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.

Room design can have a powerful effect on concentration and mood, according to a feature in the April issue of Scientific American Mind. The included research finds that ceiling height, views of greenery, and lighting all have measurable effects on thinking.

Although gazing out a window suggests distraction, it turns out that views of natural settings, such as a garden, field or forest, actually improve focus. A study published in 2000 by environmental psychologist Nancy Wells, now at Cornell University, and her colleagues followed seven- to 12-year-old children before and after a family move. Wells and her team evaluated the panoramas from windows in each old and new home. They found that kids who experienced the greatest increase in greenness as a result of the move also made the most gains on a standard test of attention.

Presented in support of my obsession with the places where writers work.

I have no idea what the city of the future will look like, but I hope Mitchell Joachim is going to be part of the planning team.  If the name sounds familiar, he appeared on the Colbert Report last week, carrying pictures of future tree houses and people movers shaped like sea life:

What does it have to do with poetry?  Everything or nothing, I suppose.  I’m fascinated by poets who produce work under the (specific) influence of their environment.  It’s impossible to picture someone like Auden without the influence of the industrial structures of English coalworks.  Who knows which strange machines and structures will become commonplace, working their way into the world of letters without much notice?

From Llewellyn Hinkes and The Morning News, an exploration of books and other physical media as fetish objects.

Not a groundbreaking idea, but a timely one given the emphasis on collecting in the Goldbarth interview I posted earlier. (Not to mention the recent release of the larger, more expensive Kindle).

The trouble is that maintaining a physical collection is expensive and bulky. There’s just too much out there in the world. Even after pruning the treasury down to only those records and books of great personal importance, you can still be saddled with mountainous stacks to maintain. The convenience of digital deep storage is hard to deny. Fewer people are willing to make the sacrifice of cost and convenience for the impracticality of flipping sides, changing needles, and hauling thousands of pounds of paper and plastic when they move in exchange for better sound quality, musty paper, and gatefold album art. But what if you don’t care about actually owning your fetish? That is, what if true fetishism had little to do with possession, but instead was more of a compulsion to ensure that those things you find precious and holy are preserved and treated with dignity?

Two years old at this point, but still a rare and fascinating look at one of my favorite poets: Richard Siken interviews Albert Goldbarth. The interview focuses on Goldbarth’s collection of vintage toys, but from there it leads into the connections between collecting and writing.

I must say first, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about the line of agreement or even the line of distinction between my writing and this collection. They’re both deep pleasures for me—the writing even more so, of course. I’m sure there must be overlap, but I’ve never been one who sits around and very consciously becomes an archaeologist or a psychologist or a deconstructor of his own aesthetic life. I don’t sit around and try to self-articulate the details: the where, the why, and the how. It seems to me that there’s probably more likeness between some of the spirit behind the writing and some of the spirit behind the collecting than there is difference. If I wanted to, I could think of many of my poems or essays as display cases of objects, also ideas, also human needs and human pleasures and human perils, that have been arranged for a specific aesthetic effect.

The photos are great as well. Goldbarth has transformed his entire dining room into a museum.

John Siracusa on the importance of criticism in the creative process:

The drawbacks are obvious. Knowing what’s wrong with something or thinking that you do, which, for the purposes of this discussion, should be considered the same thing does a fat lot of good if you lack the skills to correct it. And thinking that you know what’s wrong with everything requires significant impulse control if you want to avoid pissing off everyone you meet.

But much worse than that, it means that everything you ever create appears to you as an accumulation of defeats. “Here’s where I gave up trying to get that part right and moved on to the next part.” Because at every turn, it’s apparent to you exactly how poorly executed your work-in-progress is, and how far short it will inevitably fall when completed. But surrender you must, at each step of the process, because the alternative is to never complete anything—or to never start at all.

I’m reminded of how many poets & writers have said they don’t finish works so much as give up on them.

(via Daring Fireball)

A friend sent me this link to a piece from PBS about Bob Hicok and Michigan.

Living in Michigan, one is indeed faced with the reality of a desperate people (Here’s a fine example). It raises the question about poetry’s role in the matter. I have written about it–or tried to write about–but I’m not sure I’ve found the right words yet. What about you, out there, dear readers / dear poets? Have you addressed “these tough economic times” in your poems or seen a poet do so? Who are they?  Where are they? Will there be an anthology of poetry inspired by these Tough Economic Times?

Check the link above for a poem by Hicok. I’ll leave you with another one of Hicok’s poems called “A Primer” which appeared in The New Yorker last May.

We’re delighted to have Adam Clay sit in this week as the guest blogger of Linebreak.

Adam is the author of A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (forthcoming from Milkweed Editions), The Wash (Parlor Press), In a World of Ideas, I Have No Particular Loyalty (forthcoming from Cinematheque Press), As Complete as a Thought Can Be (Cannibal Books), and Canoe (Horse Less Press). He lives and writes in Michigan where he is completing his PhD. Adam recently became a father, and we extend our congratulations to him and his wife.  Find out more at adamclay.org

It’s awfully nice of the Linebreak editors to ask me to blog here for the next week.

Tonight I am thinking about Flickr and what it does to our notion of what an image can do or be. I am thinking about how many distractions there are and how many distractions can be a possibility for a sonnet. I am thinking about baseball, as I am most nights. I am thinking about habits in writing and how to break them. I am thinking about why there are 188,994 photos in Flickr with the tag “poetry”.

I am thinking about Philip Larkin:

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read.  Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time.  Snow fell, undated.  Light
Each summer thronged the glass.  A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground.  And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth.  The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

–

Now I am thinking about Matt Hart’s “History Lesson.” You can hear and see him reading it here (courtesy of The Great American Pinup:

–

I like collage as an art form because everything is sacred and profane all at once.

–

Then I go to bed.

Especially the part about splash pages.

National Poetry Month card #3 | Via Negativa.

The audio recording of Slate’s recent panel on the state of design at the Museum of Art and Design in New York includes some smart talk about the dangers of committee think in the creative process. From potter Jonathan Adler:

I think bad design is often design that is done by committee or focus group, design that is overly considered. I think often when you think too much about things … and rely on focus groups you wind up doing something that’s watered down, timid, bad.