Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan was born to a Jewish family in the Bronx in 1932. She graduated from Radcliffe College and received an M.A. from Brandeis University. She is the author of Queen of a Rainy Country (W. W. Norton, 2006); The Last Uncle (2002); Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (1998), which was nominated for the National Book Award; An Early Afterlife (l995); Heroes In Disguise (1991), The Imperfect Paradise (1988), a nominee for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (l982), which was nominated for the National Book Award; and The Five Stages of Grief (1978), among others. From 1991 to 1995, Pastan served as the Poet Laureate of Maryland, and was among the staff of the Breadloaf Writers Conference for twenty years. Linda Pastan lives in Potomac, Maryland.


REREADING FROST

Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?

At other times though,
I remember how one flower
in a meadow already full of flowers
somehow adds to the general fireworks effect

as you get to the top of a hill
in Colorado, say, in high summer
and just look down at all that brimming color.
I also try to convince myself

that the smallest note of the smallest
instrument in the band,
the triangle for instance,
is important to the conductor

who stands there, pointing his finger
in the direction of the percussions,
demanding that one silvery ping.
And I decide not to stop trying,

at least not for a while, though in truth
I'd rather just sit here reading
how someone else has been acquainted
with the night already, and perfectly.



When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I don’t remember when, but I know I was actually rereading “I Have Been One Acquainted with the Night.”

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

All my poems go through dozens of revisions, usually over a period of weeks.

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

Only the ending was “received,” as you put it. The rest is always sweat and tears—even blood.

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

I always experiment with line lengths and stanzas—the computer makes this relatively easy. My only principle is that it seems right.

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

Several months, if I recall.

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 try to wait at least a month so I can read it again with fresh eyes before sending it off.

Is this a narrative poem?

There is some movement over time. Does that make it a narrative poem?

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

Obviously I was reading Frost. Does love imply influence?

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

Not really.

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 daughter Rachel, a novelist, is usually my first reader and critic. And I often share work with poet friends around Washington, DC.

What is American about this poem?

Colorado? Frost? Pastan? Pessimism laced with optimism?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This one was finished!

Charles Rafferty

Charles Rafferty is the recipient of a 2009 NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing and is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: The Man on the Tower, which won the Arkansas Poetry Award (University of Arkansas Press, 1995); Where the Glories of April Lead (Mitki/Mitki Press, 2001); During the Beauty Shortage (M2 Press, 2005); and most recently A Less Fabulous Infinity (Louisiana Literature Press, 2006). He has placed poems in hundreds of journals — among them The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Massachusetts Review, DoubleTake, Poetry East, and Connecticut Review. His work has also appeared in a number of anthologies, including American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press); Rhyming Poems: A Contemporary Anthology (University of Evansville Press); and Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets (University of Evansville Press ). He currently teach at Albertus Magnus College and in the MFA program at Western Connecticut State University. By day, he works as an editor for a technology consulting firm. He lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, with his wife and two daughters.


AGAINST HESITATION

If you stare at it long enough
the mountain becomes unclimbable.
Tally it up. How much time have you spent
waiting for the soup to cool?
Icicles hang from January gutters
only as long as they can. Fingers pause
above piano keys for the chord
that will not form. Slam them down
I say. Make music of what you can.
Some people stop at the wrong corner
and waste a dozen years hoping
for directions. I can’t be them.
Tell every girl I’ve ever known
I’m coming to break her door down,
that my teeth will clench
the simple flower I only knew
not to give . . . Ah, how long did I stand
beneath the eaves believing the storm
would stop? It never did.
And there is lightning in me still.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I must have written it sometime before 2006, which is when A Less Fabulous Infinity, the book in which it appears, came out. I confess I’m not sure. In fact, when you initially e-mailed me and said you wanted to talk about this poem, I wasn’t sure which poem you meant! Once I’ve published a poem in a book, I find that I almost never return to it—unless I’m giving a public reading of my work, which I don’t often do.

After rereading this poem, though, I do recall some of the circumstances of its composition. The lines “Some people stop at the wrong corner / and waste a dozen years hoping / for directions” come from a poem that I had wrestled with for a couple of years. The poem was a failure, and I’m sure I saved these lines as my favorites, intending to work them into another poem when the time was right.

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

If I discount the years when the above-mentioned lines floated in and out of drafts, I would say it underwent about a dozen revisions over a period of a couple of weeks. My habit is to revise a hot poem (one that’s in danger of getting completed) every day. The revisions aren’t drastic—just what I can get done during my train commute. Then I take it home, print out a clean copy, and stick it in my briefcase for the next day’s commute. My poems arrive in increments this way. When I get stuck and can’t think of anything else to change, I either publish them or stick them in a drawer and wait for the mistakes to rise.

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

Yes, though not in the sense of divine inspiration. There are moments, though, when we’ve had just the right amount of coffee or quiet or whatever and we become, momentarily, the perfect medium for the poem. By “perfect,” I don’t mean that the poem comes out fully formed on the first try, but rather that enough of the poem comes out that I can see what I have to work with. It’s like the story of the sculptor who goes to the quarry to see what the jumble of marble at the bottom will suggest.

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

I used the same techniques I’ve always used—a daily working over of the poem, purging it of what seems unnecessary, and trying to find ways to surprise myself.

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

That I’m not sure of. I remember scrambling to put A Less Fabulous Infinity together, because I’d just published a book the previous year, so with this poem, it was probably less than a year between completion and publication in book form.

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 send out poems as soon as I can’t think of anything to change. This is probably a bad practice. If I had the patience to let things sit for six months, I’d embarrass myself less often. Unfortunately, I always think what I’ve just finished is the best poem I ever wrote. So off I send it.

I don’t want this to imply that I’m permanently satisfied with a completed poem. I almost always change a poem between the time it’s published in a journal and the time it appears in a book. And there are a number of poems in my books that I’d like one more crack at.

Is "Against Hesitation" one of those poems you’d like another crack at?

No, "Against Hesitation" is not a poem I have regrets about, at least not yet.

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

In poetry, I don’t find it useful to distinguish between the two states. I’ll put into the poem whatever will make it a better poem. Whether this element was actually experienced by me is beside the point.

In this poem, there is a moment that I remember. I was at a wedding, and I was standing under the eaves with the smokers while it rained. My own cigarette was done, and I remember wanting to go back into the bar for a drink. But I thought, “Not yet. It’s going to let up. Give it time.” I wasted a good five minutes of my life that day.

Is this a narrative poem?

No.

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

No.

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

Yes, it’s a reader so deft he won’t miss anything I try to slip in. He hears the faintest of assonance; he’s aware of every layer of meaning.

In this case, I think I did have an audience in mind: “Tell every girl I’ve ever known …” This is a poem about regretting inaction. Part of me must have been feeling sorry for myself that day and wishing to right the unrightable. It’s a pretty common feeling, I suppose. Anyone who says they don’t have regrets isn’t aware they had options. Either that or they’re liars.

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?

Well, before a book comes out, I show the poems to my wife. And to my friend, the poet BJ Ward. They’re both good critics, and help me to see how certain poems are flawed or boring. I wish I took their advice more often.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I think it’s fairly typical of a certain kind of poem I tend to write. At the moment, I’m composing mostly fables and monologues, and this poem strikes me more as a lyric.

Do you have another book in the works? If so, would you care to share any information about it?

I do have a new book in the works. In fact, I recently finished it. It's called American Catena. It consists of fifty-one poems–one for each state and the District of Columbia. It's kind of an odd book for me–the poems detailing my relationship with each state, which is sometimes quite tenuous. But this sometimes sketchy relationship proved to be a pleasing obstacle in completing the poems. I'm bankrupting myself now by sending it out to contests.

What is American about this poem?

Well, there’s a frustration underlying the poem that strikes me as an American sentiment – how we’re always wishing for something better or grander. But maybe everyone in the world thinks in those terms. I confess I’ve never considered the poem through the lens of nationalism.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I don’t like my choices here. “Finished” makes it sound like it was published in a perfect state, which is too good ever to be true. “Abandoned” makes it sound like I didn’t bother to fix some obvious mistakes. Let’s say that it was as good as I could make it at the time, but if I looked really closely, I’m sure I could find something to rearrange. This is what a Selected Poems is for.

Jim Daniels

Jim Daniels’ recent books include Revolt of the Crash Test Dummies, winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, Eastern Washington University Press; Mr. Pleasant, (fiction) Michigan State University Press; and In Line for the Exterminator, Wayne State University Press, all published in 2007. He teaches creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University.


EXPLICIT

In Amsterdam my friend Dr. Zero
put the Dutch equivalent of a quarter
into a machine to watch some fat hairy
zombie fuck a pig. A real pig. The screen
was tiny, but not tiny enough, for he invited me
to take a peek, and, given my only chance to watch
a man fuck a pig, I took it. I liked Holland
because we could also call it The Netherlands
and call the people Dutch so we had a lot of options
while smoking legal marijuana in a club
that warned us not to shoot up in the bathroom.
Everybody draws the line somewhere. Perhaps
you drew it a few lines back, and I'm whispering
my sins to a dusty screen and I won’t be getting
any penance for my trouble. Dr. Zero was sufficiently
disgusted and chose not to watch the one
with the donkey. Not that I hadn't put a few guilders in—
that's it, guilders! What a great name for money.
And they have the best dimes in the world.
Smaller than ours. It's great to come upon one
in the deep lining of a coat, walking home
from the hash bar knowing you're not broke—
yes, I'd used up all my change at the arcade
watching variations on a theme. Twenty-five years ago.
We didn't get tattoos like we'd threatened to,
and it's a good thing, seeing as how trendy they are
now. The past is like a bad back—not subtle enough
to haunt anyone. Ten years ago a doctor told The Doctor
he might have AIDS and Dr. Zero obsessed
about that prostitute in Amsterdam he spent five
minutes with, even though she'd unrolled
a condom on him. It turned out he had
chronic fatigue syndrome. Every story
is a long story. We didn't shoot up. We didn't
fuck any animals. We told each other the truth
most of the time. I haven't seen him
in sixteen years. The world is a bad joke.
Sometimes we laugh because we think
we're supposed to. When I showed him
the Dutch dime, he took it and swallowed it
so I'd really be broke. I forgave him.
I made a wish.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I don’t know exactly when it was composed. It was originally published in 2005, so probably sometime in the previous year. It started with a memory of my friend Dr. O when we were in Amsterdam together. He’s a larger than life character, but I found that while I’d often told stories about him, I’d rarely found a way to work those stories into poems.

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

This one came pretty naturally, so I’d guess less than ten drafts. I work on a lot of poems simultaneously, so it’s not one continuous process with each poem. It’s hard to tell with most poems how long they actually took because I pick up these folders of poems I’m working on and try to move various poems forward depending on which I’m drawn to (and ready to return to) at a particular moment. It’s a messy process in a way, but it frees me from the pressure on any individual poem. At some point in the process, if I’m lucky, the poem moves into the “done” folder and I begin to send it out.

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

Well, there weren’t any tears with this poem, but a fair amount of sweat. I don’t believe in the Muse coming down and touching you. I feel like I have to wake up the Muse and put her to work—so I guess I believe in a qualified inspiration—inspiration that emerges from hard work.

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

I wanted it to use lots of enjambment and have it look a little ragged. I wanted to create this wandering around feel, a casualness to the voice and narrative—I come out and address the reader, for example. Too much overt control would make that more mannered I think.

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

Given the nature of the poem, I had to choose carefully where I sent it. Slipstream, a fine journal, was a good fit because of their lack of qualms about printing work that deals frankly with explicit subject matter, and because of my history with the editors. I felt like I would get a good read there, and it would be a good fit. Fortunately, the editors agreed.

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

I think I kind of answered this earlier. I’m not sure how long I let them sit. Usually, I pull a lot of things together at the end of the summer to send out. I have no rules. I tend to have a lot of poems circulating though, so I don’t feel any pressure to rush the new ones out there. Definitely time for my initial enthusiasm to die down before I send it out.

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

You know, given the length of time, and our state of mind in Amsterdam, I’m not sure I myself could even distinguish between fact and fiction. He probably did not swallow the tiny dime. I wanted to write a kind of wholesome poem about friendship while dealing with unwholesome subject matter, if that makes any sense.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes.

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

I don’t remember. I often am reading things totally disconnected from what I’m writing. Reading calms me down enough to get to the place poetry comes from, but I rarely find another writer’s style or subject matter creeping into my writing while I’m reading that writer.

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

Not really. I’ll take any audience I can get. With this poem, it’s pretty graphic—which is why I just went and called it “Explicit”—so I suppose an adult audience for that one 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?

Sure. I’ve got some old poet friends I’ve known since I was an undergrad who still read my work sometimes, and they’re great critics, since they’ve known me and my writing for so long. My wife, the writer Kristin Kovacic, reads more of my work than anyone. She is a very tough, excellent critic, and I owe a lot to her for all the help she’s given me over the years.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Well, it’s more explicit. And it’s set outside the U.S. Most of my poems are set in American cities. The style, to me at least, seems pretty representative of my poetry.

What is American about this poem?

I don’t know. Maybe the bumbling Americans enjoying the legalized debauchery of Amsterdam makes it “American.”

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both. I assume it’s finished at the time, though often change things, even after they’re published, if given an opportunity to take another look at them.


["Explicit" appears in Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies, Eastern Washington University Press, 2007.]

Carrie Jerrell

Carrie Jerrell's debut collection, After the Revival, received the 2008 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Waywiser Press. A graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and Texas Tech University, she is an assistant professor at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky, and also serves as the poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. During her summers, she can be found in Tennessee, working as the Coordinator for the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference and on the staff of the Sewanee Writers' Conference.


BIG DADDY

Called me Hot Stuff. Called me Ragtop,
Lugnut, your Deere-in-the-Driveway Duchess.

Called forth Bad Company from the pickup’s stereo
and, lo, I appeared with a buck knife

and a hundred-proof smile, my battered hunter’s manual
tucked in the waistband of my cutoffs.

What were we at first but two necks of the same guitar,
high on the blister of our power riff? Each night

was a stadium tour, each day an album cover
fit for collecting. How precious,

how practiced we looked those weekends at the lake,
posing in our matching hipwaders and stabbing

at the world’s swamp-stink with the gig of our love.
But forever is a black fish hiding in cattails, a fat plop

always sounding out of range. Soon, the lake iced over.
The far-off smoke of forest fires stole your attention.

While I dreamt pyrotechnics for our stage duets,
you and your matchbox slid out the window.

No note. No final mix tape. No rose left thorny
on the nightstand. I searched for you in parking lots

until a passing trucker said he’d caught your show
in Denver, that you wore a silk shirt and played everything

acoustic, and the news rocked me like a last track ballad.
Oh Big Daddy, Daddy with the Long Legs,

father of a stillborn promise and my liveliest rage,
for weeks I choked on your name, stuck so deep

in my craw it took a crowbar and two months
of keg stands in Assumption, Illinois to dislodge it.

Now, I drink sweet tea in a Southern state. Now,
I am patient. Here, small likenesses of you croak to me

from their lilypadded thrones. I’d like to mistake
their bellows for green apologies, but I know better.

At night, I hunt them with a three prong. I fry them
in batter and grease. We both know what they taste like.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote the poem in late June of 2008. I’d been in a pretty gross writing funk since March, and it was making me cranky. One evening when I was visiting my family in southern Indiana, I went to an old-style country buffet with my folks. The buffet had frog legs, of which I heartily partook, and that brought on a conversation with my dad about frog gigging—the best times to hunt, headlamps vs. flashlights, two or three prongs, etc. So I started carrying around that subject in my head.

A few weeks later, a friend of mine and I were discussing pet names we’d been given by (or had given to) significant others, and we each listed the best and worst from our personal experiences. After our phone call, when I sat down to write for awhile, the first few stanzas worked themselves out pretty quickly, and I liked them a lot. Down the dark tunnel, I could see a possible ending for the poem, too, and I was hungry to figure out how to get there. Playing with language was exciting again, and I think that feeling—that return of energy after being so miserable at the desk for months—was just the lift I needed.

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

It took about a week, which is fast for me. I tend not to rewrite poems entirely or write multiple drafts. Instead, I usually obsess over lines or phrases, so I’ll work at one for hours, sometimes days, until I like it, then move on to the next. Sometimes I have to go back to earlier lines and tweak them as the poem develops, but I rarely overhaul a poem once I’ve written it. Overall, it’s a slow and often maddening way to write, but it works for me.

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

I absolutely believe in inspiration. Of course, I have to put in the time and effort, but if there’s no magic in the air, then all I’m doing is pushing words around, and that’s just boring. Inspiration can be found in anything (Amish buffets, anyone?), and it shows up at various times when I write. Some days, I have to write awhile before something happens that’s greater than me and the words on the page; other times, like in the case of “Big Daddy,” the inspiration comes early on. Either way, I’ll take it.

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

Yes and no. I write mostly in traditional forms, and the last project that I finished before “Big Daddy” was a sequence of sonnets on the subject of weddings. Though the sonnets were challenging and a great deal of fun, I really wanted to move away from forms, so I resisted the temptation to utilize a set form for the poem. I liked using a two-line stanza because I felt the reader might need a little more breathing room in a piece filled with so many jumps from quirky image to image, and I didn’t want this poem to feel dense.

Probably the aspect of the poem I worked hardest at was the syntax; I wanted the structures of the sentences to be as enjoyable and unpredictable as the images in them. As with all my poems, much of it was composed by sounding out those sentences. I spend a lot of time pacing the room, talking out the lines until I find the combination of rhythm, sound, and image that I want.

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

About ten months or so. I sent it to Subtropics in the fall, and it appeared in their Spring/Summer 2009 issue.

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 have no rules about this. I’ve sent poems out a couple days after finishing, and I’ve also got a few that sat around for months before I did anything with them. Generally, if I like it, then I send it out soon after. If I’m hesitant, it usually means there’s an aspect of the poem that makes me uncomfortable. But, when it comes to submitting to literary journals, I try to stay as detached as possible from the whole process. If I became too invested in what the mailbox held for me each morning, I’d spend roughly 360 days of the year disappointed, and I sure as heck don’t need that.

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

Many of my poems spring from personal experiences, but few of them are factual accounts from beginning to end. The poems—the questions they explore and the manners in which they use language to go about that exploration—come first, always. I’ve certainly been angry and disappointed like the speaker of “Big Daddy,” but the poem, which is so figurative to begin with, isn’t necessarily the play-by-play of any particular relationship I’ve had. I am happy to say that I have never looked for anyone in a parking lot of eighteen-wheelers.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yeah. There’s a pretty clear beginning, middle, and end, with complications in the plot along the way. And the speaker seems to be, or at least wants to be, a heroine, and she would like very much for the reader to view her ex as her antagonist.

Was this always a funny poem?

Yes. I think, at least right now, I write heartbreak best when I can be funny, too. Humor often keeps my poems from becoming too angry or sentimental. I think the sheer glee that I felt at the time of this poem’s composition simply worked itself onto the page, too.

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

I’d been reading lots of people, probably too many at once, because I was stuck, so it’s hard to say exactly who might have made the strongest impression. I’m sure Richard Hugo was in the mix, because I am always reading Hugo. His poetry does for me as a writer what my pink blankie did for me as a child: calms me down and makes me believe that everything is going to be okay. I’d been reading Mark Jarman’s Epistles, too, and loving the sentences in those poems. I’d also recently reread Plath and Sherman Alexie, as well as Pam Houston’s short story collection, Cowboys are My Weakness. Often, the music I’m listening to while I’m writing is just as influential, if not more so, than the poets I’m reading. I know the soundtrack to “Big Daddy” included a good deal of Loretta Lynn, Aerosmith, and the Black Keys.

Do you listen to music while you write?

I do, sometimes obsessively. I come from a very musically-inclined family, and we had music on all the time. A good deal of it was religious, too, so I think early on my siblings and I associated music with higher powers. I can't listen to anything new to me while I'm writing or else I pay more attention to the tunes than the poems, but usually I have one or two albums on repeat while I'm working. Occasionally, it's just one song on repeat, which always tests the patience of anyone within earshot. I was very fortunate the past two years to have a housemate who loved country music as much as I do, otherwise I probably would've had to pay the rent by myself while writing my first book.

I can't always explain why a particular album or artist fits the writing of a particular poem. Sometimes it's the lyrics. Other times, it's the music. But it doesn't take me long to know when something isn't - how to put it? - supportive enough. As with the poets I read, I have favorite albums and artists that I go to when I'm stuck. They, too, can usually provide a pretty good kickstart.

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

I don’t really have a particular audience in mind while I’m writing, though sometimes I think about audience when I finish a poem. Then I wonder if the poem is clear enough, or too clear, but I try not to get hung up on those questions. In the end, it’s my name on the poem, so if I’m satisfied with it, then that’s enough for me. I realize that may sound snotty, but it’s more a matter of survival. If I start to cater to the preferences of my imaginary readers, I’d never finish a poem.

I don’t think I have an ideal reader. I’d like to think there’s at least a little something in my poetry for just about anyone to enjoy, but perhaps that’s wishful thinking. If I have an ideal reader, I bet he/she listens to a lot of Tom Petty.

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?

No one saw “Big Daddy” at any point, but I did include it in a reading just a couple weeks after finishing it, so in some ways I gauged its success by the listeners’ responses. And no, I don’t show my work to anyone else—at least not right now. In part, this is just a reaction to having been in workshops for years. I’m content these days to work on my own; the poets I read and admire provide plenty of scolding.

What is American about this poem?

Bad Company, John Deere, and frog gigging.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished!

[Click here to listen to Jerrell reading “Big Daddy.”]

Jeffrey Harrison

Jeffrey Harrison is the author of four full-length books of poetry, most recently Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way Books, New York), which made the Book Sense top ten poetry list for 2007 and was runner-up for the 2008 Poets’ Prize. In addition, a selected poems, The Names of Things, was published in England by the Waywiser Press in 2006. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, two Pushcart prizes, and other awards, he currently teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. For more information, please visit Harrison's website.


COINCIDENCES

When I switch on the car radio,
a voice with the singing inflection
of an Indian is saying

that what we call coincidences
are really glimpses
of the cosmic harmony,

and I think of my sister weeping
on the other end of the phone
when I told her the story,

beginning with our older brother
who, five years earlier, called me up
from his apartment in Chicago

to tell me about this poet
from Minnesota he’d met
after her reading at the Art Institute.

He didn’t read a lot of poetry,
and it was unusual for him
to be telling me about a poet,

and he seemed a little disappointed
that I hadn’t heard of her,
but I told him that didn’t

mean anything—that she
hadn’t heard of me, either,
which he laughingly confirmed.

I saw him in Cincinnati that Christmas
and he had her book with him
and wanted me to read it,

but he wouldn’t let me take it home
to Massachusetts so I had to
read it fast, but I liked it.

Then three years later (and two ago),
I met the poet at a book fair in Seattle,
not realizing right away

that she was the same poet,
but when I did, I told her the story.
She said she remembered my brother,

because it was so unusual
for anyone who wasn’t a relative
or friend to actually buy a book

and talk to her after a reading.
She said he’d been sweet
and funny, which sounds like him.

I told my brother, too,
and I’m sure he was amused,
but I can’t remember what he said.

A year later, he was dead.
I found the book in his apartment
among his not many books:

The Green Tuxedo, by Janet Holmes.
There were yellow post-its
next to particular poems,

with notes in his childlike
non-script: “True story.”
I left them there and took the book.

It has the same dark aura
as his video of Sam Shepard’s True West
or his bootlegs of the Grateful Dead.

I told Janet about Andy’s death
and she wrote a nice note back,
but we were not in very close touch,

and another year went by before
I got an e-mail from her saying
that her husband’s son by a previous marriage,

a widower with a teenage daughter,
was dating my divorced sister—
is dating my sister.

Wow, I think, what a strange
coincidence, and I wonder, the way
I used to wonder when I was younger

and less skeptical, if this could
mean anything. So I call my sister
and tell her the whole story,

and that’s when she starts crying,
and I think it’s because I’m talking
about Andy, and I say I’m sorry,

but she says no, it’s because she
really likes this guy, and she had
already been thinking that Andy

had somehow sent him to her
because he wanted her to be happy
after the bad end of her marriage

and the shock of his suicide.
And I say wow out loud now, and I keep
wondering what is at work here.

Who knows what it is or what
will happen, but the voice on the radio
is talking about “quantum non-locality”

and how two particles that have come
into even the most glancing contact
and go off in different directions

are forever related, and if you know
where one of them is you know
where the other one is,

which makes me wonder about
my brother’s non-locality
in relation to Janet, who I know

is now in Idaho—and whether,
from his non-locality, Andy
has anything to do with all this.

The radio guru seems to be saying
yes, that coincidences mark
a state of grace, and we are all

living inside the mind of God,
and I don’t care if he is
promoting his newest book,

I roll my window down and toss
my skepticism out like a bad grape,
and despite all that can go wrong

in a lifetime and everything
awful that has already happened,
right now, at least, I believe him.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I heard the radio show that triggered the poem while I was driving home from a teaching stint in Maine (the winter residency of the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program), in the first days of 2004. I had to dig through a box in the attic to find the drafts, and they start with some very sketchy notes I made on a pad I kept in the car—really just phrases from the radio show, not notes for a poem. I’m pretty sure the person being interviewed was Deepak Chopra, and it was the way his phrases and ideas connected to thoughts about my brother’s suicide that sparked the poem. The background is that my older brother had killed himself (completely unexpectedly) a little over a year earlier, in November 2002, and that, for the past ten or eleven months, I’d been writing and revising poems on that grim subject, including a twelve-part sequence about the immediate aftermath of his death. That was, at times, a grueling process, all mixed together with tremendous grief. With all those poems behind it, this slightly more hopeful and perhaps more open poem seems to have come somewhat more easily. The first real draft is written in pencil on pages from a legal pad, and, reading it now, I am surprised to find that it already has the same basic shape as the final version. I often think of narrative poems, with their shifts between various time-frames, as more “constructed” than lyrics, but if that is true, this poem would appear to be the exception. It always started with the radio show calling up the phone conversation I’d had with my sister Ellen a month or so earlier, followed by the flashback (via the phone conversation) to the story about my brother which began five years before. The first three stanzas are almost exactly the same in the first typed draft (dated January 6, 2004) as they are in the final version. The difference is that, in the first draft, there was a period at the end of the third stanza—but in pencil I changed it to a comma and wrote in rephrasings that allowed the sentence to keep going, in an attempt to better represent the way the mind moves through time and is called back to memories.

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

It depends how you count: there are eight versions, but a couple of them are very close to each other. The final draft isn’t dated, but it is almost identical to a previous version dated January 13, 2004 … which is a week after the first draft (assuming I went right to the computer when I finished the hand-written draft). This is an unusually short time for me, especially for a poem of this length. Many of my poems go through numerous versions over a much longer period of time … to the point where even a large paperclip won’t hold the drafts together and I have to graduate to one of those black spring clips.

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

I believe in inspiration and work. As I said earlier, this poem seems to have come fairly naturally, and some of the work I put into it I undid later (which is also work).

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

Revision of this poem involved both subtracting (or compressing) and adding (or expanding)… with some of the additions being later subtracted again. One thing I added and kept were place names, because I began to realize the importance of locality (and non-locality) to the poem: there is the interweaving of time-frames but also the web of various locations, like pins on a map. Chicago was there from the start, but Minnesota, Cincinnati, Massachusetts, Seattle, and Idaho (the actual locations of the people and events) were all added in the second typed draft. Usually this just meant adding a phrase like “from Minnesota,” “to Massachusetts,” or “in Cincinnati,” but near the end of the poem, it led to the addition of the stanzas

which makes me wonder about
my brother’s non-locality
in relation to Janet, who I know

is now in Idaho—and whether,
from his non-locality, Andy
has anything to do with this.

This added passage went on for one more stanza, but I ended up cutting it. I knew that length was an issue with the poem—that, while it was in some sense a “loose and baggy” poem (“a shaggy dog story,” as one friend called it), some compression was needed to keep it from bogging down. Oh, one other thing: the poem did not get its final title until the last draft. Before that, it bore the cumbersome working title “A Series of (Un?)related Events.”

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

I waited three months—until mid-April—to send the poem out, submitting it to Image magazine, and three months after that, the editor, Gregory Wolfe, wrote to accept it. Like everything else about this poem, it seems, that went more smoothly than usual, too. I think one reason, besides luck, is that I had a sense that the poem might fit the religious nature of the magazine, though it might very easily have been rejected. It appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Image, so, a year and a few months after it was written. That’s a fairly short turn-around, in my experience. Later, the poem was included in my book Incomplete Knowledge (New York: Four Way Books, 2006).

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 from poem to poem. I don’t have any rules, but normally every stage of the process is longer than it was for this poem.

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

Everything in this poem is pretty much true, though I streamlined a little by cutting some details. For instance, in real life (and in an earlier version of the poem), it wasn’t until I got home that I realized that the poet I met in Seattle—Janet Holmes—was the same person my brother had met in Chicago, and then I sent her an e-mail to explain. That was too cumbersome to stay in the poem. But the play between life and this poem has been compelling for me. I didn’t meet Matt Greenberg, my sister’s then-new partner, until six months after I wrote the poem, and I didn’t meet his father Al Greenberg—Janet’s husband, and a wonderful poet himself—until three years later, in early 2007. It felt like a momentous occasion.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, though also meditative.

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

I hate to sound vague, but not really. In this case, I may have been thinking of the real-life players in the poem—my sister and Matt, etc. And my dead brother. Afterwards, at least, I thought he might like this poem more than some of the darker poems about his suicide. He always liked my funny poems, and although this poem isn’t funny, it’s not quite as heavy as some of the others I’d been writing.

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 have a handful of trusted poet friends with whom I share poems—some regularly, some irregularly. Bob Cording and I show each other everything, and he definitely saw some versions of this, probably starting around the third draft.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

That’s hard to answer, since I write everything from short lyrics to longer narratives and meditations, from the humorous to the elegiac. I guess it’s a little more “New Agey” than anything else I’ve ever written.

What is American about this poem?

The fact that the speaker is driving a car strikes me as quintessentially American. Also, the way it ends up including locations all across the country… or at least the top half of the country, from coast to coast, with Cincinnati being as far south as it goes.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

God (or Valéry) only knows. I hadn’t looked at it in a while before answering these questions, and there were a few small things I questioned as I read it. But I’m not going to tell you what they are!



“Coincidences” from Incomplete Knowledge, © 2006 by Jeffrey Harrison. Used by permission of the publisher, Four Way Books, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

Maxine Kumin

Maxine Kumin lives on a farm in central New Hampshire. She has published thirteen volumes of poetry, as well as novels, short stories, and essays on country living (including Women, Animals, and Vegetables). She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1973 and has been a poetry consultant for the Library of Congress and Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She was awarded the Poets Prize in 1993 and received the Aiken/Taylor Award for Modern Poetry in 1995. She also received the Ruth E. Lily Prize in 1999. In 1995, Kumin became a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets but resigned that post four years later, along with Carolyn Kizer, in protest over the board’s reluctance to admit poets of color. This act led to an entire restructuring of the institution’s bylaws. Kumin's most recent collection of poetry is Still to Mow (Norton, 2007).


JACK

How pleasant the yellow butter
melting on white kernels, the meniscus
of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets

where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are
after shucking the garden's last Silver Queen
and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses

the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon:
our first foal, now a bossy mare of 28
which calibrates to 84 in people years

and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster
at 22. Every year, the end of summer
lazy and golden, invites grief and regret:

suddenly it's 1980, winter buffets us,
winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow
we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them,

a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president's portrait
lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it
the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his

hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others
who hang their heads over their dutch doors. Sometimes
he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters.

That spring, in the bustle of grooming
and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go
to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following

fall she sold him down the river. I meant to
but never did go looking for him, to buy him back
and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table

my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons
the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order.
Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone

did you remember that one good winter?


When was this poem composed? How did it start? How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

“Jack” didn’t start with a description of the setting but in medias res with the remembrance & guilt. I can’t remember how many takes later it sort of fell into place beginning with the wine, old friends and corn shucking.

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 ultimately in inspiration; without it I would probably never write as I do not trust what George Starbuck used to call “thunk up” poems. I’d say it was mostly received but in stages that required a lot of trial and error and that is my usual experience.

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

Conscious principles? Not really. I have learned over a lifetime to employ what I call “poetic tact,” a seat-of-the-pants knowledge of what works, what isn’t too much, or minimalist. I dislike bare poems that leave almost everything to the reader but I also believe in leaving room for the reader to do some of the work, to enter into the poem.

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

Alas, I can’t remember how long after I wrote it that it was published (or even where).

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 tend to let a poem sit for several weeks or even months (in some cases years) before I submit it—in the first flush of completion I often think it is done when it isn’t and it takes time for a poem to come back down to room temperature to where I can see it a bit dispassionately.

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

Just about everything I write begins in, or is in some way anchored in fact, which gives me the freedom to fictionalize as needed.

Is this a narrative poem?

I am a narrative poet; in other poets’ work I want to see at least a narrative thread running thru, something to hold onto.

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

No particular audience in mind. It has to please me first but of course I am conscious of readership. I have never trusted the writer who says she/he only writes for her/himself. I’ve never met a musician who didn’t want the work to be performed. Ca va.

As for sharing drafts, I do so, occasionally, and I think most poets do as well. It shortcuts the process to be able to bounce a draft off a trusted adviser and can save me from heading wrong-way down a narrow alley.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours? What is American about this poem?

“Jack” doesn’t differ from the general body of my work. The older I grow the more elegiac my poems become. I write more about our lives here on the farm, probably too much about our dogs and horses, but these, along with vegetables, are what I know best. If that makes this an American poem, so be it.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I think this poem was finished.

James Harms

James Harms has published six books of poetry, most recently After West (2008) from Carnegie Mellon University Press. His second collection, The Joy Addict, for which he received the PEN/Revson Fellowship, will be reprinted this year in Carnegie Mellon’s Classic Contemporaries Series. Newer work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Oxford American, West Branch, Poetry International, Quarterly West, The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, Cave Wall, Barrelhouse, and others. A recipient of an NEA Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, he is Professor of English at West Virginia University, where he was the founding director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. He also directs the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry at New England College.


PHOTO OF MY STEPFATHER IN AN ALTADENA EVENING

There is only one picture of Gene
that stills the sadness long enough
for me to see it. He sits
on a piece of patio furniture in a shirt
aswarm with blue and gray fish,
slumped slightly as if settling in
before stiffening his spine against
the chair's rubber straps.
There is a streak of shadow
slanting through the frame
and dusting his hair with darkness,
as if the evening at the edges of the photo
is swelling with time,
is rinsing away the years as well as the light.
But there is little gray in Gene's hair,
which even now is clay-colored
and fine, as it's been as long
as I've known him. Unlike my father
or mother, I remember not knowing him,
an empty sleeve attached to a jacket,
which hangs in the hall closet
of a house long sold.
Gene has never listened
to Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mathis.
He has never asked to throw a baseball
with me, for which I am grateful.
The one time I saw him finger a satin shirt
was a moment I imagined as I ordered tuxedos
for my groomsmen, my father
and for him. He stood close to my mother
through the service like a birch
leaning slightly toward the clearing
where the sun strikes first
before spreading to the woods.
For twenty years he took all the pictures.
Which is why there is only one
of the sadness stilled, the patio cooling
and Gene at rest in the play of light
and shadow at afternoon's end, the edge
of evening. Perhaps
he is beside my mother now
in their new house near Modesto,
in the kitchen I'm sure, the windows open
to almond trees, the muffled noise
of branches budding. They seem
to be listening to the threads
giving way in the earth,
the soft rip of dahlias pushing up.
But no. It's music in the living room
they hear, Beethoven I would bet, the sadness
of air blended into song,
a wordless story the two of them
have heard so often they know enough
to stop, to turn toward each other
against the steady pull
of the earth, which spins as always
in the other direction.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem was written in the early spring of 1999. Toward the end of the poem there are actually a few references to spring, which suggests I was trying to imagine myself west, to the San Joaquin Valley, and to conjure up the strange beauty of those endless acres of almond groves that surround my mother’s house in Escalon, California. The first time I visited Escalon it was spring (several years before this poem was written), so the impression of blossoming almond trees seems to be my default image for the place; I’ve used it in several other poems.

Anyway, I think I was trying to do two things in this poem: 1) come to terms with a fairly (if domestically) cataclysmic event: my parents’ move away from our childhood home in Altadena (which is in greater Los Angeles) to their new life in retirement in the central valley; and 2) pay homage to my stepfather, who is one of the most important figures in my life.

My stepfather, like my mother, rarely appears in my poems. I think the two of them are such dependable constants that I’ve never needed to write about them; there’s no problem to solve when it comes to them, no trauma or injury that requires the repair of poetry. So I willed myself to make this poem by remembering a photograph of my stepfather. I didn’t actually look at the picture until after I finished the poem; I didn’t want the real thing to get in the way of my imagination. But just the memory of the photo sent me in two directions at once: to our old home in Altadena (in the past), and to their new one in Escalon (near Modesto, the present). I find that I need poems to exist in more than one place and time. I’m most interested in the simultaneity of the lived moment, how the past and future complexify the present.

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

I really can’t remember the process of writing the poem in any specific detail, though if it was in any way normal it would have gone through a dozen or more drafts. I’ve become a fairly fastidious editor, and can keep a poem alive in manuscript form through many edits before I need to kick out another draft. As a result, I don’t put poems through as many iterations as I did twenty years ago, when a typical poem went through forty or fifty drafts. The poem probably took between three and six months to complete.

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

Writing poems is inspiring; it’s a way of creating inspiration in our lives. So yes, I believe in cultivating inspiration through hard work. I do seem to remember that this poem was difficult to write. There are a few complicated metaphors that were tough to orchestrate, and which required the introduction of a degree of self-consciousness that I’m not always comfortable with. So all of that took some time to work out. But there are a few lines that seemed magical to me as I wrote them, that seemed to arrive out of the air. I love it when that happens. A few.

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

I wanted this poem to resemble the easy drift of memory and meditation, that state of consciousness that most of us slip into several times a day when a particular image or overheard phrase triggers a reverie. Eventually I arrived at a line that undulates for the most part, and line breaks that are comfortable and emphatic, as opposed to disruptive and transformational. So the form is an extension of tone, a way of supporting mood and atmosphere. I was certainly conscious of working with all those issues as I moved into the last couple of drafts. The technique is fairly intuitive, but I do spend a lot of time considering the shape of the finished product, and I’m not averse to taking a poem I’ve thought of as finished and completely disassembling it, changing line length or getting rid of breaks all together (most of my prose poems start out as lined poems). This particular poem found its shape fairly early and easily.

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

Well, this could be an embarrassing answer, though I’m betting it’s not all that unusual. I sent this poem out regularly for two and a half years before it was accepted by Poetry International, a journal that has been very kind to me over the years. For whatever reason, Poetry International tends to publish the poems that matter most to me, and I’m very grateful for their support. (I’d send them more work but that would be trading on that support.) The only other journal that has published more of my poems is Crazyhorse, another terrific magazine.

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. I'm certainly more patient than I used to be: I remember regretting the publication of some early poems, most of which were either revised before inclusion in a book or discarded. Then again, I can't say that I'm sure I'm always right. The reasons I like or don't like my own poems are often very personal and subjective, and don't always have much to do with the overall success of the poems. So I tend to trust certain editors and friends; if they think a poem works, I'll hold onto it or even go with an earlier version that they prefer.

But back to the original questions: nowadays I often wait months, even a year or more to send out work. I just don't feel the same urgency to get the poems into the world. Rather, I enjoy fiddling with them for a long time, seeing how they hold up to different moods, different seasons, whatever. Who was the painter who used to sneak into museums and galleries after hours to continue work on his paintings, paintings that were supposedly finished? Yup, I get that.

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

Well, I have a mother and stepfather who live near Modesto and used to live in Altadena. Beyond that, most of the details and situations in the poem are invented, even if they resemble the actual. These distinctions aren’t all that important to me.

Is this a narrative poem?

The poem is descriptive and meditative, and is controlled by a clearly defined voice. This gives the impression of narrative because we’re very aware of a narrator performing acts of memory and description. But there’s not much in the way of linear story telling. So yes, it’s narrative to a degree, but not plot driven.

There are all sorts of ways to enact meditation in poetry. Since I favor situational enactment, and love the sound of a voice on the page, my poems will resemble narratives even when they don’t do much in the way of story telling. When a poem is less connected to a situational reality, it seems more lyric, even if the degree of story telling isn’t all that different from one of my poems. I find these distinctions (like the ones in the previous answer) fairly unimportant. My students are devoted to the bifurcation of poetry into camps, and those camps are usually defined by their relationship to lyric versus narrative disclosure. It seems to me that every poem requires its own specific tools, and I like to make sure my toolbox is as big as possible.

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

I don’t remember who I was reading when I wrote this particular poem, though I know that the book Freeways and Aqueducts, which contains this poem, was informed by my deep reading of W.H. Auden (one of the epigraphs for the book is from “In Praise of Limestone”), as well as James Schuyler, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hass and David St. John, among others. And Ashbery, whose importance to my work is central: I’ve learned more from his poems than I can say.

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

I really don’t think about audience when I’m writing. I assume that if I’m satisfying my own demands for the poem that it might prove worthwhile to other readers of poetry. I tend to feel that poetry that lacks access at the level of the phrase is probably overly concerned with the wrong things; in other words, I’d like for a general reader to be able to understand my poems phrase by phrase. I’d like for them to hear a voice on the page. That’s about it.

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

Not anymore. There were years where I showed many of my poems to a small circle of fellow poets, or mailed them off to friends, but that’s not the case anymore. Occasionally I’ll email something to a friend for a quick look. And I do show my wife most of my poems for her impressions. But I don’t expect the sort of intense critical feedback that was so necessary years ago.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It resembles one sort of poem I enjoy writing, which might be described as a meandering meditation. I like poems that surprise themselves as they proceed, that explode out of narrative tracks and find ways of moving into different temporal and spatial realities without losing their way. But I also enjoy writing other sorts of poetry, so I hope that this poem is both similar and different.

What is American about this poem?

Most of my work is concerned with the way place shapes identity, and I think that’s a very American notion.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Ah, yes: Valery. I tend to agree with him. I’d like to think I finished the poem and that’s that. But the truth is (as I suggested in an earlier answer) I could probably fiddle with a poem forever. At some point I just stop, usually when the fiddling seems less productive or interesting. But is it really finished? Who knows?