Jason Koo

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


SHOPPING WITH MAYAKOVSKY

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

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

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


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this a narrative poem?

Strange question. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

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

What is American about this poem?

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

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This one ended with a click.

Danielle Cadena Deulen

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


LACAN AT THE CAROUSEL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A year.

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

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

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

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

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

Is this a narrative poem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

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

What is American about this poem?

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

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

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

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

Gibbons Ruark

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


SESSION BEGINNING IN SUNLIGHT

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


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this a narrative poem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I’ll leave that for others to say.

What is American about this poem?

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

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.

Joseph Millar

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


AMERICAN WEDDING

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

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

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

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

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


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this a narrative poem?

Oh yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It's not that different.

What is American about this poem?

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

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

Jesse Ball

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






LESTER, BURMA

For J.Z.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

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

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

None.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this a narrative poem?

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

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

Well, then I was mad about Proust.

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

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

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

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

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It ends happily.

What is American about this poem?

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

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Abandoned into print.

Corrinne Clegg Hales

Corrinne Clegg Hales is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently To Make it Right, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize for 2010 (Spring 2011, Autumn House Press). Her previous books are Seperate Escapes, winner of the Richard Snyder Poetry Prize (Ashland Poetry Press) and Underground (Ahsahta Press). She has also published two chapbooks: Out of This Place (March Street Press) and January Fire (Devil's Millhopper Press), and her poems have appeared in Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Notre Dame Review and many other journals. 　Awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Devil's Millhopper Chapbook Prize and the River Styx Poetry Prize. She currently teaches in the MFA Program at California State University, Fresno.


YOUNG NUBIAN WOMAN

It is a matter of persuading them to pose,
which they fear doing . . . .
—Pierre Trémaux, 1850s

Her bare feet flat
on stone pavement, she faces
the camera almost naked.
She must be very young,
no hips, no waist, breasts
barely budding on her chest.
This is probably Egypt,
the exhibit note says, and the girl
was brought here as a slave
from central Africa.
She is caught again
at this moment on salted paper
which will give her eternal life
in European galleries
and art books, and keep her
at this age—safe as she will ever be.
It’s a kind of seduction, really,
convincing the girl that she won’t be
hurt, that she might even like it,
and placing her body just how
he wants it, gently, even tenderly,
and then asking her to be
completely still. Don’t move.
This is how I want you
to stay forever. Please
don’t move a hair. I wonder
why she complies, what she’s
thinking, and I wonder what
the photographer wants me
to see in this girl. I think
of that other photo, a hundred years
later, of a girl about this age
running, screaming, her body
on fire, down a war-pitted road
halfway around the world,
and the four seconds of film
from another war, taken
of a young mother on Saipan
who looked at a camera mounted
on a rifle stock and believed
the photographer aimed to kill her,
or worse, and in fact, he catches her
running toward the cliff
and keeps filming as she throws
her two babies and then
her own panic-driven body
into the sea, and the camera
pans down to the corpse
of a child being battered
in the water and rocks
like dirty laundry. And my own
daughter’s slim body at eleven
or twelve, how we wanted
to believe her life
was on the verge of becoming
her own—but I’m looking now
at this African girl, dark hair
chopped into straight lines
framing her face. She stares
into the future, one hand splayed
against the ancient rock wall
behind her. She stiffens,
bracing herself for the long
exposure, and her shadow,
that deformed echo,
slides down the wall.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

My husband and I went to the Getty Museum in 2001 to see an exhibit of early travel photography, and this poem began with a photograph I saw there. Pierre Trémaux was a French architect and early photographer who took many photographs, mostly of buildings, all over the world in the mid 19th century, but the pictures I found most compelling were those that he took of people--especially women. He took another more famous photograph of a kneeling woman also called "Young Nubian Woman," but the one I wrote about is a young girl standing against a wall. It’s also referred to as "Fille du Dar-four." At that time, of course, photography required an exposure of several minutes, during which the subject was obliged to remain completely motionless, and the exhibit note at the Getty contained a quote by Trémaux about his experience taking pictures of the people he encountered in his travels:

"Photographing [native] people represents great difficulties, because unlike
drawing, [photography] cannot be performed discretely. It is a matter of
persuading them to pose, which they fear doing . . . ."

I’d always been fascinated with the history of photography, and I’d recently been exploring the idea of the camera used as an implement of power--and this photograph, along with Trémaux’s comment, provoked some very complicated questions about class and cultural privilege and power.

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

Probably twenty or thirty revisions. I had trouble with it—and I tried to give up on it several times, but it just kept eating at me until I finished it. It probably took six months to write.

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

Well, I feel like "inspiration," at least for me, generally follows a lot of hard work. I wrote this poem during a period when I was obsessed with the uses of photography—reading a lot about it and looking at lots of examples. I was trying to write about what has become the art of photojournalism. I was particularly looking at war photography, and I was taking a lot of photos myself. I was trying to figure out in what ways the advent of photography might have altered our perception, might have expanded and/or limited our understanding of the world we live in. So you might say I was ready to encounter this photograph. I had done lots of pre-work. But the poem still took several months to write.

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

Well, I stayed too focused on the specific photo for a long time. I kept trying to make it all about that one girl. It wasn’t working, so I put it away and worked on other things for a while. One day, I was watching a documentary about the filmmakers who traveled with the troops during WWII. One of them told the story of watching women and children jump from the cliffs at Saipan while he was filming them, and the documentary included the actual clip. I knew instantly that belonged in this poem. And then the rest of it came pretty quickly—the strange connection with war photos seemed to be what it needed.

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

About a year. Arts & Letters published it in 2002.

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

It varies. If I’m pretty sure about it, I will send it right out. But if I have qualms, I wait for a week or two. The older I get, the less interested I am in letting them "sit" for a while. They really don’t get better with age--and I just get older while I wait. So, I tend to do my best and trust it (which doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes revise after I’ve sent something out in the mail—or even after a poem’s been published).

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

Well, obviously I knew very little about the girl in the photo, so I imagine her situation. I really don’t worry too much about negotiating that line—in any poem. There actually is such a photo; I actually do have a daughter. I start with that, but I believe that the most complex and profound truths are usually arrived at when we allow our imaginations to interact with factual truths. I also believe that facts can lie. So—many of my poems are fictional at least in part. Poetry is not autobiography, not journalism, not textbook history. I understand poetry as an imaginative art, and at this point in my life, I value the power of the imagination as much--or more--than I value any set of facts.

Is this a narrative poem?

No. I’d say it’s more like a meditation or an observational poem.

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

I remember that I was reading a lot of Susan Sontag and Wright Morris and others on the art of photography, and I was immersing myself in depression era and WWII era photography. I don’t remember what poets I was reading at the time, but I’m sure Muriel Rukeyser was in my head.

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

No. I just hope for a curious reader who has an open mind and an open heart.

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?

Oh yes. I have a few trusted readers who usually read my drafts. One of my best readers is my husband John Hales who is a creative nonfiction writer and an excellent poetry reader. He will tell me when the thing isn’t ready yet—where the problems are.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I guess it’s less apparently personal than many of my poems. I do have a tendency to write a first-person situational poem that has the feel of memoir or personal disclosure. This one doesn’t really go there except for the brief mention of a daughter.

What is American about this poem?

I’m not sure, other than it was written by an American, but I do I believe that problems of cultural dominance and appropriation are questions that many American writers struggle with.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Oh I don’t know. I’d say it was finished, but even now I see little things I’d like to change.

John Drury

John Drury is the author of The Refugee Camp, which Turning Point Books published in October 2011. His other poetry collections include The Disappearing Town and Burning the Aspern Papers, both from Miami University Press. He has also written Creating Poetry and The Poetry Dictionary, both from Writer’s Digest Books. His poems have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Antioch Review, Southern Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Paris Review, which awarded him the Bernard F. Conners Prize. He teaches at the University of Cincinnati.


from THE REFUGEE CAMP

2.
Each morning I trudge uphill
to the refugee camp where I work.
Aliens huddle by the vestibule
while officials brush past,
muttering a password
to the guard at a glassed-in booth
who buzzes them—and me—
through the heavy door.
Turned back, the refugees grumble and curse,
kick cinders in the parking lot.

Everyone says they carry knives,
hands jammed in pockets,
their faces half scraped, half stubble,
women left behind
in cramped flats or muddy villages.
They stare at our questionnaires
and leave too many blanks.
I learn Do you know nothing, sir?
and See you later, mister
in languages I will never begin to fathom.

37.
In the graveyard where Dürer is buried,
the tombstones rise from the ground
like stone couches—positioned
so that boars couldn’t dig up the bodies.

Shuffling through dossiers, what
am I digging for? Border guards
mapping their barrackseasuring compounds
and barbed wire, naming each dog in the kennel?

Thinly disguised in mufti, I try
to act natural, always forgetting to air out
my herringbone suit. Our chief tells a courier
"He’s a good boy, but green."

I joined to learn German,
which I still haven’t mastered,
mumbling and sputtering
and smiling as I listen, as if I understood.

At the corner, an American tank clanks by,
jeeps blare and peel off
with a shriek of tires: an occupation
I’m part of, but don’t belong to.

40.
One day we process
a Bulgarian. Another name
to enter in the green ledger:
"No knowledgability, not
a prospective source."
Later in the week, someone knifes him
to death in his dormitory bunk.
I walk through the high-ceilinged
hallway, almost choking
on a bucket’s disinfectant,
and pick up the dossier on his case.
It doesn’t touch me
in the least. I wonder
when I last cried, and remember:
when a bus I was on
didn’t stop, and I called out,
and two girls sitting by the exit
laughed at my accent,
and the cut of my jacket,
and the redness darkening my face.

48.
On a holiday I walk uphill
toward the refugee camp, the Lager,
strolling by the garden plots alongside the path.
As I near the summit, three children
leap from their bikes
jeering lager! lager! lager! lager!
in machine gun bursts, dancing
around me in a circle
and chanting their insult:
I belong in the camp, among those who don’t belong.

I should tell them
there’s a music for the lost, a song
that cannot be stifled, celebrating those who are.
It sounds like jangling, scraping,
a hacksaw through metal. But still
it’s a song, and its dissonance is lovely.
It belies the second-hand clothing
and the stubbly beards and the stumbling.
Through the jeers, the noise of machinery, the silence,
an anthem makes itself heard.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

During my last semester in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in Spring 1980, I submitted a one-page poem called "Nuremberg" for discussion. It was heavy on culture, beginning with "I first saw Wagner’s opera / when I lived there" and ending with a reference to the sculptor Adam Kraft. I was a teaching fellow, and my office was located near the shelves where worksheets were placed for distribution. I remember hearing two of my fellow poets, whose voices I could recognize, picking up their copies and browsing through the drafts. One of them, Maria Flook, noticed the title of my poem and grumbled, "Just like him to write about something important!" Her companion, who apparently knew my office was around the corner, tried to shush her, but she was always forthright in expressing her opinions, and I’m glad she was, because it turned out to be especially useful criticism for me to hear. I realized that I wasn’t talking about why I was living in Nuremberg and that I needed to establish my credentials so I didn’t come off as a cultural tourist. I had spent a year and a half in Zirndorf, a suburb of Nuremberg, living in the attic of a rooming house and working undercover in an American liaison office of the West German Refugee Center, but at this point the poem had nothing to do with my personal life as a low-level spy for Military Intelligence. Thanks to Maria’s overheard comment, I realized that I had to write about the refugees and my relationship to them. But I still wanted to write about the city, where I spent a lot of my free time, as well as its medieval walls and towers, half-timbered houses, churches, museums, brothels, concert halls, shops, restaurants, and history. I didn’t want to dump the reference to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; I actually wanted to spend more time spinning out variations on that musical theme, which I took personally, since it was about a guild of poets. I needed more room beyond a single page, so gradually (since it takes time for me to absorb criticism) I started thinking about expanding the poem into a sequence. I put "Nuremberg" at the end of my MA thesis with the idea that it would suggest the direction in which I might be heading.

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

It would be hard to count the number of revisions, since I soon started adding sections and shuffling the order and didn’t finish the sequence until almost twenty-five years later. So I was generating and revising individual pieces and also moving them around, sort of like a film editor splicing snippets into a montage. I made lists of things I wanted to write about, but sections cropped up willy-nilly, not according to any plan other than a desire to include as much as I could, to be maximal rather than minimal.

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

Yes, I like being ambushed by memory and imagination, and I do what I can to be vulnerable to those surprise attacks. But I also did a good deal of research. I read several books about the history of Nuremberg, and those sources are listed in the book’s extensive section of notes. I kept a journal while I was living in Zirndorf from December 1971 through May 1973, but there were way too many gaps that I needed to fill. Some of the things I remembered most vividly I did not record in my journal. After graduation, I didn’t have a job, so in September I jumped at an opportunity to teach at University of Maryland campuses on military bases in Europe. On a weekend while I was teaching at Ramstein Air Force Base in Kaiserslautern, I made a trip to Nuremberg so I could take notes and revisit the refugee camp in Zirndorf. Several years later, after my first year of teaching at the University of Cincinnati, I received a Taft Travel Grant and returned to the city. I heard that one member of the selection committee was skeptical about my project, saying "It sounds like he wants a grant so he can stroll around!" And that’s exactly what I wanted—and what poetic research often entails—a chance to make observations and see what emerges. Of course, I also did some fact-checking, but some of my questions were admittedly peculiar. I remember going up to an "Information" desk and asking, in German, "Are there swans in the area?" In a draft of one section, I had used an image of swans gliding on a lake near the Nazi Party’s rally grounds, but I wasn’t sure they could be found there. The clerk gave me an astonished look and said, "Living?"

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

After my trip to Nuremberg in November 1980, I started adding sections, jotting down some on the pages of pocket notebooks, some on lined yellow paper, one on a napkin from Dunkin’ Donuts, and others in the margins of typed drafts, letting the material accumulate. My practice has always been to compose poems in longhand and then type them up. As for technique, I was "playing it by ear." I wanted to make the facts lyrical.

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

My working method was like constructing a jigsaw puzzle the wrong way—cutting odd-shaped pieces and struggling to make them fit into a coherent whole—and then making new pieces that required an even bigger whole. It was also analogous to the method of sewing together a patchwork quilt, which involves selecting the right scraps, for variety’s sake and harmony, in the first place.

The excerpts here all concern refugees, and I’d like to talk about how I drafted and revised those passages in particular. Section 2 began as penned additions to a typed copy of "Nuremberg." I wrote a line establishing what I was doing there ("I worked in the refugee camp in a suburb") and added lines about how "Aliens huddled outside." I numbered each of the two sections I had in progress. At that point, I had written about ten lines of the new section, but it’s hard to tell exactly how many, because it was all messy, with slash marks inserted where breaks should go. Later I added the italicized translations of phrases I had learned in Hungarian and Polish. Section 37 began on a lined sheet where I was working on the bagpipe section (which became number 10). I skipped down a couple of lines and started writing about Albrecht Dürer’s tombstone. I don’t know if I meant it as a continuation or a jump, but the material that went into different sections often came up in adjacent bursts, fragments I had to sift through and separate. Originally, section 37 was simply an unbroken block of lines. I typed up the first nine and dropped the rest. Then I added new lines in pen, along with an arrow and a bracket to show where different parts should go. On the same sheet, there’s also an x-ed out passage that I deleted and a circled passage with the note, "New section?" Originally, section 40 began with a passage about cutting myself shaving: "Dabs of a styptic pencil on my chin / are all I can show / for grief." But after eight rhetorical, overblown lines, I came up with the simple, direct "One day a Bulgarian / was processed through our office." Section 48 combined two separate sections, one beginning "On a holiday, on a whim, / I trudged uphill to the center" and the other beginning "There’s a song / that cannot be smothered."

I should mention that I also jettisoned a number of possible sections, such as one about crumpling newspapers in a fireplace back in the States while thinking about Wagner’s opera, and I rejected a lot of passages that contained extraneous details or windy philosophizing. Before I figured out where new sections belonged, I labeled them "*" or "#." The construction was modular and the overall arrangement improvised, based on contrasts and a sense of the flow.

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

Carolyn Forché accepted a thirty-part version of the sequence for an American Writers Abroad issue of Open Places that she guest-edited in Winter 1986/87. The magazine is now defunct, but it came out of Stephens College in Missouri and was edited by Eleanor Bender. I should mention that Leslie Adrienne Miller was the reader who liked "The Refugee Camp" enough to send it on to the guest editor. As it turned out, the sequence wasn’t finished, and I went on to add eighteen more sections. My first impulse was to write a companion sequence of prose poems, called "The Golden Funnel," but eventually I realized that it would seem anticlimactic to give the reader another sequence on the same subject. I had to integrate all of the sections, both verse and prose. A merger was required. That actually upset the main formal principle of the free-verse: each section contained twenty lines that were arranged in couplets, quatrains, five-line stanzas, ten-line stanzas, or a twenty-line block. I’m obsessive-compulsive, so I made sure that the sequence contained an equal number of sections in the different stanzaic arrangements. Adding an equal number of prose poems didn’t really disrupt the numerological scheme. If anything, I figured that prose poems would emphasize the variety. In the finished sequence, I made sure that no adjacent sections were in the same "form." I did break up some of the original prose poems into verse, but I can no longer tell which ones, so I guess the transformations were successful. There is, in fact, a little bit of meter and rhyme in the sequence. One of the sections I count as "prose" actually mixes in some verse (as in several poems by Yehuda Amichai), and those stanzas are in song form, with each fourth line serving as a refrain. The section (number 6) was originally published as "Interrupted Song." A number of the other prose sections also appeared in periodicals under individual titles. The most recent section, number 36 (which begins "Note how a man walks carefully"), came to me originally as an entirely separate poem, but I saw how it fit in with the rest, so I cut it down to twenty lines and found a place for it. The sequence reached more or less its final form in about 2004, when Richard Howard chose it for the Paris Review Prize and it was supposed to be published, along with a long-lined coda called "Crossing the Border," by Zoo 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 get so excited that I send new poems out almost immediately. I don’t like letting them sit. That’s obviously going to be premature in many cases, but I feel it’s also part of my long-term revision process. When poems come back, I take a hard look. Sometimes I’ll send them right back out again, but many times I put them back in the shop and pull them apart. Rejection might as well be helpful instead of merely hurtful.

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

The sequence is based on personal stories that are mostly true. The facts about the city of Nuremberg, the town of Zirndorf, the West German Refugee Center, and the music drama of Wagner are accurate, but I do give myself a lot of leeway and liberty. Some of the poems are dream sequences (sections 29, 31, and 36), many elaborate on Nuremberg history (such as section 10, which is about the story behind the statue of a bagpiper), one is an imagined interrogation in which a refugee does most of the talking (section 16), and some are out of proper time sequence. The episode in the last section, for example, actually happened when I returned to Zirndorf in 1980 to conduct some research. It seemed like the perfect way to end the sequence, so I felt justified in including it, even though the actual experience occurred beyond the time-frame of my work at the refugee camp. My journal notes, however, differ from what I finally used:

2 boys rode directly at me on their bikes, making machine gun noises &
taunting me "Lager! Lager! Lager!" as if I lived in the refugee camp.

The "2 boys" became "three children" because I wanted more of a gang circling me but also wanted to emphasize how young they were, how some might be boys and some girls. I originally had three "Lagers" but it sounded wrong, not enough like machine-gun fire, so on a later draft I penned in an extra "Lager." I was actually thinking of how, in "I Can See for Miles," the Who sing an extra "miles and" before the end, one more repetition than the listener would expect. I thought it would sound better for a song whose "dissonance is lovely."

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, it’s a fractured narrative.

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

At Iowa, in a seminar on long poems, we had read W.D. Snodgrass’s "Heart’s Needle" and I was thinking about how Snodgrass put personal matters in a historical context, his divorce against the backdrop of the Korean War. I admired how he gave each section its own stanzaic form, and although I didn’t emulate his use of meter and rhyme, I did make a point of varying the free-verse stanzas in the sections of my sequence. I was thinking of Robert Lowell’s sequences too, from "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" and "Life Studies" to History and The Dolphin. I was also conscious of Yehuda Amichai’s blending of the personal and the public. The first draft of section 40 (which then, in a much shorter sequence, was number 10) originally had an epigraph by Amichai: "When did I last weep?" from his poem "To Summon Witnesses." In the sequence itself, I mention Pound’s Cantos, and I was thinking of that mixed bag as well, partly as a cautionary tale so I didn’t strain to make it too "important."

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

Each poem feels like a message in a bottle that may, with luck, find a sympathetic reader. I’m curious about other people’s experiences myself, so I try to do what I can to make what I’m saying, observing, and recounting interesting and compelling.

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?

When the germ of the sequence appeared on the worksheet at Iowa, my classmates gave me some helpful suggestions. A couple of my fellow poets thought the poem should "start later," but they disagreed about where to begin. I deleted some of the opening material, moved some down, and put the thirteenth line at the top. But then I inserted two new lines above that as a kind of establishing shot, "In the ruined city / of toymakers and singing guilds," and continued, "they were so fanatical…" Some people wanted me to "compress this catalogue," but I went the other way and expanded the poem.

I have belonged to several poetry groups through the years, but it seemed like too much material to foist on my friends for one of our get-togethers, and I didn’t want to break up the developing sequence into fragments when I had other new drafts to share, so I worked pretty much in private. Later on, when I was writing a poem that eventually became the final piece of the proverbial puzzle and fit into place as section 36, my friend Pat Mora helped me cut it down to the 20-line standard.

As I look through a spiral notebook in which I kept a record of my submissions, I notice that soon after my graduation from Iowa I sent the one-page poem, "Nuremberg," to Richard Howard, who was then editing Shenandoah. He rejected it, although he did accept a poem called "Publication of the Bride Sheets" at the same time. Several years later, I sent him a twenty-page version for Shenandoah, and his rejection letter gave me the best advice I ever received about the sequence:

Of course it is not magazine verse at all, and can only be dealt with as a
whole, not pieced apart and published in fragments. And it gets better as it
goes on, much better—the first half, really, is too direct, too immediate, and
offers too little resistance (poetically, even prosodically) to the intensity of
your message. The second half seems more varied and "right" in its verbal cast, but the total effect is a little like the sound of one hand beating the shit out of the reader. Can’t you vary the pieces a little more, so that some might be
seen as lyrical and celebratory, thereby casting the others into an even
stronger mode? As it is, the achievement of each section is too much like that of each other section, in its intention, in its meaning. Perhaps the ironies are too heavily underlined, and perhaps, too, one needs a stronger sense of the
place—its geography, geology, some of which you brush by far too readily—it
seems to me there’s lots more in here than you have "extracted," but of course it is very impressive too: I should like to see what will become of it if you brood over it more…

I did brood over it more, and tried to vary the sections more, and allowed myself to be more celebratory. Richard Howard’s comments made me more dissatisfied with the poem and yet more encouraged too. When I finally started submitting the completed book manuscript to contests, he was the judge who chose it. But the press went out of business in a fiasco that was the subject of a Poets & Writers article, "The Collapse of Neil Azevedo’s Zoo," so I had to start submitting it all over again, and it took several years for it to get accepted a second time.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s much longer, of course, but the main difference is that I kept on adding to it even after it was published in a magazine.

What is American about this poem?

It’s the Henry James theme of the American ingénue in Europe. And I was reading James while I was living there, so the influence is conscious.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It was released, like a motion picture. The sequence is now entirely on its own, but the material still has a claim on me, and I’m currently revising a memoir, The Bad Soldier, that explores those experiences in narrative prose that it is not so fractured.