Philip White

Philip White’s poems have won a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, Slate, Poetry, Agni, New England Review, Southern Review, Hudson Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. His first book, The Clearing, from which “Six O’Clock Flight to the Interment” is taken, won the Walt Macdonald Prize and was published in Texas Tech University Press in 2007. He teaches Shakespeare at Centre College.


SIX O’CLOCK FLIGHT TO THE INTERMENT

Sometimes it seems that everything’s dislodged,
slipping, and all we really know is pain
coming back, along perhaps with glimmers
of places we have been, made visible
by change or changed attention. As, lifted now
through brief turbulence into this routine
sublimity, I feel both freed and lost,
and see the embryonic moon in its swirl
of fluids wobble in inhuman view,
the clouds below like the very earth but scraped
and colorless, a blank moraine, a surface
infinitely formed and varied but by strictures
that elude me. Illusion of a surface,
I should say, because they are only clouds.
There’s room in this cabin to forget them, though,
and the crude thrust forward that unanchors us.
We can close the windows and sleep, or try
again to feel what we feel, or try not to.
I’m going to see my second mother lowered
in the ground, beside her daughter, my late wife,
and in the pause I try to trace strands back
that hardly hold together anymore
or hold me to what’s gone. I have to face
what is at last a limit if not a failure,
the points at which my loves fell from me
and even my pain was lost and what remained
was a mere place, the fields I walked in day
by day. It’s ugly feeling nothing, but worse
to be unaware of it, or to call it moving on
or working through or healing, to mock ourselves
with snapshots, memories, adjusting the focus
and sentiments to suit our needs, as if
nothing at all had been lost or the lost
were only what they seemed to us to be.
Pain may be true, but in time the mind numbs
and wanders, and the dead don’t come. Instead,
random places, the small dark gap in the arms
of the pine that looked inviting from inside
my first grade classroom, or the flat in Hong Kong
where I lay some mornings taking in the tops
of trees below me on the street that seemed
so disappointing but so real, though the spot
I then lay is now two hundred feet in the air
between new buildings. But sometimes simply being
someplace is all we need, and in bare sunlight
on a wall we sense a signature of what is
conducting us, arraying, granting us
entry, moving us from love to love.
After all there’s room for joy here, too.
I try to piece it together, the rocky hill
where the body will be laid, the various cries
and yawps of birds that breed or pass over,
the trees in all seasons, the eroding cliffs,
small tufts or shifting atolls of cloud,
and always the vagaries of light on the cusps
of everything, and a face, maybe, something said.
But why so little of that, of others, here,
of their way of being in this place, of what
they made of the look of things that stopped us,
wrapped us in wonder, from which we took our cues?
As if they were mere scenery, props,
or like that bird back home whose call I knew
too long for it to stay with me; so lost
it was in my surroundings that only drifts
of tone, of rhythm, will come until I find
my way back to that place. But weren’t they
more than that? Weren’t they themselves sometimes,
maybe from the start, a world for us, a field,
and so the dead are like a struck stage, a slate
wiped clean, a cloud moraine above or below
or within which everything takes place
and we will never find ourselves again?


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

After my mother’s death in 1995, I didn’t write much for five years. There were other reasons, but I think it was partly because something about her love of life, her creative and responsive way of being, the mere fact of it in the world, had been elemental for me. I still haven’t written very directly about her, but her presence and her loss are behind virtually everything I’ve written since then. “Six O’Clock Flight” is one of the more explicit poems on the subject, and even so it’s pretty oblique. The immediate impetus for writing it was the death, in 2006, of my first wife’s mother, but that event was just the surface layer of a succession of losses. In other words, the poem, even more than most, started a long time before it was composed.

How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts? How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print? 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? Was this poem finished or abandoned?

As I remember, there were three major revisions involving deleting, adding, or overhauling large sections of the poem, and about ten or eleven more line-by-line run-throughs involving local changes—all within about a month of beginning to write. I typically spend far longer on a poem—decades, even. I probably would have lingered over this one too, but Texas Tech had solicited a manuscript from me and under deadline I put the poem in my manuscript and sent it off. I knew pretty early on that the poem had a culminating power for what I’d been writing for twenty years, and I thought the manuscript would be stronger for its inclusion, even without the usual time to get a settled perspective on each word and phrase and line. When the manuscript was accepted, the editor didn’t welcome revisions, so the poem was published largely as submitted, in the book, a year after I wrote it. I was basically comfortable with the poem when I sent it off, and fortunately still am. That’s not often the case with poems I haven’t spent a lot of time with. So this poem was neither “finished” in the usual way for me, nor really “abandoned.” More like “released,” “let go.”

Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears? How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

I don’t seem to write unless a place, a person, or some intriguing, disturbing, or beautiful object gets tangled up with or catches on an internal need or imperative or driving emotion. I think everything I’ve written was “inspired,” in that sense, by something outside of me. There’s also a happiness of thought or perception that sometimes occurs after mulling or brooding on something for a long time, and a serendipity of phrase that can happen when I’m immersed in the experiential properties of words—their sounds, rhythms, and layers and nuances of meaning, their histories, the ways they interact with each other—and am writing by ear and intuition. But for me those flashes hardly seem like divine afflatus or badges of native genius. They rise out of cultivated habits of openness and attention, even out of long thought and hard study. I’m enough of a Romantic to like the idea of each poem finding its own form even if it ends up resembling or re-actualizing some inherited one, and to recognize in the very phrasing of these questions a familiar complex of anxieties and hedges about craft and its supposed ideological implications. Still, I think all writers, brilliant originals or just plodding laborers like me, “consciously employ principles of technique,” though they may not analyze in real time what they’re doing or remember it later. This particular poem, certainly, emerged from conscious attention to form and craft as well as from hunches, leaps, feeling around in the dark, and trial and error. With regard to form, I responded to evolving intuitions about how the long the poem would be and how the thought and feeling might proceed, how long and connected the phrases and sentences might be, and how stress rhythms, caesura placement, line length, and line end might interact with the syntactical constructions to control the momentum. Although the poem has some of the properties of blank verse, I didn’t start with the idea of meter, or end up with a truly metrical poem.

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

The narrative of the flight mostly sets up an occasion for lyrical thinking. The narrative refers to factual events; the shape the thinking takes is fiction. I didn’t merely transcribe what I saw and thought on a particular flight. Behind the generalizing impulse in the poem is layered experience of other trips home to funerals in the years after I moved to the other side of the continent from where I grew up. The poem finds a voice for thoughts that had been germinating over time about those losses, but it also voices other thoughts, some of which writing the poem helped me to have.

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

My reading usually takes a long time to percolate down to where the poems come from, and just as long to get wicked up back to the surface, so what I was reading at the moment probably isn’t relevant. I’m just far enough from the poem not to remember what my conscious influences were, anyway. I could surmise some from rereading the poem, but that would be literary criticism, no better than anyone else’s.

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?

I don’t aim this way in every poem, but I like the idea of writing poems that all the different people in my life, particularly non-literary ones, might find approachable. Even so, I hardly ever show anything to anyone. At some point, of course, I send things out to magazines, and I eventually show all my poems to my wife, Lisa Williams, who is also a poet. Her responses have helped me more than anything else, besides my own reading and thought. Before that, I showed everything to my first wife, who was a very good reader. I’ve also had a few generous friends over the years who have given me criticism and encouragement, but I’ve never been part of a “group” and have only had a few hours of experience in a “workshop.” I usually don’t show anyone my poems until I’ve done as much as I can with them, allowing time for revisiting and reconsideration. What readers tell me may convince me that I’m not in fact finished with the poem, but if I haven’t done everything I can beforehand I don’t want to waste their time.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s more loose and meandering in its thinking and more sustained in its rhythms than some, maybe. It’s also longer than most of my poems.

What is American about this poem?

Even if death is the great universal, love and grief, and attitudes toward time and place, self and other, are all tinged, if not shaped, by culture. I’m sure the poem is American in some way. But it doesn’t make a point of it.

Donald Hall

Donald Hall is widely read and loved for his award-winning poetry, fiction, essays, and children’s literature. He has published sixteen collections of poetry, most recently White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946 – 2006. A former poet laureate of the United States, Hall is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His honors include two Guggenheim fellowships, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Silver medal, a Lifetime Achievement award from the New Hampshire Writers and Publisher Project, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry. Hall lives on his ancestral farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire.


AFFIRMATION

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I’m not sure when I wrote it. Something like 2000? It started with the first line, not particularly original, but flashing in my mind and leading on.

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

Fewer revisions than usual. If I had to make a guess I would say thirty-five. Over four or five months?

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

Some inspiration. I remember that first line came accompanied by an energy and a momentum. But I have to keep a poem around and keep staring at it, changing a word every day or week.

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

At some point I realized that I had a liquid, or muddy, metaphorical area. I remember, in the lines about the lapsed friendship, having “ruin” or “destroy”—and changing it to “pollute.” It was a late revision.

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

I do not remember how long I let it lay about. I remember sending it out to the New Yorker thinking that the end of it did not work, and wondering whether I should send it or not. Unlike most of my New Yorker poems, this one was accepted immediately and published in just a couple of weeks. Sometimes I wait a year and a half.

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?

Often I let a poem sit around for a year or so. It depends. When I have finished something, or taken it to a point where I don’t know what to do next, I show it to friends. I listen, make changes or not, and let it sit around some more.

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

I always opt for fiction if it makes the poem any better. The first friend who died did not die near a body of water.

Is this a narrative poem?

I don’t think it’s a narrative.

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

I have no notion of influences. This is not a denial.

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

I never have an audience in mind. At some point I am aware of a level of audience. When I work, I have no sense of myself or of any one to whom I am 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 no recollection of anybody’s response. I am sure I showed it to friends.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

There are so many differences among my poems, formal with line-length or concentration on a long line or on a short line and assonance, narrative, rhyme, etcetera. I don’t think that this one differs from some others. But how would I know?

What is American about this poem?

I don’t know. It was written by an American.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I certainly thought a lot about abandoning it. Obviously I didn’t. I’m glad I didn’t. I have had much response to it since its publication.

Nancy K. Pearson

Nancy K. Pearson’s first book of poems, Two Minutes of Light (Perugia Press, 2008), won the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award and is currently a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have been published in journals such as The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Pearson has received numerous awards including two seven-month poetry fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from Chattanooga, TN, she now lives on Cape Cod.


FROM THE MOTEL-BY-THE-HOUR

1.
I lost my straight shooter, a sawed-off sparkplug
somewhere in a cheap motel.
All night, I search for pipes —
tire gauge, rusted beer can, hollowed-out cigar.

Months ago, I drove across the country,
left my home in the wet hills of Tennessee,
found the unfolding pageant of billboards,
squashed possum, tugboat clouds,

hills repeating hills, freewheeling leaves going insane.
Thought I could drive my past away.
I’m here now and hunched over,
searching for a boost.

Behind me, that red suspension bridge
sinks into the deep fog,
leaves this bright world behind
for another.

2.
Strung out, Silva and I need a bump.
The wind, spring-loaded and snap-buckling
through the cypress, creeps in,
splinters the stash thin across the motel floor.

We are crawling and picking through the carpet.
Silva says, stop pushing my head down, Reggie,
my knees got seeds mashed in them.
Night is a rerun rerun. Fight over a pebble high:

that long five minutes. Reggie watches us buck and kiss.
Silva on the floor again. (Stop pushing my head down, Reg.)
The shag hooks her silver hoop —
ear snagged and hanging off

like old fish bait. Stuck down there,
someone just cover her up.

3.
Silva’s in the hallway bathroom.
She’s clawing up her face again.
Reggie is laughing real loud,
Silva, you a goddamn puller now.

I don’t want to see her face,
her skin peeling off her cheekbone,
pores torn bigger, a face on hinges.
I’m high and want to feel her tits,

put my mouth on her hard nipples.
Fuck Reggie’s laughing.
I don’t want to think about the scabs,
the other night, me with my panties

twisted up in my crack,
biting down hard on her,
getting up quickly
with blood in my teeth,

peeing in the free-standing sink
in the middle of the room,
my thighs shaking
like the hind legs of a dog.

4.
I carry my index finger in my hand.
I cut it off earlier, straight through the bone
just to see if I could.
I cup it warily

as if the bone could beat free,
a broken bird with flittering wings.
The hospital is down Fillmore Street.
I walk with a spring, kick an old donut

eaten out by ants, shoot it right into a drain.
God, I’m good. Good god.

5.
Jimmy has a tattoo of a beet on his left arm.
People often mistake it for an organ.
I like the idea of someone who loves taproots so much
he’ll suffer an afternoon under the needle

for a swollen red stem. That Jimmy.
I want to see him again and the other gay boys from Greens
with their clean haircuts and brilliant skin.
Tonight, Silva yells, honey git me my wig and I do.

Her left arm is swollen up like an udder,
her silver rings cut deep into her ashen skin.
Somewhere, young Jimmy chops onions and parsley,
his tuber tattoo beating like a purplish heart.

6.
Silva runs down the hallway after Reggie
leaving with the stash. Her feet sound like stakes
shoving into the floor.
Silva, eat something for god’s sake,

I yell and don’t know why I’m yelling this right now.
I think of an old cow, wobbling on thin ankles,
spine like a curtain rod, skin in the breeze.
Baby, she says later, throat full of smoke, open your mouth.

The sweet crack flows into me.
I touch her teeth with my tongue.
They are cow-licked and scoured out.
Baby, she says, you’ve got it bad.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem started in the summer of 2003. I wrote much of it from my small cubicle at The State Department, a post-MFA job that required me to fill in zip codes. So, the government actually helped support the writing of this poem.

The poem began as a one-stanza piece about the Golden Gate Bridge. I never intended to write a six-part poem about a woman’s experience in a crack motel. Once I wrote the first part, however, I knew I needed to finish the speaker’s story. The poem is a collage that pieces together notes I’d written on napkins, on newspaper and in journals almost ten years ago while I was living in San Francisco.

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

I’d say the poem went through about ten major drafts. I made other edits over the course of a few years. I abandoned the poem for a while. I stopped believing in the project or, rather, my ability to write about the subject matter. I thought the poem needed a happy ending and I didn’t have one. I gave that up after about a year. The poem was officially finished in 2006, I think.

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

The poem was difficult to write for so many reasons. I was “inspired” to write the poem, but that’s like saying I was inspired to pray. Once I began the actual writing, I worked very hard, sometimes for eight or nine hours at a time. I had to immerse myself in the world of the speaker to keep from being sentimental. I wrested with the details and the language. I wanted to find the most accurate language to describe the motel and the people living in it. The physical details, the one’s I took from my notes and from memory, served as an anchor for the larger concerns in the poem.

I tried very hard to get that so called “genius of place” in the poem. In his poem, “Tower Beyond Tragedy,” Robinson Jeffers writes, “I have fallen in love outward.” In a way, I had to fall in love with the hellish place/time in this San Francisco streetscape. I had to care about it.

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

I tried making the whole poem rhyme. That was a failure, but I purposely wrote in sonnet-like form. I needed to contain hell, so to speak. Back in 2005, I had seven parts, as well as a prologue, epilogue and a dream series. I imagined the whole poem would be book-length one day. Can you imagine a whole book about this motel room?

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

Two years. The poem was the runner-up for The Iowa Review Award and was published there in 2007. Two years after that, it was reprinted in Ordinary Genius: A Guide for The Poet Within by Kim Addonizio (Norton, 2009).

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 let my poems sit for many months. Usually.

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

Oh no, this question! Well, after I did a reading for about twenty seventy-year-olds at the tiny West Tisbury Library on Martha’s Vineyard, a woman came up to me and said, “I know of a great AA meeting you can join right now. It’s down the street from here.” People assume my poems are autobiographical and often assume the I/me in the poem is still living in the crack motel or the psychiatric ward. It’s like I’ve gotten a “day pass” from the ward to come out and read poetry. I can’t blame them. I am the speaker in most of my poems. It’s ugly and embarrassing, yes. Of course, I’ve changed details and embellished. To answer your question, Brian, I actually lived in the motel in The Motel by the Hour, but I’m not consistently the speaker in this poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

More narrative than most of my poems.

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

I think I was reading C.D. Wright and Mark Doty then. I’m still reading them. I’d say I’m influenced by every poem I read.

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

I don’t have an ideal reader and I try not to think of an audience while I write. I’m in my own world of line breaks and rhythm while I’m crafting a poem. But as soon as I stop the actual writing, I start thinking about audience. I love to write. The solitary act of writing energizes me. But I’m also thrilled when someone (a judge, a critic, a friend) reads my work and likes it. Kay Ryan said it better (in Poetry, April 2005) when she said, “When I am writing, I feel that I have insinuated myself at the long, long desk of the gods of literature—more like a trestle table, actually—so long that the gods (who are also eating, disputing, and whatnot as well as writing) fade away in the distance according to the laws of Renaissance perspective. I am at the table of the gods and I want them to like me. There I've said 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?

I let you see it, Brian. And a few other people in that post-MFA GMU group. Usually, I don’t share my work with anyone. Ashley Capps and I may start sharing poems, though. I feel very shy about this.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I think this poem is less image-driven than some of my others poems. It’s a story, like many of my poems, but a story with more characters and dialogue. There’s no remorse or guilt, no “aha” moment in the poem, either. The speaker isn’t redeemed. It’s ironic. You know, I’d like to write more poems like this. Why do I always try to find redemption?

What is American about this poem?

Reggie and Silva and Jimmy and every other gritty detail.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both, but ultimately finished.


NOTE: "At the Motel-by-the-Hour" was first published in The Iowa Review, Winter 2007/8 and was reprinted in Ordinary Genius: A Guide for The Poet Within by Kim Addonizio, Norton, 2009.

Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1948. In 1970 he moved to Maine with his wife Janet. From 1975 to 1998 he lived with his family in Mercer, Maine, in an off-the-grid house on forty-eight acres. His memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid (University Press of New England, 2006), concerns that experience. In 2000 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine. Since 2002 he has taught in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2000 he was writer in residence at the University of South Dakota. For eight years he led the Frost Place Seminar at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. Wormser is the author of eight collections of poetry, mostly recently Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems (Sarabande, 2008), and a book of short stories, The Poetry Life: Ten Stories (Sarabande, 2008). He currently teaches in the MFA program at Fairfield University.


DUCTWORK

Dave Mitchell doesn’t see the picture in the newspaper
Of Abdul Munim Ali Hamood who is gesturing in a grimace
Of grief toward the corpse of his twenty-two-year-old son
Who was blown up by a lunatic in a car full of explosives.

It’s not on the front page of the local paper, which has
A picture of a moose because the moose lottery was that day
And the right to legally shoot a moose is a big deal in Maine
Though who knows how many are poached for meat
Or shot for the evil hell of shooting something.

Dave doesn’t read the paper anyway.
Words give him a headache and he’s got enough
To think about what with driving his truck around
Delivering ductwork to contractors who are installing
Ventilation and heating systems in—you name it—
Restaurants, Laundromats, stores, garages, offices.

Probably when you’re sitting and eating pork fried rice
You don’t think about the ductwork and how the fans
Are blowing those hot oil fumes out into the night
But it’s got to be there and Dave is good at it
Because it’s steady work and he’s married with a little girl
Though things have turned frosty between his wife and him.

They make love rarely and when they do it’s over
Fast: two busy cogs, a narrow duty.
When Dave watches the women on the street
He craves them with a longing that goes beyond wishing.
He needs their bodies, needs to touch their nipples
And cup their breasts and break loose inside of them.

It’s a bad feeling because he loved his wife
And doesn’t know where that love went. Sure as shit
It’s not in the daily with its headline moose story.
Dave used to hunt deer but doesn’t do more now
Than keep his rifle clean and come winter sit
In an ice-fishing shack with some buddies, gab about
What happened to so-and-so and drink Jim Beam.

There are worse things, like pulling your back out the way
Rick Davis did at work last week or being a father
In Baghdad who has no twenty-two-year-old son anymore,
Who has nothing but the air to move his hands around in.

We can’t live without air, Dave knows that, and some days
When he’s idling at a light and surrounded by spewing
Exhaust pipes he can imagine we’ll ruin that. We’ll get up
One morning, start gasping and turn blue. Right now, though,
It’s lunchtime on the road, which means pulling the truck
Into Burger King and eyeing a woman in another line
And wondering what he’ll do tonight when he gets home.
Maybe he’ll finger the remote and see what’s on.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

It was composed in 2004. The name of the Iraqi father is the name of an actual man who lost his son in a car bombing. I saw a picture of him on the front page of the New York Times. You see what seem like an endless number of photos of grief but that one went right through me and I started writing. Immediately, though, the character of the guy driving the truck in Maine came to me as part of the poem.

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

It went through a fair number, twenty at least, possibly thirty. I was still revising it when Scattered Chapters was about to come out in 2008.

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

Certainly I believe in inspiration. One never knows what is going to set off a poem. And some have stronger inspirations than others have. Getting the details to be what I wanted them to be took a certain amount of sweat if not tears.

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

I knew it was going to be in relatively long lines and I knew it was going to take a certain number of lines to go where I wanted to go, to draw the comparisons I wanted to draw and make Dave a credible human being.

How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print? 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 first appeared in print in the book Scattered Chapters. In terms of sending poems out into the world, I don’t send that many poems to journals anymore. I can hold onto a poem for a long time and even after poems have appeared in books I often keep revising them. A number of poems in Scattered Chapters have been revised. Some were in anthologies. If I feel that I have more to bring to the table, then I’m going to bring it.

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

The poem is based on some facts—the father who lost his son and the moose lottery. The character of Dave is made up but is a composite of many guys I knew in Maine. I wanted to present two different realities—Iraq and Dave—but have them in the same poem.

Was this poem always in the third person? Would you care to address any general advantages of using the third-person point of view in a poem?

I wouldn’t do this poem in first because I wanted Dave to be a character with a limited point of view. And of course the father is in Iraq, far away from Maine. So third-person was natural for this poem. Third lets you create a socialized world in which your characters can move independently of one another.

Is this a narrative poem?

It isn’t to me. It’s more like a few vignettes, scenes from lives.

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

I read a lot of books. No influences in particular come to mind.

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

I write for myself and for strangers.

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 sometimes show poems to my wife who is very astute about my weaknesses. Other than that I don’t show poems much to other people. I’ve never been in a group.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don’t think it does differ. It’s the political/historical hoodoo I’ve been writing about for decades.

What is American about this poem?

The character Dave is an American—moose hunting, ice fishing, TV watching, Jim Beam drinking. Then there is the American quality of know-nothingism.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

As I noted, I tend to keep revising. At the moment this one feels done but I could wake up tomorrow with a word or line that somehow bugs me.

Bill Coyle

Bill Coyle is a poet, translator and educator living in Boston, Massachusetts. His poetry and translations have appeared in such publications as The Hudson Review, The New Republic, PN Review and Poetry, and his critical prose has been featured in Contemporary Poetry Review, and in the Swedish journals Aorta and Tvärsnitt. His first collection of poems, The God of This World to His Prophet, won the 6th annual New Criterion Poetry Prize and was published in 2006. He works in the Writing Center at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts.


PACIFIC

It wasn’t always single malts for me.
I can remember one time in the navy
some of us were so desperate for a drink,
we broke into the ship’s infirmary,
took the rubbing alcohol, and mixed it
with grapefruit juice. Like greyhounds, but with very,
very bad vodka. Jesus, that was a party.
But we were careful. We filled all the bottles
with water, so you couldn’t tell from looking,
and even if you took the covers off
and sniffed them, they still smelled like alcohol.
Of course, the hangover was pretty vicious,
and even worse, next morning, bright and early
all of the crew were ordered up on deck.
At first we thought they’d found out what we’d done,
and as we stood there on the cruiser’s deck,
sweltering in the Pacific sun,
shaking, ready to puke, I tell you, I
was ready to confess and end the torture.
After a while, though, it was clear the captain
didn’t have a clue about our party.
No, he was going on about how the islands
where we were going were crawling with diseases,
and that we’d need to get inoculated.
And then I noticed the ship’s doctor there,
looking like a waiter with his tray
of vaccine, and a few syringes and—
Christ, I felt like crying—the same bottles
of alcohol we’d emptied and refilled.
What could we do? We stood there sweating, praying
nobody in the crew had anything
incurable, and took our shots from needles
the doctor wiped off once—quickly— with water
after he’d just stuck the guy beside us.
We lived. By which I mean we all survived
that little cock-up. I’m the only one,
Though, of the five of us that threw that party
who made it back alive from the Pacific.
Before that mess was over I saw men
more desperate for a drink than even we’d been,
guys who were in the first boats going in,
who knew as sure as they knew they were living
that they were going to die there on that beach
or somewhere in the water short of it:
Anything they could think of they would drink—
paint-thinner, aftershave, it didn’t matter,
so long as it would get them good and numb.
Guys would drink Aqua Velva from the bottle.
Remember those commercials they ran later?
There’s something about an Aqua Velva man?
The happiest day of my entire life,
Happier, even, than my wedding day,
happier than the days our kids were born,
The happiest day of my entire life
Was when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
I get these looks of shock from the young people
when I say things like that, but they don’t know.
It wasn’t always single malt for me.
Now it is, when I drink, which isn’t often—
it’s just, today I’ve got a wake to go to,
For Jimmy, Margaret’s brother. He was under
MacArthur, helped retake the Philippines.
Neither of us could stand wakes. We’d both seen
enough dead bodies in the war to last
a lifetime—that’s how Jimmy always put it—
and anytime that Margaret didn’t force us,
anytime it wasn’t someone close,
we would play cards or golf or see a movie.
And when we had to go, we‘d go together.
First, though, we’d stop off someplace for a drink.
Margaret’s not happy that I’m here, she thinks
I should be at the funeral home already,
not doing anything, just being there,
supporting her. And probably she’s right—
he was her only brother, and I’m her husband,
and husbands have a duty to be strong.
My only consolation is that Jimmy,
Jimmy would understand the way it hits me,
thinking about him lying in a coffin;
he’d understand I need a shot of courage.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote the poem four years ago, over the course of a few days during a summer vacation. It started as the latest in a series of attempts to get the events in this poem, which I hasten to add I heard about second hand, into verse.

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

It depends on how you define “drafts.” This poem was composed slowly and deliberately, with very few major changes after the fact. The earlier attempts to work with the same material were precursors of this poem, but they were so different that I’d hesitate to call them drafts. Maybe earlier incarnations?

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, of various degrees and kinds, but I don’t think it was really operating in this particular case—none of this poem was composed suddenly, or in a trance-like state, which is sometimes the case with me. On the other hand, the poem was certainly “received,” in that it’s essentially a found poem with a little bit of rhetorical and metrical window dressing from me.

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

Earlier versions of the poem were rhymed, but this didn’t seem to work, even in the cases where the rhymes in themselves seemed fluent and natural. Blank verse—and something like the kind of blank verse that Frost used—seemed the obvious solution.

How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print? 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 a year before sending anything out, though I’ll sometimes make exceptions if the poem has a particularly “finished” feel to it. I didn’t publish this poem in periodical form, but it came out in my first book about a year and a half after I wrote it.

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

There were two models for the speaker of the poem. The first was a butcher I worked with at a local supermarket when I was younger. It was he who told me the story of the party in the ship’s infirmary, and of its consequences, and I tried to recreate his voice as best I could. The second model was a great uncle who had also been in the Pacific. He never spoke to me or my sisters about the experience, but I do know that he seldom attended wakes, having “seen enough bodies.” He made an exception when his wife’s brother, my paternal grandfather, died, but he sat in the corner. He was a very cheerful, very physically fit man, so his obvious discomfort made a great impression on me.

Was this poem always a dramatic monologue, or did it begin in some other incarnation?

The only previous version that I have much memory of involved one speaker who attends a party and hears the story from another speaker, so I suppose I knew from the start that this was going to be a dramatic monologue of some sort. The rhyme went, as I noted above. The other speaker went as well, probably because I realized, albeit subconsciously, that his presence, along with the party setting, would be begging a comparison with “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.”

Is this a narrative poem?

Yep.

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

I was reading the Swedish poet Vilhelm Eklund at the time, and his poetry is nothing at all like “Pacific.” Poetic influences were largely unconscious, though I don’t know that I could write this kind of poem without Frost and Browning somewhere in my thoughts. I was probably negatively influenced by myself, in that I wanted to write a type of poem I hadn’t written before.

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

Two readers. One is my maternal grandmother, who, while she was keenly intelligent, taught grade school for years, and enjoyed poetry, was not an “expert.” The other is James Merrill, in my opinion the best American poet since World War II, certainly the wittiest and most sophisticated. I’d like most of my poems to be enjoyable by both.

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 generally don’t show my drafts to people unless they’re in a relatively advanced state, or unless I’ve fooled myself into thinking they are. Then I usually bring them to a group I’m a member of, the Powow River Poets, who meet in Newburyport, MA. It’s a very talented bunch, and the workshops have been invaluable.

Having said that, I don’t think I showed this particular poem to more than one or two people, and they made only minimal suggestions for changes.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Most of my other dramatic monologues have had fairly eccentric speakers: the head of a suicide cult, a medieval alchemist living in contemporary New England, Satan. The speaker here is much more of a regular guy, even if his personal experiences are, for Americans of my immediate generation, anyway, extraordinary.

What is American about this poem?

I’m not sure. Certainly, when I wrote the poem, I assumed the speaker was American, since the two models for him were, and since I am. Looking back on it now, I don’t see any reason—though this may be because I’m neither a linguist nor a historian—why he couldn’t just as easily be Australian, a New Zealander, a Canadian, a Brit…

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

With very few exceptions, I don’t publish anything I’ve abandoned. Which is not to say that I might not realize after publication that a particular poem would benefit from revision. Or excision.

Mari L’Esperance

Born in Kobe, Japan and raised in California, Guam, and Japan, Mari L’Esperance’s first full-length collection The Darkened Temple was awarded the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2008. An earlier collection Begin Here was awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. L'Esperance's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Many Mountains Moving, Poetry Kanto, Salamander, and elsewhere and have been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, former New York Times Company Foundation Creative Writing Fellow, and recipient of residency fellowships from Hedgebrook and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, L’Esperance lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information, please visit her website.


HAPPINESS AND HAPPENSTANCE SHARE THE SAME ROOT

Trees know the meaning of happenstance.
So does the sea and all that lives in her.
As a girl swimming in a pond buzzing
with horseflies, I felt a cool current
slide over me, then pass on. This
was the lesson, though I did not know it then.
The harbor is not our permanent home.
Think of love and its stages: rapture,
the wound, then the final parting.
Knowing from the start how it will end.
We breathe into our cupped hands, hoping
to keep it alive as long as we can.
Among shouts of laughter the carousel
slows its tune, then falls still, and a child
returns from that world to this.



When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I believe this poem was written in late 2005, but the seed of the poem had been planted many years earlier (not uncommon for me with poems). I’d come across a newspaper article about the myth of romantic love that is perpetuated in Western culture – you know, the clichéd ideal of finding one’s “soul mate” with whom one then lives “happily ever after,” etc. The writer suggested that such unrealistic expectations inevitably create disappointment and that happiness, rather than being predictable and permanent, is something more ephemeral that arrives and departs in waves, often without warning. When I sat down to write the poem years later, I was ruminating on the transitory nature of experience and about my own encounters with disappointment and those small, unexpected moments of joy, and then I remembered the article, which in turn called up particular images from memory and from my imagination and my internal responses to those images, the confluence of which then initiated the making of the poem itself.

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

The first draft was written in one sitting. The short lyric, to me, is a single breath, a moment captured in language and image, so I want to stay with the energy of the poem as it emerges in that first raw incarnation, or else risk losing it altogether. After that I can step away from it for a time and then return to it more objectively for revisions, of which I often do several. It’s been a while (and I generally don’t save drafts), but I believe this poem underwent about 5-7 versions between the initial draft and the final version over the span of a few days.

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, but that rarefied and somewhat altered state can only sustain itself for so long; it must be corralled, brought down to earth, and channeled into language. I’m a slow and undisciplined writer and often allow long periods of time to pass between poems, so perhaps I rely too much on inspiration and not enough on “pot scrubbing,” as my friend Sage Cohen has called the largely messy, unglamorous, and plain old hard work of writing. This poem was about 50% received, 50% the result of “pot scrubbing”. But I didn’t wrestle with it much; it mostly seemed to have its legs out of the gate and I let it find its way, following it closely and guiding it as needed, and lightly.

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

No conscious employment of techniques, really. My whole person – heart, intuition, intellect, body – is engaged in the writing of any poem, if one wants to call that a “technique”. Ear and eye are critical allies: for this poem (and for all of my poems) I read each draft aloud to myself to ensure that I was satisfied with phrasing, line lengths, line breaks, word choice, syntax, etc. This is an important step, and a reminder for me that poetry is ultimately a spoken art.

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

It was published about two years later in Poetry Kanto, a wonderful Tokyo-based literary journal co-edited by Alan Botsford and Nishihara Katsumasa that features poems by poets writing in English as well as by contemporary Japanese poets (the latter featured in bi-lingual versions).

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 can’t say that I have any “rules” about this, but I do have some feelings about the practice of sending poems out for publication when they’re very new. Would we send our children out into the world to fend for themselves before they’re sufficiently developed? And why this rush to publish? Does doing so serve the poem, or does it serve the need of the poet to be acknowledged and affirmed by a reading public? To my mind, the needs of the poem must always come first. I personally like my poems to “season” for a while before I send them out, in case I decide to make further revisions, but also to give them the opportunity to fully inhabit themselves.

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

Most of my poems include elements of both. I’m often reluctant to explain too much about a poem because my wish is to recede behind the poem so that the reader can then project her/his own experience onto it without the perceived “me” interfering. In this particular poem, the “facts” (as in “this happened to me”) are minimal: as a girl I swam in a pond buzzing with horseflies. Period. I then make a series of subjective declarations that aren’t tied to any particular event in my life, but are related, nonetheless. There’s a carousel, but it’s a composite of the carousels in Berkeley’s Tilden Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and likely other carousels that I’ve encountered in life, books, and films.

Is this a narrative poem?

If I have to call it anything, I’d say it’s more a lyric than a narrative poem. Although the syntax is fairly linear in its sense making, the poem doesn’t really tell a story. It’s more a sequence of observations, an articulated rumination. I suppose some might call it a narrative poem. But I’m not much into labels.

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

At the time, possibly Jack Gilbert (which is pretty evident here) and Stanley Kunitz, whose poems are never far from me. Otherwise, I can’t recall. As for influences: the world. Memory and its digressions. Dreams. And the work of poets too numerous to mention. One creates on the shoulders of many.

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

Not consciously, although my hope is that my readers approach a poem – any poem – in order to be transformed in some way. Not dramatically, but to feel by the end of the poem as though something has shifted for them internally so that they then perceive themselves and the world a bit differently. That’s what I want as a reader: to be changed by a poem.

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

At the time I was in a poetry group with 3-4 other poets, which lasted for about year – it was a good group while it lasted and helped me to return to poem making with a seriousness of focus following a long silence. I’m currently not in a group, but am talking with a couple of people about starting one. It’s very difficult for me to write regularly without the structure and contact that a group provides.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Not sure that I can say, so I’ll let my readers determine this for themselves!

What is American about this poem?

If the relentless pursuit of happiness is thought to be an inalienable American right, then this is a pretty un-American poem! I suppose the diction, the declarative “plain speech” of the poem, might be called “American”. But I’m also half Japanese and that culture’s traditional sensibility (quiet, understated, accepting, reflective, feeling, and holding a balance between inner and outer) is inevitably a part of any poem I write. And I think it is present in this poem.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This poem is finished in that it is included in the The Darkened Temple. But its life continues to evolve beyond my involvement with it, in the way that it is received, experienced, and integrated (or not) by its readers.


NOTE: Poem reprinted from The Darkened Temple by Mari L'Esperance by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2008 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Available wherever books are sold or from the University of Nebraska Press 800.755.1105 and on the web at nebraskapress.unl.edu. Please do not duplicate elsewhere without permission.

Carl Dennis

Carl Dennis is the author of Practical Gods (Penguin, 2001), winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He is also the author of several other books of poetry including A House of My Own (George Braziller, l974), Climbing Down (George Braziller, l976), Signs and Wonders (Princeton University Press, l979), The Near World (William Morrow, l985), The Outskirts of Troy (William Morrow, l988), Meetings with Time (Viking Penguin, l992), and Ranking the Wishes (Penguin, l997). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2000 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry Magazine and the Modern Poetry Assocation for his contribution to American poetry. He teaches in the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and is a sometime member of the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at Warren Wilson College.


THANKSGIVING LETTER FROM HARRY

I guess I have to begin by admitting
I'm thankful today I don't reside in a country
My country has chosen to liberate,
That Bridgeport's my home, not Baghdad.
Thankful my chances are good, when I leave
For the Super Duper, that I'll be returning.
And I'm thankful my TV set is still broken.
No point in wasting energy feeling shame
For the havoc inflicted on others in my name
When I need all the strength I can muster
To teach my eighth-grade class in the low-rent district.
There, at least, I don't feel powerless.
There my choices can make some difference.

This month I'd like to believe I've widened
My students' choice of vocation, though the odds
My history lessons on working the land
Will inspire any of them to farm
Are almost as small as the odds
One will become a monk or nun
Trained in the Buddhist practice
We studied last month in the unit on India.
The point is to get them suspecting the world
They know first hand isn't the only world.

As for the calling of soldier, if it comes up in class,
It's not because I feel obliged to include it,
As you, as a writer, may feel obliged.
A student may happen to introduce it,
As a girl did yesterday when she read her essay
About her older brother, Ramon,
Listed as "missing in action" three years ago,
And about her dad, who won't agree with her mom
And the social worker on how small the odds are
That Ramon's alive, a prisoner in the mountains.

I didn't allow the discussion that followed
More time than I allowed for the other essays.
And I wouldn't take sides: not with the group
That thought the father, having grieved enough,
Ought to move on to the life still left him;
Not with the group that was glad he hadn't made do
With the next-to-nothing the world's provided,
That instead he's invested his trust in a story
That saves the world from shameful failure.

Let me know of any recent attempts on your part
To save our fellow-citizens from themselves.
In the meantime, if you want to borrow Ramon
For a narrative of your own, remember that any scene
Where he appears under guard in a mountain village
Should be confined to the realm of longing. There
His captors may leave him when they move on.
There his wounds may be healed,
His health restored. A total recovery
Except for a lingering fog of forgetfulness
A father dreams he can burn away.


Author Statment:

“Thanksgiving Letter from Harry” resulted from the fusion of two failed poems that I wrote and set aside in 2004. One was a poem called “Therapist,” which dealt with a woman who had to struggle in her practice with the conflict between her wish to have her clients face the facts of their lives and her wish to have them resist hopelessness. The poem focused on her respect for a father’s refusal to believe that her soldier son, missing in action, was dead. I set the poem aside because I could never ground it convincingly in the ordinary world. The therapist remained shadowy, a character with only one idea, and the son, missing in an unspecified war, seemed more of an illustration than an actual person.

In the other poem, entitled “Thanksgiving, 2004,” the poet used the occasion of the holiday to talk about his feelings about the war, but after the first stanza, in which he admits to being glad he doesn’t live in Bagdad, he turns to other, more serious reasons for being glad, in particular that he is free to write what he pleases, and compares his situation with the fate of Ovid, the poet of Imperial Rome who is banished to the edge of the Empire because of a poem that Augustus found offensive. This poem failed because the poet finally seemed to betray its initial impulse to deal with his disgust with living in a country that has betrayed its values. In focusing on the way in which other writers might suffer more, he seemed to accept his situation rather than protest against it. It succeeded in avoiding a certain kind of polemical rhetoric, but at the price of a disturbing passivity.

I began my revision by giving the Thanksgiving Day poem to a friend, Harry, who had a legitimate reason, as a school teacher, for not wanting to focus too much on the war in Iraq. Then it seemed that I needed a way for the war to return naturally to the poem, and it struck me that I could use some of the material about the lost soldier if I made one of Harry’s students bring up the story herself. When the notion of a student paper about a brother occurred to me, I realized I had the plot of the new poem.

As for what is American about the poem, I give two answers: l) its beginning with the sense of shame that many Americans feel about the behavior of our government abroad; 2) its creating one from many, or at least from two, if not an unum e pluribus then an unum e duobus.