Ronald Wallace

Ronald Wallace is the author of twelve books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, including, most recently, Long for this World: New and Selected Poems and For a Limited Time Only, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He co-directs the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and serves as Poetry Editor for the University of Wisconsin Press Poetry Series (Brittingham and Felix Pollak prizes). He is married, with two grown daughters and four grandchildren.
　


THE FACTS OF LIFE

She wonders how people get babies.
Suddenly vague and distracted,
we talk about "making love."
She’s six and unsatisfied, finds
our limp answers unpersuasive.
Embarrassed, we stiffen, and try again,
this time exposing the stark naked words:
penis, vagina, sperm, womb and egg.
She thinks we’re pulling her leg.
We decide that it’s time
to get passionate and insist.
But she’s angry, disgusted.
Why do we always make fun of her?
Why do we lie?
We sigh, try cabbages, storks.
She smiles. That’s more like it.
We talk on into the night, trying
magic seeds, good fairies, God . . .


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

When my daughter was six years old (she’s now thirty-nine and has a daughter of her own), sitting in the back seat of our VW Squareback as we pulled into our driveway one evening, she asked the inevitable question, "where do babies come from?" My wife had just been reading an article in a popular magazine addressing that very question, and arguing that, when your child brought it up, you should give them all the glorious details. We did. As it turned out, that wasn’t what she wanted to hear, and the poem was the result.

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

If by "revision" you mean every slight change of syntax or punctuation mark, maybe a dozen. If you mean more substantial revision—lines, line breaks, word choices, tone, structure, etc.—very few. It’s very close to the original draft, which is not necessarily typical of my writing practice.

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

I hate it when poets say that a poem "wrote itself." Or when fiction writers insist that they just sit back and let their characters take over. It makes writing into a mystical activity, reserved for the mythical writers who work themselves up into some kind of trance state and just let the spirit flow through them, and it seems to me to discourage new writers from even trying to write. For most of us, writing is hard work and requires a lifetime of determination and practice and trial and error. That said (he admits sheepishly), "The Facts of Life" did seem to write itself. It’s a wonderful feeling when that happens, but I know how much work it takes to get oneself to the point that one can experience this kind of creative surge. I could say that the poem took less than an hour to write, or I could (more honestly) respond that it took years of reading and writing and living and struggling, followed by an hour of drafting and a few more of minor revision.

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

The poems in my first book, Plums, Stones, Kisses & Hooks, were largely lyrical and "serious" in tone, focusing the things of this world with an emphasis on the sensory and musical. For my second book, I consciously attempted more humor, having, for years, appreciated the distinctive humor of American poetry, from Whitman and Dickinson through Frost, Stevens, and Berryman, and on to Wagoner, Kumin, and Collins. I wasn’t necessarily trying to be funny; I was just trying to be more open to the essential humor of things. The use of sexual double entendre, of internal rhyme, of shifting dactylic and anapestic meters, contributed to that end, and though I didn’t consciously impose those comic devices on the poem, they naturally flowed from the tone of the speaker, and the light-hearted subject matter. The exact rhyme of "egg" and "leg" halfway through the poem always draws gratifying laughter from an audience when read aloud. My scholarly research on American Humor provided a (somewhat unconscious at the time) underpinning for the poem.

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

Not really, though the poems in my first book were written almost entirely on three-by-five note cards (a carry-over from my PhD years), and I had switched to yellow legal pads for the poems in my second book, in an effort to expand their freedom and length. I continue to write on legal pads today, not entering anything into the computer until it is pretty close to being finished.

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

The poem was written in 1978 and first published in Poet Lore, one of my favorite magazines, in 1983, the same year that it appeared in my second book, Tunes for Bears to Dance to (University of Pittsburgh 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 have no rules about submissions, other than to wait until I think a poem is ready to go out into the world. In some cases this is many years and many revisions later; in many cases, it is never. I used to be more eager to get things into print fast; now I let them simmer much longer, on the whole.

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

I have had a number of impassioned discussions with my poetry colleagues at the University of Wisconsin about whether a poem should be "true" or not. I seem to be the lone voice arguing that, if a poem is not obviously a persona poem, it should reflect, pretty literally, the poet’s own experience. I feel betrayed if a poet claims, for example (as a recent visitor to the Wisconsin campus did), in the undifferentiated first person, to have survived cancer, if, in fact, he or she has not. "The Facts of Life" tries to capture the facts of an experience I really had. My poems are thus quite autobiographical, and I make no apologies for that. Of course, I realize that the "truth" of an experience is colored by the observer, and that to convey that "truth" you must sometimes manipulate (or even invent) "facts." My head says you can say anything you want to in a poem; my heart says you can’t. So, generally, you can be pretty sure that if I say something happened to me in a poem, it happened to me in real life.

Is this a narrative poem?

Well, almost all mainstream poems these days are lyric poems, often with narrative elements. I guess mine is one of those.

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

Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, John Berryman, David Wagoner, Maxine Kumin, Carl Dennis, Ted Kooser, Billy Collins, the list goes on and on. I was reading everybody I could, going through the University of Wisconsin library’s massive poetry collection a book at a time, and reading everything in Poetry and Poetry Northwest.

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

I think my audience is poetry itself. I try to get into a dialogue with the poem: "Look here, poem, what I can do!" To which the poem answers, "Oh, yeah, well watch this!" Or maybe I’m my own ideal audience, or my audience is those poets whose work I admire. Ideally, I’d love for my poems to be enjoyed by anyone who reads. But I don’t really think about audience at all while I’m writing. Instead, I try to make something beautiful, to capture the freshness and vividness of life, to be perfectly articulate, to confer a kind of immortality on my experience.

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 almost never show unfinished work to anyone. That said, my wife is a good reader of poetry, and she has occasionally let me know that a particular poem I thought was finished, wasn’t. My editor at the University of Pittsburgh Press, Ed Ochester, has done the same, and has been an absolutely essential reader and supportive critic of my individual poems and my books for thirty years. I am very lucky to have had the relationship with him that I have.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I like to think I write a range of poems, and this lies in that range.

What is American about this poem?

Well, that’s hard to say, since I value world poets (Neruda, Vallejo, Transtromer, Holub, Popa, Szymborska, many others) and try not to limit myself to any one kind of work. Perhaps the humor is "American?" Perhaps the tendency to use the plain style, everyday speech? Perhaps not?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I often quote this Valery statement to my students, usually when they won’t let a poem go, and risk tinkering it out of existence. And it’s certainly often true in relationship to my work. But some poems actually do seem perfect (and thus "finished") to me (much of Frost and Dickinson come immediately to mind) and, though this may be ridiculously vain and self-satisfied, I remain delighted with this particular poem of mine, and feel that the finish has not worn off with time.

Marilyn Nelson

Marilyn Nelson's collections of poetry include: The Homeplace (1990), The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem (2004), A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005), and The Cachoiera Tales and Other Poems (2005). Her most recent books are picture-books: Beautiful Ballerina (2010) and Snook Alone (2011). Nelson was Poet Laureate of Connecticut in 2001-2006. Other honors include three honorary doctorates, two Pushcart prizes, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Storrs from 1978 to 2002, and professor of English at the University of Delaware from 2002 to 2004. From 2004 - 2010 she was founder/director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a writers' colony. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Connecticut.


MINOR MIRACLE

Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood
memory. I was cycling with a male friend,
through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way
stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again,
a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign,
hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels.
My partner called, "Hey, that was a 4-way stop!"
The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe
under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled,
"You fucking niggers!" And sped off.
My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads.
We remounted our bikes and headed out of town.
We were pedaling through a clear blue afternoon
between two fields of almost-ripened wheat
bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace
when we heard an unmuffled motor, a honk-honking.
We stopped, closed ranks, made fists.
It was the same truck. It pulled over.
A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid out:
greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos, probably
a Marine Corps boot-camp footlockerful
of martial arts techniques.

"What did you say back there!" he shouted.
My friend said, "I said it was a 4-way stop.
You went through it."
"And what did I say?" the white guy asked.
"You said: 'You fucking niggers.'"
The afternoon froze.

"Well," said the white guy,
shoving his hands into his pockets
and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his boot,
"I just want to say I'm sorry."
He climbed back into his truck
and drove away.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I told the anecdote as part of a conversation over lunch with some of my colleagues in the English Department at the U of CT. I’d told it several times before, as part of my repertoire of personal anecdotes. Some of my colleagues asked, after laughing, whether I had ever written the story down. They insisted I should write it; that it was "a poem." I wrote it that evening, essentially as I had told it. That’s why the first lines provide a seque from the conversation that brought the incident to my mind.

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

I wrote it very quickly, not my normal painstaking multi-revision process. The story was part of my repertoire of funny stories, so I just wrote it as I had been telling it.

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. I do not feel this particular poem is the product of inspiration.
Or perhaps I could say this poem was 100% "received."

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

I employed very little conscious "artistry" in the writing of this poem. Frankly, it feels to me more like prose broken up to look like a free verse poem than it feels like an actual poem. Though of course I employed my best ability to write well.

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

See above. My poems, even free-verse poems, are usually quite a bit more consciously "shaped" than this one is. In this one, all I’m doing is telling the story pretty much as it happened. I did change the situation slightly – in actuality, the other cyclist was my former husband, who is a blond German.

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

I think I only included it in my "new and selected" poems, so it was not published immediately.

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 used to be eager to see my poems published in journals; I needed that sense of verification. Now I seldom send to journals, partly because most of my poems are written as parts of long narrative projects, most of which are already under contract to be published as young adult books, and publishing too many poems in "adult" journals would disqualify the books for some important young adult book awards.

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

As I said above, I did change the story slightly, to imply that both of the cyclists are black. That makes it a better story. I also refrain from giving the information that this happened in a small town in Minnesota: most people seem to assume it’s in the South. But my two "changes" are entirely unspoken and implied. All of the details are described as I remember them.

Is this a narrative poem?

Of course!

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

I don’t remember. I think I wrote it when I was well on my way to being a committed
formalist poet. I doubt that any poet I was then reading influenced this poem.

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

Perhaps.

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?

There were no multiple drafts of this poem. There have been individuals with whom I’ve shared early drafts of poems. For a while, my second former husband. For a while, my friend Marilyn Hacker. My friend Pamela Espeland. Various other friends. Sometimes my editors.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I find it relatively shapeless and lacking music.

Gary L. McDowell

Gary L. McDowell is the author of American Amen (Dream Horse Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 Orphic Prize in Poetry. He's also the author of two chapbooks, They Speak of Fruit (Cooper Dillon, 2009) and The Blueprint (Pudding House, 2005) and co-editor, with F. Daniel Rzicznek, of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press, 2010). His poems and essays have appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, Laurel Review, Mid-American Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, Third Coast, Quarterly West, and Verse Daily. Having recently finished a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Contemporary Poetry at Western Michigan University, he is the new Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Belmont University in Nashville, TN, where he lives with his wife and two young kids.


SNORKELING

The distant thunder keeps beat
with the steel drummers on shore.
We push away and The Snorkeler eases
into the bay. Above us, gulls glide
westward ignoring the scraps of teriyaki
left by children, the spools of fried breads
and candied plums that litter the docks.
I taste salt with every breath.
Waves break against the hull, the soft
spray whisked back into our faces.
Dad holds onto the rail as the boat dips
and pushes, flails and falls.
I want to tame the water,
reweave the breakers into something smooth,
skin of a snare drum, tight and melodic.
Dad’s legs, so thin and weak,
shake every time we hollow, bottom-out
in the wake of a wave. He’s dying.
But we’re going deeper into the thunder until the drums
drown-out and the hairs on my arms stand.
We float toward the coral, the sharp,
ragged edges of fish bones and fossilized
lobsters, to where the gulls
can’t feed, too far from shore,
so instead they keen and whine.
The ocean is too cold, the lightning
will not strike us, but the boat is turning
back. Dad’s gaunt hips and swollen middle
set against the steel blue storm
remind me that we’re all flesh,
all boom, and I want to push him in
hard and unashamed.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

"Snorkeling" was composed during the first year of my MFA program at Bowling Green State University in late 2005. It was one of the first poems, of any merit anyway, that I wrote with some idea that fathers/fatherhood would be a major and obsessive theme in my work. The poem derives its narrative and emotional impetus from autobiography. When I was fourteen my family took a cruise to the Bahamas. During this time, my step-father, Jim, was very sick, but the doctors had not yet discovered the cause: a malignant tumor on his brain stem. He battled stomach discomfort, vertigo, dizziness, bouts of uncontrollable "lefties" where he'd be unable to walk without veering oddly to his left, and other such neurological symptoms. But the doctors never did an MRI of his brain. The oddest thing. It was only after we returned from the trip that an MRI was done and a diagnosis was made.

Anyway, the poem started as an attempt to write about that trip, about how after days of waiting for him to feel well enough (oddly, he was feeling well when we left for the trip, which is why we ended up going to begin with) to take me scuba diving, something we'd been planning for months, we finally got on the water only to have the diving postponed because of a nasty storm. All of the loaded metaphors and images at my disposal—the boat, the storm, the as-of-yet undiscovered cancer, etc—made this poem an inevitability, I guess.

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

This poem went through four distinct drafts over about a three month period. I'd say that the meat of the poem was present from the very beginning, but the ending took a lot of fine-tuning. Oddly enough, I don't think I ever actually workshopped this poem at BGSU, but I did take it to my mentor's office every week for what seemed like an eternity. Larissa Szporluk, my teacher at BGSU, kept pushing me to be "honest," "tell the truth," "be angry, it's okay." I think I was initially afraid to enter the emotional territory of this poem; it was hurtful, it was scary, and it was hard to write about. But during the writing of this poem, I learned that those characteristics are exactly what would help me write the most important poems. Now I covet those feelings, work hard to find them in my subject matter, and work even harder to make sure the reader can feel them as well.

I wanted the poem to end when the speaker jumps in the water to escape the emotional turmoil of dealing with a dying parent, but it just kept sounding so damn sentimental, so damn gimmicky. I showed draft after draft of possible endings to Larissa over those months, but nothing ever seemed to work. Finally, one day we were talking about something else entirely (my memory's shaky here, but I think we were talking about Larry Levis' "Linnets") when I interrupted her and blurted out: "I push him in! I push him in!" I rushed back to my apartment and wrote the exact version you see above.

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

I definitely believe in inspiration. As I mentioned above, the ending for this poem just "popped" into my head, but it was only after a lot of that sweat and tears that the inspiration struck. So though I believe in inspiration, I certainly don't settle for it, wait for it, expect it.

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

I remember deciding early on that the poem would be a single stanza, but I don't remember consciously employing any other conscious ready-made techniques to the writing of "Snorkeling." I will say that I remember having a really hard time lineating the poem at first. I just couldn't find a natural rhythm, a comfortable gait, but it worked itself out as the poem went those initial drafts.

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

The poem appeared on No Tell Motel, the internet lit journal, on June 14, 2006. No Tell Motel is a great venue: they publish a new poem every weekday and each poet selected gets their own week. It's a great way to really get a good taste of each poet. Anyway, the poem appeared about six months after I finished it.

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 only sat on "Snorkeling" for a few days, really. Once I got those final lines squared away, I felt pretty good about sending it into the world, and since it was the last of a series of five "body" poems I was working on, I got them over to No Tell Motel right away. Usually I don't sit on a poem very long once I feel good about it, but so many times I tinker with drafts while the poems are out to magazines. I think I just like having a horse in the race, as they say.

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

Much of this poem's tension comes from this very negotiation. The factual and fictional elements of the poem are quite blended: Bahamas (true), dad (false: it's step-dad), The Snorkeler (false: I don't remember the boat having a name), the birds (true), the steel drums (true), etc. I felt very strongly about wanting to create an atmosphere, a tone, a setting in this poem, and so I turned to the power of the detail. Sometimes I read the poem now and wonder if it's not overdone.

I didn't set out to tell only the truth, per se, but I definitely wanted the reader to feel that the narrative of the poem was factual, was "based on real events." That said, I'm a staunch believer in Richard Hugo's dictum that "truth must conform to music." I didn't want to write a made-for-TV movie though, and so I remember hoping that the emotional center of the poem would feel natural and not sentimental or melodramatic. The negotiation between fact and fiction was certainly on my mind while working on this poem . . . while working on any poem.

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

I remember I was reading a lot of different things. I became, that first year of my MFA, a voracious, unsatisfiable, obsessive reader, something I try to maintain these days, too, of course. I distinctly remember going through a Larry Levis, James Wright, and William Matthews phase during that time, but I also remember a separate thread of Rosmarie Waldrop, Leslie Scalapino, and Lyn Hejinian (My Life, specifically) happening simultaneously. I was also drunk on Faulkner's prose and Bernard Cooper's memoirs at the time. Surely all of those writers converged into some kind of monstrous influence, but as to just how, it's hard to say.

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

I'd like to think that my ideal reader is any reader brave and confident enough to pick up a book of contemporary poetry. I know the conversation's taking place in blogs, lit journals, and classrooms all over the country, but I do wonder also about the fate of poetry in the American reading public's lives.

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 wrote this poem I was in the MFA program at Bowling Green State University, so my classmates—outside of workshop—and instructors there saw various version of this poem, and as I mentioned before Larissa Szporluk was a huge help with it as well.

My most trusted readers now-a-days are different than they were then, as a lot of my MFA classmates have moved into other fields. Today I definitely have a group of incredibly gracious, talented, kick-ass poet-friends who read my work regularly: Keith Montesano, Traci Brimhall, Chad Sweeney, F. Daniel Rzicznek, etc. I'm lucky in this way.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

"Snorkeling" isn't too different from many of the poems in American Amen. There's an aspect of autobiography to it, and it focuses pretty heavily on the natural world even as it deals with interior obsessions, but formally the poem is one of the few left-flush, one-stanzed poems in the collection. I tend to utilize white-space a bit more.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

In so much that, as Valery says, any poem can be finished, I'd say that this one was merely abandoned successfully.

Nicole Cooley

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and now lives outside of New York City. She is the author most recently of two collections of poems, Breach (LSU Press 2010) and Milk Dress (Alice James Books 2010). She has also published two other collections of poems and a novel. She has received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poet, and Callaloo, among other journals. She directs the new MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College-City University of New York where she is a professor of English.


I’M STARTING TO SPEAK THE LANGUAGE

of disaster, he says and we keep driving through Mississippi,
Highway 90, Hurricane Alley, on our way to New Orleans,
while Johnny Cash sings, Go on, I’ve had enough.
Dump my blues down in the Gulf.
And he says, that one’s blue-roofed, that one’s gone,
and we stop to see an address on a tabletop leaned
against a tree, a FEMA number spray-painted on wood.
There’s no house. Private Property. Keep Out. Do Not Demo.
We are here together on a tour of the Gone: three porch steps
For Sale By Owner, a beached trolley at the edge
of the road like a huge stunned animal -- Tour Historic Biloxi!—
Gulfport Economy Inn. IHOP. Jefferson Davis’s Beauvoir House.
All that’s left of an address he calls the new lexicon,
the spray-painted X, the house marked O,
Dog Found. Stone foundation threaded with weeds
that are no language. Still, you can tell
where a house once stood, he says, by the clearing.
A front gate is For Sale by Owner. All that’s left
of an address. Missing a whole story.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem was written in the early fall of 2006. It was sparked by a drive on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that I took with my husband and two young daughters that August.

We drove from Florida to New Orleans, where I grew up, on Highway 90, now called "Hurricane Alley" for the devastation wrought there by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, on August 29, 2005. We were headed to New Orleans for the first anniversary of Katrina.

Because I grew up in New Orleans and because my parents still live there--and remained there during the hurricane--I had witnessed the destruction of New Orleans and its outlying parishes. I thought that what I saw in New Orleans when I came back two months after the storm was the worst thing I'd ever seen in my life.

Then we drove through Mississippi. I sat in the car, writing down everything I saw: the ruined towns, the missing houses, the stunted trees. I didn't know what I would do with the images but I had to record them.

Then in the fall of 2006 I started writing my book of poems Breach about the hurricane. This poem is part of that project.

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

Many versions, many revisions. To be honest, the first draft of anything I write is terrible. I'm not saying it to be self-deprecating. It is true. Above my desk I have a quote from Marvin Bell, something he said to me in grad school: "If you have writers block, lower your standards." Since he said that, I've never had writers' block. I tell myself, I can always write a bad poem.

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

I don't believe in inspiration. (I love telling my students that--everyone is always shocked.) If I sat down and wrote a poem only when I felt like writing a poem or when I felt inspired, I would have written maybe one poem in my life.

What I believe is that to keep yourself writing, to fully live a writing life, you have to do whatever it takes to keep the engine running, so to speak. For me, that means: writing when my students write in class, writing on the subway, assigning myself writing exercises, forcing myself to sit at my desk and write.

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

With this poem, I did, in two respects. First, the poem was greatly influenced by the conversation my husband and I were having in the car as we drove. He observed how disaster generates a new language--the X and O written by the National Guard on the flooded houses to show whether or not bodies were found, the signs "Do Not Trespass" in front of a missing house. We talked about how the signs do and don't tell the story. They bear witness and yet there is so much unsaid. I wanted that to be part of the poem not just thematically but formally: to use a fragmented structure in a tight, dense poem.

Secondly, I wanted the title to elide into the first line, for similar reasons. After I began to see what the poem was about (after a bunch of truly awful drafts--I was not thinking of any of this initially) I wanted to convey a sense of the reader having no way out, of being trapped in this new language.

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

It followed my usual process: bad early drafts, excitement at seeing what the poem was truly about, as the poem emerged, lots of revision.

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

It appeared in The Paterson Literary Review and in my book a few years later.

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?

My practice varies but never do I write something and immediately submit it. I don't trust my judgement. I either love or hate my work when I first write it, and I don't trust either reaction.

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

That is interesting. The poem comes out of fact--the facts of Katrina and what it did to the Gulf Coast and the devastation of communities and lives. And I also think to write about Katrina you must be faithful to the facts of the historical event. It would be irresponsible to write about the event without knowing all the facts--doing the research, knowing the communities, talking to people who survived the storm and the flood.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, though I wanted the narrative to be chopped and fragmentary but, still, because the poem describes a drive, moving through time and space, there is an underlying narrative impulse.

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

I was reading two of my favorite poets, Muriel Rukeyser and CD Wright. Both write a poetry that is so engaged with the world, sometimes termed documentary, always questioning official histories, and always changing the way I think about language and what the category of "poetic" can mean.

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

Anyone! I'm thrilled when people who do not usually pick up a poetry book read my work. Last year, I was fortunate to have my books taught in several non-English classes at different universities--Global Affairs, an interdisciplinary seminar on the oil spill, and a class on the archive--and it was wonderful.

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. My husband (not a poet--he works in human rights and genocide studies and is an academic), my sister (not a poet, works in theater), my dad (Peter Cooley--a poet and a merciless critic of my work! as I am of his), and my dear poet friends Julia Kasdorf and Kimiko Hahn.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It is a lot shorter than most of my poems. (In early bad drafts it was very long.) I work very hard at not repeating myself. I don't want to write the same poem over and over for my whole writing life.

What is American about this poem?

I think it's American because it focuses on one of the great American tragedies of the century: the way we treated the people of the Gulf Coast and their communities when Hurricane Katrina hit. Our country's non-response. The people's horror that they had been essentially abandoned and forgotten. And I worry our country is now forgetting this too, not even six years after it happened.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I would say finished because it is published, but the situation it is about continues--the ruined Gulf Coast--and I keep writing about that.

David Hernandez

David Hernandez is the recipient of a 2011 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. His recent collection, Hoodwinked (Sarabande Books, 2011), won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize. His other collections include Always Danger (SIU Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, and A House Waiting for Music (Tupelo Press). His poems have appeared in FIELD, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Missouri Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and Poetry Daily. He is also the author of two YA novels, No More Us for You and Suckerpunch, both published by HarperCollins. David lives in Long Beach and is married to writer Lisa Glatt.
　

TROMPE L’OEIL

What’s left of his silver hair he wants
cut so his wife would stop calling him
Mr. Cumulus. He tells his hairstylist
how short with a forefinger and thumb
centimeters apart as if showing her
an invisible pill, one of the dozen he takes
daily to keep the channels of his heart
unclogged, the blood thin, joints
without fire, the great icebergs of ache
from colliding into his body.
She turns for her scissors and turns
again to see his head shuddering
like a dandelion in an earthquake,
the cape Velcroed to his neck going up
down up down above his crotch.
She’s thinking what you’re thinking.
He’s thinking, I should clean my glasses
with a handkerchief instead.
In the mirror he squints at her reflection,
pink cloud of face, orange haze
of flowerpot she raises like a trophy
before shattering it against his head.
True story, unless the hairstylist
who told the hairstylist who told
the hairstylist who’s now clipping my hair
lied. Or the hairstylist twice removed
loves embellishment. This is how
every story telephoned from person
to person becomes after each telling
distorted, the way these parallel
barbershop mirrors repeat themselves
to make an endless green tunnel
I can see myself walking through.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I keep a log of every poem I’ve written, so I can tell you definitively that I worked on this poem from May 17th-19th of 2004. And I’m pretty sure I started this poem shortly after getting my haircut and hearing the story that the poem dramatizes.

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

I’m constantly revising as I write, rewriting what was already rewritten, and tinkering with line breaks and punctuation marks until my vision blurs, so it’s hard to say how many revisions this particular poem went through. Fifty drafts is about my average.

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 given too much credit. It can only do so much—never any of the heavy lifting that’s required when crafting a poem. Inspiration is a lazy architect who gives you a blueprint with only the front door drawn, then snoozes on a hammock while you build the entire house.

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 depends on the poem. Sometimes I’ll let it sit on my hard drive for a few weeks, then look at it again with a fresh pair of eyes. I’ll inevitably make more changes before submitting it to a magazine. Occasionally I’ll send it off a day or two after it was written it, but I understand that impulse has more to do with wanting to get published and less with wanting to write well.

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

There’s a presumption that a poem is more meaningful if the poet describes an experience exactly as it happened, and if he were to fiddle with the facts, then the poem is somehow inauthentic. As if simply sticking to the facts will prevent one from sounding disingenuous. I’m more concerned that the poem sounds emotionally true, which is to say I haven’t answered your question yet. In short: I didn’t allow factual events to meddle with the writing process of "Trompe L’Oeil." But I did get a haircut.

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

I don’t remember who I was reading May of last year, let alone May of 2004. However, I can tell you my two biggest influences: Charles Simic (especially his early poems) and FIELD magazine.

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

That would make me nervous. Like having someone standing behind me while I write, staring at the monitor. I have about seventy-three other things in mind when I write. How are the line breaks working? The verb choices? Tone? The character of the speaker? What’ll I have for lunch? When are the Wrens going to put out another album? My mind wanders.

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 showed Lisa, my wife. She’s the only one I share working drafts with.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s the only one with muttonchops.

What is American about this poem?

There’s something very American about hairstylists swapping stories. Also, Velcro makes an appearance—a company whose headquarters are located in Manchester, NH.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

"Finished."
　
　

Mathias Svalina

Mathias Svalina is the author of one book of poems, Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), one forthcoming book of prose, I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur (Mudluscious Press) & numerous chapbooks. With Zachary Schomburg he co-edits Octopus Magazine & Octopus Books.

WINTER STARS

I’ve been through this

before in my imagination,
since you were never predicted
to live this long.

The ambulance.

The hospital.
The white cotton gloves
left on top of the coffin.

Now

that it’s the body twisting
itself to death
rather than simply
turning off
as the doctors
predicted,
all of my prepared
expressions are useless.

I’m left

like the amateurs,
wondering what
makes the trains sound
so beautiful
in the distance
in the twilight.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in 2009. I think I was at The Tea Lounge in Brooklyn, because I wrote a lot of the manuscript that it comes from at that place. The manuscript is a record of my reactions to my father’s cancer and his impending death.

The title of the poem is a reference to a Larry Levis poem, of course. It is a poem about his dad. As for the content of my poem, my dad had a congenital heart defect and throughout the years we always assumed he would die as a result of this. When he was diagnosed with terminal cancer it seemed odd and surprising that this ailment he’d been born with, that we’d always assumed would be the death of him had been displaced by cancer.

There are few things less surprising than the fact that the people we love die and yet it doesn’t keep us from having the reactions that we do. The poem is trying to get in that space somewhere, a poem about my dad’s death and a poem about the presumptions and cliché pretensions we have about epochal emotion-points in our lives.

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

While I’d hesitate to tell this to a creative writing student, this poem was probably written in about five minutes and I think I have changed maybe a handful of words since then. I’ve changed a few pieces of punctuation and one or two words since the version that is on Blackbird, which is slightly different than the one above. So while the final tinkering might have taken a few years (and it might not be over) the essential poem was written in minutes.

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

I believe that inspiration is ubiquitous and therefore unimportant to my writing. All one has to do is see a tree and then see something else and one has inspiration. Any juxtaposition is inspiration. Though, as I said above, this poem came quickly to me. If that is inspiration then I believe in that, but I think I’m begging the question there.

I have a harder time with the second part of the second question. Part of the phenomenology of being a poet at this point in the art’s history is that one enacts a belief that one's time is better spent writing a poem than reacting meaningfully against the horrors of human oppression. Which I think is wrong. I don’t think this poem had a lot of struggle to it, or whatever "sweat and tears" means in relation to writing poetry. In my opinion, writing poetry is fundamentally not work and never struggle. When I hear people claim that they struggle over poetry, that poetry is "work" it sounds like the language of a piggy bank to me.

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

I wanted this poem to be plainspoken and directly connected to my real life, which is something I don’t do normally. I wanted it to sound like a poem written by someone who loves William Stafford. Any revisions I have made have been to try and make it more plain and clear.

I wanted it to be in a rhetoric of "honesty," which doesn’t really have anything to do with "honesty" in the sense of telling the truth, but more like "honesty" in the sense of paving the streets when they need to be paved.

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

I think it had been about two years. I wrote the whole manuscript in 2008 and 2009. Then my dad died and I did not look at the manuscript for a while. I sent one batch of poems from it out before he died, and this was to Blackbird. They were the first journal to publish poems from that manuscript.

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

I think this one "sat" for about a year. In general my practice varies. Often when I think something is "done" I usually go ahead and send it out. Sometimes it gets taken immediately, sometimes it sits around, sometimes I give up on the poem or forget about it.

But I write a lot of stuff. Some of it I send out rapidly, some of it, conversely to what I said above, I hold back. As I mentioned before, since this manuscript was emotionally important to me and written in a way that I typically don’t have much interest in, my reaction to it was different. I think I’ve only sent out maybe three batches of poem from this one.

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

This poem is as close as I can get to factual in a poem, which is not very factual. My view of reading literature doesn’t allow much space for facts. Literature doesn’t have a truth value. Which is essential to its uses and failures. I don’t think anyone who reads this poem would know anything substantial or true about me, but they might know something about the poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

Nope, just a little meditative piece.

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

I was reading a lot of Jay Wright and Boccacio when I wrote this, as far as I remember, in addition to the thousands of poems and hundreds of books one is constantly in the process of reading or coming to an understanding of at any moment when you’re a poet. I think I was modeling the approach to information in this manuscript on Wright. This poem is a direct response to a kind of thinking about how a writer goes through commonplace steps of their lives, as evidenced by Levis’s poem about his father and any number of other typical white guys writing about their dads. So Levis is, as he so often is, an influence.

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

Usually I write imagining how my friend Zach or my girlfriend Julia would react. But with this manuscript I think I was writing to someone who wouldn’t be interested in most of my poems.

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 showed this manuscript to my friend GC. I think he was the only one I showed this poem to. I regularly share work with a variety of friends. Their reactions are interesting and instructive, but ultimately, their reactions are usually less important than reading the poems out loud to myself and trying to gauge my ear’s reaction.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Most of my poems are either in an absurdist style or a tersely imagistic style. This one is closer to the latter, but attempting a more direct clarity of emotional intent, a more closed control of the meaning-making. It’s also about Mathias John Svalina, which my poems usually are not.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It was finished. I had a specific, though limited, goal for it and I think I accomplished it so I considered it done.

Keith Taylor

Keith Taylor’s most recent collection of poems is If the World Becomes So Bright (Wayne State University Press, 2009). A longish chapbook of short poems, Marginalia for a Natural History, will be published by Black Lawrence Press around the end of 2011. He has published some eleven other volumes of edited books, translations, poems and stories. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for the Arts. He coordinates the undergraduate program in creative writing at the University of Michigan, works as the Poetry Editor of Michigan Quarterly Review, and directs the Bear River Writers’ Conference.
　

THE DAY AFTER AN ICE STORM

When it dawns crystalline, blue,
the air sparkling with prisms
reflected off oak and spruce,
off every twig, branch, or limb,
even off trees cascading
over fences, trees uprooted
by the splendor of ice—
the day lifts us, takes us out-
side ourselves, outside the news
of a nurse driving back home
last night, at the blackest hour
of the ice storm, when I was
watching electrical arcs
illuminating the yard.
I heard trees break apart
and was thrilled with fear. She stopped
to help at an accident—
it looked far worse than it was—
and a young man, twenty-three,
leaving work in his truck,
spun out on the ice killing
the nurse, who, in a brief moment
of faith, might have imagined
today dawning crystalline,
brittle, gloriously cold.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem started in the moment, in the tragic irony. I forget which year it was (probably sometime in the late '80s or early '90s), but we had a tremendous ice storm, a beautiful ice storm, frightening and wonderful. Even as it was happening, I knew my response was aesthetic. I was thrilled. And then, the very next day, we heard the reports of the nurse dying as she tried to help someone. The contrast in the emotions that were present in our town on that night seemed important, somehow. It still does.

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

Hard to say. I know this poem was around twenty years or so before I published it. A dozen revisions? Twenty?

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

Yes, I believe in inspiration, although I think there is probably a very mundane, even materialist explanation for it. This poem was received and revised. I think they all are.

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

Once I had the rush of the first long sentence easily contrasted with the short second sentence, I must have gone back to count syllables. Although inconsistent now, there is still the strong skeleton of the seven syllable line in the poem. Like many poets I will often try an early version of a poem, particularly one that at first seems dominated by prose rhythms, in syllabics. The counting forces us to look for new words to fill the syllable count and often presents us with new and interesting diction and enjambment. Once the poem has mellowed a bit, I occasionally don’t feel as committed to the arbitrary count and can go back and revise with the usual considerations of free verse. This poem, however, carries the clear imprint of the count.

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

Perhaps the length of time the poem stayed on my work table is unique. Usually I will give up on a poem after a while. This one stuck.

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

I am going to guess that this poem was around from ten to twenty years before it appeared in 2009 in my collection If the World Becomes So Bright. I always liked the poem, but never could find a magazine that wanted to publish it. Finally it appeared in the 2008 Bear River Review, which is a small journal some of my colleagues put together to help promote the writing done at The Bear River Writers’ Conference. Now I direct that, so I can’t really claim that as a publication.

Since the book has come out, it is a poem that several people have commented on positively, and I find that gratifying. I was also pleased that it was the poem picked for this web site. Odd how that happens, isn’t it? I couldn’t find anyone to like it for a couple of decades and now it seems to have found its audience.

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?

The practice varies from poem to poem. Sometimes I’ll send a poem out, then get it back, and let it sit for a long time, years and years, before I try again. That often teaches me something about the poem, and it’s usually a lesson worth learning.

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

This is a narrative poem that recounts an incident that really happened, although I know little more about it than what appeared in the papers. I have recognized the possibility that the victim of the crash might have the same response to the wonders of the storm that the speaker has—even while she is acting bravely and in a way that distinguishes her from the speaker of the poem.

The facts of the matter get more complicated though. Months after the accident I discovered that the young man in the truck was actually drunk, driving on an expired license, and that he went to jail for a very long time for causing the death of this woman. I had imagined that he too was a kind of victim of the weather, of these forces that were so much larger than any individual. I may have been very wrong about that.

So the poem has a basis in fact that gets changed for the purposes of the poem. I hope that results in a poem that provides imaginative and emotional engagement with the world but that does not violate the importance of the fact behind it.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes. There’s a story to this one.

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

I would like to think that there is an obvious imprint of James Wright on the poem—somewhere in its studied simplicity, in its acceptance of the beauty amid the horrors that surround us.

But, formally, I learned that syllable counting from a very different poet. Kenneth Rexroth often counted syllables to control his narratives, to give himself a kind of distance. And, yes, he often used seven syllable lines. An odd number because it kept him, I’m guessing, from falling into any easy iambic rhythms. And a short line because it creates a great contrast with complicated syntax of the longer sentence. It’s formally quite simple, yet allows for an interesting register of tone and emotion, particularly in a narrative.

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

What was it James Wright said? "I’m looking for a few intelligent readers of good will," or something like that? Me, too!

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?

For a decade I had a strong and committed writing group of four writers. We met every other weekend and worked quite rigorously on each other’s work. I finally dropped out of the group because I wanted to force myself to find a bigger audience than that group of readers.
For a couple of decades, the wonderful poet Marc J. Sheehan helped me organize books and revise poems. He did a fabulous job. But I had to pull back a bit from Marc’s help so I could be sure of finding my own poems rather than his. For the last decade or so, I have depended on editors who have helped the process along. For my last book, Annie Martin of Wayne State University Press did a fabulous job of editorial input.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

The first person has become more muted in my poems recently. Now I realize the first person is pretty quiet in this poem. It may be important only as some kind of Emersonian observer, so perhaps this poem was a harbinger of work to come. Maybe that’s why I always liked it.

What is American about this poem?

An odd question for me, since—legally—I am not an American. I’m a Canadian, although I have lived most of my adult life in the States and most of my influences are American. But, yes, this feels like an American poem. There’s something in the direct narrative and the simplicity of the diction that seem to me to grow from a particularly American place. Even though there is ice in the poem, it doesn’t sound Canadian. I don’t think Americans hear this distinction much, but I’m pretty sure Canadians do. A student asked me a similar question recently and I responded "I’m a Canadian citizen and an American writer." After I thought about that for a while, I realized that it was exactly the kind of statement that would just piss off everyone, even though it might be true.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

So far this poem has been abandoned into its finished state. I might go back and make it more finished . . .