Alex Dimitrov

Alex Dimitrov is the author of Begging for It, published by Four Way Books. He is also the founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City. Dimitrov’s poems have been published in The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, Poetry Daily, Tin House, Boston Review, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize in 2011. He is also the author of American Boys, an e-chapbook published by Floating Wolf Quarterly in 2012. Dimitrov is the Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets, teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and frequently writes for Poets & Writers.


THIS IS NOT A PERSONAL POEM

This is not a personal poem.
I don’t write about my life.
I don’t have a life.
I don’t have sex.
I have not experienced death.
Don’t take this personally but
I don’t have any feelings either.
The feelings I don’t have don’t run my life.
I have an imagination. I’m imagining it now.
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
This poem stole that line from John Ashbery.
This poem wants you to like it,
please click “like.”
This poem was written during a recession.
I’m so politically conscious
the word “politics” is in my poem.
This is not a New York poem.
There’s not enough room for all the wars in this poem.
Gay marriage is now in this poem.
Have you liked this poem yet?
It was written in 2011 in New York and posted 11 minutes ago.
Would you sleep with the poet who wrote this poem?
Would you buy his book? Click here.
This poem loves language.
This poem has slept with other poems
written by poets who love language.
All poets love language.
Let’s talk about language while people die.
This poem cares a lot but wants you
to think that it doesn’t really care.
The speaker of this poem may have been
born in a former Communist country.
It may or may not matter.
I had an orgasm before writing this poem.
I have my sunglasses on while reading this poem.
Everyone is going to die
please don’t take it personally.
The world. The world.
The world is blood-hot and personal.
I stole that line from Sylvia Plath.
Put your money on this poem.
I love the money shot.
This is not a personal poem.
This poem is only about Alex Dimitrov.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

This is my favorite poem I’ve written. The first draft happened on August 12, 2011 before a Wilde Boys salon with CA Conrad and Dorothea Lasky. Conrad had asked me to record a poem for his Jupiter 88 video journal and I wanted to write something new. I was at this store in the Lower East Side, waiting to try on a shirt, and the cashier said, “please don’t take it personally,” to the guy in front of me, who had been rung up for the wrong amount. That exchange between them triggered something and I thought, “well yeah, everyone is going to die, don’t take it personally.” And that phrase more or less became what sparked the poem and it also found its way in it. So I started writing all this down in the Notes section of my iPhone, and I was in the dressing room, it was very hot, my friend Rachel was waiting for me and there I was, practically standing with my mouth open like I’d been drugged or something, typing out lines that were coming to me when I was supposed to be trying on this shirt. And you know, I was thinking about what it means to try on anything—a personality, a life, a boyfriend. And what does it even mean to write a personal poem? What does it mean to be a person at all? In any case, I didn’t try on the shirt. I typed out all of those questions and then came out and just bought it (I like that shirt a lot actually, it has these nice white sleeves but the body of the shirt is black. It has an 80s little boy charm). Then I went home and drafted the poem in two hours. Half an hour after I finished writing I recorded it for Conrad. And you can watch that video of me reading it here.

The poem is dedicated to CA Conrad because he’s a witch and his invitation to record something for Jupiter 88 is one of the things that inspired what I wrote. It’s a radical act of magic any time a poem happens. With this one that felt especially true.

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

I changed maybe four or five lines after the first draft. This poem came to me almost entirely as itself. Which rarely happens. And when it does, you know something is…working.

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

Sometimes you struggle with a poem for weeks and weeks and the poem never happens. And you abandon it. And as a result of having struggled—what I mean to say is, that struggle isn’t for nothing—something unlocks, a blockage clears, which allows you to write into something else entirely. Not the poem you were trying to write. But a different one. That’s what happened with “This Is Not A Personal Poem.” I had been trying to write a love poem, and I wrote something new, in a different voice, something that surprised me.

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

I don’t know, but thank god for my iPhone right? And thank god for the internet. I had to google those Ashbery and Plath lines on my phone, in that dressing room, to make sure I was remembering them correctly. And then I was led to a different line of Plath’s than the one I had originally intended to use. A better line. So, the internet helped me write this poem. I would like to thank the internet.

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

Well I don’t really expect to make art while I’m shopping. But this is America. Anything’s possible.

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

Craig Teicher accepted it for publication in The Literary Review in the summer of 2012 and it was published in early 2013. I’m grateful to him. Like I said, this is my favorite poem I’ve written.

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

It depends on the poem. The last six months I’ve been writing what I feel are different poems for me and it’s taken a while to figure out that voice. It’s taken a while to even come up with titles for those poems. So I’ve been letting them sit and then I read them over once in a while and add something here or take away something there and then let them sit some more. But I’m very impatient. So I’m surprised that I’ve been able to do this.

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

There’s so much more than fact and fiction. Everything in between the two is more interesting. And fact and fiction don’t really exist as pure entities. So who cares.

Is this a narrative poem?

No, it’s a personal poem. Everything in it is true. It came from my real life.

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

I was listening to Elvis Presley and collecting jpgs of Paul Thek paintings.

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

Well sure, I’d like Hillary Clinton and Justin Bieber to read my poems.

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

No one saw drafts of this poem. Sometimes I send drafts to Jameson Fitzpatrick and Soren Stockman. They’re both studying poetry in NYU’s Graduate Creative Writing program right now and I think they’re fantastic poets. But it’s more for the purpose of sharing. We share poems with each other. It’s not a workshop or anything. I can’t wait for both of their first books whenever they come out.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s like when Warhol started painting the electric chairs, you know? Something different happened.

What is American about this poem?

Everything I hope.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I don’t know but it was a party and it didn’t really care who came. Ashbery came and Sylvia Plath and Alex Dimitrov. That’s what I love about this poem.

Judson Mitcham

Judson Mitcham's work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Georgia Review, Hudson Review, and Harper's. He has published three collections of poems: Somewhere in Ecclesiastes, which won the Devins Award; This April Day; and A Little Salvation: Poems Old and New. His novels, The Sweet Everlasting and Sabbath Creek, were both awarded the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Mitcham has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and he has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. He taught psychology at Fort Valley State University for many years, and he now teaches creative writing at Mercer University. Mitcham is the current poet laureate of the state of Georgia. He lives in Macon with his wife, Jean. They have two children and three grandchildren.


THE MULTITUDE

The woman in the airplane wanted
to talk about Christ. I did not.
I raised my magazine. She continued, saying Christ
promised heaven to the thief
who believed while nailed to the cross.
The clouds looked solid far beneath. She began
the story of her life, and I stopped her
as politely as I could, saying please, right now,
I’d simply like to read. And for a while,
she did keep quiet, then she asked
if I’d ever really given Christ a chance, so I tried
telling her a joke, chose the one
about the Pope and Richard Nixon in a rowboat.
She discovered nothing funny in the story.
Jesus fed the multitude, she said. 
I looked around to find an empty seat.
There wasn’t one. She asked me if I knew
about the sower and the seed; about Zaccheus;
Legion and the swine; Mary Magdalene;
Lazarus; the rich young ruler. And I did,
I knew about them all. I told her yes,
sweet Jesus; got the stewardess
to bring another bourbon; tried to buy
the missionary one, but she declined. 
And when the plane set down,
I’d escaped up the aisle, made the door,
and started walking fast toward the baggage claim,
when I saw them, all at once, on the concourse:
thousands I would never see again, who'd remain
nothing in my life, who would never have names;
and I realized I'd entertained—strangely,
and for no good reason I could see—
the hope of someone waiting there
who loved me.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem came together when I combined elements from two other attempts at poems, neither of which ever seemed right, so it began as a reworking of other material. It appears that I first put it into my computer in 2002.

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

I write poems in longhand, and they exist first as prose fragments. I don't concern myself with lines until I have some sense of what the language of the poem might be and where it might be going. I don't mean by this that I hack up the prose fragments into lines, but that I tend to think things through in prose and then think things through again, but this time trying to find the right music for a poem. When I start putting the poem into lines, I tend to rewrite over and over from the beginning, so it's hard to know exactly what constitutes a draft. By the time I come up with something that might be called a whole poem, I've usually gone through many versions. Then I'll type it up and revise it on the computer. In this case, from the first typed draft to the published version, there appear to be eleven revisions.

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

I've always liked Pasteur's "Chance favors the prepared mind." I'm not sure I know what inspiration is. The feeling of inspiration has proved notoriously unreliable for me, and has not given me my best results. It seems to me that if you work hard at writing, work hard at seeing what language can discover, you are in the habit of trying out connections to see if they might mean something on another level. Sometimes such a connection comes to you, and perhaps you feel inspired, but it's probably unlikely that you would have made that connection if you had not been in the habit of working and looking at things in a certain way.

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

I didn't employ any formal technique. I tend to write lines of three or four beats. James Dickey talked about his "thump-loving American ear," and I guess that’s what I have. This poem seemed to work best without stanzas. Most of the lines end on words of one syllable, and in this poem, as in most of my poems, the last word of the poem recalls an earlier sound somewhere in the last few lines.  

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

I finished it while putting together the manuscript of my second book, This April Day, which had been taken by Anhinga Press, and I decided to include it in that book, which came out a year later.

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

Well, I stuck this one right into a book, and it seems to have worked out all right, but my experience is that my poems are almost always significantly improved by my taking a fresh look at them after some time has passed. I go through long stretches of sending out nothing, even when I have poems that I think are finished. I'm under no pressure to publish, and the world is not clamoring for more poems from me.

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

I grew up in the Baptist church, reading the Bible and listening to sermons. My family would discuss scripture at length. We loved the old hymns, which are still a source of comfort and strength for me, as is the King James Bible. I’ve never encountered a proselytizing woman on an airplane, but it is true that many, many times in my life I have been presented with the Good News in an aggressive, accusatory way, a sort of hectoring piety. I did draw on the experience of sitting next to a woman on a plane and listening to her and her companion exchange smug assertions about the true nature of God. And I do remain, as I've been all my life, strangely dismayed by the understanding that the inner lives of other people are bound to be as vast and complicated as my own. William James has a wonderful essay on this phenomenon, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings." The mystery of otherness is greatly multiplied in crowds, and where better to see a crowd than the Atlanta airport? Many times, I've exited a plane, walked out into the multitude, and felt an acute aloneness.

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 don't recall. Too many influences to name.

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

I think of other poets whose work I care about.

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've found it helpful to have one good reader look at poems that I think are finished, but not at early drafts, when the poem is still trying to become something. When I've shared early drafts, I've tended to become defensive, but if I think the poem is finished, if I think I have done my best, then I'm able to listen. I may not agree, but I'll listen to that trusted reader, and if changes are needed, I'll probably make them.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don't think it differs in any significant way.

What is American about this poem?

That might be for someone who is not American to say. I'm not sure I can step back and look at it in that light.

Dora Malech

Dora Malech is the author of two books of poems, Say So and Shore Ordered Ocean. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Letters& Commentary, Poetry London, and Best New Poets, among other publications. She has served as a Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College of California, in addition to teaching at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters in New Zealand, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards that include a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Writers’ Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.  In addition to writing and teaching, she makes visual art and directs the Iowa Youth Writing Project, a language arts outreach organization.


MAKEUP

My mother does not trust

women without it.

What are they not hiding?

Renders the dead living

and the living more alive.

Everything I say sets

the clouds off blubbering

like they knew the pretty dead.

True, no mascara, no evidence.

Blue sky, blank face. Blank face,

a faithful liar, false bottom.

Sorrow, a rabbit harbored in the head.

The skin, a silly one-act, concurs.

At the carnival, each child's cheek becomes

a rainbow. God, grant me a brighter myself.

Each breath, a game called Live Forever.

I am small. Don't ask me to reconcile

one shadow with another. I admit—

paint the dead pink, it does not make

them sunrise. Paint the living blue,

it does not make them sky, or sea,

a berry, clapboard house, or dead.

God, leave us our costumes,

don't blow in our noses,

strip us to the underside of skin.

Even the earth claims color

once a year, dressed in red leaves

as the trees play Grieving.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote “Makeup” in Fall 2003. I went back to the notebook in which I was writing at that time, and the poem keeps company with other lines and drafts of poems that grapple with similar materials (mortality, a shifting season, artifice, expectations, family).

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

I’m glad I went back and looked at my notebook to verify my response to this question, since I completely misremembered. Most of my poems (especially at that time) are the result of a magpie’s process of collecting shiny bits of language and observation. I go back through my notebook and begin the process of revision by piecing together these fragments, puzzling them into form. That was how I misremembered “Makeup” happening, but in fact, I basically wrote the first draft of the poem from beginning to end. It was definitely a rough draft, but its motion was there in its entirety. I think it must have been a month or so before that first draft went through a few more drafts to reach an almost-final draft, and I always keep worrying at individual word choices and so forth long after that.

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

I do believe in inspiration, but not in the sense of the poem as a “gift” from elsewhere (though I won’t rule anything out; I just don’t want to flatter myself that whatever or whoever’s “elsewhere” would give me the time of day). I suppose I think of inspiration as an incredibly active kind of attention, a radical receptivity. So while certain poems, like “Makeup,” come to me in a rough form but whole, I think they still require revision and work to live up to whatever “inspiration” or impulse occasioned their beginnings. I also think that “Makeup” in particular was a poem that I had been “working” on in my mind for pretty much my whole life, in the sense that its concerns came directly from my life. While we think of the “first draft” as the first words written on the page, a poem often starts gestating in the life and the mind and the body long before a word makes it to the paper. 

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

I don’t know how consciously I was making formal decisions, but I was definitely concerned with questions of form in general at that point in my writing life, and I’m sure that those concerns shaped the poem. Actually, I was just about to transition into writing much more “formal” poems (in the sense of “received” form or “traditional” prosody) a few months later, and I feel like I was already starting to explore in that direction. In my notebook, I have some notes a few pages before “Makeup” about stichic poetry versus strophic poetry, and I think the move to a stanzaic form in revision was something that was important to the intentions of the poem, in terms of exploring art and artifice, and employing rhetorical moves to build an argument of sorts.

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

Four years. The poem first appeared in the May 2007 issue of Poetry.

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

It varies. I often wait for poems to have company before I send them off into the world. I don’t necessarily need to write three or four more poems “like” each other, but I kind of like to send poems out together that, if by some stroke of luck, got published alongside each other, would resonate in some way. So one poem might sit for a year or two waiting for kindred poems, but I don’t have any strict rules, just practicality and instinct in this regard.

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

I see this poem as fact. I mean, there’s personification, metaphor, and so forth, but I don’t know what to say besides that there are the way in which I tell the truth.

Is this a narrative poem?

No, I feel like it’s more in the kind of lyric, conceit-driven tradition of the Metaphysical poets. That said, there are definitely “characters” with needs and wants and fears and desires, there are conflicts of sorts (between individuals, between individual and nature, between individual and society), and there’s some sense of “resolution”; many of the “traditional” elements of narrative are there.

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins. ElizabethBishop. John Donne. William Shakespeare. Federico García Lorca.

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

Well, if this poem is “fact,” as I just claimed, I’m talking to God about cosmetics. So there’s that.

Really though, an ideal reader for me would be anyone open to the possibility of pleasure in language and attention and uncertainty.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s less “dense” in terms of language and imagery than some of my other poems. It risks certain sentimentalities (writing about my mother; talking to God) that I should probably risk more often.

What is American about this poem?

The questions of artifice, presentation, and cultural expectations feel American to me. Also, I think Americans (and yes, this is an overgeneralization), are squeamish about accepting death and decay as part of a life cycle. We hide death away like it’s shameful. We pretty it up if we have to look at it at all.  Of course, there’s a loss and an estrangement there. That said, I don’t think poetry’s strong suit is getting up on a soapbox and espousing a firm opinion like “artifice is bad.” I write poetry to complicate my point of view, or dignify the world’s inherent complications. This poem entertains the possibility of a kind of redemptive artifice. (I mean, I think perhaps poetry’s a kind of redemptive artifice?) I’ve had people read this poem or hear me read it and tell me stories about a loved one who insisted on red lipstick on her deathbed; there’s often an eye roll or a smile that accompanies the story, but there’s something there that’s worth noticing. Now that I think of it, those stories haven’t all been from Americans, so perhaps it’s generational? Or simply human? “American” is as complicated as “artifice,” or anything else worth thinking about, I suppose.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

A bit of both.

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.