Lance Larsen

In 2012 Lance Larsen was appointed poet laureate of Utah. He has published four poetry collections, most recently Genius Loci (University of Tampa Press 2012). His poems appear widely, in Orion, Raritan, Poetry, River Styx, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Verse Daily, The Best of Pushcart Poetry, Best American Poetry 2009, and elsewhere. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as awards from Sewanee, The Joseph Campbell Foundation, The Anderson Center,  and Southwest Writers.  As an essayist he has won the Writers at Work nonfiction fellowship prize, and two pieces have been listed as notable essays—in Best American Essays 2005 and 2009.  He teaches at Brigham Young University and recently directed a study abroad program in Madrid.   


THE WORLD’S LAP
   
The spirit keeps wanting to float off into Italian
frescoes, dissolve into acacias,
fall lightly like dust into the Indian Ocean.
Meanwhile the body, tired mule,
pushes the grocery cart through Perishables.
The math is simple.
Spirit + body = a sadness machine.

Subtract either spirit or body and you’re left
with a story
problem for actuaries. 
Guillotines make permanent separation a snap.
Ditto famines and plagues,
ditto waves if you try to cross
the ocean without holding fast to a floating object.

But how to keep the machine happy—
supply it with live clams and dead auteurs? 
Dance it through corn mazes
in the Midwest? An owner’s manual
would help, but how does one translate
the Upanishads of the clavicle,
and where do you add oil in a sadness machine?

Once in a San Jose park, on vacation, I asked
my daughter, Where are we?
She looked up at me: My dolly sits
on mine lap, I sit on yours lap, you sit
on the chair’s lap, the chair sits
on the world’s lap. There are a million
ways to say California. Only a few promise rest.


When was this poem composed? How did it start? 

I completed the first draft in April 2004. I may have made earlier stabs, but have no record of them. I recall wanting to write a poem that weighed in on the soul-body duality in a fresh, unexpected way. I eventually settled on a method, yoking the meta-poetic discourse of analysis to images that I hope are vivid and visceral, perhaps even slightly surreal.

How many revisions did this poem undergo?

Hard to say. Is fussing with one sentence a draft? What about the times I read the poem over and despaired, then went on to something else? Then sometimes I made changes and saved the new draft over the old. In total, I’d estimate at least twelve or thirteen drafts, perhaps as many as twenty, which for me is getting off easy.

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

I submitted it to Agni in April of 2005, a year after I began writing it, and it appeared later that year in issue 62.    

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

I’ve grown to distrust the word “inspiration,” which of course is one syllable short of “inspirational”—that dreaded synonym for anything sentimental, touchy-feely, or didactic. Still, parts of the poem felt as if they came from somewhere else, almost as if I were eavesdropping on primitive inside me, but I had to fight like a demon to translate what I “received” into language less mongrel and self indulgent. There’s always a mud fight between Dionysus and Apollo. 
  
How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

The earliest draft was fifty-five lines long, which I wrestled down to forty-two lines and placed in stanzas of seven. Then I tightened and cut, dropping a stanza, then later another. Now at twenty-eight lines the poem is roughly half its original length. This is often how my work goes: drastic cuts, shaping, corralling sprawl into stanzas, taking advantage of white space, working for fortuitous line breaks. 

Is this a narrative poem?

I often employ narrative, but in writing this poem I remember setting myself the task of not telling one unified story. Re-reading it now, I see that it’s a montage of sorts, relying on various snippets of implied narratives.

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?

No set rules, though I almost always take more than a year between first and final drafts. I only finish a handful of the poems I begin. My castoffs resemble an unruly compost heap, if not a cemetery. But when I find something starting to work, I share drafts around. My first reader is my wife, Jacqui. I also exchange work with a handful of friends, and I belong to a writing group that meets once or twice a month in real time. When I can pass muster with those readers—and doing so is never a given—then the work has a decent chance of survival. 

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

I was likely channeling certain poets who, at least in some of their work, bring to bear both personal experience and a philosophic mind. Stevens certainly, probably Bishop, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass, Susan Mitchell, Dean Young. I’m leaving out a lot of people, obviously.     

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

Very little of the poem is directly autobiographical, though I hope the lines have a lived authenticity to them. For instance, at home I’m the chief hunter and gatherer, that is, grocery shopper, so I know a good deal about pushing the cart through Perishables. In the closing stanza, I quote my daughter, who actually said those lines, or most of them. That’s the factual dimension. The fictional is that we were not in California at the time, but in our kitchen. Once during a Q & A, Philip Levine was asked whether he writes autobiographical poems. “Why would I want to be myself,” he answered, “if I could be someone interesting?” Of course, his work has a very distinctive voice and imprint—the Levine factor, we might call it—but he doesn’t let fact get in the way of a good story or compelling description. I’m after a similar thing in my own work: a life enhanced, pushed and pulled, disguised, spliced together, or distilled into a rich, more satisfying sauce. 

Kara Candito

Kara Candito is the author of Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her work has been published in AGNI, Blackbird, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Santa FeArts Institute, Candito is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville and a co-curator of the Monsters of Poetry Reading Series in Madison, WI.

FAMILY ELEGY IN A LATE STYLE OF FIRE                                                              

After Larry Levis

In the story no one tells, my Great Uncle Salvatore

is an errand boy for the mafiosi and ends up on the dance floor

of Cocoanut Grove in Boston, November, 1942, an hour

before the club ignites; this is one version of justice.

Now Levis would say that fire is so American. We know

he drank until all that remained of his world was a match

trembling down a cheap motel hall—the flame

finite and manageable—while behind the bolted doors

of every room on the floor little Neros played embossed

harps muttering E tu, ignis, e tu? And it’s true, I’d rather drown

than burn, but the best death is undoubtedly getting lost

in a blizzard. Frost spends whole books stumbling through

snowy woods, though he never mentions how he ends up

in them, or how he gets out alive. Deer have been known

to swim out to sea without reason, and though the dumbest

end up as road-kill, I’ll put my faith in the long distance swimmers,

the Aeneases that wash up on strange shores and found

profane cities. Like fire and water, facts are tireless.

His last few months Salvatore bought jewels no one in Reggio

could imagine, and never wore them. One is a saint’s knuckle

cast in 18-carat gold. My grandfather keeps it in a backlit shadowbox.

In my drawer, there’s a blood-coral cornuto because the dead

will play the same dirge in the dark for years. And what

is more haunted than the feathery music of fire?

This November, I’ll get it right. I won’t imagine Salvatore

and the revolving door jammed with bodies, or the flashover’s

chemical boom, like the trapdoor of an ancient tomb stunned open.

I’ll go back to Calabria and find myself at fourteen, reading

a mystery novel under a bergamot tree. I might miss T.V.

I might be extravagantly bored. I might talk about churches

where no one is lighting candles for dead relatives.

Whose stage are you on?  Whose pyre are you in? I’ll ask myself

knowing I have to become someone else to answer this.

If, in the end, we get what we pay for, then I would like a receipt,

please. If, in the end, the band is playing Bell Bottom Trousers,

let that be his favorite song. Let him wade onto the dance floor,

into the slack-tide of a forgotten life; let him think of nothing—

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I started writing “Family Elegy in a Late Style of Fire” during the summer of 2009, when I was living in Tallahassee, FL and finishing a Ph.D. at Florida State University. The impetus was a found note in an old journal about an account of the 1942 Cocoanut Grove Fire in Boston (in which 492 people were suffocated, trampled or burned to death in a nightclub). One of my relatives died in the fire, and I found the act of imagining his history both frustrating and fascinating. So, I guess this poem began with the impulse to explore the messy intersections between public and private history, myth, story, and imagination.

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

I’m not sure exactly, but the poem has been through more than twenty drafts. Initially, it was a page or two longer, and there were more associative and temporal leaps. I spent about two months generating a first draft, and I’ve returned to the poem periodically since the summer of 2009. In fact, I made a few cosmetic revisions last weekend, so “Family Elegy” has taken more than three years to write.

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

I believe in inspiration as that which brings me to poetry, and work and artifice as the forces that make me sit down and actually write something I’d want to read. It’s difficult for me to write when I don’t feel moved or provoked. On the other hand, I have a hard time constructing and revising poems when I’m not reading poetry and consciously thinking about how to construct poems.

On the level of artifice, Larry Levis’ “My Story in a Late Style of Fire” and Dean Young’s “One Story” were essential models for “Family Elegy...” Levis’ poem inspired me to think of the past (both real and imagined) in terms of charged and unresolved images that evolve emotionally and associatively against different backdrops. Since I first heard the story of my relative who died in the Cocoanut Grove fire, I’ve been compelled to imagine the terrible sublimity of his death. Yet, being trampled to death in a fire or identifying the body of a loved one who has been trampled to death in a fire are experiences that I can’t fully access. When I try, I become a frantic spectator.

Dean Young’s “One Story,” which is a swerving, sweeping plural, even “postmodern” poem, gave me a framework for a quest that recognizes its own impossibility. Young’s precedent inspired me to turn Levis into an actual character in the poem. His life and early death provided a corollary for exploring how both private and public historical discourse mythologize the dead. In the course of this exploration, I started to see this myth-making as essential to the function of history because it tames the unknowable and imbues it with a purpose or a lesson.

Finally, I liked to swim late at night in the pool of the apartment complex where I lived in Florida, so I guess there’s some aquatic, nocturnal quality to the poem’s rhythms and images, despite the fact that it’s ostensibly about fire.

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

In “Family Elegy…” I wanted to make the false starts and frames that are often edited out as part of the revision process essential parts of the whole. Early on, I decided that I needed a fairly mannered container (long-lined couplets) to give shape to all of the chaos. After this, it became a matter of deciding which shifts were more effective and necessary. Originally, the cause of the fire was mentioned, and the scene of the fire was imagined in more detail. Gradually, I realized that the poem was less about these specifics, and more about interpreting the afterimages.

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

I made a conscious effort to defer and distract the narrative focus from what felt like the poem’s emotional center until it was absolutely necessary.

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

A draft of this poem was published in The Rumpus in the winter of 2010, about six months after I began writing it.

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

I don’t have rules, although I’ve learned that poetry and instant gratification seldom go hand and hand for me.

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

I think the poem deals with the impossibility of distinguishing the two. Facts are cold and tireless. When we care about them, they lead us to imagination. The result is a duet between the known and our strategies of filling in or explaining the unknown.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes.

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

I don’t have a particular audience in mind, although I’ve come to realize that I’d rather be accused of writing poems that feel too much, rather than too little. So maybe I’m writing for all of the big, reckless feelers out there.

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

At the time, I had a bi-weekly workshop with a few friends from graduate school, and I was actively sharing work with my mentor, Erin Belieu. I like to share my work with insightful, brutal readers whom I trust, and the structure and deadlines of a small workshop suit me. Since I moved from Florida to Wisconsin in the summer of 2010, I’ve kept in touch with the same readers via phone and email.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I think it’s more expansive.

What is American about this poem?

“Family Elegy” deals with displacement, violence, and myth. In many ways, it’s about immigrant experience, which foregrounds the idea of the past as another country or language that is somehow larger and more important than the present. It’s also one of my poetry love letters to Larry Levis, who is the quintessential post 1960’s American poet for me. I think I structured the intuitive forces of “Family Elegy…” around the final lines of his poem, “My Story in a Late Style of Fire”: “It is so American, fire. So like us./Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.”

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

“Family Elegy” has been doted on, neglected, and abandoned, but I don’t think it will ever feel completely finished.

Robert Farnsworth

Robert Farnsworth’s poetry has appeared in magazines all over the U.S., in Canada and the UK. He has published three collections, two with Wesleyan University Press: Three or Four Hills and A Cloud (1982) and Honest Water (1989), and most recently, Rumored Islands (2010) with Harbor Mountain Press. For seven years he edited poetry for the national quarterly The American Scholar.  His work has won him a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, and a P.E.N. Discovery citation, and for the summer of 2006 he was the poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH. He has for twenty-two years taught writing and literature at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where he lives with his wife and two sons.

VAGRANCY

From an American early autumn evening

flung back into tomorrow’s afternoon,

I sat a while in the car park, smoking

over a map, then for practice drove west

to a neglected town, where transatlantic

flying boats set down seventy years ago,

and on the silent pier beside their museum,

imagined back the long white scuds of their

landings. No one else otherwise like me

would have come here. So now that no one

could take my peculiar solitude from me,

I set out, drawn by the intuition that my

heart would feel welcome on the grounds

of some enduring verse I first read forty

years ago. Intimation, almost invitation —

I felt bound to honor, no, not answer, honor.

Even knowing the big house was a ruin.

Under steep September sky: sea-gray,

lavender, blue, and quartz, I shouldered

a bag, and set off into the Seven Woods

toward the lough, not expecting swans —

all flown, long flown, as that weary spell

of a poem supposed they would be.

But on those woodland paths I made a loop

of several miles, until I’d walked myself

quite out of the life I’d yesterday begun

to shed in the airport lounge. The pleasure

was guilty, but pleasure it was, piercing

as music I wished never to end, a real

dépaysement, an achieved disappearance,

a belonging more profound for its complete

fictitiousness, and I lay down in these

beneath a lime tree in Lady Gregory’s garden,

to sleep a just sleep, as in the cherished

crypt of a page. Invisible, anonymous —

who could I fail now? My sleep was not

my own; who was going to wake me?

Nobody I knew knew where I was, knew

that I was this contented tramp dozing

in September shade in a mildly famous garden.

His hour of sleep would change me,

just enough to make the next weeks happen

not exactly to me, but exactly. I woke

beneath the gaze of six red deer.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Like many of my poems, “Vagrancy” had a long gestation. It began as a few prose journal notes from a trip I made to Ireland in the autumn of 2000. I find more journal notes revisiting/ developing its concept from sometime in 2003. The poem was worked up into its final form across a week or two in the summer of 2006, tweaked from time to time until April of 2007, when I read it and published it on From The Fishouse.

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

After the poem took its essential shape (in four to six stress lines) that summer of 2006, it went through maybe three substantial drafts. The crucial one I find is half typed, the second half hand-written. I suppose there was a handwritten first half (that’s how I usually work things up, by hand, then type, then more handwriting, retype, etc.), but I must have lost it.

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

First, I guess I’d say that for me poems are essentially inquiries, into the nature and inner workings of experience and memory. Patience is my key (or is it my excuse for laziness?)… waiting for the notions (there need to be several) to relate and coalesce around an essential music and strategy, around some compelling image(s) and a definite tone or stance. That relation/coalescence constitutes inspiration for me. Once a draft catches fire this way, it usually happens fairly quickly (a few hours or days). Sweat work is then mostly a matter of adjustments, leaving a draft for a day or a week and returning to look for incipient or unsuspected circuits of energy, and for wasted motion. I keep leaving the “finished” poem, and returning to it for months (sometimes years) for another look, and another, which process seems to make the piece both more strange and more intimate to me. As described above, once begun, the actual drafts of  “Vagrancy” as a poem arrived on the page pretty easily, but then I let it cure a while, and made some small adjustments.   

How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique? Was there anything unusual about the way in which you wrote this poem?

Not really unusual, the process of this poem’s composition. I worry about how narrative-dependent (or to put it less charitably, how anecdotal) my imaginative impulses naturally are. That’s certainly not “what the age demands,” but I have started (late in life) to accept my instincts more graciously. Finding tension, pitch, and seductive detail to make an accessible but still lyrical meditative music preoccupies my compositional process. I knew this poem would measure itself as rough blank verse after I was about five or ten lines in. I always read aloud constantly as I compose, pushing the draft out into silence, readjusting some of what’s already down to better (I hope) propel the piece toward both desired and unsuspected connections, pacings, tones.

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?

“Vagrancy” appeared in the From The Fishouse on-line audio archive about eight months after it was finished. One other print editor who’d asked to see some poems had seen it, said he liked it, but hadn’t purchased it, so…  Matt O’Donnell, founder/editor/curator of the archive, lets invited poets choose their own contributions, and since it was new, and I liked the piece, had taken encouragement from the positive reaction of audiences I had read it to, I included it. In general, though, I’d say almost a year or so will usually pass before I send a new poem anywhere. (That wasn’t the case when I was an anxious boy of thirty…)

Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two? Is this a narrative poem? Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

I suppose that nearly every poem I write derives in some significant measure from actual experience, if that is what is meant by “fact.” But I believe every poem is obligated to take responsive, imaginative possession of the fact, and involve the reader in that process memory and imagination and language work upon ordinary experience. “Vagrancy” does work with my own experience very closely— my cherishing of travel as refuge or escape into anonymity and what the poem calls dépaysement, in this case escape into a place that reading Yeats (especially “The Wild Swans at Coole”) had long ago seemed to have given me access/entrée to—Lady Gregory’s estate, now a national park. The thrill of disappearing into a poem I had loved since the age of fourteen, as if into an afterlife, was wonderfully, dissonantly chorded with a sort of grubby, jet-lagged, interloping homelessness, sleeping there under some venerable tree, having sought the swans I knew wouldn’t be there. Certainly Elizabeth Bishop’s “Questions of Travel” must have been a whisk for the mix of the poem’s fascination with the relation of cultural and private imagination, of image and visitation, possession and belonging.   

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

Sure. Alert, curious people who want from their reading both the delight of recognition (imaginative collaboration, really), and of being a bit troubled. People who might be inclined to say to themselves I feel I know what this poem is involving me in, and to pursue (gently and fiercely) the implications of such an intuition. Isn’t that what every poet would wish for?

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?

Nobody else saw this poem in development. I do sometimes pine for trustworthy writer/readers with whom to exchange drafts I feel are solidly enough conceived, but these days I haven’t anyone like that, and I have grown probably too used to solitary work anyway…

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I actually feel this poem is very representative of what I have developed as an essential style, and of the nature of my current imaginative preoccupations.

What is American about this poem?

In the context of the poem’s “genre” (“travel poem…”)—that’s an interesting question! I suppose the poem is predicated on a sort of yearning to be from nowhere, to belong to an imaginary place, to a poem. “Vagrancy” has recently been translated into and published in Polish, so I’m thinking that either makes it symptomatically American, or conversely, sort of a-cultural in its resonance? 

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished.  

Wayne Miller

Wayne Miller is the author of three poetry collections: Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006), The Book of Props (Milkweed, 2009), and The City, Our City (Milkweed, 2011), which  was  a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award and the Rilke Prize. He also translated Moikom Zeqo’s I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA, 2007) and co-edited both NewEuropean Poets (Graywolf, 2008 w/Kevin Prufer) and Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th CenturyMaster (Pleiades Unsung, 2011). Wayne lives in Kansas City and teaches at the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades. In 2013, he’ll be the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Nocturne

Tonight all the leaves are paper spoons

in a broth of wind. Last week

they made a darker sky below the sky.

The houses have swallowed their colors,

and each car moves in the blind sack

of its sound like the slipping of water.

Flowing means falling very slowly—

the river passing under the tracks,

the tracks then buried beneath the road.

When a knocking came in the night,

I rose violently toward my reflection

hovering beneath this world. And then

the fluorescent kitchen in the window

like a page I was reading—a face

coming into focus behind it:

my neighbor locked out of his own party,

looking for a phone. I gave him

a beer and the lit pad of numbers

through which he disappeared; I found

I was alone with the voices that bloomed

as he opened the door. It’s time

to slip my body beneath the covers,

let it fall down the increments of shale,

let the wind consume every spoon.

My voice unhinging itself from light,

my voice landing in its cradle—.

How terrifying a payphone is

hanging at the end of its cord.

Which is not to be confused with sleep—

sleep gives the body back its mouth.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The event that triggered the poem happened, I think, in the late fall of 2002, when I was a visiting professor at the University of Central Missouri (then Central Missouri State University), where I still teach. I was living for the year in one of four apartments in an old converted house on Gay Street. All the other tenants were students and, though they were friendly, it was clear that I, as a professor, wasn’t especially welcome at their parties. One neighbor had the bad habit of getting locked out when he went into the back yard for a smoke, and on at least two occasions the party was loud enough no one could hear him banging on the door to get back in. It sounds pretty foreign today (this was less than ten years ago!), but he didn’t have a cell phone. Soon he came up onto the little deck outside my kitchen and rather sheepishly knocked on my window so he could use my phone to call down to his apartment. His guests, I assume, could hear the phone in the kitchen better than they could hear the back door.

I started writing the poem, I believe, one night in the spring of 2003—perhaps after the second of the above occasions. I think I had a first draft in a night or two.

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

I like William Stafford’s idea about this. I’m paraphrasing, but he says something like: a poet is someone who has arrived at a method that allows him to say things he could not have said without that method. My method is nothing like Stafford’s (he wrote a poem every day before getting out of bed—and when a poem didn’t come, he would “lower his standards”), but I do think it’s the consistent work of continually touching back in with the possibility of a poem—and then, once I have a draft, with the poem-in-progress—that allows me to arrive at moments of genuine surprise. Moments, in other words, that feel “received” somehow.

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

I’m an obsessive reviser. Once I have a draft done, I carry the poem around in my back pocket, and when I have a few minutes I unfold it and read it to myself, then perhaps make a change or two (or more). I do this for at least a week, then set the poem aside for a little while. After another couple weeks I come back to it. As I recall, “Nocturne” didn’t change a whole lot between the first draft and the final draft, but I still carried it around and read it over obsessively.

Part of why the poem didn’t go through a lot of changes, I think, is that the stanzaic structure of the poem arrived more or less formally right. Often I find myself altering stanzas systems—regular to irregular, couplets to tercets, etc.—until the poem feels like it’s slipped into place. (I have a number of ideas about different kinds of stanzas and their effects, but that would be too much to go into here.) This poem I started in loose free-verse tercets, and the tercet’s generally off-kilter, syncopated feel turned out to be right for the poem.

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

Only that the first draft was already pretty well along and didn’t require a lot of revision. Many of my poems don’t fully emerge until a tenth or twelfth draft—that’s when I really surprise myself with something or I suddenly find the right formal structure. But this one was pretty well developed in its early stages.

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

I recall tinkering with the poem off and on over the next couple months, but when I look back through my files I don’t seem to have made many substantial changes. (In the system of my computer, substantial changes require a new Word document, and I only have one document for “Nocturne.”) It also looks like the poem got picked up one of the first times I sent it out. This, too, isn’t typical for me—and it especially wasn’t typical when I was a younger writer with few prior publications. Field published the poem in their fall/winter 2004 issue. I should also say that before the poem came out in The Book of Props in 2009, I made one final edit to the second line. It originally said “in a windy broth.” But that doesn’t really make sense if one literalizes “broth,” so I changed to the above, which I think is better—cleaner.

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

I think what I outline above is typical: I carry a poem around and read it over obsessively, tinkering, revising, etc., until I exhaust myself and put it away for a couple weeks. Then I touch back in with it. If it seems done at that point—when I no longer quite remember the particular details of writing it—I send it out. If the poem requires more revision, I continue revising, then put it away again. Rinse, wash repeat. Sometimes after one of those repetitions I just abandon the poem. Other times, I find it’s done and I put it in the mail. If it comes back rejected, I check back in with it to see if I need to revise further.

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

This particular poem happens to be lifted from my life experience. There are aspects of the apartment house I streamlined in the interest of avoiding unnecessarily clutter, but for the most part the background narrative this poem is “true” to my life. That said, I have other poems that are almost entirely fictional—particularly in my third book, The City, Our City, when I became increasingly interested in monologues. Overall, I’d say I’m not as interested in “truth” as I am in evocative situations—situations, perhaps, that reveals a larger, more complex or paradoxical truth than the limited truth of my own life.

Is this a narrative poem?

It’s a lyric poem, but it has a background narrative.

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

I was reading a lot of Stevens at the time I wrote “Nocturne.” (Can’t you tell?) And I had just become obsessed with Francois Villon.

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

I tend to imagine a future audience—some person fifty or one hundred years from now who’s literate and has read a decent range of poetry. I’m by no means so confident in my work to be convinced I’ll be read in the future (are any poets so sure of themselves?), but I think it’s important—at least for me—to write with such an audience in mind. I try to remember that an important part of why we read poetry is to connect intimately with a mind that’s not our own—to discover as directly as possible how a mind in a different time or location lived and experienced the world around itself. When I’m thinking about the relative value (or non-value) of a poem of mine, I sometimes consider how well it some aspect our own moment in history—or at least of my tiny slice of it.

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

If I’m stuck or unsure or a poem, I share it with Kevin Prufer or Brian Barker—two longtime poet friends whose ideas and work I respect a great deal. I think Kevin saw a late-ish draft of this poem.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

My more recent poems experiment with persona and think more directly about history—how it does and does not hold us as individuals inside it, etc. I began to arrive at that interest a year or two after writing “Nocturne.” Many of my earlier poems were interested in phenomenological questions, just as “Nocturne” is. So perhaps this poem is, for me, a kind of culmination of a particular type?

What is American about this poem?

Well, it’s set in a small town in the American Midwest—not just in America, but in the real Amurcuh. That’s pretty American. (Or, at least, so Sarah Palin told me.) The Stevensian phenomenological descriptions in the first 2/3 of the poem are clearly American-made, though perhaps the aphoristic assertions in the back 1/3 are more European import.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Both.