George Bilgere

George Bilgere is the author of five books of poetry. The White Museum was chosen by Alicia Ostriker for the Autumn House Poetry Series in 2010. His 2006 collection, Haywire, won the May Swenson Poetry Award in 2006. U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins chose Bilgere’s The Good Kiss to win the University of Akron Poetry Award in 2002. Bilgere received a Pushcart Prize in 2009. His other honors include a Witter Bynner Fellowship through the Library of Congress, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Ohioana Award, the Midland Authors Prize, and a Fulbright Fellowship. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Radio host Garrison Keillor frequently reads Bilgere’s poem on his daily National Public Radio program, The Writer’s Almanac. Bilgere teaches literature at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.


BRIDAL SHOWER

Perhaps, in a distant café,
four or five people are talking
with the four or five people
who are chatting on their cell phones this morning
in my favorite café.

And perhaps someone there,
someone like me, is watching them as they frown,
or smile, or shrug
to their invisible friends or lovers,
jabbing the air for emphasis.

And like me, he misses the old days,
when talking to yourself
meant you were crazy,
back when being crazy was a big deal,
not just an acronym
 or something you could take a pill for.

I liked it
when people who were talking to themselves
might actually have been talking to God
or an angel.
You respected people like that.

You didn’t want to kill them,
as I want to kill the woman at the next table
with the little blue light on her ear
who has been telling the emptiness in front of her
about her daughter’s bridal shower
in astonishing detail
for the past thirty minutes.

O person like me,
phoneless in your distant café,
I wish we could meet to discuss this,
and perhaps you would help me
strangle this woman on her cell phone,

after which we could have a cup of coffee,
maybe a bagel, and talk to each other,
face to face.  


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

One day after class (I work at a sleepy Midwestern college, teaching sleepy Midwestern students) I was walking across the quad and realized that the first ten—-ten!-—people I saw, students and faculty alike, were on their cell phones. At that moment I realized we were moving toward a time when all humans at all times will be permanently on their cell phones. The next morning I was sitting at my local café. Of the six people there, four were on their phones. This called for a poem!  

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

This was one of those rare poems that came out pretty much in its final state. I tweaked it, fiddled around with a few words and phrases, but mostly it arrived fully formed.  

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

I think “inspiration” is what happens, if you’re lucky, during the rather dull and arduous process of writing a poem. You’re plugging away, nothing of much interest is going on, you’re thinking this one’s going to be a dud—-then, bingo! Something nice and surprising happens, the poem suddenly comes alive, sits up on the table, and demands something to eat. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s great when it does.  

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

I wouldn’t say anything unusual happened. But I do think that my best poems have some “attitude” in them. Something bugs me, something irritates or angers me, and that becomes the impetus behind the poem. By the way, in the early version of “Bridal Shower” I said I wanted to “murder” the woman on the phone. I changed that later to “strangle,” which seems more vivid and also makes me seem a little less crazy.  

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

Funny thing. A couple of months after I finished it I sent it off to New Ohio Review. They liked it, and published it a few months later. Then Garrison Keillor saw it and decided to read the poem on his daily radio show, The Writer’s Almanac. His assistant wrote to tell me it had struck some kind of universal chord of non-cell-phone-user resentment. They received a huge number of responses. Keillor ended up including the poem in his new anthology, Good Poems, American Places. So it’s had a good run.  

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

Well, of course, Horace famously suggests you let a poem sit for nine years. I wish people would do that nowadays. Then I’d have the whole field to myself. As it is, I usually keep it for a couple of months and if I feel it’s ready I send it off into the world with strict instructions not to return until it finds a job.  

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

I try to keep fiction out of my poems. I want the poem to be as close to what actually happened as possible. That’s why you won’t see me writing something like The Faerie Queene. I’m looking for the poetry in the ordinary world. When you find that, when a good poem shows it to you, you realize it’s not the world that is ordinary but the way you see it. The poem should strive to recover some original wonder or freshness in the daily reality that surrounds you. I think Wordsworth said something about this.

 Is this a narrative poem?

I guess I’d say it is. Like most of my poems it tells a little story.  

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

As a matter of fact I was reading a collection of Szymborska’s poetry. Of course, I have no idea what she sounds like in Polish, but even in translation there’s something about her stance, her curious, cool distance from the subject matter, her way of seeming bemused, detached, and deeply involved all at the same time, which has probably affected my own work. Please don’t tell her this. >Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader? To tell the truth, I think of the people who listen to NPR as my ideal audience. And yes, I realize this means I will never be called “edgy.” Darn. 

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 show my work to my wife. It’s funny—she doesn’t really have all that much interest in poetry. But she’s a good reader with an infallible instinct for falsehood and pretension, two of my specialties. She’s very hard on me but I love her anyway. 

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours? 

I don’t think this one strays too far from the standard Bilgere oeuvre. 

What is American about this poem? 

I could spend the rest of my life thinking about this one. Probably it’s the central preoccupation of all my work. The poem is American in that the language reflects the flat, plain, Midwestern speech I inherited. It’s a poem that’s suspicious of technology. It resists the fact that we’re spending more time with our gizmos than with each other. Like most of my work it’s a poem that pretty much any literate person can understand. No tricks, no hidden costs. This is a poem you could sit down and have coffee with. And I hope you will.

Fleda Brown

Fleda Brown’s Driving With Dvorak was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. Her most recent collection of poems, Reunion (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), won the Felix Pollak Prize. The author of five previous collections of poems, she has won a Pushcart Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and her work has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. She now lives in Traverse City, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.


TRANSLATION

The woman with the pale hair is signing
the poem. Not that kind of signing.
Her hands dip and flutter and hop
against the black backdrop.
Her mouth shapes emoticons.
Really, I’m not sure what
the mouth’s for. I watch her lips,
the poem changed to hieroglyphs.
She makes her eyes turn off and on.
Keats’s could do no better. Still
wouldst thou sing and I have ears in vain.
Her face goes from happy to pained.
She is inside the poem where the birds live
with their hollow mouths.
I am watching her more than I’m listening.
The poem is not something she believes.
It has sprouted on her like leaves.
It has come out the other side of itself.
Which makes me wonder if I will ever
be able to recover from language enough.
Those people who pray with their palms up
as if they’re catching or releasing
electromagnetic waves?
This is definitely not me. I’m following
the words as if they were closed captions
for the trumpets and blazing of the Rapture.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I think I might have taken a few notes for this poem while sitting in the audience at AWP listening to a poet read. The poet was on stage, a long way from me—it was a big room—and I ended up watching the person doing sign language more than I was watching the poet. The sign language was its own poetry. I started thinking about how the poem must seem to the person signing, and how it must seem to the deaf person. How a poem changes into a different thing with each translation. A little while after I got home, I wrote a draft.

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

I honestly don’t know, and these days as I work more and more directly on the computer, a poem keeps morphing and morphing and I don’t know what to call a “draft” or another “draft.” What are future editors of editions going to do? It’s like a Rubiks cube that you keep moving the pieces until they make a design. Maybe I had it in motion for several weeks before it settled into a place that felt right.

I was able to find several versions I had printed out. The first version is shorter and ends with “How can I ever recover from language enough?” I hadn’t found the poem yet! A later draft ends with “All I do/ is hunch over and trail my finger along/ the actual words as if they were Braille.” I was getting close to it, now, but instead of letting the poem fly out of my grip into its own life, I was trying to hunch over and clamp it down.

Another happy change I see is that I had originally said of the signer, “She looks so sad, now thrilled.” I changed that to “Her face goes from happy to pained,” which is richer in language and also gives me a chance to sound the word against “vain.” I also changed “zaps of extraterrestrial energy” to “electromagnetic waves.” I like the sound better, and I think the tone is a lot better. Not so consciously cute, and more scientific, a more ironic perspective on the people praying with their palms turned up, more in keeping with the speaker.

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

I think there are two kinds of inspiration: the split second of awareness that there’s a special energy in the moment, the event, that makes you want to do something with it, and the one that comes in the middle of the work when you break through—if you’re lucky—to a vein of meaning you didn’t even know was there. When I say meaning, I mean something far from a “moral.” I mean a breathless and uncontrollable gap in linearity that reveals a truth there are no words for. This kind never happens for me until I’m deeply enmeshed in making the poem.

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

I’m very attracted these days to repetition of sounds, and I arranged the lines and changed a few words to get some of those chiming sounds going: hop/backdrop, lips/hieroglyphs, vain/pained, etc. I’ve been writing poems a long time. Any “principles of technique” are so embedded in me I work with them like a blind person, feeling my way through what I know. I want a line to be taut in itself, to have its own integrity, so I tinker with line endings. I am ruthless in cutting things out, but in this case, I added and re-thought some lines.

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

I don’t think so.

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

It will appear in my new book, No Need of Sympathy, which will be out in 2013 from BOA Editions, but your use of it here is its debut as a single poem. Since I’ve retired from teaching, I’m lazy about sending things out. I wish I’d do better, but I think I’m rebelling after all those years of having to yearly tally up my publications for tenure, promotion, and merit raises.

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. Some poems I’m more sure of than others. I usually send poems to a good friend poet, and then I show them to my husband, both of whom are too kind, but they do call my attention to places I want to fix. And the tone of their response is the best information.

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

The situation of the poem is fact. The rest of the poem is my mind, playing with the situation.

Is this a narrative poem?

I think all poems are narrative in that they have an embedded story. Even Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” is narrative. He listens to the bird, he wants to be carried away from his sad situation, but he must return to his life. My poem maybe follows a narrative of the mind, contemplating. First it thinks this, then this, and concludes this, kind of like Keats.

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

I might have just attended a wonderful session on Keats at AWP with David Baker, Stanley Pumley, Ann Townsend and someone else I can’t recall. I think I stole the phrase “recover from language” from somewhere, but I don’t know where now. “Close captioned” popped into the poem because I watch TV at the gym with the close caption turned on, so it was in my head. Also, I have to say, my hearing is bad and so I’m interested in issues of how we translate what we can’t quite hear.

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

My ideal reader is the host of my brilliant predecessor poets as well as those contemporary poets whose work I passionately admire. On the other hand, if an ordinary person who seldom reads poetry can’t make heads or tails of what I’m doing, I think I’ve failed.

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?

Yes, I mentioned both my husband and a poet friend. I used to need more advance readers, but find these days that I really only want some verification (or not) that I’m right to go public with the poem. For years, when I was teaching at the University of Delaware, I met with a poet friend for lunch once a week and we meticulously went over each other’s drafts. At some point, that felt unnecessary and even limiting. Years ago I worked with a few other young poets in a workshop situation. Now I comment with a great deal of energy and attention on my students’ work in the Rainier MFA program, and that’s all the time I’m willing to give these days to other people’s work.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It does feel a little different, maybe slightly more ruminative. There’s literally no action by the speaker in the poem. She’s only thinking.

What is American about this poem?

I don’t know. There are no large social issues in it, which some might find typical American narcissism, but then I read translated poems that also are inward, quiet, and contemplative. The reference to evangelical prayer would probably peg it as American.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I must think it’s finished, since I put it in the book manuscript and I haven’t gone back to it. It may be that as the book is beginning production, I find some changes I want to make. But I’m pretty happy with it at the moment. I was glad to have developed that speaker who’s so scientific, who worries if she’ll ever “recover from language enough” to be able to express what language can’t convey, yet she follows the signing as if it were “closed captions/ for the trumpets and blazing of the rapture.” I like the passion that escapes from her at last. The poem is really about belief, isn’t it? The signer doesn’t “believe” the poem: it just sprouts on her like leaves. She doesn’t need “belief.” The poem simply passes through her.

Jason Koo

Jason Koo is the author of Man on Extremely Small Island (C&R Press, 2009), winner of the De Novo Poetry Prize and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Octopus, The Missouri Review and The Yale Review. The winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, he teaches at Lehman College of the City University of New York, where he directs the graduate program in English. He lives in Brooklyn.


SHOPPING WITH MAYAKOVSKY

One morning I wake
not wanting to get out of bed,
and see a cloud
in my room.
“Mayakovsky?” I say.
“Find me some trousers!” he orders.
I scramble to the closet
and pull out a pair of jeans.
“Don’t know if these will fit,” I say.
“Of course they will,” he says.
“I’m a cloud.”

He puts them on and begins to look more like
himself, his cloudiness
assembling
into a column. “Don’t have much style, do you?”
he says. “Nevermind—
let us go out into the world and find ourselves
an ocean.” Before I
can object
he’s kicked me out the door
into the sunlight.
“Ah, just what I was looking for,”
he says, reaching up for the sun and fixing it
like a monocle
in his eye. “Now, poet,”
he laughs, slapping me on the back
and sending me flying
into some pines, “take me to your supermarket.”
I point him down the street—
rain leaks from his legs,
flame leaps from his eye,
and as we walk he floods and scorches, scorches and floods…
“Marvelous!” he cries.
“Your window-flashing automobiles!
Your torrent of engines!
But these buildings are ugly.”
I slow him down
by telling him about my problems in love.
“What will it be?” he says,
his face softening,
the floodtide letting up.
“Love or no-love?
And what kind of love:
big or minute?”
He grins and nudges me with a feathery elbow:
“Girls are partial to poets.”
We arrive at the supermarket,
where Mayakovsky
falls in love with the automatic doors.
He walks into the store over and over again,
each time announcing,
“But I—!”
The people in the cash register lines
drop their products.
Turning,
Mayakovsky bows and says,
“Ladies and Gentlemen,
I
present to you
Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy.”
One woman screams—
the rest smile and bat their eyelashes.
I grab a shopping cart
and Mayakovsky hops in.
We cruise through the aisles,
blackening the boxes.
“Look at all this food,” he says.
“Over there! The ocean.” 

We roll into the frozen fish section,
slowing by freezer doors
so Mayakovsky can open and fog them
one by one.
He sees the lobster tank
and tells me to stop,
going silent
with concentration.
“This is how I feel,” I say,
stooping. Calmly,
Mayakovsky tells me to move
on, then, once out of view of the lobsters, wheels
and says, “Stop moping!”
“But what’s the point?” I say.
“I’m not you—I’m just wasting my time.”
“You think you’re wasting your time?
You don’t know what it is
to waste time
until you’ve written a three-thousand line elegy
on the death of Lenin.
Try drawing posters
and championing boiled water
for a change.” I apologize
and he says, “Who can blame you for feeling
unproductive
with all these stores around?
Forget about them.
Sharpen yourself
on the edge
of your own decision.”
“But what if nobody listens?” I ask.
“Hit them with hammer strokes
of metaphor
in stanzas like pistol points.
Make sure you sing.”
We pass the kitchen utensils
and Mayakovsky plucks
a long wooden spoon
from its rack, folds
a tuft of cloudfront
neatly back into a lapel
and inserts the spoon
like a boutonniere.
“Now, let us find some women!”
he says, pointing to the produce section.
But then: “Never,
under any circumstances,
set your heel on the throat
of your own song.”
As we turn toward the tomatoes
the spoon shifts, revealing
the tiny, clean bullet hole underneath.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in the fall of 2003, as an assignment for Lynne McMahon's workshop during my first semester in the PhD program at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The workshop was organized thematically around the ubi sunt poem--thinking about this, I feel like writing an ubi sunt poem for all the workshops lost over the years. As you can probably tell, "Shopping with Mayakovsky" is not an ubi sunt poem in the classical sense; it's a conversation poem modeled on Mayakovsky's own conversation poem with the sun and O'Hara's follow-up conversation. But I figured I'd stretch the parameters of the assignment, as I couldn't imagine Mayakovsky writing a straight-up ubi sunt poem, and just elegizing the loss of him didn't feel true to his spirit. By the way, I've had to write ubi sunt four times (now five), and every time TextEdit autocorrects "sunt" to "aunt." There, just did it again. Very annoying.

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

Unlike most of my other poems, this one didn't go through that many revisions. I can't say exactly how much time elapsed between the first and final drafts, but the poem was pretty close to its final form after the first draft--it came out all in one go (another rarity for me). Most of the revisions were pretty small, such as changing punctuation--I remember taking out a few of Mayakovsky's exclamation points prior to the publication of my book. The only fairly big change I remember making was adding the image of the lobster tank. I went to Gerbes (the supermarket where the poem takes place) shortly after writing the first draft and walked by the lobster tank and saw a missed opportunity. Can't have Mayakovsky in a supermarket and not have him look at the lobsters.

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

No, I don't believe in inspiration in the sense that some gust from the heavens enters you and makes you spooge your genius onto the page. But I do believe in letting a certain amount of energy build up inside of you prior to writing a poem. You've got to let the energy build and build--this may happen through "sweat and tears." You want to write a poem about Mayakovsky. You know his poems well but haven't read them for a few years. So you go back and read them over and over again. You look back at some old notes on him. You look back over the biographical material. You prepare and prepare and finally you just make a starting point--hopefully it sticks. Sometimes it doesn't stick, and you know pretty quickly that it sucks because of all the prep-work you've done. In this case, I liked the opening I happened upon and the poem just flew from there.

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

I wanted to write very short lines after the type of lines Mayakovsky used in his own poem about talking to the sun. I wanted the poem to shoot down the page. This was a big change for me, because prior to this (and after) I used predominantly long lines. I didn't feel comfortable in short lines. But the thought that these were the type of lines Mayakovsky would've written in sanctioned them for me. I also tried to incorporate some formal homages to his stylistic hallmarks, such as isolating "I" by itself in a line, or using his titanic "But I" rhetorical maneuver. I also just, well, used a lot of his own lines or images in the poem, such as the one about him fixing the sun "like a monocle" in his eye.

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

Yeah, I mean, I was talking to a cloud. That was pretty unusual.

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

Published online by Shampoo in 2006, so I guess about three years. Not sure exactly when in '06 it came out.

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 any strict rules, but I definitely sit with a poem for at least a month or so before sending it out. Even when I write a poem all in go (which, as I said, is pretty rare for me), I continue working on it for at least a week afterward, seeing how I can improve it or if I missed any opportunities (such as lobsters). And I know that some obvious little edits will only become clear when I haven't looked at the poem for a few days after this primary composition period. So, to be safe, I give every poem at least a month to congeal. When it looks like globbed spaghetti--that's when I send a poem out.

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

Well, obviously my talking to Mayakovsky while walking through a supermarket is fiction. My moping like lobsters with their claws tied up in a lobster tank is fact. Mayakovsky shooting himself is fact. Sadly.

Is this a narrative poem?

Strange question. Yes.

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

I believe I was reading Mayakovsky at the time, but don't quote me on that.

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

I've talked about this in another interview, but yes, I have a reader in mind, a sleepy friend I want to WAKE UP. I believe Mayakovsky wrote for this type of reader--and he's my inspiration in this regard. I want my poetry to kickstart a reader into life, more life, more life.

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?

Yes, the people who were taking the workshop with me saw the first draft, of course. Some great people in that class: Steve Gerhke, Nadine Meyer, Nicky Beer, Katie Pierce, Christine Marshall and others. Steve was, and still is, an important reader for me, the one who seems best able to gauge just how good a poem of mine is--is it really good, or just so-so? Or crap? He was really behind this poem, as were most of the other people in the class, which sort of surprised me, because I thought it was fun but not that "big" of a poem. To this day I don't think this is one of my best poems, but several people have told me this is their favorite, or one of their favorites. I gave a reading last spring in Sacramento and a young woman came up to me afterward to tell me she had discovered this poem online and decided on the basis of this one poem to see me read. That was interesting.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Well, like I said, it uses very short lines. So that's different. But in other respects it's not that different, as it mixes humor and sadness and uses a conversational voice and has a narrative structure.

What is American about this poem?

Maybe the fact that I'm quoting Mayakovsky in English translation? The supermarket definitely. I thought it would be interesting to put this Communist poet, the voice of the Revolution, in a consumerist landscape. Also, I felt that I was following an American line of influence from Mayakovsky through the New York School, specifically O'Hara and Koch.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This one ended with a click.

Danielle Cadena Deulen

Danielle Cadena Deulen is a poet and essayist. She is the author Lovely Asunder, winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize (University of Arkansas Press, 2011), and The Riots, winner of the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the 2012 GLCA New Writers Award (University of Georgia Press, 2011). Formerly, she was a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has received three Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry prizes (2007, 2008, 2010) and a Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellowship. Her poetry and essays have appeared most recently in The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and The Indiana Review. She received her MFA from George Mason University and her PhD from the University of Utah. She currently lives in Ohio where she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati.


LACAN AT THE CAROUSEL

Horses reined with iron bits in their mouths
and gold poles through their bodies,
shine silent and in mid-stride, their pink manes,

their flowered saddles, and the inanimate
gaze of their eyes. The center of the carousel
is ringed with mirrors to make the spectacle

of lights multiply, and the archaic music
brighter. He sits on a giraffe with his six-months
daughter. They go up and down in the illusion

of a gallop, though, of course, they go nowhere.
Other children squeal, but his Judith is silent,
watchful the way all bastard children are.

She is constructing the memory that will
split her. Beneath the lacquered floor of the ride
is an unconscious machine, a labyrinth of gears

churning everything forward toward nothing.
At the top of the poles is consciousness.
At the root of the poles is desire. Everyone

must ride until their desire is extinguished,
or until someone intervenes. Beyond the scarlet
awning, an intricate broil of clouds, like language.

Soon, they’ll all be drenched. When he moves
to take his girl off the ride, he finds her watching
herself in the mirrors—the seams of the mirrors

interrupting her view, and she is alternately
jubilant and confused—the subject and the image,
the subject and the image. When she turns her

tea-rose of a face toward him, he looks elsewhere.
In his periphery, an elephant with a rope in his teeth—
a minotaur lounging with a book—all the figures

impaled with gold, like the flash of light
from that first, ideal self—how it stabs,
repeatedly, through the center with its lie.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem was composed during the fall of 2009. To ward off anxiety about my first book not getting published, I abandoned what at that time was the Lovely Asunder manuscript and began writing what I believed then would be a new manuscript. This poem was, originally, the fourth in a series of seven poems, each focusing on a large figure from the early era of psychology. I had written “Charcot at the Opera,” “Freud at the Laundromat” and “Jung at the Harbor,” before it. So, by the time I sat down to write this one I’d had a bit of practice in the form I found myself repeating: all in tercets, using language from the featured psychologist’s critical work, and focusing on an imagined everyday moment in the person’s life. I re-read Lacan’s writing on the Mirror-stage, read a few brief, overly-general, probably spurious Lacan biographies online, and then imagined him at a carousel with his illegitimate daughter. I decided on a carousel because I liked the consonant rhymes with Lacan’s name, and decided it would be amusing to describe the carousel in Lacanian terms, so my attempt began there—with amusing myself.

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

Other than two spelling errors, the poem was never revised. It’s more or less a first draft. But as I mentioned before, I’d been inadvertently practicing the form I created for this series by writing the three previous poems, so this one seemed almost to write itself. I wrote it very quickly—straight through—and when I arrived at the last line it seemed done. I found this suspicious—thought perhaps I was being overly proud of getting some work done and it would probably look like a disaster to me in the morning (the way much of my work does). But in the morning, it didn’t seem like a disaster, and in the months after it also didn’t strike me as disastrous.
After several months of eyeing it suspiciously, I decided that perhaps it was one of those rare cases of “first idea, best idea.”

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

Well, there was no sweating or crying with this particular draft, but I don’t believe in “inspiration,” so I’ll explain it this way: When you learn a new instrument, you practice the scales so that you can eventually learn to forget them and just play. This poem came quickly, but after much practice in similar poems and in generally writing poetry. So, I believe this was the reward of previous hard work. In other words, the sweating and crying came years before, so that when it came to the moment of writing this poem, I could just sit down and play.

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

I’ve probably already covered this; I had a loose, modal form in mind, but moved through it rather unconsciously.

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

A year.

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 might send off a poem a week after I’ve written it if I think it’s good enough. Some poems I’ve waited years to send out. This particular poem went out pretty quickly once I stopped accusing it of trying to make a fool of me—that took about six months.

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

I like this question. I always like this question, though I believe it sets up a false binary between “fact” and “fiction.” The word “fiction” gets a bad rap as somehow actively false, when it’s clear that living within an expected narrative structure is essential for living. What are expectations but our expectations of the imagined narrative structures we wish our lives to take?

But to answer the question regarding this specific poem: I used Lacan’s biographical details and language, but twisted both to render this scene. The “facts” of someone’s life is not often very interesting—the fiction of their constructed self is always more interesting to me, and that’s what I wanted to explore in Lacan’s case here. The early giants of psychology always seem to me to present themselves as invulnerable—believing themselves to be distant, like gods, commenting on the structures and narratives of the human mind so much so that they couldn’t see how their thinking and lives unraveled beneath their own theories. I suppose this was especially true of Freud. His case study of Dora is, for me, far more intriguing as a case study of Freud’s narcissism than anything else. That said, my attempt in the series and certainly my attempt in this poem was to collapse the intellectual distance between the subject and the reader by peering into a quiet, intimate moment in the subject’s mind—showing how their paradigmatic theories might apply in their own specific circumstances. In this way, it is an exploration of the actual critical work of Lacan, which is itself a kind of fiction.

Is this a narrative poem?

I think this poem has some narrative aspects in that it attempts to capture a scene in Lacan’s life. Specifically, I focus on an imagined conflation of the intellectual and emotional lives of Lacan, which could be seen as a kind of spiritual climax in the larger narrative structure of his life. The poem hints at antecedent scenarios—an affair has taken place, and Lacan has already written his earlier works—but here he sees his Mirror Stage working on the face of his daughter and begins to wonder what it will mean for her.

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

I was reading Hopkins during the time I wrote this poem. But I’m always reading Hopkins…he’s one of my favorite poets—an influence that probably no one would suspect by reading my work.

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

I don’t imagine any kind of reader while I’m writing. I don’t really begin to consider an audience until the editing process, and then it’s just to try to image the poem making sense to a wide variety of people—hoping the poem gives enough on the first read, but opens enough for the reader to consider coming back to it again.

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 believe you saw this draft, Brian, but we were both too busy to actually workshop the poem. Perhaps you could have allayed my fears much earlier.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Well, it doesn’t have any autobiographical elements to it and it confronts—in a rather tongue-and-cheek way—Lacan’s theories. Both of these aspects make it different from other poems of mine.

What is American about this poem?

The writer. This may seem a pithy statement, but in the year before writing this poem, I’d been chewing on Lacan’s theories and thinking of how they might apply to a national consciousness: if people can spend their entire lives in an asymptotic trajectory toward an idealized self that never really existed, nations might do the same thing. And I’d argue that America, in its very conscious attempt to form an identity separate from Europe, found its Ideal-I in the figure of the cowboy. Well, I’d argue this along with many other people—Richard Slotkin, namely.

Somehow, the carousel, in its commodified and synthetic reenactment of horse riding, reminded me of America’s nostalgia for a “natural” national consciousness that never existed: “They go up and down in the illusion / of a gallop, though, of course, they go nowhere.” Although, I certainly don’t expect anyone to think of such a thing when reading this poem. That’s one of those aspects of the work that, I realize, would only occur to me and only because I wrote it. So, this poem is American in my own preoccupation with the fiction of American identity which I saw as being utterly applicable even to Lacan’s notions of the self, and this preoccupation with constructing identity (both personal and national) is very American.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Neither. I never worked on it enough to abandon it, and “finished” I take to mean polished which in my mind requires time and care and attention. This poem, strangely enough, existed on its own without my having to do much to it. A terrible metaphor to explain: it was one of those woodland, four-legged creatures who stand up with the amnion still wet on its back.

Gibbons Ruark

Gibbons Ruark has published his poems widely for over forty years. Among his eight collections are Keeping Company (1983), Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems (1999) and Staying Blue, a 2008 chapbook. The recipient of many awards, including three NEA Poetry Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and the 1984 Saxifrage Prize for Keeping Company, he was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, and grew up in various Methodist parsonages in the eastern part of the state. Educated at the Universities of North Carolina and Massachusetts, he taught English largely at the University of Delaware until his retirement in 2005. He lives with his wife Kay in Raleigh.


SESSION BEGINNING IN SUNLIGHT

The day’s too warm for the tart smoke of a turf fire,
Though dust motes in the sunlight are a kind of smoke,
The brass is polished, the stained-glass panels make
A gossipy row of snugs along the bar.
A shadowy hand. The fluent stick on the taut
Rim of the bodhran summons a ramrod dancer.
Suddenly deft fingers flying on the slender
Whistle. Tin. The tenor banjo’s picking out of thought,
The gaiety of flutes evaporates our cares.
One fiddle. Two. Something come apart is mending.
Heat lightning. Night coming on. Soon there will be stars
And strangely in the dark the lark ascending.
Here’s a health to these harmonious Irregulars:
Let this reel unwind the music’s only ending.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The truth is that this poem has been quietly germinating since the fall of 1981, when I heard my first session of traditional Irish music in Galway City. I’ve alluded briefly to such sessions in several poems over the years, but didn’t get around to facing one head-on until the summer of 2006, after I’d been listening in on Sunday sessions in The Hibernian in downtown Raleigh for about a year. But it was that great session in Cullen’s bar in Galway that got the inner clock ticking.

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

Oddly enough, this poem started for me as an effort to use the “haiku” stanza that Richard Wilbur has used so beautifully in a number of poems, beginning I believe with “Thyme Flowering Among the Rocks,” but after several false starts at that I gave up and fell back on the pentameter and eventually the sonnet. One of my musician friends said that he loves the way the poem “becomes” a sonnet. I hope he’s right. In any case, I believe that I have learned that anything shorter than the tetrameter line doesn’t lend itself happily to my voice. There were three or four days between the first version and the first “final” version, after which I moved from the notebook to the keyboard. But I always make a few more changes after that, and evidence of those last revisions dissolves into ether. For example, I don’t find the line “The gaiety of flutes evaporates our cares” anywhere but in the final typed text.

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

There was some sweat but no tears. Luck is the main kind of inspiration I believe in, but I always have to qualify that with a remark by Jack Nicklaus: “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”

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

The answer to the first question: By means of work and luck. To the second: Yes.

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

I suppose I finished it a good bit faster than is normal for me. Maybe that’s because it had been lying in wait so many years, and maybe I just absorbed something of the tempo of those Irish sessions.

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

Thanks to Rod Smith at Shenandoah, a little less than a year.

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 usually send poems out not long after I feel they are finished. It can take various lengths of time for that feeling to take hold.

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

I have frequently objected to the fairly common view that fiction writers are inventive, whereas poets simply tell the truth. In fact, I objected so often in the hearing of my older daughter that she gave me a T-shirt emblazoned with the words I MAKE STUFF UP. I believe that shaping one’s materials into something like a sonnet is itself a form of invention, so a “made thing,” as Leon Stokesbury calls his fine anthology, is a kind of fiction even if every word of it is fact. When X. J. Kennedy saw this poem in print, he said “Do Irish larks indeed fly by night? Bejaysus, what’s got into them?” I replied that I guessed the larks were an auditory hallucination induced by the music. But given the magical and painful distinction Shakespeare draws between the lark and the nightingale in Romeo and Juliet, my nocturnal larks might be a little hard to credit.

Is this a narrative poem?

Since the sun goes down between the beginning and the end, there is a narrative element, but I’d have to say it’s mainly a lyric poem.

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

I never read other poets while working on a poem, and in fact have often found prose to be more influential on me than poetry. Though Pound is not one of my touchstones, I love his remark that poetry ought to be at least as well written as prose.

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

The vast majority of my poems are addressed to specific people, but this one is an exception to that rule, so I might say it is addressed to anyone who wants to listen to the music with me, and it is of course for harmonious Irregulars everywhere.

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 don’t show unfinished work to anyone, and I show finished work only to my wife before sending it off. On one or two occasions I haven’t even done that if the poem was one for her which I wanted to be a surprise.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’ll leave that for others to say.

What is American about this poem?

Strictly speaking, the poem is set in America, but it invokes Ireland, so one could call it Irish-American.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.

Joseph Millar

Joseph Millar's first collection, Overtime (2001) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University and spent twenty-five years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His work has won a fellowship for the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize. In 1997, he gave up his job as telephone installation foreman to try his hand at teaching. A new chapbook, Bestiary, is now available from Red Dragonfly Press, and a third collection, Blue Rust, will be published by Carnegie-Mellon in 2012. Millar is now core faculty at Pacific University's Low Residency MFA Program and lives in Raleigh, NC with his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux.


AMERICAN WEDDING

The yarmulke hides the bald spot on my goyische skull
as I watch my new son-in-law's size 13
stomp down on the linen-swathed wineglass.
My daughter looks radiant, no other word
for it, gowned in white satin the color of light.
We're surrounded by Jews dressed in black
like the sea, like the streets of Manhattan,
whose young men will soon bear me up
on a chair, a floating throne
over the circle clapping and singing.
I've eaten roast duck at the rehearsal dinner,
listened to the cantor's plangent tones,
stood by while the two signed the ornate
ketubah, gold-leafed promise
unschooled like a map of the world.

My small wan gaggle of distant family
clumps together next to the aisle,
divorced, remarried adopted, nervous:
our dead father's third wife coughing behind
my stepchildren, ex-wife, half brothers, motley,
ragged, one nephew wearing a baseball cap.

When the groom lifts the veil from her
delicate temples, I'm thinking someone
should warn them: a future of funerals, car
payments, taxes, kids throwing up in the night.
It's a job you mostly won't know how to do,
your naked arm deep in a jammed kitchen sink,
burnt rinds of eggplant crazily adrift.

Your children will lift their small faces
toward you and give you reason to weep,
and if you manage to stay together
there will be nights you lie down
like strangers back to back
falling away from each other in sleep.

Above us the moon looks speckled, torn,
fluttering over the courtyard and I'm dazed by the perfume rising up
from this fleshy rose pinned to my worsted lapel.
I'm swallowing down the thick nuptial wine,
getting reading to dance all night.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

It started after we got back home from New Orleans where the wedding took place. I was having a spell of sadness, a kind of dazed aftermath. I knew my daughter was kind of going away forever.

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

It went through quite a few. These narratives usually require a lot of cutting and some pasting. I had the basic scaffolding, and then I kept remembering things (the jammed kitchen sink) and fitting them in there. Maybe ten months or fifteen. Sometimes I have to keep walking around for a while when I think a poem's finished and then I will find it is not. Sometimes when I can't get an ending, I need to be alive for a little longer, to wait and be patient.

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

I do believe in inspiration and surely there must have been some of that, but the way most of this poem came was through the various avenues of memory: the Jewish wedding customs—the shattered glass, the Ketubah, the hoisted chair—they were obvious poetry. So the writing seemed like mostly conscious labor, but I had so much feeling about this, I was able to jump around fairly well.

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

Just the usual techniques of free-verse narrative. I tried to compress the syntax, make sure each line had something in it, tried to speak clearly and not overdo it...

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

It didn't appear until my second book, Fortune, came out in ‘07, maybe three years.

It was accepted by Paterson Review but I don't think they ever printed it because I failed to send them a computer disc of it, which they'd requested.

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 usually let them sit for a while. No rules but usually.

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

This poem is pretty much true to the facts. I think the spirit of a poem's truth is more important than its factual truth, but in this case the facts seemed enough.

Is this a narrative poem?

Oh yes.

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

Probably my usual influences: Sharon Olds, James Wright, Philip Levine, Nina Simone, Neil Young.

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

Usually a true friend, but sometimes an enemy or someone I don't like.

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 wife, the poet Dorianne Laux, sees all my work before I send it anywhere.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It's not that different.

What is American about this poem?

There are a few American threads running through it. The Jewish ceremony, its old-world solidarity, the speaker's sense of estrangement, his own "recombined" family riddled with death and divorce. Also, a kind of celebration of the Other and the idea that marriage is probably somewhat the same for everybody.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?
I think it's finished.

Jesse Ball

Jesse Ball is a fabulist of the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. His many prizewinning works run through the fields of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and art. Most recently he is the author of The Curfew (novel) and The Village on Horseback (omnibus). He teaches lucid dreaming and general practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.






LESTER, BURMA

For J.Z.

Lester and Burma were speaking gaily. He had encountered her in the hallway. Hello, he said, you certainly are a sight for sore eyes. They proceeded to a room adjoining that hall, where a large window opened onto the street. I would like to have you for supper, said Burma, and took off her dress.

I am appalled, said the doorman to the coachman, and the coachman to the gardener, at the way the young lady dosports herself. You would think she had been brought up better than that.

Burma was wearing no underwear, and her slender body looked very nice on Lester's sofa. He said so. Thank you, said Burma. I swim each day, and use fine oils. Of course you do, said Lester.

What will happen, said Lester's father to Lester's mother, when that boy gets to the big city? Who will he fall in with? Will he return in ten years' time and shower us with gifts and rememberance? Or will he, said Lester's father to Lester's sickly uncle, die from the plague like all his cousins? Perhaps he will take to the sea and become a privateer, with a letter of marque. I would like that, said the uncle. I would like that also, said Lester's father.

A cloud of bees overtook the window and screened the room for a minute. Do you think they'll harm us? asked Lester. Why, no, said Burma, they're just curious. Aren't you ever curious? Yes, quite, said Lester, laying his hand upon her thigh.

The beekeeper paused by his hives. A cloud of bees is missing, he said, to no one in particular. I hpe the little creatures aren't up to any mischief. I hope they return by dark so I can tuck them in their little beds and read them fairy tales.

At any rate, said Lester, we might at least have a look in the bedroom and see what's going on in there. Yes, said Burma, we might at least do that. Just to know for sure. The bedroom door closed softly behind them.

And when the bees returned to their hive, the beekeeper was there with glad tears and an admonishing word. He read them a story from a fine book he'd just bought, in which a boy and girl go to bed together with no other reason than that it is nice to be in bed with a boy and it is nice to be in bed with a girl and it is nice to wake up midway through a life in early evening to the buzzing of bees in an adjoining room.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

In the spring of two thousand and three. In a basement room with a glimmer of light through some sort of absurd duct poking up onto 125th street in Manhattan. I was attending graduate school at Columbia at that time.

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

None.

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

The mind runs on particular courses. Should such a course be presentable, perhaps it is a poem.

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

Delight. All labor, all love in useless, ample delight.

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

I did more of this sort of thing before March Book, and more after. Prose that isn't anything, that doesn't believe it has to be anything. It is an arrow approaching its target on foot, unannounced.

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

I believe the book appeared a year later, from Grove Press.

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 most often write in volumes, so it is a matter of the publisher's will to action.

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

Poetry is non-fiction. Poems are battle-reports fresh from the field. You must wipe the blood off them to read the hastily written words. Also, poems are inventions, having nothing to do with anything. They are like the kisses girls give to imaginary crocodiles, if such crocodiles, if such girls exist.

Is this a narrative poem?

Some would say so. But not very much happens. Do things need to happen?

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

Well, then I was mad about Proust.

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

That person who is always walking back and forth to the mailbox to see if the mail has arrived.

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?

Once things are done, I tend to show my wife. But in two thousand and three, I hadn't heard of her yet.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It ends happily.

What is American about this poem?

It continues the continent's true heritage: that arrival must extinguish something. Somewhere another poem has been snuffed out. No, I suppose, I don't find that I am particularly American. Do you have to be, just because you were born here? I like the American transcendentalist tradition. I like free thought. I like Paul Morphy and Henri Darger. That's my America.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Abandoned into print.