Way back when we started Linebreak, one of things we’d planned to do was interview the author of each week’s poem. It took a while, but today we’re finally getting started with Joe Wilkins, whose poem “Somewhere South of Miles City” we published earlier this morning.

Let’s start with the writing of this poem. Was there a particular event or occasion that prompted it?

“Somewhere South of Miles City” came out of a restless, uncertain, traveling time in my life. My wife (girlfriend at the time) and I had right after college committed to teach two years in the public schools of the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America. It was hard. Really hard. We thought we might leave. In fact, at times we were sure we were going get the hell out of the Delta. But something made us think twice. We stayed. And that was the right decision. My students did such wonderful things that second year, and I fell in love with teaching. (Liz and I got married while we were down there as well; that was a pretty good decision too.)

Anyway, a few years later, in grad school at the University of Idaho, drifting a bit again, I ran across Kevin Young’s poem “Quivira City Limits” and was just blown away. The windy uncertainty he captured with his stilted syntax and the slanting, second-person address immediately brought me back to the decision to stay in Mississippi, which led me to the decision to stay in grad school, which led me to the idea of why in the world we stay anywhere, call anywhere home.

So, I stole the syntax and some ideas from Young, grabbed a few Miles City images I’d happened to scrawl once in a travel journal, and started writing.

How long did the writing of this poem take from first to final drafts? Was it typical of your process — or do you have a typical process?

This one was a little quicker than usual, maybe a month or so. I don’t know exactly why. I was in my second year of grad school at the time and had begun to figure a few things out. And I was as well meeting with the poets Lucas Howell and Steven Coughlin each week for a pitcher of IPA and some talk about poems. Their advice in the crafting of this one was invaluable.

My process usually takes months and dozens of drafts. I begin with the music; I follow the words and the way they ring next to one another in the first drafts. As the poem progresses, I begin to see where it might want to go, and then I try to push it as gently as possible in that direction. Slowly things come together.

Place is very important in this poem, as it is in your other poems that I’ve read. (“The Names,” “The Big Dry, Montana, 1985,” “Route 7 Outside Nacogdoches, Texas,” etc.) Has place always been prominent in your work? When did Montana, the state where you grew up, first appear in your poetry?

Landscape and place have always been an important part of my writing. I remember reading Richard Hugo for the first time as an undergrad and being so struck that in one of his poems he mentions Shawmut, a loser of a little ghost town some twenty miles down Highway 12 from where I grew up. It seemed to me by using the names of places so prominently in his work Hugo gave himself a kind of authority, a kind of dignity or wisdom that many of the other poets I read in the Norton had somehow surrendered as they turned away from the real. (I’m thinking of a line from A Farewell to Arms here: “and finally only the names of places had dignity…the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers…”)

My father died when I was very young, and all through the economic downturn and brutal droughts of the late ’80s and early ’90s my mother somehow kept us together and kept us fed on a part-time teacher’s salary. That experience was physical, was real, and though Hugo’s influence on my work has waned a bit, I still vehemently believe in a poetry of the real, in a poetry that engages the people and places of this world.

You live and teach in Iowa now. If it’s fair to call the landscape of Montana a kind of wellspring for you — or a recurring subject at the very least — how has being removed from it affected your writing? I know that some writers with strong ties to a particular place need to remain in that place to continue writing about it. What’s your experience been?

Well, I do miss Montana. But I miss Mississippi and Idaho and Houston and London and Spokane, Washington, too. I love lots of places. And though I don’t know if it’s love quite yet, I’m beginning to at least appreciate the nuances and small surprises (like the sudden bluffs above the Yellow River I found the other weekend) of the Iowa countryside. Here in north Iowa I’ve also begun to focus less on the vast sweep of landscape and more on the particulars of a single place — the fireflies that fill our backyard on a summer’s night, the washed red of the tulips today.

And on a more philosophical note, I also think a bit of distance can be a good thing. I know I didn’t much understand what made the West the West until I spent some time in the South. And, as I continue to travel and discover, I think my vision too continues to complicated and deepen. There are a lot of beautiful, strange, sad, and fascinating places out there.

What about your influences? Which poets or poems have had the greatest effect on you — both in your life and your writing? Do you recall that first poem that got your attention, the one that made you want to write poems of your own?

I was a computer engineering major in undergrad. I had come from a home with no money and just wanted to make some. Someone told me engineering was a way to do that. In my senior year, though, I finally had room to play around with a few credits and on a whim took a poetry workshop. The very first day of class the professor walked in and read Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.” I remember being so sad and delighted, so run over. Transistors had never done that for me. I was hooked.

Since then, James Wright and Robert Hass have taught me a lot about voice and language, as well as a certain quality of concern for the world. B. H. Faichild and his thirty line sentences have been huge in any number of ways. And Robert Wrigley, in his work and his person, continues to show me that poems and lives are complicated, wonderful things — worth all the work and more.

Among contemporary poets, who are you reading and admiring right now? Which journals or presses do you follow?

Oh, so many. I just taught Michael McGriff’s Dismantling the Hills in my poetry workshop, and “Iron,” the first poem in the book, is more than worth the cover price. Though it’s a few years old now, I just ran across Rebecca Wee’s Uncertain Grace last year; every poem in there does that essential work — makes the stone stonier, the water wetter. I’m also reading new and selected collections by Rodney Jones and Robert Wrigley. What syntax! What wisdom! God I hope I’m writing poems that good down the road!

For journals, I’m always reading Poetry, the Georgia Review, Mid-American Review. And I’ve been very impressed by the Southern Review lately; I’ve read the last year and a half of issues cover to cover and have found some simply wonderful stuff. Like everyone else I’m also reading quite a bit online. Beyond Linebreak (which I think is great!), I’ve been following Blackbird, Boxcar Poetry Review, and diode pretty regularly.

You’ve published pretty widely in both print and online journals. Is it safe to assume you’re still putting your first manuscript together? If so, what’s your approach to a book of poems as a book? Do you prefer narrative collections where each poem contributes to a larger story? Or is it okay for a collection of poems to be simply that — a collection of individual works?

I am putting a manuscript together. Or, I guess, it’s more or less together — it’s just not published yet! It has been through a few drafts, a bit of reorganizing, some culling, as I’m trying to find ways to get the different landscapes, stories, and concerns of the book to speak to each other more intentionally and succinctly. I’d say I’ve been sending it out seriously for about the last year. We’ll see what happens!

As far as a book poems, I think my notion is whatever works. I love books of poems where each piece fits carefully into the whole (Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares, Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom, Campbell McGrath’s Spring Comes to Chicago). And I love books where the poems feel not necessarily some small piece of the larger narrative, but still closely connected in theme, tone, or subject matter (Linda Bierds’ The Profile Makers, Trethewey’s Native Guard, Fairchild’s Local Knowledge). And I love books where anything goes too (Stuart Dybek’s Streets in Their Own Ink, Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires). So, though my first manuscript probably fits into that second category, I guess I’m easy when it comes to books of poems!

Finally, here’s a question adapted from an interview with a rock star. What was the greatest amount of money you ever earned from poetry, and how did you spend it?

I had a poem up on Slate last summer. I got a couple hundred for that one. Though I can’t tell you exactly how I spent it (my wife does some pretty serious budgeting stuff, and I just go along with it), I did spend a whole day up in the Twin Cities last August looking for double-hopped IPAs and some used Whiskeytown CDs.