Bruce Snider

Bruce Snider is the author of The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. His poetry and non-fiction have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and PN Review, among other journals. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, he lives in San Francisco.


THE CERTAINTY OF NUMBERS

It’s not the numbers you dislike—
the 3s or 5s or 7s—but the way
the answers leave no room for you,
the way 4 plus 2 is always 6
never 9 or 10 or Florida,
the way 3 divided by 1
is never an essay about spelunking
or poached salmon, which is why
you never seemed to get the answer right
when the Algebra teacher asked,
If a man floating down a river in a canoe
has traveled three miles of a twelve mile canyon
in five minutes, how long will it take him
to complete the race? Which of course depends
on if the wind resistance is 13 miles an hour
and he’s traveling upstream
against a 2 mile an hour current
and his arms are tired and he’s thinking
about the first time he ever saw Florida,
which was in seventh grade
right after his parents’ divorce
and he felt overshadowed
by the palm trees, neon sun visors,
and cheap postcards swimming
with alligators. Nothing is ever simple,
except for the way the 3 looks like two shells
washed up on last night’s shore,
but then sometimes it looks like a bird
gently crushed on its side.
And the 1—once so certain
you could lean up against it
like a gray fence post—has grown weary,
fascinated by the perpetual
itch of its own body.
Even the Algebra teacher
waving his formulas like baseball bats,
pauses occasionally when he tells you
that a 9 and a 2 are traveling in a canoe
on a river in a canyon. How long
will it take them to complete their journey?
That is if they don’t lose their oars
and panic and strike the rocks,
shattering the canoe. Nothing is ever certain.
We had no plan, the numbers would tell us,
at the moment of our deaths.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote the earliest draft of this poem sometime in the fall of 1997. I had been writing a number of poems about my middle school and high school experiences, and so this subject was a natural outgrowth of those. If I remember correctly, I started with the opening line, “It’s not the numbers you dislike,” and just went from there to figure out what I meant by that.

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

This poem came much more quickly than most. I think I wrote the first draft in two days. Then I tinkered with it a bit over the next couple of months. For the most part, though, it arrived mostly as it is, with only minor edits. Usually poems come to me in fragments and require more labor to weave together. This was just one of those poems that showed up one day.

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 I also think it generally requires a lot of help, which often means sweat and tears. Or at the very least it means showing up and making yourself available. I’m not generally someone who’s struck with lines, images, or ideas while walking down the street. Not much happens for me unless I’m sitting in front of an empty page or at the computer. I wrote this poem, for example, during a time that I was keeping a pretty strict writing schedule, getting up early in the morning before work, writing in coffee shops on the weekend, etc. The poem wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t done that.

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

I wasn’t thinking much about technique when I wrote this poem. It was all pretty instinctive.

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

I started it in the fall of 1997 and it eventually appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of Third Coast, so not quite three years.

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

I don’t have any strict rules about this, though I do try to let poems sit for a few months until I can see them more clearly.

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

The poem came out of my own resistances to math as a kid, so in that way the poem has its roots in autobiography, though certainly not all of the details refer to my life.

Is this a narrative poem?

No. It’s more rhetorical and digressive in its structure, but as with most poems, there’s certainly an implied narrative, or at least elements of narrative.

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

I’d been reading the New York School poets, especially Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. Both were a huge influence on me at the time. In part, I think their work accounts for the poem’s playfulness as well as its discursiveness and use of conversational speech.

I was also influenced by Naomi Shihab Nye’s early work, some of which treats language as a physical object in the landscape, animating it as a quasi-character or concrete force in the poem. I just applied that same strategy to numbers, which, because I’d always had an antagonistic relationship with math, provided me with a natural tension for the poem.

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

Like many writers I mostly write what I’d like to read. I’m not sure that makes me my own audience exactly, but it does shape the direction of my work. Of course, my own tastes are always changing, so hopefully the poems are changing, too.

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 showed it to a couple of friends and former teachers for feedback.

I have a good friend, who tends to be my first reader. Her instincts are quite different from my own, so she’s a good counter to my own excesses. I also usually share my work with my partner, who is a fiction writer. In my experience, fiction writers often have better bullshit detectors, so I’m always grateful to get that perspective.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Its tone and strategies are similar to a number of the poems I was writing at that time, though more recently my poems have become less playful and more interested in experimenting with elements of form, meter, internal rhyme, line and stanza, etc.

What is American about this poem?

The ironies and idiomatic speech of the New York School poets strike me as very American, so to the extent that this poem bears their influence, it is as well.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Finished. Or maybe abandoned. I don’t know. I just decided it was done, or at least I was, which may be the same thing.

Lucia Perillo

Lucia Perillo has published five books of poetry including Dangerous Life (Northeastern University Press, 1989); The Body Mutinies (Purdue University Press, 1996), which was awarded the Revson Prize from PEN, the Kate tufts prize from Claremont University, and the Balcones Prize; and The Oldest Map with the Name America (Random House, 1999). Luck is Luck (Random House, 2005) won the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Her new book, Inseminating the Elephant, was published by Copper Canyon in 2009. In 2000, Perillo was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. She lives in Olympia, Washington with her husband and dog. To learn more about Lucia Perillo, please visit her website.


THE SECOND SLAUGHTER

Achilles slays the man who slayed his friend, pierces the corpse
behind the heels and drags it
behind his chariot like the cans that trail
a bride and groom. Then he lays out
a banquet for his men, oxen and goats
and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat
until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.

The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—
in the morning more animals must be killed
for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds
no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;
not even heaving four stallions on the pyre
can lift the ballast of his sorrow.

And here I turn my back on the epic hero—the one who slits
the throats of his friend’s dogs,
killing what the loved one loved
to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent
by vanishing from my concern
after he throws the dogs onto the fire.
The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.

When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep
until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh. But once

I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals
my first lament. So now I guard
my inhumanity like the jackal
who appears behind the army base at dusk,
come there for scraps with his head lowered
in a posture that looks like appeasement,
though it is not.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Firstly, I’d like to caution people against a straight-on explanation of a poem by its writer, which seems like a recipe for misinformation. But in this case I do have a specific memory of writing the fourth stanza in 1991, during the first gulf war.

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

My ability to write by hand deteriorated during the long assemblage of this poem. Since I write mostly with a computer now, I can’t say how many revisions the poem underwent. I finished the poem in 2008, when I decided to write a poem about the Iliad. I finally had a place to put the old fragment.

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

I compose using lyric methods—words pop into my head and I begin reciting/semi-singing them. And I also use intellectual/analytic methods. You could say one method is received and one is work. But I don’t like to analyze the process too much—probably for fear of damaging it.

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

The sense of final form seems to me like received knowledge that the poet finally surrenders to.

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

It was a quick one, for me, if you discount the seventeen-year gap. Maybe a year?

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

The problem of the poem was how to allude to a complex text, and how to add something to the recapitulation of an often-recapitulated work. I wanted the allusion to be clear to those who haven’t read the Iliad. My poem moves from that poem to a snip of a personal anecdote, which incorporates both fact and fiction.

Is this a narrative poem?

It has various narratives in operation: Homer’s, mine, and the historical narratives of our two most recent wars.

Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem?

Homer, of course, but I will also say the jackal is real and comes from a book called Birding Babylon, which is a transcription of a soldier’s field notes/blog, from his time in Iraq.

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

I guess that would be me.

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?

Unfortunately, I have no one to share poems with regularly. But the flip side of that is that a unicorn was not designed by a committee.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

That’s a question for critics, I think. It’s best not to get outside one’s poems.

What is American about this poem?

It happens to be very American because it draws on our recent history. To get outside myself (and violate the rule I just set forth), I suppose it’s unusual for me.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

The poet Valéry said that we never finish, only abandon.

Tony Hoagland

Tony Hoagland was born in 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His chapbook, Hard Rain was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005. His other collections of poetry include What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Donkey Gospel (1998), which received the James Laughlin Award; and Sweet Ruin (1992), chosen by Donald Justice for the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and winner of the Zacharis Award from Emerson College. Hoagland's other honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the O.B. Hardison Prize for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Shakespeare Library, as well as the Poetry Foundation's 2005 Mark Twain Award in recognition of his contribution to humor in American poetry. He currently teaches at the University of Houston and Warren Wilson College.


LUCKY

If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to help your enemy
the way I got to help my mother
when she was weakened past the point of saying no.

Into the big enamel tub
half-filled with water
which I had made just right,
I lowered the childish skeleton
she had become.

Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed
her belly and her chest,
the sorry ruin of her flanks
and the frayed gray cloud
between her legs.

Some nights, sitting by her bed
book open in my lap
while I listened to the air
move thickly in and out of her dark lungs,
my mind filled up with praise
as lush as music,

amazed at the symmetry and luck
that would offer me the chance to pay
my heavy debt of punishment and love
with love and punishment.

And once I held her dripping wet
in the uncomfortable air
between the wheelchair and the tub,
until she begged me like a child

to stop,
an act of cruelty which we both understood
was the ancient irresistible rejoicing
of power over weakness.

If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to raise the spoon
of pristine, frosty ice cream
to the trusting creature mouth
of your old enemy

because the tastebuds at least are not broken
because there is a bond between you
and sweet is sweet in any language.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem seems quite antique to me now, but it was written in a period of time in the early nineties—even then, it had been twenty years since the events reported on took place, caring for my mother during her last months of dying.

Of course it derives from real experience, one of those many many uncharted constellations of intimacy that constantly occur between family members, friends, and partners. I say "uncharted" with pleasure, since experience offers an ongoing infinity of such moments, each never before observed and represented.

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

I had a lot of trouble with the wording of a bridge passage –I think the description of the bathtub scene—three quarters through, and I struggled with the economy of the phrasing for a year or more before getting it as close to right as I could.

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 such a thing as getting lucky sometimes. I also believe that one of the gifts we cultivate as working poets is the instinct for where a poem can be found—the coordination of details and dimensions, the angularity with which a tone can be established or how a story can be positioned, to best catch the light. In this poem, (to me) that special angle is the exposure of how Power—not gender or familial attachment—is at the core of the interaction.

The rhetoric of the poem, which is to say the opening sentence, was a rock-solid way to begin. But I remember I had a lot of trouble with other moments, like knowing that the last line was the last line. I'm sure I wrote well past it.

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

I solved some of the poem's necessary movements with rhetorics of phrasing, like the chiasmus ("punishment & love, love & punishment") two thirds through. In any case, I still think "Lucky" is a rather plain-Jane poem.

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

Soon after finishing it, my friend Conrad Hillbery requested some poems from me for an issue of Passages North; at the time, I didn't think the poem was particularly special.

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?

Different for different poems. Some poems have taken years and years to finish, and by the time they are finished, they might not be interesting in terms of subject matter anymore. Some get finished and half forgotten, then turn up again looking better for the vacation. Yet I believe in laboring through the technical problems presented by almost any poem, even a mediocre one, because it has a long term technical benefit, like a callisthenic.

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

The facts—I just now remembered—had been turned into a story years before the poem was written, when a woman I was dating asked me to tell her a story. So I told her the story of bathing my mother's ravaged body, and how strange it was looking down at her—the pale suture marks and scars, the gray-haired pubis. Because the facts had been turned into a story, years later it was there in the refrigerator of language-memory, ready for the poem.

Is this a narrative poem?

Narrative dominated (probably over-dominated) by rhetoric.

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

I learned many of the things I needed to know about narrative from Larry Levis's book Winter Stars. Some other influences were probably John Skoyles's elegantly straightforward book A Little Faith, and John Engman's book Keeping Still Mountain. Also Tess Gallagher's Under Stars. All extraordinary books.

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

Someone willing to go along for the ride. I believe in The Ride, the poem as carnival concession.

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?

Over the years it has changed, but when I'm lucky, I have one or two keen, reliable friends.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Well, in retrospect, it is much of a piece; plain and urgent, trying to use both intelligence and feeling to get more deeply at each other. I try to do verbally fancier things now, but Force and Intensity are primary assets of poetry.

What is American about this poem?

Its merciless candor.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Yes.

Anna Journey

Anna Journey is the author of the collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems are published in a number of journals, including American Poetry Review, FIELD, and Kenyon Review, and her essays appear in Blackbird, Notes on Contemporary Literature, and Parnassus. She’s won the Sycamore Review Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Diner Poetry Contest, fellowships from Yaddo and Bread Loaf, the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the J.A. and Isabel Elkins Fellowship from Inprint, a University Presidential Fellowship, and the University of Houston’s Inprint/Barthelme Fellowship in Poetry. She’s currently a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston. In 2006, Journey discovered the unpublished status of Sylvia Plath’s early sonnet “Ennui” and the influence of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby on it.


THE MIRROR’S LAKE IS FOREVER

That’s when I knew the mirror was all sex and hard
fact. Unlike knowing my grandfather

posthumously. Because a ghost can’t be
androgynous as a lamp is,

as peat moss is,
as the smell of cedar—

knife-feathery. Because the dead
can watch me pee without

even a trace of embarrassment. And who
has the right to more? Mirror

that couldn’t reach my dead
grandfather’s closet—his jewel-colored

medical books in former editions,
his gay porn magazines: men smooth

as conchs in softcore seascapes. My mother,
who found them while cleaning

out his house, asks, Are you sorry
I told you? I said, No,

I’m not sorry. As if staring
into his horn-rims and my grandmother’s

coral dress could help me understand
the selfishness of portraits—

their shut door splintering the past’s
exact coffin-space.

I know that shame
is beard-high with two daughters—the blonde

one with cats and the dark one with red-
haired girls. I know

the mirror’s lake is forever
dragged for corpses, lily-buoyant

arteries, livers, and cocks. I know
he’s caught there: doctor,

with his white coat, and gold-veined
tobacco. And what is more haunted

than the smoked voices
of cicadas under plums? And what

heats faster than silver? His constellation:
cold instruments raised

over useless space. Somewhere
there’s a ghost

I’ll open my shirt for, recount my
Entire Medical History for,

who I’ll forgive for wearing
tweed and love beads and for hiding

stacks of magazines in the dark, who will press
that silver scope to his ear, who will listen.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I’d been reading a lot of Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s poetry at the time—this was during the spring of 2007, I think. That spring was my last in Richmond, Virginia, as I finished up my MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. I’d received a thesis fellowship, which gave me a semester-long respite from teaching. I’d wake up at noon, caffeinate, maybe stay in my plaid pajamas until four, and then take a stroll around Hollywood Cemetery—named for the thorny ambience of the holly trees and not the movie industry—or cross the arcing footbridge to Belle Isle and dangle my feet in the muddy James. It was a kind of paradise, actually, except that I had to fry my own veggie sausage.

Anyway, I’d been devouring Goldberg’s Lie Awake Lake like a crazed beast. The collection consists mostly of elegies regarding the death of the poet’s father. There’s a strange, incantatory energy to Goldberg’s lines that makes even the frightening or macabre seem irresistible. Her wild images and surprising associations, her lyrical repetitions, and the defiant voice of her poems thrilled me. In Goldberg’s poem, “Sly Sparrow,” in which a sparrow gets shaved for surgery and a new wing grafted on, the bird says:

I began to call up song like a knot.
I became one mean musical
motherfucking sparrow: Call me Nicole. Though
by nature
we are a tolerant sort, like therapists
or pears.

I want to be one mean musical motherfucking sparrow! You know?

Also, the fact that Goldberg’s speakers are occasionally posthumous ones (like the resurrected mutant sparrow, for example) got me thinking about how I might engage these kinds of fabular characters, or ventriloquize them, in my writing.

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

Well, it’s been awhile, so my memory isn’t even remotely reliable. But when is it ever? I’d say the poem went through many drafts (which means, for me, probably six to ten), with a year elapsing between the first and final drafts.
The penultimate draft seemed to be motoring along just fine, right up until the ending slammed into a wall. I considered cutting the poem from my first book, actually, because the ending felt so abrupt. That draft stopped when the speaker discovered “the mirror’s lake is forever / dragged for corpses, lily-buoyant // arteries, livers, and cocks.” I thought, “Yeah, ending on ‘cocks’ would sure be a high-volume ending,” but it just felt showy and unearned. I needed something more risky and emotionally resonant, not just a big, profane cymbal-clang. I mean, so the speaker stares into a lake. So what?

A year later, faced with the unpalatable notion of cutting the poem, I decided to tackle the ending. It’s unusual for me to return to a poem after so much time, but I wanted to keep it in the mix if I could. I realized during that final revision that the grandfather must fully materialize from the lake’s floating organs, that the speaker needs to commune more directly with her specterly relative. I needed the speaker to become more exposed.

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. I also believe, however (to paraphrase Randall Jarrell), if you want to be struck by lightning, you have to be there when the rain falls. For me, being there when the rain falls involves reading (poems by my old favorites or by new authors, nonfiction articles in The New Yorker, even some zany local city paper feature on North Carolina’s Kudzu Jesus on a telephone wire, whatever)—with my feelers out searching for triggers. Being there when the rain falls also involves my actively making space and time to write for an uninterrupted period of time. So I plunge in, write with risk, revise with energy, and, hopefully, the poem keeps on getting better and better as I stick with it.

Many of my poems grow from stories I hear that resonate with my own peculiar obsessions. My interest in the macabre probably comes from my family’s certain oddness of perception. We’re the kind of family who, on Christmas Eve, sits up late on the grey couch flanked by red and green sequined stockings poring over old crime scene photographs on the internet (courtesy of Lizzie Borden and Jack the Ripper). I’m not kidding; my mom, my sister, and I really do that.

When my mother finally revealed her discovery of my grandfather’s telling stash of magazines while cleaning out his house after his death in 1987, I knew instantly that the story would wind up informing a poem. I was surprised, of course, but I also experienced a disorienting sense of loss; I felt like my grandfather had prevented us from fully knowing him. I kept thinking, “If he’d only told us, he would have met with complete acceptance, understanding.” I felt deprived; I felt like my chance at really knowing him was long vanished.

The sexuality of our own parents, or grandparents, however, isn’t something most of us are comfortable with; it’s transgressive; it’s taboo. Especially taboo, too, was my grandfather’s living simultaneously as a closeted bisexual man and the patriarch of a nuclear family, in Mississippi, before the civil rights movement was in full swing. My grandfather was an active member of the community: he shrunk the heads of all sorts of people in town; he founded an Episcopal church; he volunteered his time to work toward advancing integration policies. He was a painter, guitarist, collector of newfangled technologies; he was the first person on the block to purchase a television. In the sixties, the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses in the front yard of his suburban brick home in Jackson. He also got passed over for promotions with some regularity at the hospital, despite his popularity with patients and effectiveness as a psychiatrist.

In this context, then, keeping his bisexuality a secret from his children, as best he could, seems an act of bravery and protection. Surely, though, it must also have been a deeply painful and self-destructive sacrifice to make. The project of the poem is most certainly elegiac and yet one that, in spite of the speaker’s hauntedness, I hope, is also tender and celebratory.

Anyway, when I start to wonder, “Should I really be writing about this?” I know it’s exactly what I ought to be doing. I like to challenge myself; it keeps me off the couch.

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

I often choose to write in couplets; perhaps that’s because they’re about as far away as you can get from prose. There’s a cool restraint to couplets, a formal clarity, and a kind of—I don’t know—buoyancy that helps give my speedy, image-packed, lush language room to breathe. So, it’s about balance; it’s my recipe for staving off some sort of baroque implosion.

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

About two years after I finished the poem, the online journal Blackbird published it, along with audio clips and five other poems from my first collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. Click here to read them.

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

I don’t have any rules about how long I wait to send out poems. Usually, if I return to a poem after a week or two and still think it’s good, then I go for it.

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

Wallace Stevens calls poetry the supreme fiction. After all, why should we poets cede any damn territory to fiction writers? When I make use of factual details, as I do in “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever,” I also try to allow plenty of room for invention. If I cleave to my autobiography, then the poem falls flat. I suspect one reason I’m drawn to writing about my grandfather is that I never got the chance to know him as an adult; he died when I was seven. Because I have such a limited understanding of him, I suppose I feel freer to make up details—to elaborate, invent, exaggerate, and omit—until I arrive at a poem that speaks the truth through the necessary art of fiction’s lies.

Is this a narrative poem?

The poem contains narrative elements. There’s a story at work here; there are characters; there’s a setting; there’s a discernable plot. I suspect the poem has more in common with the lyric mode, however, in that it emphasizes personal feeling and a single moment rather than a narrative. But that’s the line I constantly walk and upon which I slip and blur the boundaries. I’m happy with that. I love getting way out there in moments of lyric, cosmic drunkenness just as much as I love the vivid stories that weave throughout narrative poetry—Larry Levis and Norman Dubie are gods to me.

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

I mentioned before that I’d been excited by Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s approach to elegy in Lie Awake Lake. I’d also been reading Anna Akhmatova’s Selected Poems (Judith Hemschemeyer’s translation). There’s a brilliant poem of Akhmatova’s, “In Tsarskoye Selo,” in which the image of lake as a mirror, in the second section, really stuck in my head:

…And there’s my marble double,
Lying under the ancient maple,
He has given his face to the waters of the lake,
And he’s listening to the green rustling.

And bright rainwater washes
His clotted wound…
Cold one, white one, wait,
I’ll become marble too.

I borrowed Akhmatova’s line, “He has given his face to the waters of the lake,” for the title of another poem I wrote during that time. Although I don’t remember which poem came first, both “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” and “He has given his face to the waters of the lake” are sister poems of sorts; they’re closely related in that they both sprang from the lake image as a kind of haunted psychic landscape.

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

Although I don’t have a particular audience in mind when I sit down to write, I do think a lot about clarity: clarity of image, dramatic circumstance, syntax, etc… I often recall a dear mentor’s simple mantra: “Clarity is never a vice.” This isn’t to say that you can’t have both clarity and mystery in a poem; because you can. Leaving room for mystery is important, but it’s not the same thing as being vague or imprecise.

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 wrote the poem during my MFA at VCU, so my teachers Gregory Donovan and David Wojahn read it and advised me. At that point, however, I was no longer taking a formal workshop; I met with them each one on one. Both Greg and David worked tirelessly and generously with me, for three years, on most of the poems in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. I couldn’t have done it without their devoted mentorship.

A little later in the book’s evolution, after I moved from Richmond to Houston (to begin my PhD at UH), Mark Doty helped me immensely. He said, “You should try a seduction poem,” so I wrote a whole series of devil/eros poems that wound up going in the manuscript. Those poems with a sharp sexual edge added new textures and tones to the collection, which excited me quite a lot; they helped tip the scales away from an onslaught of total gravitas.

My boyfriend, Patrick Turner, reads most of my drafts. He’s an upright bass player, but he trained early on in creative writing, so he offers me all kinds of valuable insights. He also brings me little snippets of stories he reads or hears that might be poem-worthy. (I wonder if he does this to make up for all the basses, banjos, fiddles, singing saws, etc, that sit around our apartment like they own this place…)

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

“The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” is more directly autobiographical than many of my poems in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. The poem’s setting, though, is perhaps more slippery and oblique than others in the book. A good number of the poems in my collection are anchored in highly specific, if strange, concrete settings: a costume ball in a basement, an artificial limb factory, a Confederate cemetery, the garden section of a suburban hardware shop, a city bayou. The landscape of “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” is more of a psychological projection.

What is American about this poem?

I’m an inheritor of confessional verse, which is, I think, a particularly American mode of writing. Sylvia Plath, especially, is a great heroine of mine. Much of my poetry is highly personal, like “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever.” I refuse to be boxed in, however, by What Really Happened, or “paralyzed by fact,” as Robert Lowell says of the trappings of confessional verse in his poem, “Epilogue.” I’m loyal to poems, not facts.

What’s also American about this poem is probably the setting—however in flux and bizarre it may be—which is the cicada-inflected, fraught American South. Some of the images and associative leaps, though, pull not from the stars and stripes but from European surrealism.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

For me, it’s both. I don’t give up on a poem until I’ve reached an ending that has certain qualities; it has to make some kind of unexpected, exciting turn. The rhythms have to be emphatic; the last image or phrase has to be resonant, strange, and precise. Charles Wright says somewhere that you’ve got to “hit the right notes hard,” and that’s what I always try to do, but especially when I gear up to end a poem.

I know when to stop revising when I keep making the same changes over and over again, like a little OCD worker bee; I’ll change an “a” to “the,” for example, or I’ll delete a conjunction and pat myself on the back, sipping my coffee. Even when I reach an ending that I feel good about I do still find myself scratching my head, wondering if there’s a better one out there. At that point, though, I just try to keep my fingers away from the keyboard!

In “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever,” I surprised myself when, toward the end of the poem, my speaker sits before her dead psychiatrist-grandfather as a patient. I surprised myself even more when she started unbuttoning her shirt, exposed and ready to recount her “Entire Medical History” for him. I thought, “Whoa, this is kind of disturbing! Should I be doing this?” That’s when I knew I had to follow through with it and hit the right last note, when the grandfather reaches out and, even posthumously, listens. I had to balance the shock of the floating cock imagery and the weirdly sexual undressing with a note that laid bare the speaker’s own vulnerability and need.

Elton Glaser

Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron and the former editor of the Akron Series in Poetry. He has published six full-length collections of poetry: Relics (Wesleyan University Press, 1984), Tropical Depressions (University of Iowa Press, 1988), Color Photographs of the Ruins (University of Pittsburg Press, 1992), Winter Amnesties (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), Pelican Tracks (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), and Here and Hereafter (University of Arkansas Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in the 1995, 1997, and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry. With William Greenway, he co-edited I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (University of Akron Press, 2002).


DEAD RECKONING

I’m done with
The abundance of winter, so full of itself,
The air no more than snow
And the earth no less, nothing multiplied
Zero by zero, until
I can’t take it, I can’t
Keep my mind from skating away
Somewhere south, as the ice melts
To blue and green and a red-tailed hawk
Riding the air, broken summer
Of the sun’s division, where the world
Comes back again, piece by piece,
And I see my shadow
Split the shore, walking the dark
Tideline between the beaten sand
And a thousand white arousals of the sea.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote “Dead Reckoning” in February 2002. It’s not at all surprising that this winter poem was composed in that cold month, when I often think about escaping Akron for someplace sunnier and warmer. I’ve lived in Ohio for thirty-seven years now, but my native state is Louisiana, where snow is a very rare treat, not a constant wintry torment as it is here. I’m sure the poem began on one of those freezing days when my mind, as the poem says, kept “skating away / Somewhere south.”

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

I think the poem was put together over several days, inching slowly forward as I tried to figure out what the next phrase would be. Once the first draft was complete, I probably just did some fiddling with the lines to get the rhythm and music right, no major revisions.

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 both luck and discipline. My habit is to use index cards as bookmarks, writing on them words and phrases and images as they show up and seem interesting. My poems tend to be built out of these chance juxtapositions of language; I flip through these stacks of cards, looking for some clue to where the poem might go next. With “Dead Reckoning,” for instance, I had the last image, “a thousand white arousals of the sea,” on one of the index cards, though I didn’t know it would go in this poem until I got close to what seemed like the conclusion. I loved the sound of that line and probably tried to use it in several earlier poems where it didn’t really fit. Here, I think, it found its rightful place.

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

As someone said, a poem is finished when it uses up all its material. I had nothing more to say about this wintry wish. I was conscious of trying to get the restlessness that sparked the poem into the form itself; thus, the many enjambments that drive the poem forward, with few resting places. I’m always aware of the integrity of the line. In this instance, the first line, “I’m done with,” was isolated like that because of the “Dead” in the title. Maybe only a few readers will pick up on that--my point is, it’s there to be picked up on. Readers should be given immediate pleasures and also some delayed pleasures, little gifts for returning to the poem and looking at it carefully.

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

“Dead Reckoning” was not published in a magazine. It went right into Pelican Tracks, which won the Crab Orchard Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2003, the year after the poem was written. Much of the book is concerned with the experiences of North and South, so the poem slipped easily into that collection.

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

I don’t have any rules about how long before I send a new poem off to a magazine. Laziness is often a big factor. Or sometimes I think a poem ought to go to Magazine X, but that magazine is already considering some of my work, so I’ll hold on to the new poem until I hear from the editors about the poems they’re holding (always holding too long, of course).

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

Since my poems tend to start from language or image, I rarely know what they’re going to be before I actually write them. The facts in “Dead Reckoning” are so simple they barely deserve the term. I believe, with Wallace Stevens, that “Poetry is the supreme fiction.” Or, to put it more crudely, you just make this stuff up as you go along.

Is this a narrative poem?

“Dead Reckoning” is less a narrative than a mental itinerary. I’ve written narrative poems before, but only because that’s how a particular poem had to unfold. Mostly, my poems are about states of being, conditions of experience. Or, at least, that’s how I like to think about them.

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

I can’t recall what poet I was reading when I wrote this poem. It may well have been Wallace Stevens, to whom I return again and again. Not to claim too much resemblance, but both Stevens and I often begin with seasons or weather and then let the poem unfold in unforeseen directions. In this case, the direction is south.

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

I used to have in mind when I wrote a poem an undergraduate teacher of mine, the late Raeburn Miller, whose high standards I always tried to live up to. These days, I just try to be as hard on myself as I can, testing the lines for any weakness, again and again. Given how few books I’ve sold in more than twenty years of publishing, it would be delusional to think about an “audience” for my work, only a few stubborn readers who still care about the well-made poem and who still love to go “adventuring in the language,” to borrow a phrase from William Stafford.

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

I don’t remember if I showed this poem to anyone before I finished it. I might have, because at the time I belonged to an informal workshop of poets in Akron, some of them my former students. And two Ohio poets, William Greenway of Youngstown and Lynn Powell of Oberlin, good friends of mine, see almost everything I write and usually have some suggestions for improvement. They can see things I miss and often make me look like a better poet than I am.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

“Dead Reckoning” is certainly of a piece with the other poems in Pelcian Tracks. Stylistically, it’s in the lyrical realism mode that I often worked in earlier. Except for the attention to details of nature, it has little in common with the poems I’ve been writing the last year and a half, which are much more oblique in development. Over the years, my interests shift from mode to mode. Whatever I’m working on at the moment seems the right thing to do.

What is American about this poem?

Well, the scenery in “Dead Reckoning” is certainly American. I think the wish at the heart of the poem is universal. We all want to return to our personal paradise--that’s not solely an American desire.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I abandon few poems, and those I do abandon never get sent out for publication. This poem has been “finished,” polished to as high a gleam as I could get it. If a poem has that kind of hard-worked sheen, like a mirror, then maybe a reader can see himself or herself in it.

Todd Boss

Todd Boss’s best-selling debut poetry collection, Yellowrocket (Norton, 2008) has enjoyed widespread critical acclaim. Todd’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded him its annual Emily Clark Balch Prize in 2009. His work has been syndicated on public radio’s The Splendid Table and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. His MFA is from the University of Alaska-Anchorage. Read (and hear) Todd’s poems at his website by clicking here.


TO BE ALONE AGAIN IN THE THICK SKIN

of this low-slung bungalow house,
August overcast and waning,
windows open to the breathings
of the distant interstate passing,
you and the kids on some errand,
no note on the kitchen counter,
the workday done, my computer
on and waiting, I feel so helpless
against a tide of emotion I can
only identify as a melancholy joy.
When I was a boy come home
from school to the farm alone,
my father working, my mom with
my sister to a lesson or something,
I would pass through all the rooms
in a daze, lingering, gazing in all
the mirrors, lying down on all
the beds, trying myself on for size
in every doorway, every hall. Or
I would wander the farm itself,
the lawns, the lanes, the fields.
There was no highway there to
trouble the sound of being alone.
The only noise was wind if there
was wind, or plane if overhead
a plane. I didn't know it then,
but we lived beneath the pattern
of flights from MSP International
to points northeast and pan-Atlantic,
and though they were so far up in
the air, their thin roar glimmered
in your ears if you strained hard
to hear. It never occurred to me
that one day I'd be tired of flying.
That the thrill of passing again over
my own hometown would finally
be lost on me. Looking back on
that clueless boy, I pity him
for who he became. For isn't there
something lonely about a life
that wasn't in the least foreseen?
I live in someone else's city, in
someone else's house, it seems.
It's as if one day I stumbled into a
giant jumble sale of dreams, and
left with my arms loaded, caring
only that I got some good bargains.
I'm not saying I don't love my life.
Your heart and this city and this house
are the only places I can imagine
belonging. But isn't that just it?
In, through the screens of our lives,
the song of the world outside comes
thronging in all its unexpected
discord. And we call that chaos
home, despite everything we love.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem came all in a rush, maybe four years ago, and ended with the line “I pity him for who he became,” which is a bitter ending, but not entirely earned, to that point. I thought it was done until I became aware of a nagging feeling, whenever I came back to it, that the ending was unsatisfying. It took a long time for me to figure out why.

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

There were probably only two or three drafts of this poem, but they each took a long time in between, if memory serves.

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

This poem wasn’t “received” in the way that many of my poems are. Instead, it came in a gush of frankness that felt refreshing to me at the outset, and I followed that impulse.

The trick was trusting that impulse again when I went to finish the poem, picking it up from where I’d left it and catching that same vibe, like a wave, and riding it out. That’s what took me so long.

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

In order to finish this poem in the way it wanted to be finished, I had to be even more honest about what I’d already been honest about, and then be even more honest about even that. This poem is really a little pile of unlaundered honesties, with a recollection in the middle like an outgrown jacket. It’s hard for me sometimes to look at an honest autobiographical poem and say, “I haven’t been entirely honest about this. What would entire honesty look like?” I think that’s probably more often a memoirist’s dilemma than a poet’s, at least where autobiography is concerned.

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

Nobody published it till it came out in book form. Then it appeared on Poetry Daily, I think, which was a surprise. And now you’re interested in it, which is interesting. I think it’s one of those poems that, if you connect with its sense of displacement, can really touch you. I’m always interested in a poem that can’t make the editorial cut at journals, but for some reason resonates with readers. I could point to a dozen of those in my book, and it’s not for lack of sending them out to likely journals. To me, it points to a populist hole in the periodical literature. Which makes sense, because so many journals are based in academies.

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, of course. I know a poem is good when I want to share it immediately with someone. I want to stop people on the street and say, Hey, you. Listen to this! I like to think I’m getting to the point where I can distinguish that feeling from the mere sense of satisfaction that comes of finishing a poem, any poem; but they’re hard to tell apart. Both are flattering feelings, and I’m susceptible to flattering feelings.

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

Fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes fact. Our autobiographies are just the stories we tell ourselves. You think you know who you are, in a nutshell, but in truth your stories represent about 2% of what you might call your “real autobiography.” I no longer worry much about “fact” … it’s overrated. Our stories are the pier from which we think we’ve seen the ocean.

I’m not writing about myself, even when I write autobiographically; if I’m writing well, I’m writing about something much bigger than that, and using myself merely as the fulcrum for that desire.

Is this a narrative poem?

Sure, it tells the story of someone who has changed … Then it ends in a lyric flourish beginning with “But isn’t that just it?”…

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

I went through a wonderful Tony Hoagland phase, and this strikes me as a chatty perspective piece not unlike his.

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

I write for the displaced agrarian in all of us.

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?

Nope.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s chatty and disclosure-oriented. It’s not what Nate Klug who dismissed me handily in a Poetry review called a “Todd Boss” poem… which is to say it’s not clever, sound-driven, syntactically convoluted, or in any other way overtly inventive. It’s just straight-up. Which is what I love about it. Some poems want that.

What is American about this poem?

I give up. What do I win?

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Yes. Aren’t we all?

Jessica Garratt

Jessica Garratt grew up in rural Maryland, and since then has lived in Iowa, Ireland, Austin, New York, and now Missouri, where she is a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri in Columbia. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, and from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her MFA. Jessica's first book, Fire Pond, won the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, selected by poet Medbh McGuckian, and was published by the University of Utah Press in April 2009. Individual poems from the collection have appeared in the North American Review, Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Revew, Crab Orchard Review, The Missouri Review, and in the forthcoming Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets' University and College Prizes, 1999-2008.


PILGRIM

I’ve been attended (in my efforts to fall in love
this month) by the mouse in my apartment, who’s nested
its image everywhere: in a wadded receipt
beneath my bed, in the long-tailed phone charger, dying
beside its socket. It’s hidden in the thistled ditch
my bed becomes when I sit up in the night, possessed
by a dream whose paws are still pressed to the smudged side
of my eyes, searching the sheets for what they see.

“Something ate that poison,” I told you on the phone,
“It’s got to materialize eventually.” “Not necessarily,”
you said; and later, “Don’t be afraid.” Afraid? Is that
what I am? I was surprised. I imagined what would change
if you lived here too—how my private late-night vigils
would un-green, snapped free of their source, collected
for kindling to make a fire in the clearing, and see
if there was enough to talk about (or do) till morning.

With you so far away, and us so new, it’s been hard
to discern the likelihood of love. I’ve culled a nice image
of you as Pilgrim: earnest, straight-necked, boyish
New Englander—and found I was tickled by the thought
of your hard-working love, not yet called to its task—the city
still a wilderness, the hill stifling its light. I can see it
much better during the sprints my vision does
in the unmarked fields between our talks. But,

when you speak, each of your best qualities reveals itself
to be the uncomplicated twin of a subtler brother
you never knew, whose sense of irony, whose mind
like a sweep of moor, and eyes that aren’t always averted
to the sky—never had the chance to rub off
on you. If one such brother had lived, I might tell him
on the phone tonight, how the mouse has finally arrived
dead at the foot of the stairs. How it was midday, not night,

when I found it. How it didn’t seek a shoe or a pillow
or a kitchen drawer to die in, but curled up beside
the front door, as if wanting no more than to leave—
but how really the mouse lay down where it happened to be
when the poison sponged the last fluid from its body.
How its feet are tiny and simple at noon. How
my landlord will come in the morning and sweep
the bare gray fact onto the dustpan’s gray-blue range.


When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem in 2006, soon after moving into a new apartment. On the night I finished moving in, my sister was over and saw a mouse race across the kitchen and into a gap under the kitchen sink. I never saw it myself, but when I mentioned the incident to my landlord, he promptly deposited some little pouches of poison in my apartment. And then for a week or two, I compulsively projected phantom dead mice onto everything small and hidden – everything potentially translatable into mouse and death. I even had a friend come over once and use my broom to push something mouse-ish looking out from under the bed while I stood at a distance on the stairs. That was the ‘wadded receipt’ I mention in the poem.

Meanwhile, a separate part of me was perched above this bout of hyperbole, observing quietly, and noticing some resonance between my dilated, nearly Gothic visions of this tiny, elusive creature, and my sometimes over-grand projections of imaginative but unapt narratives onto romantic situations that cannot sustain them. So there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between the two scenarios in the poem exactly, but I began to play and see how they could enlarge, illuminate, and scuff each other, once I courted this adjacency. I didn’t know how they would come together ultimately, or what the relationship between the threads would mean.

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

Well, from the Word documents dated on my computer surrounding this poem, it looks like the first intense round of drafts (there are six of them I saved) happened between August 29 and September 18. But the ‘final’ one (on September 18) appears to be the draft I turned in to my workshop – and it has a whole extra stanza tacked on to the end that doesn’t exist in the version of “Pilgrim” in my book. I know I tinkered around with it for another month or two after this initial burst. And then again more recently, during the final round of edits on Fire Pond.

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?

Before I turned a draft in to my workshop, I ran it by my friend who, at the time, I showed pretty much every new poem to first. He had trouble with the poem as it stood, because he felt that the poem didn’t provide within its bounds a key to navigate or unlock its own meaning. And I remember having this immediate, sort of rebellious reaction to this idea, like, Really? Is that what I should be doing here? I had felt satisfied, in a way, by the manner in which the different elements in the poem didn’t determine themselves too steadfastly, or map onto a chart of analogies. My friend wanted to know what the mouse was standing in for, whereas I think I was seeing the mouse more as an immanence, radiating in its own right, even as it could cast something new or relevant onto other elements in the poem.

Still, I hadn’t quite clarified all this to myself yet, and I took a stab at providing more closure by writing that extra last stanza, which my friend thought made the poem much better. That’s the version I turned in to workshop. In case it’s interesting to see the different sort of gesture this ending made, here’s that alternate ending to the poem:

“…How
the landlord will come in the morning and sweep. But,
telling all this to you—well, the thought makes me wince.

Perhaps because it’s difficult, as it is, to memorialize
the dismal, ordinary scenes in a life. But when sunk
in the mind of another, such as yours, they shrink even more,
the way a gravestone shrinks from a spring afternoon
that shines its explanations over everything, coming to all
of last year’s conclusions. What about particulars? What about
grit? Even the imagination crawls up from the dungeon
of the body, each stair a fact on its way to myth.”

After some messing with this final stanza for a while, I finally decided to abandon it entirely. It seemed to expand the poem too much, at the same time as it shut down some of its pulse. It was so explain-y, and I wasn’t at all sure that the explanation was actually the conclusion the poem itself seemed to draw or move toward.

This poem, more than most of mine, produced vastly different reactions from people. One reader thought it was a biting and incisive character assassination, whereas someone else thought the mouse really just stood in for the guy in the poem, and saw the speaker as sad and vulnerable. Some looked at me blankly and pityingly when I said I had wanted the poem to be funny. So, in the end, I really just had to stay my own course with this one, and trust my instincts. Which, I guess, is always the case ultimately.

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. Or, maybe what’s more true is that I believe in a state of profound concentration. I think when I’m working on a poem might be the only time I ever entirely concentrate on anything. And in that state, I do feel a sense of ‘tapped-in-ed-ness,’ if that makes sense. The world feels more fluid and connective—itself a kind of unified ecstasy—and I am in it, important to it and also not important at all. I remember asking a friend once, many years ago, what it felt like to be deeply in love (because I was pretty sure I hadn’t been at that point). She said, “It feels like you’re suddenly tapped into the world – like the world is letting you in on this wonderful, mysterious secret.” Pretty wise for a 19 year old, right? In many ways, I feel this is a pretty apt description of the experience of making a poem – especially in the early stages of composition.

And as for sweat and tears – I don’t know. That’s not really how I think about writing poems. The ‘work’ of it – after the initial ‘inspiration’ – is absorbing as well. I’m hungry for the process at that point – to keep helping the poem forward, to keep shaping. I know writers (talented, successful ones) who claim to not really like the process of writing. That sounds like sweat and tears. But that’s not at all how I think about it. And at the same time, I don’t think I’ve ever felt that a poem was simply ‘received.’ It tends to feel more like something in between the aggressively active and the entirely passive.

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

The basic ‘action’ of the poem was pulled from my life. In that sense, many of my poems could be said to begin in ‘fact.’ But I don’t think that means much really. The events in the poem are just the beginning. It’s what happens when consciousness gets to the ‘facts’ and works on them that’s interesting. What begins as experience in the world quickly turns into an imagining of that experience, rather than a recounting of it. What takes over is a curiosity about the nature of that experience, the images that fascinate or suit a certain frame of mind, the ideas that are raised, the psychology that might take hold and cause certain leaps of thought, but also certain actions. The work of the poem is no longer in accurately representing my own state of mind or actions in a particular moment, but in representing a mind, in a more general sense. Dickinson put it well when she wrote: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse -- it does not mean -- me -- but a supposed person.”

Is this a narrative poem?

In a way; but ultimately I always privilege the meditative over the narrative in my poems. If you imagine the narrative as a paved road, threading concretely through a landscape, my poems generally tend to follow the track of the mind of a person walking along it. Or maybe a cloud of map-savvy gnats floating above it with a vaguely forward movement.

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

Well, I remember that I was teaching an American Literature course for the first time. And the beginning drafts of this poem coincided with the beginnings of American literature – Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, the pilgrims, the City on a Hill. It actually happens often enough now, that what I’m teaching at the time enters (or instigates) a poem.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

I don’t usually write such ‘blocky’ poems. But these dense eight-line stanzas just felt right for this one. I do think, however, that this poem might mark the first in a string of longer, more meditative poems that triangulate disparate subjects and seek to connect them through the writing of the poem. This now feels like my native way of moving through a poem, but it wasn’t always.

What is American about this poem?

A lot, I think. Obviously there’s the pilgrim metaphor, and the early spirit of American idealism (the sacred beacon of a city, hoisted up on a hill). In many ways, I think that the dialectics and Bermuda triangles this poem (loosely, noncommittally) moves between might be said to be American in their concerns (at least historically, and in literature). Is Nature a sacred forest of Platonic forms? An inert gathering of matter and fact? Evidence of the occult (as in very early American literature)? Reflective of the human imagination? I also think that this poem flirts with metaphor without entirely trusting or committing to it. This seems American to me – the move between lofty idealism and gritty pragmatism (in varying degrees of sly and earnest) – between the hankering for a beacon, and an insistence on bare gray facts. I think (in retrospect, of course) that the poem splashes around in these different American underpinnings. “Splashing around” seems American too.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Oh, well, I don’t know… I think being poets means we don’t have to decide on one way of casting this. ‘Finished’ sounds so burly and sealed, ‘abandoned’ too melodramatic, or else falsely modest. Somewhere in between, I suppose. But I do wish I’d found this letter of Dickinson’s (written to Higginson) before “Pilgrim” ended up in my book – I surely would have included the following lines as an epigraph: “Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted.”