George David Clark

George David Clark was born in Savannah and raised in Chattanooga and Little Rock. The author of Reveille (winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize from the University of Arkansas Press), his recent poems can be found in the The Believer, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Measure, Southwest Review and elsewhere and his work appears reprinted at Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and in a variety of anthologies and special series. The editor of 32 Poems, he is an Assistant Professor at Washington & Jefferson College and lives in Washington, PA with his wife and their three young children.

CIGARETTES

It’s August, hot, and a newly-married

couple in Mobile have left the window

partly open to the night and road noise

while they make love on a futon in the dark.

After, as he breathes heavy on the pillow

beside her and a thin clear line of perspiration

seems to quiver on the white guitar

that is her belly, she sighs and says,

Oh, now I wish I had a cigarette.

He’s been thinking he should pull the sheet

from where it’s bunched along the floor

and it takes him a moment to understand

that cigarettes—which both of them detest

and she has never tried—are not her point.

She phrases it that way because pleasure

is complicated, more so perhaps than suffering.

It will augment and diminish, both,

not unlike the ancient priests who’d purge

the humid entrails of the pharaohs

and then bathe the bodies’ cavities

with myrrh and frankincense and palm wine,

freights of fragrance in the hollows after.

She means that monuments to rapture

should be light to carry and combustible,

toxic in small quantities even secondhand,

and with an odor that darkens one’s clothes.

Somehow he comprehends this vaguely.

It reminds him of a concert he attended

in high school, the massive outdoor stage

where the band played one encore, a second,

then mangled their guitars across the amps

and footlights: sparks, debris, electric howling.

Stoned and riding home with his ears fuzzing

in the back of a friend’s Topaz, he felt

invincible and fantasized a car crash.

He’d passed out then, and later, coming to

sore-throated and coughing on his parent’s porch

where the guys had left him, it was as though

some breakneck song—all glass and metal

in his mind—had wrecked around him.

He rose there slowly and limped out of it

the way a man emerges from a shattered

windshield, the live adrenaline already

funneling off, but with a few stray echoes

still looping through his chest like feedback.

Tonight on the far side of the room

the infinite lungs of the wall clock exhale

long gray minutes. Eyes shut, motionless,

his wife leans toward sleep. Her teeth

are tingling faintly, white but crooked

on the bottom row. She has clenched

and ground them during sex again

and now she guesses at the likelihood

of braces in her future when there’s money.

It is her habit to sweep the tender downside

of her tongue across the misalignments

where the frets of wire might someday run,

and for a moment her mouth becomes

the smoky back room in a downtown bar

where a struggling band from out-of-state

is just about to plug in their Les Pauls.

Nascent music crackles in the outlets,

jittering, almost perceptibly, the ashtrays.

A breeze sleepwalks the curtains back

into the room and out again. Back and out.

Her husband slides his heel along her calf

and starts to tell her they should set his legs

on fire (she could inhale while they kiss),

but no, she’s gone unconscious. Instead,

he pulls the sheet to their shoulders

and thinks, as he dissolves beside her, how

from a distance they would look like two

thin cylinders wrapped in white, their minds

these grainy filters in their heads. Asleep

before he gets to who might smoke them

and why, his breathing slows and deepens.

The room cools slightly. The traffic

lulls outside and the sex aroma dissipates

till only the air that cycles through their chests

is warmed and sonorous and redolent.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I must have started working on this poem in the fall of 2011 while my family and I were living in Upstate New York. I can remember pretty clearly wrestling with this one in my little office on the 3^rd floor of Colgate’s Lawrence Hall—an incredible place to spend a year writing. My window looked out on one of the loveliest campuses I’ve encountered, complete with swans sailing back and forth on a little lake.

The seed of the poem was the line that I give the wife at the end of the first stanza. My own wife had said this (“I wish I had a cigarette”) a couple of times, though she too has never smoked, and I wanted to try to think through some of what that comment expressed.

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

I save and number my drafts, so I can see that “Cigarettes” went through twenty-six significant revisions over the course of about eight months before I first submitted it to a journal. The first draft of a poem is fairly excruciating for me, but I love revision, so I sometimes get stuck chewing my own cud. Even after “Cigarettes” was published, I continued to fiddle with the poem. Finally, with the help of Enid Shomer, my editor at Arkansas, I made a couple more important changes as I prepared the poem for publication in Reveille. In total, that makes about three years between the first draft and the final version, though there were seasons where it sat untouched.

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

Is it Auden who wrote that by “inspired” we mean simply that a work of art is better than we could reasonably expect it to be? I like that gesture toward demystification, but when I say I believe in inspiration I want to avoid suggesting that I mean simply a writer getting lucky. The workings of the mind are just such a mystery. I wonder if inspiration isn’t like some calculus we can’t fathom because in addition to the author’s preparation, its variables include the subconscious, the language itself, and even a spiritual element. Before I begin writing I like to spend a little time reading something that excites me. I also pray. I tell my students that in my experience the muse is most likely to respond when I court her with good writing and reading habits.

This poem certainly wasn’t “received”, but its “labor” involved more play than sweat and tears. You know how when you’re shooting “HORSE” with a friend on a driveway goal, you try all these ridiculous tricks (behind the back, off the windshield, nothing but net)? Every once in a while something implausibly goes in. Particularly with lyrics, poems have the advantages of highlight reels—all one’s best shots edited together with none of the air balls. Under such conditions a seemingly inspired performance really isn’t so impossible. The pleasure of revision is cutting away all of the uninspired mistakes, or at least as many as one can.

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

I’m trying to dramatize parallel thought processes in time, so one of the poem’s “formal” challenges was moving back and forth between consciousnesses. Perhaps the more difficult technical work in this poem however, was rhythmic. I wrote the first draft in blank verse, but eventually I wanted a bit more rhythmic flexibility. I think this poem wants to hide its blank verse roots without forfeiting the potency of that cadence altogether. A great deal of my energy in revision was spent trying to hear and hone that balance.

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

This poem appeared in TheYale Review in January 2013, so almost a year after I first submitted it. It wasn’t truly “finished” though (in the form it takes above) for another good year and a half.

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’ll revise a poem every day until I can’t see the flaws anymore, but then I tend to fire it off pretty quickly. I don’t recommend this bad habit though, and it’s meant that I sometimes have to ask editors if I can make changes after things are accepted. These days I’m trying to wait longer. If I’m satisfied with a poem after I’ve left it completely untouched for six months, I can let it go without qualms. It’s just hard for me to set something I like aside for that long. On the other hand, I know that if I keep fiddling too long I can do real damage.

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

There’s not a lot of fact in this poem, but, as I mentioned above, at least one line of dialogue is borrowed from my wife. I drove a Topaz in high school like this character’s friend, and I suppose the details concerning how the pharaohs bodies were prepared for mummification are factual. The rest is a fantasy.

Is this a narrative poem?

It’s narrative in the sense that time progresses (albeit slightly) and there is a sequence of events related by causation, but those “events” are really only thoughts and memories, and the poem actually seems more driven by the lyric impulse to depart from time and meditate on experience, rather than a thrust toward climax and conclusion.

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

This poem owes its most direct debts to Robert Hass. As I struggled with the shape or “plot” of this poem, I remember studying the way Hass will leap away from his triggering subject for lyric texture and perspective. I think there’s also a rhythmic debt to Hass here, but I wasn’t as conscious of that influence while I was composing.

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

I would love it if a fan of Stevens, Eliot, and Moore enjoyed what I wrote. My ideal reader is probably pretty sensitive to a poem’s sound and has an affinity for the surreal.

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. In the last couple years my first readers have been the editors to whom I submit my work for publication.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This is among the more narrative poems in Reveille, but I’ve written several others in this style recently. I try not to repeat myself any more than I have to, but the metaphysical subject matter here really represents an abiding interest.

What is American about this poem?

It certainly references American places and culture (though not exclusively), but I suspect the most American thing about this poem is its idiom. English speakers outside the States, and even Americans outside the Southeast wouldn’t write quite like this. Or I don’t think they would. Maybe another way of saying this is that I hope there is something of my place’s color in my words. I’ve lived outside the region for some time now, but I think of Georgia and Arkansas as home. I want a versatile tongue with many tones, but I also don’t want to completely lose my drawl, in my speech or on the page.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

It’s finished. I think.

Robin Becker

Robin Becker’s collections of poetry include Tiger Heron, Domain of Perfect Affection, The Horse Fair, All-American Girl and Giacometti’s Dog, all in the Pitt Poetry Series. Becker has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Harvard, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Liberal Arts Research Professor of English at Penn State, Becker served as the Penn State Laureate during the 2010-2011 academic year.  A column, “Field Notes,” appears in The Women’s Review of Books, where she serves as Poetry Editor.  

HOSPICE 

I wanted to believe in it, the word

softer than hospital but still not home—

Like any other frame house on the street,

it had a lawn, a door, a bell—

Inside, our friend lay, a view

of the garden from her room but no lift

to raise her from the bed. A sword, the sun

plunged across the cotton blankets.

I wanted dying to be Mediterranean,

curated, a villa, like the Greek sanatoria

where the ancients cared for their sick

on airy porticos and verandas

with stone paths that led to libraries.

A nurse entered her room and closed the door.

For the alleviation of pain, I praise

Morpheus, god of dreams unlocking

the medicine drawer with a simple key,

narcotic placed beneath the tongue.

In the hall, the volunteer offered us coffee.

How could I think the Mozart we played

to distract her could distract her? Or olive groves,

or marble sculpture in the atrium?

When was this poem composed? How did it start? 

In the middle of my 2008 residency at the Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, I learned that a beloved friend was dying. To see her, I traveled to Massachusetts where she had moved to a hospice. After her death and funeral, I returned to New Mexico wrote the first drafts of this poem.

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

This poem had several endings before I settled on this one. In that sense, it took a long time to complete. I had researched ancient Greek practices for caring for the dying and I had settled on Morpheus and Mozart, but I couldn’t find a way to bring it to a close.

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

For me, “inspiration” can mean any number of things: the “trigger” image that starts the process of composition; the phrase that arrives in the breath (and brain) as if unbidden; the bit of research that sends the poem off in an unexpected direction. I would say that this poem combined all of the above and then required considerable revision to find its final form.

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

The opening blank-verse couplet establishes a balanced, semi-stately tone which drops off, in line four, to become an iambic tetrameter line. After that, the lines vary from seven to fourteen syllables, returning to blank verse in lines seven, fourteen, and twenty two. Stanza shapes have always interested me. I don’t know--until somewhere in the poem’s development--what kind of stanza will suit the poem. In this case, I chose couplets to emphasize the relationship between the speaker and her dying friend.

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

The word “hospice” generated the journey of this poem. I can’t  think of another poem I began with a single word I didn’t ditch before the poem’s completion! Often, I let go of the catalyzing word or phase as the poem develops. In this case, it remained central.

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

I think Prairie Schooner published it the following year.

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

I show my poems to a few trusted readers before sending them to editors. The time from completion to submission varies with each poem.

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

This poem combines visual detail culled from memory (always questionably reliable) with the creation of a “speaker” whose perceptions, desires, and praise originate with me but then move out and away from me.   

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, I consider this a narrative poem in that it tells a first-person story of an encounter with a friend dying in hospice.

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

Maxine Kumin has had and continues to have an impact on my writing and thinking about poems. Her poems contain an accountability and specificity which I admire--especially when the poem enters mysterious terrain.

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

Having spent my life in universities, I like to imagine poetry students--undergraduates and grad students--reading my books. My “ideal” readers include other poets, feminists, animal lovers, and poetry lovers.

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

Yes, I shared this poem with a few trusted readers with whom I regularly share new work.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

In that this poem becomes a meditation on a single word, it bears a close relation to another poem called “Dyke.” 

What is American about this poem?

An American anxiety about death informs this poem.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

When I finally decided to end the poem with a question, I felt I had found the poem’s route to closure and considered it finished.

Matthew Pennock

Matthew Pennock is the author of Sudden Dog (Alice James Books, 2012), winner of the 2011 Kinereth-Gensler Award. His poems have been widely published in such journals as Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, New York Quarterly, LIT, and elsewhere. He’s also a regular contributor of criticism to the Philadelphia Review of Books. 

THE QUEER OCCURRENCE OF MATTHEW PENNOCK 

AND THE GARGANTUAN MOTH

But first, at work there was a moth.

Loping flight, low-pitch wave,

the size of a finch or small robin. 

Customers screamed and ducked.

I pursued and cornered. 

Slow turn, a charge, 

diamond-grid ellipses 

bluish gray and wild,

I looked the beast dead in the eye,

caught it mid-flight in my hands,

and ran to the balcony to release it

because, like all just conquerors, 

I am merciful, 

but I must have clipped a wing

because it descended to the sidewalk

in a flat spin. 

Men approach the prospect of impotence

with a desperation dwindling

into the habitual.

I’m sorry, amateur butterfly.  

I shouldn’t have plucked you from the atmosphere,

shouldn’t have stolen you like the hard kiss 

Mary gave me at her front door,

the one with our entire bodies.

And when it ended, I swear I tasted blood.

When was this poem composed? How did it start? 

This poem’s origins actually go back pretty far. Its skeleton was excised from a much longer piece that I wrote back in either late 2003, or early 2004. I was just out of undergrad, and much more discursive and verbose, so the poem this sprung out of was four pages long, and we’re talking solid pages, long lines, no stanza breaks. It was inspired by what exists as the poem’s relatively simple action: One time at work, there was this giant moth … Hence, I’ve always called it since then “that moth poem.” 

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

The moth poem’s strange adolescence begins when I brought the initial gigantic version to my first session with Richard Howard during my first semester at the MFA program at Columbia. I was proud of it too. I thought it was epic and universal and that I was going to blow him away. Needless to say, he read it, and when he finished he looked at me with an expression of what can only be described as a mix between revulsion and concern. Then he immediately began to question me about my other work trying to figure out how I had managed to get there in front of him wasting his time in his studio apartment with his French bulldog staring expectantly into my crotch. Then as he held my unclean poem with two fingers as far away from him as possible, he closed with his gentlest voice, saying “Please, don’t do this. You do not want to do this.” I left destroyed, but it turned out to be a good destroyed. So I abandoned the poem for a while. Then near the end of my MFA, when I had regained my shattered confidence, I revisited it. I carved out a much smaller, meaner poem that sort of distilled the original. Even then, though, I wasn’t done, it still went through many different incarnations. Stanzas were rearranged then returned to their original places and rearranged again. This poem existed in constant flux for years.  

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

Despite the fact an event happened that “inspired” this poem, this is a sweaty and teary piece. I don’t really believe in “receiving” poems. I’ve only had a poem spring forth into my mind close to form, a few times, and then I still worked hard on those poems and tinkered endlessly until I got them as close to right as I could. Frankly, this idea of receiving poems annoys me. Poems are not magic lightning bolts extending from the finger of God, destined only for your pretty little brain. No matter how your process works, you are laboring in some way and revising, even if it’s all done in your head before you set pen to page. Nothing comes out perfect the first time, and to claim otherwise damages young writers. I’m of the opinion that poets who talk about receiving poems fall into one of three categories: the fibbers trying to cultivate a false poetic mystique; the delusional; and the lazy, who do not want to put in the effort good poetry demands. The two formers can still be excellent poets, the latter not so much.    

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

Eventually I just stopped tinkering and learned to accept it for the weird little animal that it was.

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

In that different pieces of it are written years apart, yes, I would say that is unusual for me.

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

Let’s see…It probably reached its current form circa 2008, and then it didn’t appear in print until my collection was published in 2012, so four years. It almost never made it, I considered cutting it from the manuscript several times because it always felt like it didn’t quite fit in, but there was something about it that I found charming, so I kept it. It’s a survivor.  

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

My antipathy to submitting things usually dictates how long a poem sits rather than any sort of rules I set. Beyond that, it really varies. Some poems feel finished much faster than others. This particular poem was never sent out to magazines or anything. Probably because I never felt I truly had it right. 

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

For me, it’s mainly rooted in fact, but the moth story takes on a folk-lore quality, like a big-fish story. The incident actually happened as I wrote it, only with slight exaggeration for the purposes of making it a bit more colorful. I wanted it to sound kind of like a mock epic, like a classic old-timer at a bar exaggerating about something relatively trivial. While the events may not look exactly like they would to an outside observer, in some ways this version is more true.

Is this a narrative poem?

It’s about as narrative as I get. There’s a story there, which has a beginning, middle, and end, but the poem itself makes several lyrical/associative leaps in regards to the fear of impotence in the original story, but become related in retrospect due to the proximity of the events to each other, so ultimately I think the heart of the poem is still lyric even though it makes use of a narrative.

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

Way back in 2004, I remember I was actually reading The Iliad and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which is probably why I was so interested in making it epic. I really can’t remember if anything directly influenced my rewrites, I was reading so much then, thanks to my MFA. I remember being enamored with Denis Johnson's Incognito Lounge around that time. Somehow that feels relevant.

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

I’ve heard it said several times, and I subscribe to this as well, poems are written to someone, an actual individual the poet loves, whether they know it or not. Most of my poems have a specific someone in mind when I write them, not always the same person, but someone who shared the experience or conversation that sparked the poem. I don’t think about ideal readers or audiences so much. I think about the actual people in my life that I want to speak to, but can’t always find the words at the appropriate time. 

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 was lucky enough to have a good experience in my MFA. Some of us continued to workshop long after the program ended, and still do. Two people in particular, Ricardo Maldonado and Erica Wright, have read probably almost every draft of everything I’ve written in the last ten years. That type of support is wonderful, and so necessary in the cold world of the arts, which is often competitive. 

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours? 

Well, there’s the element of storytelling, which is a technique I do not employ often, but beyond that this poem feels different to me from my other work because of the voice. It doesn’t sound like the normal speaker present in most of my poems. It’s a little too assured. For example, in other poems, my speaker apologizes a lot, or experiences much guilt, but it’s genuine. In this poem, the speaker apologizes, but he’s not sorry. He’s not sorry at all. I guess this poem feels a little more stereotypically masculine to me. I’m often interested in being masculine, but not stereotypically. I think the purpose of the poem was to point to the ridiculousness of a lot of male anxiety, but I’m not sure if it ever truly comes across.

What is American about this poem? 

Ha! Good question. I’m often obsessed with America. I’ve never thought of this poem as being particularly American, but now that you mention it, I can see it creeping in. There’s definitely a sense that the speaker has lofty intentions, but fails miserably. I guess I could have had a “Mission Accomplished” banner strung up after the moment he catches the moth, but before he releases it. Also there is this fear of impotence running through it, which parallels the sense of waning American power on the global stage, as it also parallels the waning power of the American male. I don’t think the poem makes a value judgment on these issues, but rather points to them as an inevitability.

Was this poem finished or abandoned? 

I don’t know if either of these is the right way to describe it. It definitely didn’t feel finished. I never came to a point where I sat back and said “This is done!” In that sense, I guess I abandoned working on it, but I never truly abandoned the poem. Like I mentioned before, it just hung around until it made it. So I’ll say it again. This poem survived.