Ash Bowen's poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, and Black Warrior Review, among other publications. He lives and works in Texarkana, AR.
Jennifer Jabaily's poetry has appeared in Mannequin Envy and Fickle Muses. She's a second-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Ashley Anna McHugh is a third-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Measure, DIAGRAM and Memorious as well as other publications.
Johnathon Williams's poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2009, the Pebble Lake Review, and Unsplendid. He lives in Fayetteville, AR, with his wife and daughters.
I am interviewed at PANK by the lovely Roxane Gay, on subjects such as editing, innovation in online journals, and zombies. There’s a fair bit about our selection process here at Linebreak, for those of you interested in how the sausage is made.
Interviewed in Spiegel, Umerto Eco talks about the importance of lists to learning and culture, and how the list has changed in the age of Google.
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.
Actor, writer, and illusionist Ricky Jay is interviewed about his many film projects at The A.V. Club, where he shares a charming anecdote about the time he almost put Pierce Brosnon’s eye out with a playing card.
Robert Pinsky talks about inspiration, the place of poetry in contemporary America, and ebooks in a recent interview by Michael Shea at The Southeast Review.
Q: [...] As someone who’s been writing for over 40 years, where do you still find inspiration?
A: The only resource, ultimately, is great works of art. The music or poetry or building or movie you love. Or will love. Art inspires art
Brian Brodeur’s How a Poem Happens is particularly good this week, with a look at the process behind the writing of Tony Hoagland’s “Lucky.”
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.
Brodeur always picks good poems, but sometimes poets give only cursory answers to his questions. This week, Hoagland delivers.
William Giraldi, a prose writer and fiction editor of AGNI, provides this lovely bit about the transformative power of reading in an interview by Jessica Pitchford at The Southeast Review:
Literature helps salve the wound, the wound every one of us has, the original sin Augustine stuck us with. Of course the Augustinian notion of original sin is a metaphor for how imperfect and damaged our species is, how much work we need to do in order to live honest and productive lives. Emotional truths are waiting for you in literature, and I honestly don’t know how people travel through this world without Wordsworth. I would have hanged myself years ago if I couldn’t have sought refuge in him and others. Reading is transformative—I love that word—because it forces a reckoning, a confrontation with truth in a way that few other art forms can do. Run the other way if you find yourself on a date and the person says that he doesn’t have time to read, because what he really means is that he doesn’t have time to think or feel.
The rest of the interview is well worth the time. Now I have to go and search out all of Giraldi’s short stories and essays. At least the review offers this sample essay to help get me started.
Random trivia: I went to high school with Jessica. No lie.
Lisa Fay Coutley wrote “Errata”, a poem we just snapped up. It was published a little while back, so you might want to revisit it before you check out Lisa’s gorgeous answers to my fairly grotesque questions. As a refresher, Lisa Fay Coutley is Associate Poetry Editor for Passages North. She teaches writing at Northern Michigan University, where she is an MFA fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Pedestal,Terminus, and elsewhere. Now: Onward!
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ASHLEY: How did this poem first occur to you? Where are its origins?
LISA: As with many poems, it started while I was driving. In Marquette, MI, winters are painfully long; spring is certainly a welcome time. I was driving on the first sunny day in months, and the snow runoff welling against the curb looked like a string of diamonds in the right light. That was how it began, with water in a gutter. From there, I imagined ravens in that gutter, and on and on. I was interested in the idea of light striking water in a gutter in an unexpected way, and then the ravens just took over, as ravens are wont to do. Those are its literal origins.
ASHLEY: “Errata” is an intriguing title, meaning – of course – both errors and corrections. How do you see the string of images here: as a list of mistakes or as setting right of what was wrong? Both? How do you see the title interacting with the poem?
LISA: Both. The poem begins by trying to correct a longstanding error/misconception about the myth of the raven, but certainly by doing so it’s trying to reveal the blurry nature of errors and corrections (and truth or judgment for that matter). The speaker in this poem is trying to set something straight, and as the poem moves, the errors/corrections become more intimate. It’s important to recognize that this speaker is talking back to some degree, and anytime you see such a speaker hinting at bravado (I won’t strut, etc) there’s the potential for reading vulnerability. I suppose it will suffice to say that just as you can’t have the need for correction without error, you can’t have a strong speaker without weakness. Certainly these binaries are dangerous, but for all intents and purposes, in this poem they are very much applicable and accurate.
ASHLEY: Casting the ravens as a transformative image that represents both “bad omens” and the speaker’s heart is striking, and it puts me in mind of a broken relationship – possibly a death. How did this connection come to you - all at once, or were you as surprised by the ending as I was? What implications did you intend this image to have in regard to the relationship between the “you” and the speaker of the poem?
LISA: Well, the final lines were in place when I first constructed the poem in a very different version/form, and when I reworked it, changing the beginning entirely, the goal was to find my way back to these lines.
Using the raven as a transformative image for the heart stems from my fascination with a particular version of the myth of the raven. According to some sources, Apollo turned the raven’s wings from a silvery-white to black when it delivered news of his lover’s infidelity (or for not pecking out the lover’s eyes). I was intrigued by this idea of punishment, of a bird that’s terribly misunderstood—once white and prized for its clairvoyance and later construed as a dark omen. To reconcile this with the speaker is to both cherish and condemn the heart and the choices and misconceptions therein, which certainly calls back to the “you” of previous lines.
ASHLEY: “Errata” is a lonely poem, and circles what we do when we feel unseen: the man “pocketing two-for-one toothbrushes” and the cashier “hand-perking her breasts / and picking her teeth with a receipt”, the son who the “you” of the poem won’t see. How do you see real or imagined invisibility working in this poem? How much does the presence of the self rely on others in your view?
LISA: The loneliness of the poem circles around the idea that sometimes we condemn ourselves to solitude and misunderstanding by doing what we think is right/asked of us, or acting against what we construe as right/wrong (depending). In many ways, it’s simply about the reconciliation of motivation and action. The self certainly relies on the presence of others who are full of judgment and action/inaction just as she judges and acts or doesn’t act. They definitely serve as backdrops for one another just as they serve to cancel the other out in other instances. I fear that I’ve muddied your question. In short, it is about what we do when we think we aren’t seen as much as it is about the ways we can lose ourselves through perceptions or through preoccupations with the desires that motivate our actions.
ASHLEY: If this poem were a constellation, what would it look like? What would its backstory be?
LISA: Of all the questions you’ve posed, I find this one to be the most intriguing. Yet, I think that any answer I could give would be less poignant than the question itself—this idea that we make connections between random points of light in a sky we don’t understand. Essentially, the poem strives to do something similar.
ASHLEY: Speaking of stars, a complete digression: What’s your sign? Do you read your horoscope? Does it matter or not?
LISA: Really, it’s not a complete digression. As I’ve said, the poem is working within a version of a myth about the raven. I am a Libra, born under the star sign of the raven constellation. Do I put a great deal of stock in my horoscope? Not at all, but as I said, I was intrigued with this story of the raven and internalized it for the purpose of this poem.
ASHLEY: Back to the poem: Abandonment of the self seems integral to this poem, especially as the speaker dissolves into the “you” of the poem: “Your shape in this bed is my shape”. What does the abandonment of the self mean for this relationship? How integral is it? What does this mean to you personally, if anything?
LISA: First of all, I’d just like to say that I’m flattered by how deeply you’ve read the poem—you’ve picked up on some of the nuances that I worried wouldn’t be apparent. I appreciate your attention here.
As for the abandonment of the self, it is definitely an integral part of this poem. One of the many errors this speaker attempts to correct is a loss of self, having allowed the self to be lost in the “you.” It calls back to the loneliness you pointed out. For me, in this world of misconceptions and errors and corrections and relationships, the loneliest feeling is to miss one’s self. At times, we mean to lose ourselves; at others, it’s an unfortunate result of circumstances. In either case, we don’t typically see it coming, and it can take a long time to find the way back. When we do try to trace it back—to piece it all together—it’s every bit as disjointed as this poem may appear to be; yet, in the end, all of these points of light are linked.
ASHLEY: The “you” seems to be given complete control over the speaker’s presence or absence when the speaker says, “Erase my whole notes from your page.” To me, this passivity impresses a severe longing, a willingness to submit the self entire to another person – almost a helplessness – but it could also be a command, urging the you to let the speaker go, to let the speaker move outside of the “you” and into herself. How do you imagine that line? Does the speaker want to be erased completely – or freed from the control of the ”you” through that act of destruction? Both?
LISA: Again, both. More or less, the answer to this question is in the answer to question 7, but I think that the ambiguity you’re plucking out here is important. Bravado, loneliness, truth, desire—all very murky territory, and the journey back to the truest self, sifting through these emotions, is one of utter confusion. I hoped this would be reflected—that there is a sense of vulnerability and self-doubt in trying to find one’s way back. In this way, it’s as necessary to ask permission of the “you” as it is to make this command. I think it’s what makes the loss of self that much more tragic yet empowering as the self is rediscovered; at times, the speaker might like to be erased, but in the end muscles through in an attempt to be free.
To see this piece in the context of the collection I’m working on (tentatively titled Back-Talk), you’d see a whole slew of speakers who are ultimately tenacious as they struggle through loss. Again, my hope is that their most delicate human traits (i.e.: fear and weakness) will be apparent in their heightened sense of necessity in such endeavors.
ASHLEY: In the last lines of the poem, it’s the speaker whose heart is a bad omen, which implies that the speaker blames herself for the failure between herself and the “you”. How do you see this duality of assertion and surrender working in the poem?
LISA: The speaker sees herself as a bad omen only insofar as others see her heart as a bad omen. Again, this is drawing on the raven’s myth—of what this speaker might have seen/known that caused such wreckage, of what might have been avoided. Perhaps it’s too loose of a connection for the metaphor to fire on all cylinders; either way, it strives to reinforce all that I’ve said about the reconciliation of self and motivation within the poem. She’s bound to blame herself, and part of that would certainly be about “the failure between herself and the ‘you.’” Though that’s not the most important part.
ASHLEY: Transitions between the images in this poem seem to work, but they are also slightly disjunctive. How did this string of images arrive? Was your writing process fluid or jarring?
LISA: As I said earlier, initially, this poem took on quite a different form. In fact, I was working with a sonnet in iambic pentameter couplets, but the rhetoric wasn’t jibing in such a confined space. Once I broke the form, the rhetoric seemed to move itself. Some of the images from the sonnet made their way into this version; others came from other pieces (older pieces). I’m likely to plug in old ideas in new places when they seem to fit, and there was some of that happening here. I’ve found that as I make my way through the poems in this first collection, there’s a great deal of overlap. So when I can rip a line from a poem that I’m sure won’t make it into the book, I do that. This is all to say that it wasn’t necessarily “fluid,” but it didn’t feel “jarring” either, seeing as the images/emotions are of the same vein.
ASHLEY: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I read the relationship between the speaker and the “you” as romantic. What do you think?
LISA: No correction necessary, you aren’t wrong to think that the relationship is romantic, but in the end, the relationship with the self trumps the romance.
ASHLEY: On the topic of romance: Would you ever date a poet? If you had to, but could date any poet, living or dead, who would it be? Why?
LISA: I have dated poets, and I’ve learned that you can’t judge a man by his poems. Therefore, I couldn’t answer this without spending some time with the man, which, of course, rules out all the dead guys. As for the living, not just now.
ASHLEY: Which poet has most influenced your work? How?
LISA: There are many, most of whom are more contemporary than not: Sylvia Plath, Marie Howe, Leslie Adrienne Miller, Rita Dove, John Rybicki. The list goes on…
ASHLEY: Do you like their author’s photo? Why or why not?
LISA: I’m not sure that I’ve necessarily seen a true “author’s photo” for Plath, but I find the contrast between her face and her words/voice most intriguing. I don’t know that I’ve seen any strikingly-unique photos from any of the others.
ASHLEY: What do you think is the best pose for an author’s photo? Most cliche? Is it OK for it to be in black and white – or is that inherently pretentious?
LISA: I think the best pose is the one that best reflects the author. Most often, they seem to be pretty standard—head and shoulders, sometimes black and white (which I didn’t find pretentious before, but I might now). Usually I find them boring. But I did admire a particular photo that poet Sandra Beasley used earlier on in her publications: a photo of her looking away, writing. It felt honest.
ASHLEY: Last one on author’s photos. Promise. Why’s there a bird in your author’s photo? Whose is it? What’s its name? Tell me all about it. I’m wildly curious.
LISA: This tickles me. It’s a very long story, but I’ll try to be brief. During the last summer of my undergrad days, I had a huge writing assignment due and two young sons who wanted to play. Needing time to write, I forced them to go outside. Within five minutes they were back indoors. My oldest (who was 7 or 8 at the time) said, “Mom, do we have parakeets in this area?” I went outside, and there was a parrot in our spruce tree. He wouldn’t leave until I offered him a cage. When no one claimed him, we kept him. My sons named him Einstein. He lived with us for a few years, during which time I was the only person who could handle him. Tragically, in the end, I left my parrot’s and ferret’s cage open when we left for Christmas one year. I assume the ferret chased him around until he died of a heart attack. I buried him in a jewelry box in Lake Superior. Uplifting story, I know.
Of course, the metaphorical implications of something that wanted nothing more than to be caged at a time in my life when I was feeling pretty caged—and that he died as a result of a cage that I left open—has definitely been a source of material for me. In fact, I wrote a poem based on much of this, which is forthcoming in the fall issue of Blackbird.
In any case, the contrast of being caged with wanting to be caged represents me and my current body of work, which is why I use the photo. So much for being brief.
ASHLEY: Why won’t the speaker “strut across town” in ballet slippers?
LISA: Here, bravado meets vulnerability—a refusal to “strut” (which is typically done with confidence) in “ballet slippers” (which have the potential to throw the wearer off balance). Honestly, “slipper” just happened to come out after “blizzard” as a matter of sound, and then I realized its function, as well. I think Richard Hugo might have a thing or two to say about this.
ASHLEY: I’m getting a little out of hand, so I’m going to shut this down in true Linebreak fashion: When was the first time you got cash money for poetry, and how did you spend it? Any advice for those with checks in the mail?
LISA: At this point, we’ve both gotten out of hand. What can we do? First and only cash money for poetry came from The Pedestal Magazine last December. I bought a thirty-dollar bottle of wine. I don’t advise this for everyone, but it can be a nice reward for all the hard work we do. Poetry’s a seriously tough sport.
An Interview with Carolyn Guinzio
An Interview with Katrina Vandenberg
It’s been a hot minute since Carolyn Guinzio’s “Shack & Creek” first went live on Linebreak. You have a point. But that just gives you a solid reason to refresh your memory by visiting our archives. Here’s a jump start: Carolyn Guinzio is the author of Quarry (Parlor Press), West Pullman (Bordighera) and the chapbook Untitled Wave (Cannibal Books). Now: Here’s Carolyn!
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ASHLEY: Here’s how we do first questions at Linebreak: What were the origins of “Shack & Creek”? Where did the poem begin?
CAROLYN: Shack & Creek began with an image. I remembered hearing a story of a small house being washed down a river in a flood. The very idea seemed to say something about human beings, permanence and power, about the things we have no power over. Even a house can be uprooted.
ASHLEY: “Shack & Creek” seems to exist in the tension between the comfort of isolation and a simultaneous longing to move outside of the self, that struggle to “let it go back” toward a more natural interaction with the world. What does this tension mean to you personally, if anything?
CAROLYN: A shack on an edge of creek makes me think of a hermitage, so yes, the balance between solitude and connection is meant to be evoked as well.
ASHLEY: I noticed a tension between the organic self – the tree roots – against the constructed self – the shack. How do you feel about this opposition – or is it an opposition in your mind?
CAROLYN: The tension you noticed between, as you nicely put it, the organc self and the constructed self, is something that interests me very much. The idea that we make something real just by looking at it, a version of the watched pot that never boils, is an aspect of one of my favorite things to think about: We humans know just so much, just enough for speculation, presumption and hubris. We undestand just enough to scoff at the certainties of the past.
ASHLEY: In our correspondence with you, we mistakenly referenced the poem as “Shack and Creek” instead of including the ampersand. You corrected us right away, but – knowing you – it seems like that was an important choice rather then poetic posturing. What, to you, is the significance of the ampersand?
CAROLYN: The importance of the ampersand has to do with a project I’d been working on for some time. A symbol that fills the space between things, a symbol for connection between things: the perfect center between two, like the bubble in a level. It also resembles a route on a map, with intersecting points, roads and rivers. I liked it as a visual symbol of connection, a wordless “and.”
ASHLEY: What was the first poem that had an effect on you?
CAROLYN: The first poem that had a effect on me? That’s a tough one, but a very early favorite was “The Emperer of Ice Cream”. I’m fond of beauty, and it has such shape and sparkle, while being utterly bleak at the same time. And it’s in the level bubble between sound and sense, my favorite place.
ASHLEY: At a recent poetry reading in Fayetteville, you mentioned that your chapbook from Cannibal Books was a poetic departure from your previous work. What do you see as your usual poetic stance, and how did this book change that course? Why did you see this as necessary?
CAROLYN: Untitled Wave is quite different from the poems in Quarry, it’s true. It’s a sequence of poems with very long lines and it moves forward only very slowly, like a stalled out storm front. It hovers obessively over its ideas; there is a lot of repetition and circling back. The lines are not economic; they unravel. I think it’s a bridge to the project that followed it. I do think it’s possible for any of us to reach a point where we could continue writing pretty well the same way we’d been writing, but I want to try, at least, to move forward and try something new.
ASHLEY: Now for the traditional final question: What’s the most money you’ve made from poetry, and how did you spend it?
CAROLYN: I have not been particularly lucky making money from poetry. I got a state grant in KY, I think it was $5000, which I probably used for health insurance premiums. But who among us is in it for the money?
An Interview with Katrina Vandenberg
I’m a little behind schedule when it comes to posting this interview with Katrina, true – but that’s just another excuse for you to return to “Courage and Horror Stand Side by Side”, which can only lead to good things. Promise. As a refresher, Katrina Vandenberg’s first collection Atlas was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. A new chapbook, On Marriage, is available now from Red Dragonfly Press. She’s received residencies from the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, the Amy Clampitt House, and the MacDowell Colony, and her work has appeared in journals such as The American Scholar, The Iowa Review, and Post Road. Now – on to the answers you’ve been longing for!
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As usual: What was the impetus for this poem? What triggered it?
I saw a production of the play Speak Truth to Power. It’s based on the testimonies of human-rights activists from all over the world, and their stories are singular and moving and brave. After, the director of Center for Victims of Torture made a speech in which he said that “courage and horror stand side by side.” I saw it, literally — characters in Everyman or the gods Jack Gilbert sometimes writes about, passing out decisions about our lives. Like most people, I’ve never found a satisfying answer to the question asked by the Book of Job, which is basically: why do good people suffer? How do we respond?
The spacing and breath accomplished by the dropped lines and drastic spacing of “Courage and Horror Stand Side by Side” is, of course, the reason it needed to be published in a monospace font, but it’s astounding formally, and handled with a deftness that’s rare to find in poems that attempt to use the full width of the page. Why did the poem call for this kind of form or shape? How did it occur to you?
Thanks for formatting it, by the way. I heard it took two weeks to get right. More below.
The shape of this poem on the page seems to be an atypical style for you. Did you find it a challenging form to work with? How did you approach it? What were your primary concerns?
The poem was originally had a circular structure. It ended with a couple lines that were something like: “Then let this poem be your song for them, / say the gods who hold the cosmos in their hands.” I showed the poem to Jim Cihlar, the poetry editor at Milkweed, and we talked about it cutting it back, roughing it up. He’s a sharp reader, so it’s possible he also suggested exploding it on the page, but I don’t remember.
I liked the idea of breaking open the poem, because it’s not about an orderly universe, and cosmos grow like that — they’re named for the orderly look of their blooms, but the plants themselves are vigorous and unruly, and grow anywhere . . . I don’t think I’ve ever spent more time reading a poem aloud as I was writing it, to make sure there was still some sense of there being lines.
But I was initially suspicious of whether breaking the poem made it any better. White space makes everything look significant, after all, and when I look at that poem, I still see a fairly conventional one in a slightly more dissonant form — in the same way that a lot of verses in songs by groups like the Pixies or Wilco have a slightly more dissonant “new” sound but are still fairly conventional twelve-bar chord progressions. However, I enjoyed doing it, and writers should trust pleasure.
One aspect of your poem that truly impressed us was that the lines in “Courage and Horror Stand Side by Side” really seem to be lines – provocative units of sense. How important was this to you in composing this poem? How do you judge a line as a line?
A line, Miller Williams said in class, is a unit of sound, sense, and syntax, and that is how I will think of a line forever. In 2006, I heard Billy Collins on NPR, talking about how the University of Arkansas Press published his first book, and how much he learned about poetry from Miller — the press founder and his editor — during the editing process. Apparently Miller taught Collins the same definition of a line, because I was making dinner as I listened, and caught myself reciting it along with Collins.
Rote knowledge is useless if you stop there, but it often makes an excellent foundation. You can bend it, contradict it, explore its gray areas, turn it on its head, but I’ve found it easier to do all that when you begin holding some concrete ideas in your hand. I’m glad I had teachers who made me write 300 lines of blank verse, be articulate about 16th-century sonneteers. My teachers left out tons of writers I wouldn’t — anyone who wrote after the 60s, writers from other countries, women writers, writers of color, just for starters — and I don’t write formal poems much anymore, but I still think about that principle of “sound, sense, syntax,” maybe especially when my lines don’t look like ones I was taught to make. So many of the more experimental visual artists and musicians I admire departed, knowledgeably, from tradition.
Another question about the form or shape of this poem: It strikes me that the dramatic spacing of the poem – both horizontal and vertical – keeps the reader’s eye from moving too easily across the language. However, it seems as though the poem can be read in multiple patterns while still maintaining its strength. Was this something that you considered, or did it occur naturally? How do you feel about the lines being read in alternate orders?
I didn’t think about alternate readings. If you can read it in multiple ways and it’s meaningful, great. Whoever makes the art has to let it go.
In this poem, the gods are actively involved in human lives – “…the gods who / dole out fates…” – but they are also presented as inherently and naturally distanced, which I see in the parallelism of the lines “The gods are busy. / The cosmos are lavender.” How do you see this tension working in the poem? What does this disjunction mean to you personally, if anything?
I like “the gods.” They seem nearly fictional to our cultural mind-set, which gave me more room to move around in the poem than a monotheistic God might. And I’ve always — liked might not be the right word — the way the ancient gods were multiple and had egos and personalities. They were fallible, could take pity, get angry. I wanted that capriciousness. They are irrational, and they are in charge.
That’s why the massage therapist’s response means so much to me: she can’t control the rapist, but because she prays to be in control of her response, she inadvertently succeeds in scaring him. Perhaps if she had prayed to scare him away, it wouldn’t have worked. I don’t know. I think he gets scared because he can tell he doesn’t have her.
A lot of poets I know are wrestling with how to portray injustice. We are more aware than ever that we live in an increasingly-crowded planet with scarce water supplies and great wealth disparities, in which there is genocide and mass rape — it wasn’t a kind of poetry many of us were taught to write. The poets I know feel as if they’re trying to build a way to talk about these things, from the ground up.
There are a number of characters in this poem – the gods, the speaker, the “you”, the boyfriend, the rapist, the massage therapist. For the most part, they’re kept straight – which is an accomplishment in and of itself – but while we can assume the gods are speaking through italics in the line,”And did you sing for your enemies?”, I’m wondering who answers them by saying, “No.”
The “you” says “no.” I hope that one way to read the poem is that it is the unsung song for the enemy, but it’s okay if you don’t read it that way.
The simplicity of that answer, and the significant variation in syntax that comes with the answer “No”, followed by the statement that “The gods are busy” lends a lot of heft to that response, as though the two are somehow related, as though that’s the moment the gods become disinterested in the voice that answers. How do you see or feel this moment? What about singing for one’s enemies intrigues you poetically or personally?
At that moment, I see the gods as preoccupied parents, though I didn’t want them to seem all-benevolent, or even parent-like. Perhaps they want the speaker to learn to sing for her enemies, and she’s not yet ready, so they go on.
I’m really interested in compassion and forgiveness. Learning how to truly forgive someone (and whether — I had a long talk with a poet-friend this week, about whether or not “forgiveness” is sometimes a euphemism for taking abuse), is one of the biggest tasks people have. Like a lot of people, I’m not very good at knowing what to do with my anger. I don’t write angry poems well; other poets do.
Having seen an earlier version of this poem, one that featured even more dramatic spacing, I’m wondering how you felt about condensing the lines for the purpose of publication? How did you go about this? What was lost and what was gained?
I pulled in the right margin and took it from there. Most of it was intuitive. The poem’s easier to read now, which I initially had mixed feelings about. But I initially miss most things I cut, then cease to notice.
Also, you originally had reservations about publishing this poem – if I’m remembering correctly. While we’re ecstatic you chose to let us go ahead, what were your reservations?
Part of the rape narrative really happened. The event was years ago, and I’ve never met the woman, but because she’s a real person who lives with it every day, I wanted time to examine my conscience. There was a chance I had learned a detail I used while acting in a position of trust, and if I had, I didn’t feel I could publish the poem. Finally, I called a local journalist; when I learned that the detail had been published in the newspaper at the time, I felt I could let go of the poem.
We could probably have a lively discussion about what details of other people’s lives are free for writers to “take.” When I was in grad school, I learned that pretty much everything’s fair game; at CVT, we talk about the importance of clients owning their stories; hospice nurses talk about “vulnerable adults.” I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer, especially given that the Internet makes a poem so much more public than it might have been, published in a small magazine, ten years ago. I don’t think the Internet makes us less private, by the way. Instead, we’re creating new kinds of shields to suggest openness while maintaining a different kind of privacy.
Generally speaking – and imagine this in the voice of a six-year old girl – Where do poems come from?
Reading other poems? Living in your body, in the physical world? A lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness? Strange juxtapositions. Taking the figurative literally. Generally speaking, if I knew, I don’t think I’d like writing as much, but I could write faster.
Who are your most important influences, the poets to whom you return again and again? How much sway do contemporary poets hold with you?
I’m a fickle reader. I envy people who love a poet or two above all others, and pattern themselves after that poet. But somewhere in my past I’ve had Donne phases, Keats phases, Whitman, Milosz, O’Hara, Bishop, Larkin, Levis, Simic, McGrath, Rilke, Strand, Zagajewski, Berryman phases. James Wright was the first poet who really meant something to me, as a college kid in Ohio. But mostly I obsess over single poems, one after the other, and I always seem to find just the one I need.
Contemporary poetry is amazing in its variety, playfulness, and fascinating associative leaps. How could I not respond, somehow, to the poetry of my own time? It seems pointless to fight about schools of poetry, though, as if only one kind could or should exist, when we, and our responses to the world, are so varied. One quality I greatly admire about the MFA program at Hamline, where I teach, is that the faculty introduce students to a diverse body of writing.
However much I read, I wish I could read more. I try to read new books from Twin Cities presses, especially — Milkweed, Coffee House, Graywolf — and like reading very new books and older ones simultaneously. Recently I co-read Brenda Shaughnessy’s Human Dark with Sugar and Pablo Neruda’s Selected Poems, which resulted in a very good writing week.
What was the first poem you read? How did it affect you? How and when did you realize that you wanted to be a poet? What was your response?
An Emily Dickinson one, in third grade. I remember being happily uncomfortable with the way “gown” and “on” didn’t exactly rhyme, and the poem making me happy and sad at the same time. I found it in a textbook we’d been given to use for only that morning, I loved the poem, and I was afraid I’d never find it again once my teacher collected the books. So it also became the first poem I ever memorized.
Finally, our Rock-Star question, but extended: What’s the most money you’ve made from poetry, and how did you spend it? What about the first time you made any money from poetry? What’d you do then? Any advice for those expecting their first checks?
I won a $44,000 Bush Artist Fellowship in 2005. It let me take time off teaching, write my next manuscript, read a lot, volunteer at the Center for Victims of Torture, apply to places like MacDowell. It was probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
I got the best piece of advice about the $1,000-or-so first-book advance from Natasha Trethewey via Dan Albergotti: Don’t use it to make a car payment. Buy something you can keep, something you normally wouldn’t buy. I think Dan bought some first-edition Jack Gilberts when he won the Poulin. I bought our house a twenty-volume set of Oxford English Dictionaries.
And, this isn’t poetry, but in high school, I won $50, second place, in a local story-writing contest. I wish I could find you the photo they took for the newspaper; I have really big hair in it. I learned later, from a PTA member, that the panel had decided that my story was too depressing to win first prize.
Sally Molini’s poem “At Ruann’s Having Tea with the Future” was published this morning on Linebreak. Molini’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in LIT, Beloit Poetry Journal, elimae, and 32 Poems, among other journals, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is co-editor for Cerise Press, an online international magazine and lives in Nebraska.
Since Johnathon started with this question last week, and because I’m curious about such things: How did “At Ruann’s, Having Tea with the Future” come into being? What prompted it?
There actually was an initial image for this poem. I once walked by an oceanside deck full of tables set for dinner, a bright white napkin folded in the shape of a sail sitting on each plate. For some reason I never forgot those napkins. This was at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego; I’ve never stayed there but it’s quite a place, a sprawling Victorian beach resort with lots of flagged turrets, carved balconies, gazebos and open vistas full of what must be recreational splendor.
Anyway, the poem grew from that one image, the original setting and contents of the piece changing over time. Wasn’t sure what I wanted to say until I added a bit about the current job market, and so, far from the pricey red peaks of the Coronado, the ailing economy found its way into the poem. I also liked the idea of someone reading tea leaves for a person who doesn’t pay enough attention to or maybe doesn’t understand completely the accumulating signs and directions of her own life, which is something to which I can relate.
Do you have a usual writing process?
I usually start out with a line, an image, or a phrase. I’m a slow worker, am unfortunately not prolific; a poem can take me a while to finish. Often it helps to get away from the screen or keyboard, so I’ll walk around the living room and stare through a window out into the backyard while working on something. I like getting past that beginning phase of the poem, enjoy revision the most, when there’s something coming together on that no-longer blank screen. I least like starting out with a new piece, having to develop and expand that first flash of an idea or line. There’s resistance and doubt to push past, which is probably typical for other writers.
In other poems of yours that I’ve read - ”Elegy for an Estranged Friend“; “In Lumbini, Doing the Continental Shift“; “Remains at 920 Prospect“; “Bird in the Hand Alley” – you seem to see the human elements of a poem through the lens of dense natural imagery. What draws you toward these images, or how do they arrive?
Not sure why I’m drawn to certain images or how they arrive — seems the best lines or phrases sort of pop up out of nowhere as I work, which doesn’t sound very intellectual. Ideas come from the usual daily bumping into people and objects. Memory obviously triggers a lot, people and events that have ripened with distance and so come to mind with a little perspective or malleability.
The natural world can offer clues about what’s happening on different levels, physically, spiritually, etc. In the poem, “In Lumbini” mentioned above, there’s a glowworm crawling on a bathroom floor — there are various meanings in that glowworm and its world, which is also my world. We’re connected, that little bug and I; the possibilities, the how and why of that connection calls to me.
I tend not to analyze or think too much about the creative process; it definitely has its mysteries and I like keeping it that way, don’t want to try and solidify some view.
Which poets or poems have influenced you the most – in life or in writing? How do you see these poems or poets working to inform your poetry – or do they?
A teacher once told me that the poets one reads and studies become a kind of chord of voices which shapes one’s own voice. I like that idea, a sort of ongoing weave of developing sensibility. To name just a few poets whose work I love and keep close: Gerard Manly Hopkins, John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop and T. S. Eliot. Contemporary poets: Tom Lux, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Dean Young, Eleanor Wilner. Sometimes a poet’s attitude or views can be more influential than their work. For example, I love Keats’ poetry, yet reading his biographies and prose writings have had more of an effect on how I view and read poetry.
Let’s assume that your favorite poets are, as we have always suspected, superhuman. If you could steal five literary superpowers from your favorite poets, which superpowers would you steal and from whom?
I wouldn’t mind being empowered with:
If someone at a bar were to ask you what you do, would you tell him or her that you’re a poet? If so, when did you decide to call yourself a poet? If not, why?
I call myself a writer. I like what Louise Glück’s said in her essay “The Education of The Poet” — I use the word “writer” deliberately. “Poet” must be used cautiously; it names an aspiration, not an occupation.
Finally, here’s our (soon-to-be) traditional rock-star question: What’s the greatest amount of money you ever earned from poetry, and how’d you spend it?
“Little World, Flitting Away,” a poem about the ever-increasing number of extinct species and our dying natural world, made $100 when it took 3rd place in Fugue’s annual poetry contest a few years ago. Not sure how I spent the money; probably on books.
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.
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.
Linebreak contributor and all around swell gal Sandra Beasley is featured this week at How a Poem Happens, with an interview on the writing of her poem “Metro Section, Page 4.”
In the wrong hands, the narrative/lyric divide is one of the great straw men of lit-crit. The great poems have both. Even in The Iliad, Homer was careful to build in descriptive passages that worked as mini-lyrics and proved his value, amidst all that marshalled history, in the role of delivering poet.
“Gangel: You mentioned before you get inspiration from conversations overheard in the streets. Where else?
Ashbery: I’m very much of a magpie as far as reading goes. I read anything which comes to my hand. National Enquirer, Dear Abby, a magazine at the dentist, a Victorian novel. I don’t have a program in anything, as a matter of fact.
Someone remarked about an obscene passage in a poem. I replied that this shocked him not because it was there, but because there were not more of them.
There is an American feeling that if you do one thing, you’ve got to do that and nothing else. It goes against my grain.
Poetry includes anything and everything.
Gangel: Do you find it easy to relate to people?
Ashbery: Yes I do. I am a very gregarious person. This often surprises people, because my poetry does have a reputation for being aloof and antihuman. But I’m quite the reverse. I enjoy talking with just about anybody. My students, for instance. We get along very well socially. I don’t believe in closing myself off from anybody or anything.
My best writing gets done when I’m being distracted by people who are calling me or errands that I have to do. Those things seem to help the creative process, in my case.”
–From Sue Gangel, “An Interview with John Ashbery” (originally printed in the San Francisco Review of Books [November 1977], rep. in Joe David Bellamy, Ed. American Poetry Observed: Poets On Their Work (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1984), 14.
“I am interested very much in debased and demotic forms of expression…. They often seem so much more moving than something that is beautifully phrased and composed. The crudeness of a Hollywood sound adventure picture on the one hand and a sort of high-flown translation from the Greek on the other were both elements that attracted me and not entirely just to make fun of them either, but to sort of purify the language of the tribe.”
–John Ashbery, on the film Where the North Begins, and its influence on his plays The Philosopher and The Compromise. (American Poetry Review, May-June 1984) courtesy of the Ashbery Resource Center.
Grace Cavalieri: Well, the reason I asked about your process is because the vowels are so musical. That is either from years of hard work, or something that actually could not have been constructed. The vowels in that poem are extraordinary, and it is the motion in the poem. Of course I’m on the other side of the table; I have the opportunity to listen. And I was just thinking how one gets into such a space of comfort, to use vowels that way, and that’s a very musical poem. Also, it has, one of your characteristics, the direct address in the middle, which jettisons where you have been. And as I always say, you’re very mischievous, you lull us along in the poem and then you do something quite unusual. The last lines, with your adverbs, are unusual for you too—”softly,” “fiercely”—now that’s interesting. I see they’re in parentheses. I heard them in parentheses.
Louise Glück: That interests me.
GC: I have often said you do something no other poet does as well, and it’s not fair to leave you there. You can take the emotion, the very fragile feeling, and you build a scenario around it. You build a house around the feeling. Now that sounds like something everyone does, but no one does it exactly as you do. It is misunderstood as autobiography sometime, but it is fiction, except for the feelings. Where did you get your confidence in story?
LG: Well, that’s a quite curious question.
I adore the fact that these two questions alone are nearly complete paragraphs, and that Louise Glück manages to answer them both with a single, noncommittal sentence.
Just in case you’re suspicious, I did absolutely no editing. Go ahead: check.
If you haven’t already seen it, Daniel Nester’s interview with Rachel Shukert, in which he asks the same questions that Teen Magazine asked Jamie Lynn Spears, is wonderful in too many ways to mention.
Have you gotten advice from mom or sister about business?
Well, my mom says that homosexuals are evil, but I think the guy that does my highlights is gay. So I guess my mom is just really old-fashioned, because he does a really good job.
Daniel’s poem Stardust Memories appeared on Linebreak on March 4, by the way.
The Sept. issue of The Believer contains a fantastic interview with scientist Richard Dawkins by poet and philospher Troy Jollimore. My favorite nugget is this section on the differences between metaphorical and scientific understanding:
BLVR: That made me think again about what makes poetry poetry, and I think there’s an interesting thing that can be said on an abstract level, which is that I think poets have a conception of truth that is different from what philosophers have and what scientists have. Philosophers and scientists tend to think of truth as converging, so that ultimately all the theories come down to the one truth that accommodates everything else. Whereas if we think about metaphorical truth, as poets do, we don’t think of metaphorical truth as necessarily converging. We don’t think of the latest metaphor as replacing the earlier ones. We think more of adding metaphors, and so you just come up with a new one, and now we see an aspect of the world that we didn’t describe before.
RD: Yes, I’m sure that’s right, but maybe truth is not what we’re talking about anyway there. In the romantic period, poets came close to despising scientific truth, didn’t they? [People] think science takes the joy out. Well, I wrote a book called Unweaving the Rainbow, which took on Keats’s idea of the rainbow being unwoven. It’s a view that I could never view with much sympathy, because it seems to me that the more we understand, the more beautiful it becomes. Richard Feynman, somewhere, talks about seeing a red flower and how you might think it’s beautiful, and wax beautiful, wax poetic about it, but he sees a greater beauty because he understands why it looks as it does. There is a level of beauty in understanding, and scientific understanding when you really get it is aesthetic; it is among the highest aesthetic experiences that you can enjoy.
The section exemplifies why I love most of the interviews in The Believer — because they’re never interviews per se. There are few questions and even fewer answers. The interview, then, becomes a simple record, a transcript of two brilliant people riffing on mutual obsessions.
Only an excerpt of the interview is available online. Buy the issue to read the rest.
Oh, and Jollimore’s first book of poems is Tom Thomson in Purgatory.
The paradox of blogging: when we are doing the most we could write about, we have the least time to write about it. Today I spent 90 minutes in front of an undergraduate class, answering questions. To walk into a room of 35 students and see your book sitting in front of each of them is a bit staggering.
If I were a more poised person, perhaps I would have decided long ago which were my vetted, “safe” answers for interviews, and which were answers to steer from. But instead I tend to answer things on a gut-level. Which makes for quick turnaround. And answers that will possibly haunt me in my old age. Some things I learned from my own Q&A:
-The second section of my book has discernible anger. I’m secretly proud of this, actually. There should be more anger in poems. This also elicited the quotation (on the topic of heightened rhetoric) “I’ve never actually asked anyone to make the bitch of me in a relationship…”
-If you use someone’s proper name in a poem, readers notice.
-Clarity is a good thing. No need to apologize for it. It doesn’t mean your poem is a simpler poem, or a less-beautiful poem.
-My favorites from the book are other people’s favorites.
-If you like my book too much, i.e. multiple re-readings, the cover may split away from the interior pages. Ack.
-In every audience, there is that one person who really, truly, wants to talk about sonnets and sestinas.
-If they ask if you want a chair, don’t bother. If you start out on your feet, you’ll stay on your feet.
The questions were great, though–quirky, engaged, genuine. When everyone has read a common text you can make very detailed references. To ensure everyone had read the text (no offense, but we’re talking undergrads, just getting back into a school year), the professor had actually given a quiz on my book the week before. A quiz! I suppose the key would be asking for analysis of the objective factual/mythological elements (Orpheus, those barrel-bound folks going over Niagara Falls), versus asking “So, do you think the speaker actually cheated on her boyfriend?”
When the conversation veered toward the dividing lines between private and public narrative, I told the students that any contemporary, American first-book poet who doesn’t admit to the litmus test of “Will this book make my mother cry?” is lying. I also said I hate prompts, rebel against prompts, think that prompts render the poem not-entirely-mine, and therefore useless to me, nine times out of ten. Prompts are the lifeblood of the undergrad workshop. Filter. Must. Learn. To. Filter.
My payment for the visit was a bottle of water. It is a glamorous life I lead. I came home to see my book reviewed in the latest copy of Allergic Living. That’s right: I’m next to What Else to Eat: The Dairy-, Egg-, and Nut-Free Food Allergy Cookbook. They photoshopped my cover art onto a generic “book” template for the illustration, which means it looks like Theories of Falling came out in hardback. Not that I am complaining. There are thousands of copies of this magazines out there, on the waiting-room table of your local doctors’ offices. Who knows? I could become a Christmas gift.
After touching down to pick up mail from home, it was off an evening titled “Rise Up and Hear: Honoring Abraham Lincoln’s Legacy.” Cosponsored by the NEA and the Poetry Foundation; hosted at the Department of the Interior. Featuring readings by Dana Gioia, Robert Pinsky, Kevin Young, and (this is where it gets surreal) Joan Allen and Sam Waterston. Poems Lincoln either loved–or inspired–by Vachel Lindsay, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and so on.
Free wine. Sculpted, dramatic auditorium. Classy reading. But I have to say, which gave me more buck for my day in terms of poetry? Those 35 students in an Indian-Summer-hot classroom. Bottle of water in hand.