Richard Frost

Richard Frost’s most recent collection of poems is Neighbor Blood, from Sarabande Books. During the past sixty years his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, New England Review, Poetry, Harper’s Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, and many other journals. He is a working jazz drummer and is Emeritus Professor of English at the State University College, Oneonta, NY.


ONE MORNING

My brother’s wife phones me and says I’d better drive over
right away for what will probably be the last visit,
so I get in my mother’s old Buick and two hours later
I’m at their apartment at Smugglers’ Village in Stockton.
My brother’s life has been a mess all along.
He came out of the war a drunk, lost on the horses,
failed in real estate and fiction writing,
got a good job and wrecked two company cars.
He is alternately charming and a bully, and I probably
wouldn’t be his friend if he were not my brother.
Now he is dying of brain cancer. The surgeons
have removed an apricot-sized tumor from the back
of his head. He has regained the power of speech
but is dying fast. Here I find him standing
at the door in his brown leather jacket
and the blue knit sailor’s cap to hide his baldness.
No one has told him that he is going to die,
and like everyone else he believes he will live forever.
The first thing he tells me is that he has gained two pounds.
On his way back! He told his doctor to turn off the switch
if they couldn’t get the whole tumor. His doctor
let him wake up, so that means they took out the cancer,
and now he will have a long, gradual recovery,
which is all a “hell of a problem.” He is six feet tall
and weighs in at a hundred and twelve. Do I want some Scotch?
Back in the kitchen, his wife flits to and fro,
fixing a sandwich. She has hidden her bottles
for twenty years in the laundry basket,
behind the canned preserves and under the dresser.
She can’t remember things. Their little terrier
Packy hysterically yaps, rattling his claws
on the picture window, jumping down from the couch
and skidding into the kitchen. Do I want some Scotch?
Yes. And we talk about the war, our father,
the cars we’ve owned, the family fishing vacations.
My brother’s skin is yellow, and his eyes
are a very clear blue. He remembers the time
he was on the Ralph Edwards television show
This is Your Life, because he’d been a friend
of the Chicago policeman whose life this was. We talk
about this for a half hour. Do I want
more Scotch? Yes. His wife brings sandwiches
and three capsules for my brother. I am not making sense
because the dog wants out and my brother’s wife
is back there crying, and finally all I remember
is that we laugh about something. My brother and I
laugh about something we did. It is about
the time he faked an earthquake, or ate the ant
crawling along the drainboard, or stole the chairs
from the restaurant. I will never remember exactly
what it is we laugh about, but we laugh.
Then I drive home, across the bay
in the evening. It makes no sense at all.
I come home, and my brother’s wife is right
about that being the last visit.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

My brother, fifteen years older and my only sibling, was my hero and role model and finally, as the poem suggests, a grand failure in life. He worked himself up to a high executive position with Pacific Gas & Electric and then self-destructed—killed himself with booze and cigarettes. He’s the subject of several of my poems. He showed me a lot about how to live and how not to.

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

Some of my brother poems were stitched and unstitched for years. This one wrote itself pretty quickly, probably in less than a month. It’s a fairly straightforward telling. In a sense, my brother poems were handed to me by the unfortunate circumstances I wanted to set into order. The sweat and tears were in the events and needed to be turned into words that could suggest them to the reader. My main “technique” was to tell it in the loose five-stress lines that come naturally to me after long practice in the old forms. It’s regular talking, with the added pulse.

As a jazz musician, has music influenced your sense of the poetic line in any palpable way?

People always ask whether for me there’s cross-fertilization between jazz and poetry, since I’m a drummer. Music came naturally to me—I learned the forms before I knew what I’d learned. Poetry too was something like that. But they’re quite different. With my kind of music, it’s a simultaneous combining of old structures and improvised utterance, invented as it goes along, each moment a step in a composition created in real time. Poetry is more like formal musical composition. You can take as long as you wish piecing the thing together, and in the end the effect must be that of a natural sequence in real time. With that difference understood, I will say that probably the same sensitivity, comprehensions of rhythmic and tonal patterns, all the stuff that lets me play music, must be working somehow also when I’m writing.

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

The practice varies, but I’ve learned to wait awhile. Maybe the longer the better! (But, being practical, sooner or later one must turn the beast loose.) After the poem cools off for a week or two, one sees it more judiciously and can find the necessary tuning. I can always get back into the original feeling and revise, better after such a wait.

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

In this poem I didn’t lie as much as I often do. I’ve even lied about my brother. But in this case, I was given some pretty good whole cloth. Their dog actually was named Packy. Of course, it’s a narrative poem—which is what I do. I’m not smart enough to be a lyric poet like my wife, Carol Frost. She has flashes of metaphor and meditative insight that I wonder at and can’t approach. It’s probably why we’ve stayed together so happily for forty years. I love lyric poetry, yet I fall so naturally into storytelling. First comes one thing, then another, and next… It’s how my mind works. It gives me a chance to talk about the world as if I’m watching it happen, and I can remark about it as it goes along.

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

Influences? Donne, Wilbur, Hopkins, Hall, Keats, Dobyns, Dickinson, Cummings, Blake, Justice, Chaucer, Whitman, Wright, Rilke, Stevens, Marvell, Thomas, Pope, Browning, Bishop, Shakespeare, Collins… Oh, boy!

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

My ideal reader is someone like myself; or a beautiful, appreciative woman; or my dead brother. Mainly, someone who can hear and understand the language, and who understands irony.

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’m not in cahoots with a group, but I always ask Carol to look at my first draft, and I look at hers. I’m often helpful down on the punctuation and grammar level and with other small important matters. Carol tells me enormously important things, like the need to develop the poem beyond the elementary stage where I’m stuck or prematurely satisfied.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s one of my running narratives, like a lot of the others. Then I have the pithy ones.

What is American about this poem?

I suppose that the basic events of the poem, with details changed, could translate into any other culture; language, more than anything else, is what makes it American. That’s when I really do follow in the steps of Whitman, as best I can. He began (overblown as his language often is) the American sound in our poetry.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Abandoned, with the exciting delusion that it’s finished. I reserve the right to add, delete, make any changes as long as I live. After that, it stays as it is.

Sandra Beasley

Sandra Beasley won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize for Theories of Falling, selected by Marie Howe. Her poems have also appeared in Verse Daily, Slate, The Believer, AGNI online, Blackbird, and the Black Warrior Review Chapbook Series. Honors for her work include the 2008 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and fellowships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, and VCCA. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she serves on the board of the Writer’s Center and periodically contributes to the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. She is working on Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a memoir forthcoming from Crown.


METRO SECTION, PAGE 4

For Big Ryan

I didn’t know you’d left grad school,
joined up, didn’t know your first name

was really Donald. Came under
heavy fire in Ubaydi. I read fire

& think absurdly of a red blanket,
as if the insurgents tucked you in,

& though I know you have died,
how you must be hating the desert.

When your dorm room had no A/C,
you declared Rogers 100 was Hotter

than two rats fucking in a wool sock.
How many years? Five? Seven?

I was nothing to you, the girlfriend
of a friend. Already the you I picture

smudges, stenciled over by the Marine
you became: hair clipped at the temples,

a ROTC t-shirt you probably never wore.
You are quoted, months ago, as saying

Dad, if I die, I did it doing my duty
and protecting my country. History

is a hand folding over you,
a magician stealing the coin.


November 18, 2005


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem started in the Metro Section. On page four. “Marine from Va. Killed in Iraq Firefight.” I’m not usually so literal in my titles, but there you have it. My first hint of Big Ryan’s death came from my ex-boyfriend’s (this will date me) AIM away message, which included his proper name, what looked like birth/death dates, and four or five classic quotes including the one about Rogers 100. I dismissed the away message as some sort of weird joke—Ryan had gotten hitched, maybe, and his life as a “free man” was over. But less than an hour later I was reading the Washington Post, and there he was.

I wrote the poem within the day. The misreading of “came under fire” as a “red blanket” came first, within the moment. Between that and the two direct quotes—one from the article, the other courtesy of my ex—I had the poem’s arc in place.

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

Gosh...maybe three revisions, over the course of a week. With a meeting of my then-writing group during that week, which helped. My poems go from first draft to final draft in relatively short time. I don’t say that to mean I don’t revise: I revise voraciously, word by word, but I tend to integrate it in the initial drafting, which often involves a four to six hour burst of attention to a poem that fits on a single page.

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

When you’re working in the mode of elegy, crediting your own sweat and tears feels
pretty crass. On a craft level, I suppose I was fortunate in that the death was of someone close enough to register, but not of such an intimate relation that raw grief obscured my job as a poet approaching the topic. On a personal level: aw hell. Big Ryan, the best lines are just things you said in the first place.

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

One of the first things I do after drafting a free verse poem is take out all the line breaks—moving it back up into prose—checking that the syntax and grammar work, then re-breaking it all over again. The editor in me won’t tolerate a lot of indeterminate pronouns or tense confusion. The line lengths, the voice, came very naturally.

The closest thing to a poet’s indulgence here is the use of ampersands in lieu of “and.” You can find this affect in other poems from Theories of Falling (“The Puritans”), all composed at about the same time, all some of the earliest work in the book. The ampersands are a nod towards momentum. I felt that it was important for the poem to move fast: to try and capture the speaker’s growing understanding of what has happened in something like real time.

The hardest part for me was having the speaker tackle her own credibility and ask herself if what she is really mourning is the man, or her image of the man, a romanticized connection to a part of her life now past. But that was where the risk was, so that was where I had to go. An elegy without risk borders on exploitative sentiment.

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

Well…funny story. Shortly after I won the New Issues Prize in 2007, a friend solicited some poems for an online journal she was working with at the time. I sent this poem along, and the editor wrote to say he would like to run it in his Autumn issue. In the meantime the frontmatter for my book was due, so I dutifully entered it as a “first appeared in” credit. Autumn came…autumn went…no publication that I ever saw.

I wish I could say it was the only such case—in my book, or in the books of many other poets I know. I welcome the notion of poetry as a gift economy, but I think it’s a shame when editors use that to absolve themselves of accountability. Dream big, solicit widely, but back it up at the end of the day.

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 submit for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is at the request of an editor; sometimes it as the reading period closes for a brass ring of a journal; sometimes it is a journal that feels like a safe port for a well-loved but hard-to-place poem; sometimes it is just for immediate gratification, that momentary mood lift as I press a stamp to the envelope.

I don’t hesitate to send out a brand-new poem if the opportunity seems right. Some of my poem-a-day drafts have been revised and accepted by journals in less than a month’s turnaround. My chapbook of sestinas for Black Warrior Review, Bitch and Brew, was being written right up to the deadline. My work right now celebrates the values of speed, clarity, humor, music; I think these qualities thrive when writing under pressure. There are modes I will return to sooner or later—meditative poems, ekphrasis, multi-sectioned sequences—that will require longer gestation periods. I’ll honor that.

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

For this poem I’ve completely torn away the fictive veil that protects the poet from accusations of autobiography. (Though note how I still carefully differentiate between “the poet” and “the speaker”—years of workshop experience on display!) I hope I did justice to the people whose opinion on this poem really matters. . . . I’m not one of them. When I read this poem at Busboys & Poets, a venue in Washington, D.C., I was approached afterward by a William & Mary graduate who recognized Big Ryan. She probably knew him better than I did, and she liked the poem. That was good.

Is this a narrative poem?

Sure. It’s an unusual variant on narrative, because the story follows the speaker’s developing cognition of an event that took place outside her knowledge. I don’t relate the timeline of the attack in Ubaydi, which could be called the driving event of the poem.

On the other hand, a definition of “lyric” is a poem that privileges the speaker’s mindset over the external world. If this poem starred a fictive soldier and a generic “she” as speaker, without factual antecedents, and I was a critic, not the poet, I might call it a lyric.

In the wrong hands, the narrative/lyric divide is one of the great straw men of lit-crit. The great poems have both. Even in The Iliad, Homer was careful to build in descriptive passages that worked as mini-lyrics and proved his value, amidst all that marshalled history, in the role of delivering poet.

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

Blame those ampersands on Nick Flynn and Some Ether. That’s a book I turn to again and again when I’m trying to rally in my writing. And in the process of answering these questions I’m remembering a Sharon Olds poem in which she recounts learning of an ex-boyfriend’s death from the radio, as she’s reading The New York Times. “First Love (for Averell)” appears in The Gold Cell. If I loved the poem enough to remember it now, I’m sure it influenced me then.

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

Do I want the careful reader, spectacled, savoring these poems by the fireside with a tumbler of rye? Do I want the excited undergrad with a well-creased book, gulping poetry down by the mouthful between bus stops? Do I want the powerful reader/editor who can pick up the phone and say “Sandra Beasley, send me your next book manuscript! I must have it!” Do I want my aunt, who doesn’t read much poetry, to say “Now that. That I get. That’s pretty good”?

I want all those things. I’m greedy.

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?

As I mentioned, at the time I was meeting once a month with a small writing group. But I quit the group soon afterwards. I felt like the group’s feedback clung to the tenets of the poems I had been turning in, and resisted principles I wanted to explore—using more surrealism, more associative leaps, abandoning a coherent and personifiable speaker.

Marie Howe told me I needed to find some good readers, some trusted readers, and I guess I’m still looking. Part of the problem is that my cohort of poets is still moving around—changing jobs, homes, getting married, having first children—and asking for them to read even one poem feels like a rare favor, not part of an ongoing ritual.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

The ending of the poem takes an unusually large leap into metaphor; usually my endings are a bit more organic, often offering some kind of narrative conclusion. But how does a poet create closure in the wake of the death of someone interrupted mid-stride? Endings are always problematic in the elegiac mode.

Mentions of stage-magic show up throughout Theories of Falling: Houdini makes a cameo in one poem, and a tasseled girl loads a gun with blanks in another. Maybe the ending is lazy, drawing upon a comfortable body of imagery, the poet’s security blanket. But I don’t think so. The magician who steals the coin—not to re-appear it behind your ear, necessarily, but to tuck in his pocket before moving on to the next mark—that feels very indicative of this particular war. To close your hand over something, to pin a medal on it, to sign proclamation #1,001; as if any of these things could vanish a loss.

What is American about this poem?

This poem is in the last section of Theories of Falling, “This Silver Body,” a section of what I think of as entirely American poems, bird’s-eye-view poems that take a look at culture beyond the self. Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are onto something with their celebrations of America’s plurality, its sweats and sacrifices and foolish moxies and sad, incremental epics. This poem has two sister poems, “Theories of Non-Violence” and “My Los Alamos,” that can be found in Theories and elsewhere on the web.

Death in wartime is not uniquely American. But this is an American death, and this is an American elegy—self-aware, regretful, littered with the mundane. Coming from a military family myself, I find it strange that our culture has taken to talking about “America” versus “America at war in Iraq.” It’s the same country. You can’t dissociate yourself just because you voted for Barack Obama and you wish it wasn’t still going on. It’s only when someone “unlikely”—an upwardly mobile student with a lot of options, well on his way to a Ph.D.—joins up voluntarily, and is killed, that some folks are faced with this reality.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. How could I not finish it? Who are these ego-less poets who can claim to abandon their poems? They seem like they’d be good drinking buddies.

Dan Albergotti

Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. In 2008, his poem “What They’re Doing” was selected for Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, Albergotti currently teaches creative writing and literature courses and edits the online journal Waccamaw at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC.


VESTIBULE


I sometimes wish I could find Cindy
to thank her for agreeing with my fine idea
that we sneak into the university chapel
late one night in 1983 to make love.
I don't just want to thank her for giving me
the trump card — “house of worship”—
I hold in every stupid party game that begins,
“Where's the strangest place you've ever . . . ?”
No, I want to thank her for the truth of it.
For knowing that the heart is holy even when
our own hearts were so frail and callow.
Truth: it was 1983; we were nineteen years old;
we lay below the altar and preached a quiet sermon
not just on the divinity of skin, but on the grace
of the heart beneath. It was the only homily
we knew, and our souls were beatified.
And if you say sentiment and cliché, then that
is what you say. What I know is what is sacred.
Lord of this other world, let me recall that night.
Let me again hear how our whispered exclamations
near the end seemed like rising hymnal rhythm,
and let me feel how those forgotten words came
from somewhere else and meant something.
Something, if only to the single moth
that, in the darkened air of that chapel,
fluttered its dusty wings around our heads.



When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I believe it was early 2004. I have a terrible time remembering these things. I don’t keep good records of draft composition, so I can’t say for certain. I do have an old note card that indicates I sent it out to a journal in April of 2004. How the poem started is an even murkier memory. I know that I’d toyed with writing a poem on that subject for a while, but how it came into this form—what initiated it—at that time I’m quite unsure. I may have been thinking about the structure I’d decided on for my full manuscript around that time. “Vestibule” ends up serving a prefatory function in that organization. More on that later.

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

Not many. Aside from a few words changed here or there, this one pretty much came out whole. I’d say that’s true for about half my poems. I’m obsessive about working ideas and rhythms and lines in my head, but I’m not as diligent as I wish I could make myself when it comes to working over poems on the page or screen. For me (and I don’t recommend this approach to my students, or anyone else for that matter) the majority of the work is often done before the first line is written. I’ve referred to this “method” before in an interview with Town Creek Poetry, where I liken my process to making soup.

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

I certainly don’t believe there’s a magic wind floating out there biding its time before willfully flowing through me to produce a divine text. But at the same time, I don’t think creating a poem is a purely mechanical, conscious process. I believe in trusting the subconscious mind. I think it’s an essential part of realizing yourself as a poet (or as any other sort of artist). If your art is entirely within the realm of your articulation, I don’t believe you’ve begun to tap your potential. As for how much of this poem is “received,” I’ll just say that I have no idea where the dusty-winged moth came from. I don’t know why it flew into my poem, but I’m very happy it’s there now.

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

No conscious employment of form or technique in this one. But I hope that the poem’s free verse lines reflect my experience with meter. I will always argue that the free verse poet who has never written in the old formal meters has denied him- or herself incredibly valuable lessons about rhythm that cannot be learned in any other way. I think—I hope—that I write a stronger free verse precisely because I’ve written sonnets and villanelles.

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

It does vary from poem to poem. But it’s hard to be a very good judge of one’s own poem’s status. Sometimes I feel very confident that a poem is ready only to realize much later that it wasn’t. Other times I think a poem isn’t entirely there but put it in the mail against my “better judgment” and then see it snatched up by the first editor and reveal itself, over time, to be wholly realized in that form. In the case of “Vestibule,” I believe I sent it out pretty soon after composition—in the spring of 2004—for consideration by journals. I never simultaneously submit work, so the poem spent a few years auditioning for 8-10 journal editors, returning home each time. It first saw print in The Boatloads in April 2008.

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

When I present this poem at a reading, I often follow it with this reminder to the audience: “Remember, you can never safely assume that the first-person speaker of a poem is autobiographical. Of course, you can’t rule it out either.”

Is this a narrative poem?

I’d probably call it “meditative” before narrative, but more and more I find those sorts of distinctions to be unhelpful and distracting. I’d call it a poem. I don’t mean to disrespect the question—I’m just tired of poetic taxonomy these days.

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

I don’t know who I was reading, but I can say that the voice of Jack Gilbert is often in my ear. I think you can see a little of his influence on this poem, both in its stichic structure and its speaking of memory in sacred terms. But I say that with the knowledge that the author is usually the least qualified to make such observations. For all I know, my reading of Alan Shapiro or Brigit Pegeen Kelly could be all over this poem in a way I cannot see.

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

My ideal reader is the person born a couple hundred years from now who might read my poem and find it meaningful to his or her 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?

I don’t have a regular group of readers. I used to share my work in process with others a good bit, but it’s a rarity now. I think it’s natural for that just to fade away after a while.

“Vestibule” is the first poem (or proem) in your first book. What made you decide to give it such a place of prominence in the manuscript?

The book’s organization is roughly liturgical, and I thought a poem titled after the entryway to a church would be an appropriate starting place. There’s also that audacious line, “What I know is what is sacred.” I thought that if I’m going to be arrogant enough to write that line, I should be bold enough to present it up front.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I feel particularly unqualified to answer that question meaningfully (see my answer to the “influences” question above). I think that, more often than not, we’re our own worst critics—not in the standard use of that cliché, but in the sense that we are unlikely to see what is most important or relevant in our own work. So, with respect, I’ll pass on the attempt.

What is American about this poem?

I think one of the particularly American elements is not so much in the poem itself, but in the sense of transgression that’s the result of its American context. I imagine that if you conducted a poll, you’d find a much higher percentage of Americans than of Europeans offended by the idea of coitus in a church building. We’ve got a lot more uptight prudes on this side of the Atlantic.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Oh, far be it from me to wrestle with Paul Valéry. Abandoned, abandoned, all of them abandoned! But not abandoned until, as urged by Beckett, I had “failed better.” At least I hope so.

Richard Newman

Richard Newman’s newest book of poems, Domestic Fugues (Steel Toe Books), appeared in the fall of 2010. He is also the author of Borrowed Towns (Word Press, 2005) and several chapbooks, including 24 Tall Boys: Dark Verse for Light Times (Snark Publishing/Firecracker Press, 2007). His poems have recently appeared in Best American Poetry, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry East, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He lives with his wife and daughter in St. Louis, where he teaches at Washington University and St. Louis Community College and edits River Styx.



ASH

for John Hilgert

With your cock-eyed rhythm you couldn’t play your way
out of a 12-bar blues with your eyes closed,
so we’d strum a minute and spend the rest of the night
sighing and telling lies. Drowsy from pot roast,
we’d sprawl across the back porch and guzzle
Rolling Rocks like children eat chocolate,
though even then you complained of stomach pains,
and though I’d smoke a pack of cigarettes,
you would be the one we’d lose to cancer.
One night my backyard neighbor built a bonfire,
burning what must have been a decade’s worth
of newspapers and phonebooks, who knows what—
wedding pictures, love letters? In a month
he’d sell his house and move. “Gee,”
you said, “that must feel really really good.”
We watched his silhouette stalking back and forth,
tossing more and more things onto the fire,
each time sending up a fountain of sparks
blinking orange then drifting over the fence
into our yard, winking out and whitening
as they fluttered to us and settled on the porch
like a flock of grizzled gulls, a silent ash-storm.
We breathed and tasted ash, and you lay peppered
and unperturbed, an empty on your chest.
“You asleep?” I wondered. “No,” you said,
“just taking in the night. And your neighbor’s past.
But I wouldn’t mind another beer.” Inside,
I scrounged another stale cigarette,
bleeped the messages from my own ex-wife
(“Who cares,” you’d say, “she’ll still be pissed tomorrow.”)
and grabbed a few more beers for each of us,
but back out on the porch I found you gone,
drawn to the dying fire like a moth
or child, pushing your way through leafy greens,
my dogwoods, further into the dark. Below me,
the whole porch mottled in white and gray except
the blank space where your body had lain, your outline
in ash, and you, covered in the ashen remains
of what can only cling to us, the living.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I inherited this big bear of a guy, John Hilgert, when I started editing River Styx. He had been the magazine’s Art Editor when it was about ready to collapse. Together we changed the look and feel, size and format. Subscriptions had plummeted to double digits, so we wanted to make the magazine more compelling and appealing, livelier and more visual, with color covers and illustrations and art—as he said, “so the words and pictures talk to each other.” John was great fun to work with (great ideas, epic water gun fights in the building), and he soon became one of my best friends and drinking buddies.

Several years later, although I knew he was fighting a losing battle against cancer, his death stunned me. His wife, Betsy, asked me to write a poem for his memorial service, which I figured would be packed—John was not only a talented artist but a popular teacher. I’m sure the pressure is nothing like being asked to write an inaugural poem for the president, but it felt claustrophobic for me. I had no ideas, nothing that didn’t feel tired, obvious, sentimental, clichéd, and stupid, and I was about to call Betsy and apologize, but then the day before the service I was looking at his picture and suddenly I could hear John’s voice saying some of the funny things he used to say, particularly one time when we were grilling in my backyard and he looked over at my neighbor burning all of his stuff and said, “That must feel really good.” I got the image of the ash and the whole poem came pretty quickly from there, pretty much one draft with a little light editing months after I’d read the poem at the memorial.

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

My best poems either come all of a sudden, almost out of nowhere, in pretty much one draft, or I have to work and work draft after draft until I get it right. I tend to hate revising after a certain point, and if I don’t feel there’s much potential, I won’t waste any time working on it. It’s easier to throw it away and start something else. That’s not to say most of the poems from Borrowed Towns or Domestic Fugues haven’t gone through a number of drafts—it’s more accurate to say I wish those sudden one-draft moments came more often than they did, but then who doesn’t. “Ash” feels like a lucky gift to me—all I had to do was unwrap it.

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

“Ash” is in a very loose blank verse, written back when I was playing as much with five-stress accentual lines as regular iambic pentameter. Though I enjoyed an erratic iambic pulse, I cared much more about beats than feet, and I found strict accentual syllabic patterns unnatural, boring, and plodding. Since then, maybe because my own temperament has evened out, my meter has grown more regular. Maybe I’ve grown unnatural, boring, and plodding.

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

It’s funny that you ask. “Ash” is the one time I published my own poem in River Styx. Several board members asked me to include it, and since we were dedicating a whole issue to John, featuring much of his art on the covers and inside, I agreed. The funny part is some people’s reactions to me publishing my own poem. We even had some River Styx interns who were in a poetry class taught by an MFA student who apparently didn’t think much of me as a writer or editor. The interns told me that he sanctimoniously told the class, “Newman must be very proud to be notching his publication belt by publishing his own poems.” To that guy, I’d like to send out a very hearty fuck you. Publishing that poem in that issue, with so much of John’s art, was one of the better decisions I’ve made as an editor, and it reached a lot of people, which is the best we can hope for in this business unless we’re out for prizes, awards, and belt-notching publications.

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

Regarding how much of that poem is true, I honestly don’t remember. The events in the poem certainly didn’t happen that way—it’s more a hodgepodge of different scenes and quotes from different places, all stuck together with some outright lies to make a central narrative. Some of the quotes John says in the poem he actually didn’t even say, but I can’t remember which ones anymore. After I read the poem at the memorial, dozens of people came up to me or emailed me and said, “You really captured John’s voice in that poem—I could really hear him.” He may not have said those things, but those are exactly the kind of things John would have said, likely even the way he would have said it. As with most poems, I felt I needed to tell some lies to get at a greater (more universal and more entertaining) truth.

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

I’m certain at the time that I was reading Frost and Larkin, because I always go back to Frost and Larkin. At that time I was also reading and reviewing books by Rodney Jones, Andrew Hudgins, and Lucia Perillo.

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

I always have an audience in mind when I write a poem—my wife, various friends, family members, a colleague or neighbor, the people in my workshop group, favorite living or dead poets. With “Ash,” I assembled in my mind a handful of specific people, friends and colleagues who knew and loved John and keenly felt his death. With the dialogue and images, particularly the last image, I wanted to move them the way I was moved by John’s absence in the world, unite us, I suppose, in a communal gesture around this poem and his absence. Of course I also hoped, although probably later, that the poem had a more universal appeal beyond John’s circle of friends.

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?

The first group I shared that poem with was probably the 250 people at the memorial. These days, I usually show early drafts to my wife, who is also a poet and a good close reader. I was in an online workshop group called KFM. It was formed by a bunch of Fellows at the Sewanee Writers Conference and named after a game we played on the porch at the French House—“Kill, Fuck, or Marry.” We sent poems to the group once a month over the last three or four years, but we’re currently on hiatus.

What is American about this poem?

The opening 12-bar blues reference makes it American, right? Despite the Larkin influence, I do think that my speech rhythms and lines are distinctly American, specifically Midwestern. My work is influenced by the Midwestern landscapes, many of which are flat, bleak, and dreary, yet sometimes wondrously expansive. That’s actually another thing John Hilgert and I shared. Many of his best photographs were these huge breathtaking rural landscape images. Coincidentally, while I was writing about people in rural southern Illinois, where my people come from and where I spent much of my childhood, he was taking pictures of it. A couple years before he died, we did a collaborative show together at what they now call The Contemporary—his photographs and my poems on the walls, along with watertower and grain elevator sculptures by Christina Shmigel. We called the show Bottomlands. That’s one of his pictures from Bottomlands on the cover of my first book, Borrowed Towns—a picture of Carmi, Illinois, where my family comes from, where my mom was raised, where our family cemetery lies tucked between silty cornfields, and where my brother still lives today. I don’t think John knew all that when he took the picture, and we discovered we were working on similar projects from two different ends after we’d already known each other and liked each other’s work for years. I have other images from that show in my study behind me where I write.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both. It came out so fast as an organic whole, and I wanted to retain much of that spontaneous voice, spirit, energy, naturalness, and original architecture. Rereading it now, I want to fix the meter, which in some places could probably be done easily enough by shifting some line breaks. But what’s done is done, and it’s nothing like what I’m working on now—very impersonal, very formal, very much a kind of poetry that looks closely at the world, not gazing at the self. We have to learn to live with the flaws.

Steve Scafidi

Steve Scafidi is the author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (2001) and For Love of Common Words (2006), both from LSU Press. Although sometimes he teaches poetry at Johns Hopkins University, mostly he works as a cabinet maker. He lives with his family in West Virginia.








TO WHOEVER SET MY TRUCK ON FIRE

But let us be friends awhile and understand our differences
are small and that they float like dust in sunny rooms
and let us settle into the good work of being strangers
simply who have something to say in the middle of the night
for you have said something that interests me—something of flames,

footsteps and the hard heavy charge of an engine gunning away
into the June cool of four in the morning here in West Virginia
where last night I woke to the sound of a door slamming,
five or six fading footsteps, and through the window saw
my impossible truck bright orange like a maverick sun and

ran—I did—panicked in my underwear bobbling the dumb
extinguisher too complex it seemed for putting out fires
and so grabbed a skillet and jumped about like one
needing to piss while the faucet like honey issued its slow
sweet water and you I noticed then were watching

from your idling car far enough away I could not make
your plate number but you could see me—half naked
figuring out the puzzle of a fire thirty seconds from
a dream never to be remembered while the local chaos
of a growing fire crackled through the books and boots

burning in my truck, you bastard, you watched as I sprayed
finally the flames with a gardenhose under the moon
and yes I cut what was surely a ridiculous figure there
and worsened it later that morning after the bored police
drove home lazily and I stalked the road in front of my house

with an ax in my hand and walked into the road after
every car to memorize the plates of who might have done this:
LB 7329, NT 7663, and you may have passed by—
I don’t know—you may have passed by as I committed
the innocent numbers of neighbors to memory and maybe

you were miles away and I, like the woodsman of fairy tales,
threatened all with my bright ax shining with the evil
joy of vengeance and mad hunger to bring harm—heavy
harm—to the coward who did this and if I find you,
my friend, I promise you I will lay the sharp blade deep

into your body until the humid grabbing hands of what must be
death have mercy and take you away from the constant
murderous swinging my mind makes my words make
swinging down on your body and may your children
weep a thousand tears at your small and bewildered grave.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This poem started just after someone set my truck on fire late one night in June of 1999. I hid in the bushes with an axe for three nights waiting for the person to return. He didn’t return and I needed to get on with my life so I started this poem and wrote it rather quickly.

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

After I wrote the first draft I was able to sleep inside my house again and so I pinned the draft to my wall—which was an old practice of mine—and looked at it and tinkered away for a few weeks. The emotion of the poem appears, as is, in my first draft. It was a useful poem to write in that I wanted to murder someone and the poem—and the urge to write one—saved me from stupidity. It may not be a good poem or a poem at all but I am grateful to it. The Southern Review published it in 2000.

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

The blank page is about the only holy place I understand. I think all writing is inspired—even the worst. It has to come from somewhere and I don’t know exactly where any of it comes from. I do know that it appears on the page suddenly and I am astonished at that fact. It is like getting a note written in invisible ink—there is something mysterious and secret about a first draft and all the subsequent drafts just deepen my surprise. I think we study and read and cultivate our instincts as poets but we also live in a state of bewilderment that makes poems possible.

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

I didn’t consciously do anything to write this poem except to make myself as clear as possible. There is no invention here. Everything happened as I say in the poem. It is probably more of a letter than a poem anyway and that is OK with me. A letter has purpose and magic.

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

I put this poem aside for a couple of years and sent it out when my first book was accepted by LSU Press. I don’t have a lot of time so I’d rather read a poem or write a poem than mail one out. Sometimes I write a thing and get anxious to mail it to a journal but that rarely happens anymore. I let poems sit a long time now. I used to believe that if you did good work as a writer then that work would inevitably find its way in the world. I still have this faith secretly but it is chastened by the forces of luck and caprice and circumstance. The literary world is often stupid but the writing life has genius in it. I’ve published work I’m proud of and I’ve published work I am embarrassed by and it takes me years to know the difference so I’ve decided to be patient.

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

There is no fiction here. In fact what happened next was I drove to work—the truck was burnt but I could still drive it—worked all day, and then ran an errand with a friend. The errand went awry and we found ourselves stranded in Winchester, Virginia standing on a street corner for two hours shouting and laughing at passing cars and when I finally got home near dark I found a huge peacock standing in my yard which I chased up an oak tree where it screamed and hollered all night. All of this is true. This was one of those days that will make you write poems if you hadn’t tried before. I believe in the truth of fiction and most of my poems rely on invention but this poem is plain reporting.

Did you ever find the guy?

If the poem hasn’t found him by now I know it is hunting for him in the empyrean. He might wake from a dream soon and be afraid. It is a hound of hell.

This poem explores a complex range of emotions: paranoia, humility, irony (“my friend”), fear, complaint, murderous rage. Could you briefly address the flexible tone of this poem?

The tone does change dramatically from the first line to the last. The storyteller gets caught up in the emotion of the thing and loses all tact and decorum and drops into violence. It is a picture of someone losing their shit. The joy of this, for me, is that it happens in real time. I think the poem captures a moment of temporary insanity that we are all familiar with but rarely like to acknowledge. It is madness. It intimidates and delights me.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes.

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

I was reading Robert Fagles’ translation of the Illiad and my copy burned up in the fire. On my bookshelf today I have a scorched copy of an anthology of erotic literature, Twenty Four Centuries of Sensual Writing, edited by Jane Mills, which was also in the truck.

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

I think of the men and women I work with when I write. I think of the poets who are my friends. I think of my family. I imagine my audience consists entirely of people I know. So I am always amazed and delighted to hear from a stranger. I am always astonished to know that the world exists and is larger than my small circle.

What is American about this poem?

I like this question mostly because I don’t know how to answer it. The speaker of this poem is a malevolent, two-faced nut. He is blood thirsty and just about out of control. There is no happy cleansing of the emotion, no calm tsk-tsk-ing of an inner voice, no moral at the end. I love the poems of Ted Hughes, an Englishman, and of Federico Lorca, a Spaniard, and they both wrote poems seeking the duende, or the ur-life of the body. This poem looks for blood which it confuses for justice. I don’t know if any of this is American. According to Achilles and Hamlet and Hollywood and every newspaper published today murderousness is alive and well most anytime and anywhere you turn. Perhaps the sloppiness of the poem is American but that doesn’t seem fair. I’ll take the blame for that.

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

I kept this poem to myself but I do have a group of old friends and new friends whom I rely on for advice. I am supremely grateful to these readers for their insight and encouragement. I usually wait until I have a manuscript of 50 or so poems and then send it to them with a list of questions. They send me work too and it is always a delight and a privilege.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It seems a natural part of what I am interested in as a poet which is power. And helplessness. I am fascinated by what I cannot control or understand and that is most things--I love all the forces of nature that make up an ordinary life. They look like love and rage and death and sex and rivers and whatever happens in the springtime and whatever is going on in the sky. I like my place in all of this—a place transformed by all of these forces, a place of bewilderment. For the last two years I have been writing a biography of Abraham Lincoln in one poem after another. His life seems just such a swirling place. His life, like ours, is informed by circumstance and forces beyond any individual control and yet he navigated them with real cunning and grace. For a while. And then those forces overwhelmed him and he was gone. Isn’t this our fate? And yet, he seems alive and well today in the same way that poems defy impossibility. In poems the dead rise up and walk and our lives sparkle with clarity, even beauty.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

The purpose of that poem was to get me back into the house and to my senses and it worked. So it is finished.

Ron Slate

Ron Slate was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1950. He earned his Masters degree in creative writing from Stanford University in 1973 and did his doctoral work in American literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He started a poetry magazine, The Chowder Review, in 1973 which was published through 1988. In 1978, he left academia and was hired as a corporate speechwriter, beginning his business career in communications and marketing. From 1994-2001 he was vice president of global communications for EMC Corporation. More recently he was chief operating officer of a biotech/life sciences start-up and co-founded a social network for family caregivers. Slate is the author of two collections of poetry: The Great Wave (Houghton Mifflin, 2009) and The Incentive of the Maggot (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), winner of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize. He lives in Milton, Massachusetts.

BELGIUM

Invented by the British to annoy
the French, so said De Gaulle.
The Belgians are rude but live to please,

live by pleasing. Speaking languages.
Renting their houses.
They’re not rude, they just drive that way.

We dress for dinner
but the ambassador dresses down.
The western nations don’t understand each other.

Never to go to war with one another again.
Invented by the western nations
to annoy the Chinese.

Our ambassador dresses down.
It’s his wife’s birthday.
Staff of eight lives to please.

Herbert Hoover saved Belgium in 1915
with seven million tons for eleven million.
Saved Belgium from Germany and England

who misunderstood each other.
Hoover believed in uncommon men.
The ambassador is an uncommon man.

He and others come to Brussels
for reassurance, each voice will be heard,
each nation will achieve the goal

of living off all the other nations.
A relation of men dominating men.
Now it’s your turn, now mine.

The guards take a look under the limo
and wipe for traces of ill intent.
The European conscience is as clean as Antarctica.

Tiny pyramids of chocolate,
a dollop of chocolate inside.
We undress for bed, the ambassador

puts on his tuxedo pants, for fit.
I sign the guest book in the morning:
First it was your time to please.

Next time it’s mine.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote no poetry for almost 20 years until July 2001. “Belgium” was the first poem after that long silence. My wife, my mother-in-law and I took a trip to Europe after I quit my corporate job that June. In Belgium we were the houseguests of the American ambassador to the EU and his wife – friends of our family. He was a Clinton appointee waiting to be replaced. When we returned home, I started writing. The poem is typical of what I produced that summer – glib, jumpy, filled with miscellanea. Animated by the amazement of being able to write at all. Freed somehow to fix on its material in a nervous, insistent way. I started with the De Gaulle bon mot – and then annoyance became the subject and voice of the poem, how global politics is about people annoying and misunderstanding each other.

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

It took almost three years for this poem to settle and tighten up. Generally my work requires much revision, but this poem didn’t see much reconstruction. Mainly tweaking and deletions.

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

Passivity and intentionality, receptivity and broadcast – they seem to happen simultaneously when the going is good. There are lines in the poem that quote others without attribution, so that material is “received” in a way. “They’re not rude, they just drive that way” is the ambassador’s wife’s line (she drove us to Bruges). “Never to go to war with one another again” is the infamous appeasement line by Neville Chamberlain. Poems are slowly contrived, but they ought to seem sudden and even abrupt. Deliberation and delay at the same time. What Elizabeth Bishop called “a perfectly useless concentration.” Because the poet doesn’t know how things will end, his or her ability feels passive before that unpredictable conclusion.

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

I chose to write this poem in tercets in order to heighten the terseness – hoping that the tercets would suggest a straining for order, units of meaning – but also, an experience separated into event and reaction. Many of the threesomes are complete speeches, others resolve soon after. The tone of the poem more or less came naturally – that of a small man judging a very big contentious world. Candid and preposterous.

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

This poem first appeared in The Incentive of the Maggot. I don’t send much poetry to magazines because I revise a lot and sometimes it takes a long while for the poem’s true agenda to clarify. Or for me to give up on cheap effects or offhand comment and attempt the more difficult thing.

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

Poems are selfish. Concerned only about themselves. They use information and myth, data and fabulism, for their own purposes. Poetry is a murmuring among and despite the facts. Wittgenstein: “Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” “Belgium” is a catalog of facts, ephemeral and historical – not to convey information, but to suggest what a person sounds like when he tries to confront an entire world through an outburst, of language, memory and trivia.

Is this a narrative poem?

Insofar as the poem portrays an event (birthday dinner) and time passes to the following morning, yes, it’s a narrative, or better still, it contains a narrative element.

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

I was then reading Milosz, Kundera and Borges. Probably not influential per se.

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

When I gave my first reading of poems in The Incentive of the Maggot, one of my business colleagues approached me afterwards and said with self-satisfaction, “So that’s what poetry is like.” He got it. So I’d like the poems to work for someone like him. The new work for The Great Wave was written as if spoken to my teacher-friend.

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?

Louise Glück has worked with me since 2003, first on The Incentive of the Maggot, and then on the successive drafts of The Great Wave. Working with her has changed things in profound ways for me. Michael Collier, my editor at Houghton, is an incisive critic and has supported The Great Wave through completion. Floyd Skloot, an old friend and a wonderful poet and essayist, critiques my first drafts.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Its immersion in phenomena and history, the glibness of tone, the scope of its judgments, the peculiar transparency of the speaker – these are features of the first poems I wrote in 2001. Over the past few years the work has become somewhat more reflective in tone, more intentional in selection of its materials, perhaps more spoken.

What is American about this poem?

The American looks out at the world and feels at a certain oceanic remove, just like this speaker. The old histories between France, England and Germany are a nuisance, continually drawing in the Americans. “Belgium” is the American disparaging the power structures of Europe, now based in Brussels (the EU, NATO, etc). George Bush II had never been to Europe before his presidency, and then he went to Brussels. Herbert Hoover, uncommon and misunderstood, is a quintessential American man regarded as a hero by the Belgians.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. When completed, I sent a copy to the then ex-ambassador telling him I had dedicated the poem to him and that it would appear in my first book. He declined the dedication on professional not personal grounds, or so he said.

Michael Ryan

Michael Ryan's Threats Instead of Trees won the 1973 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award; In Winter, for which he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award, was a 1981 National Poetry Series selection; God Hunger won the 1990 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and New and Selected Poems won the 2005 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His other books are an autobiography, a memoir, and a collection of essays about poetry and writing. He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of California, Irvine.


OUTSIDE

The dead thing mashed into the street
the crows are squabbling over isn’t
her, nor are their raucous squawks
the quiet cawing from her throat
those final hours she couldn’t speak.
But the racket irks him.
It seems a cruel intrusion into grief
so mute it will never be expressed
no matter how loud or long the wailing
he might do. Nor could there be a word
that won’t debase it, no matter
how kind or who it comes from.
She knew how much he loved her.
That must be his consolation
when he must talk to buy necessities.
Every place will be a place without her.
What people will see when they see him
pushing a shopping cart or fetching mail
is just a neatly dressed polite old man.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

2002-03. It started with the first sentence breaking over the first five lines: that was the donnee and it didn’t change through revision. It set me into the poem in every way I needed, both dramatically and prosodically.

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

Not as many as most of them, but the poem took eighteen months to come right. The problems were entirely writing problems--how to say what needed to be said and how to exclude what didn’t.

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

The first sentence was given to me: that’s how I experienced it. The brain is a mysterious organ, even to neuroscience.

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

Frost said, “The ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.” I write by ear, as well as with my brain and heart.

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

It first appeared in the February 9, 2004 issue of The New Yorker. Horace exhorted the poet to keep his poem in his desk until the ninth year, to make sure that he has made it as good as possible: limae labor et mora (“the labor of file and delay”). Only a small portion of what I write can I bear to see in print, but sometimes I have sent poems out too soon and have published a few in magazines that mercifully never made it into a book.

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

I have never met the people in this poem except in this poem.

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

I love prose fiction and wish I could write it. Narrative casting, the choice of pronouns, is everything (along with everything else being everything. I love Wallace Stevens’ line: “You can do what you want, but everything matters.”) Obviously, you can do things in third-person that you can’t in first- or second-person. And so on, for each of them. The introduction of a new pronoun can be the most dramatic event in a poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

I confess it is, focused on and by a single moment. The way the poem tells its story is another one of Stevens’s everythings. The twin ancient powers are story and song. The proportions vary from poem to poem. I like a lot of both.

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

I don’t remember what I was reading. Emily Dickinson is my favorite poet. Frost is my favorite theoretician. I love his poems, too. And many many other poems, composed in many different languages by poets living and dead. Every time I am moved I am influenced, a word whose Latin root means the flowing of an ethereal fluid or power from the stars which affects a person’s character and actions. Human beings are permeable, fortunately and unfortunately.

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

My audience is the poem itself. I write to the poem. I try to see what it actually says. I also try to listen to its telling me what it wants to be.

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?

Some of the best poets writing in English have been my trusted readers for years. I’m married to one of them and show her everything. “Outside” is a crypto-love poem to her. I hope I never suffer the loss the old man in the poem does. I wouldn’t be neat or polite.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I try to do something new in every poem. I try even harder while being drawn to habitual subjects like how people bear the unbearable. That’s the subject of many Dickinson poems that move me the most. “Outside” is pushed very far from me autobiographically while being very close to me personally. Maybe this reflects the contrast between outside and inside in the poem.

What is American about this poem?

Everything is American about this poem, but not exclusively American, I hope.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I can’t make it any better. Valery’s idea (“A poem is never finished, it is merely abandoned.”) was spoken from and for his time, a time when the independence of art seemed exciting. Language is certainly its own realm, subject to its own rules, but it’s also rooted in communication that refers to the real world of survival, for both the species and the individual. If it were otherwise we wouldn’t have learned to talk. Opacity is easy. And puts me right to sleep. The real mystery is clarity, but it’s only the means not the end, unless it’s spiritual and emotional clarity of the kind Dickinson practiced in and by writing poems. Art for art’s sake would have struck her as a ludicrous, debased idea. For her, the foundation and purpose of art was moral and religious, as it was for every poet of her time except Poe, but unlike the Victorian sages for Dickinson the relationship between art and morality was implicit not explicit, private not social, neither pious nor privileged but enmeshed with gritty, difficult, daily life, and every crack and crease in their connections was open to exploration. I think this is still the great enterprise of poetry, and it will never be finished or abandoned.