robert Krut is the author of This is the Ocean (Bona Fide Books, 2013), which received the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Award, as well as The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009). His work has appeared widely in print and online, in journals like Cimarron Review, Blackbird, Smartish Pace, and more. In 2007, H_NGM_N released his chapbook Theory of the Walking Big Bang; subsequently, he began serving on the press/journal’s Editorial Board. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lives in Los Angeles.

THE OCEAN

A mermaid circled by a ring of jellyfish,

light dotting the water, a prism shattered 

on the waves. I can nearly reach her.

Ovals of smudged soot for eyes—

around her neck, my heart on a string,

a leather pocket in suspended breath.

I inhale water, exhale black ink.

Opening her mouth, a whirlpool revealed,

a vacuumed riptide—

water pulls away in all directions.

I reach out to her, but cannot see.

Waking in the middle of the desert, slate rock

beneath my knees as I look up, blinded by sun,

seaweed draped across my shoulders.

There may be nothing for miles and miles,

but I have come from the bottom of the ocean,

and I am here to tell you about it.

When was this poem composed? How did it start? 

A few years ago, maybe five or six. I have two general ways a poem starts, ways that I suspect are similar to most writers. Sometimes it comes from noticing something specific: a person in a diner, an old store-sign, a stray cat in the yard. Other times, it is more of a gradual reveal of something hovering around inside my head. I'll have particular images that float around in my consciousness that I can't shake. For a few weeks before this particular poem, I kept drifting toward two images: a leather-skinned heart, hanging from a string, and a vial of ink in its place, inside a chest. I didn't know for sure that I wanted to work these images into poems, but at night, going to sleep, that's what I would see, and during the day, if I closed my eyes for more than a blink, that's what I saw: an image cloud working its way across my brain for a few weeks. Sometimes I try to harness images like that, sitting down at the computer to wrestle them onto the page, and other times, in a rush, they're released all at once. With this one, it was the latter—I sat down without a specific goal, and they were suddenly there (and wound up elsewhere, later, in other poems, as well).

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

It went through a lot of trimming, just trying to cut the language as close to the bone as felt possible.  I felt an urgency with this one, so it wasn't long between first and final drafts—I obsessed over it for about three weeks until it was in fighting shape.

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

The initial spark, and the "content" (however you define that) was definitely "received," but the crafting of that text into a poem was heavy-lifting of obsessive cuts, additions, and more cuts. I do believe in inspiration, but think it comes in two ways. There's that rare, wonderful sort of vision-based experience, where an image is revealed and won't disappear. That doesn't happen often, but when it does, it feels great. But there's also inspiration in simpler, more earth-bound sort of ways, like noticing someone's mannerisms, or an out of place bit of graffiti, or something along those lines, where daily life presents you with inspiration for a poem.

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

The form came somewhat organically for this one—Everything happened somewhat naturally. For example, the two single-line stanzas were there in the initial writing, not something I was consciously doing. Ultimately, I did edit it to get all of the others to three lines apiece—since it is what some might call surreal, I wanted the stanzas following a strict length. I felt like, in a poem like this, a more free-form framework might make the whole thing disappear.

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

I was heading up to work—I live in Los Angeles, but work in Santa Barbara—which is a drive alongside the Pacific Ocean. It was a day where I had a little extra time, so I pulled over to hang out at the beach for a bit. I wasn’t planning on writing, necessarily, but I had my notebook with me. I sat down at a picnic table looking at the cliffs and the water and wrote the whole piece right there—I saw the whole narrative of the piece and starting writing. Frequently, I jot down phrases or images when I’m in places like that, but it is rare that I write an entire draft. It was like those images mentioned earlier needed to be written in that particular place, in one rush.

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

Years—the first time it appeared was in the book. Prior to that, the closest it came to being published was in the form of a video-poem, in conjunction with the book’s release.

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? 

No rules, really, although I do try to wait at least a bit, as I know there is usually that endgame after you think you're done, sometimes weeks or months later, when you realize/admit it needs more work.

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

The quick response is that it takes what is fiction and tries to present it as straightforwardly as possible, to make it fact. The longer response is that—and I know how this will sound, but still—it is all fact to me here. Of course, the fact is that it didn't happen in the tangible world—but to me, it was all very real.

Is this a narrative poem?

To me, yes.

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

I had recently purchased Bed of Sphinxes by the great San Francisco Surrealist Philip Lamantia—at City Lights Bookstore, no less. Somehow I hadn't really read him before. I felt an immediate connection with him and his work. I know those poems were floating around in my head while I wrote this, and for a long time after.

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

I always hope someone out there will connect with something I write. I know that may be a slim margin of a sliver of a stream of the reading world, but I hope someone reads it and connects. So, I don’t really have an “ideal reader” in mind so much as someone just open to reading a poem.

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

This was in a small group of poems that I could tell were the start of my second book. (My first, I felt, was done, even though it was a few months away from being accepted). It felt different. I sent the group of about eight poems to my friend Pete Miller, who, in addition to being one of my favorite poets, is a great reader. He offered up wonderful advice on what to keep and what to cut in the poem. As a bonus, he introduced me to a group of poets—all in different cities—who share a new poem each week in ten-week, seasonal bursts, offering suggestions to each other. That group, which has a bit of a revolving door (although certain people like Pete, Trish Murphy, Sarah Pape are there every round) made a huge impact on my writing for the second book.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours? 

Before this one, “the ocean” as an image was sort of off limits—It felt a bit too loaded, too played-out, too overused. With this one, though, once it got moving, I realized I wanted to throw out the rules of what I could and couldn’t write about, or use in a poem. I knew it was a big, perhaps overripe image/concept, but I decided that I was going to embrace it fully, and hopefully make it unique.
What I hope is happening in this poem, and the book (where, clearly, the ocean plays a major role) is that combining that sort of potentially tricky image with the minutely personal surreal, something new happens.

What is American about this poem? 

The poem was written in and (for me) takes place on the California coast. I hope, though, that it is sort of borderless.

Was this poem finished or abandoned? 

While there is a big part of me likes the idea that no poem is ever finished, this one feels that way to me. That last line is almost a built-in stopping point, telling me it's time to go write new ones.