More wonderful answers by super poets... Part II of III... a follow-up post to...
http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2016/09/eleven-questions-for-eleven-poets-by-alan-michael-parker.html
Question 6: Which poem in your book arrived mostly whole?
Elizabeth Colen: Quite a few of the poems in What Weaponry arrived mostly whole, in a sense.
While I rarely have moments where one perfect sentence follows another perfect sentence and so on, what I do have sometimes is a few focused hours of obsessiveness. In this, I write a line, read it out loud, and rewrite and read out loud until the line is perfect, move on to the next line and repeat, until I feel something is capital-D Done. Sometimes this takes an hour, sometimes five or six or eight. But the poem is complete after this. And more than half of these poems were written like this.
I wrote 90% of the first draft while traveling by train one summer several years ago. I had long stretches of time of the landscape rushing by and the sound of the train cocooning me. This combination of continuous forward motion and white noise ended up being an incredibly productive whole-poem space.
“Burnside,” for example came about after I learned the word “undersound” and a poem fell nearly whole out of that idea.
Carolina Ebeid: “Epithalamium for Alejandra & Wojtek” came to me in one swoop. This rarely happens to me. I want to believe other poems will arrive like that; I’d leave the porch light on for them. I usually work from the images/words/lines I collect in my notebooks, so that I am often building the poems through collage. On the golden occasion, I sit and write a full poem beginning to end. This kind of poem seems like a telepathic massage received, like I didn’t write it, I only acted as scribe. These poems tend to be short.
Max Ritvo: “Poem to My Litter” arrived word-for-word as a whole. I just needed to cut a sappy line at the end, and Paul Muldoon at the New Yorker made me see the light of that very quickly. “Poem to My Litter” has so many beautiful and tragic life facts in it—it's a poem about real life mice that had my real life tumors cloned into them so that we could test different chemotherapy poisons out on them. It didn't need the rather erratic help of my image-making faculties, it just needed a calm and compassionate and loving tone, with the right dose of self-awareness, to bring out the truth of my life in it. But I must say, its initial lineation was miserable—the poem was all scattered, droopy, ragged, ugly stanzas. I needed to whip it into beauty, and I needed the help of my genius editor and best friend Elizabeth Metzger to make me understand that long couplets were the best and most merciless way to expose the world.
Chris Santiago: “[Island of Fault Lines]” came about in the middle of a wicked thunderstorm. I was in a budget hotel on the island of Palawan, it was muggy as hell, and the power kept flickering on and off. I was cranky. Most of my anger, though, came from research: I’d been spending the last week hitting archives and museums, and doing interviews for a fiction project about the Philippine-American War. Few people talk about this war, although estimates for the civilian death toll range from 200,000 to 1,000,000. But my research took me beyond it, into the countless other misfortunes endured by Filipinos, on both sides of the Pacific. The anger had been building steadily, and developing its own logic; it became this poem, which, except for the ending, spoke itself onto the page in a single sitting.
Lee Sharkey: “Lashing the body from the bones” came all of a piece and quickly. Essentially a found poem, it is a distillation of the transcripts of the poet Peretz Markish’s testimony at his trial for crimes against the state in the last months of the Stalinist era, as published in Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov’s Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Markish was a Yiddish-language poet widely acclaimed in the early years of the Soviet Union but later executed along with twelve other prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals on what has become known as The Night of the Murdered Poets. My contribution to the poem consists entirely of my excisions. The testimony is so Kafkaesque it bore no emendation or commentary.
Clint Smith: The poem, For the Taxi Cabs that Pass me in Harvard Square, was written largely in a single sitting. It, like much of my collection, was written in a sociopolitical moment when conversations around racism were at the forefront of our country’s collective discourse. The problem is not that we weren’t talking about issues of race, but that we were largely talking about it in the wrong way. The average American’s conception of racism is that it is a violent interpersonal confrontation, and thus racism is imagined as singularly performative—something that only exist if it can be easily witnessed or observed. Additionally, much of the discourse centered around how the victims of racist acts—police violence or otherwise—would not have experienced such violence if they were better educated, or behaved with a different sort of decorum. This poem came to me during a winter evening in which several friends and I were attempting to hail a cab near Harvard, where I attend graduate school, to go to dinner in the city. Cabs continued to pass us until a white friend stepped to the curb of the street and was able to hail one on his first attempt. It is moments like those that disabuse me of the notion the race won’t matter once you attain a certain level of education, credentials, or prestige. Blackness remains the coat you can’t take off.
Tony Trigilio: Because it’s a book-length poem, I’ll focus on one segment that came to me almost whole, and required very little revision: the three pages written about a trip my wife, Liz, and I took to Madison, Wisconsin, right after a two-week cancer scare in summer 2015. This segment of the book, written about a crowd of people and ducks on a Saturday night at Madison’s Lake Mendota pier, came in one rush about a week after we returned to Chicago. I couldn’t get the physicality of the ducks out of my mind—couldn’t stop thinking about how these ducks were so unselfconsciously living through their bodies. The people lounging on the pier that evening, just before twilight, seemed to be living in much the same way, stuffing bratwurst sandwiches in their mouths and guzzling beer in midsummer Saturday twilight. Even without the cancer scare, we would’ve experienced the evening much like the people around us at the pier did—minus the bratwurst—but this night our bodies were lightened by the sheer, primal gratitude that we were simply alive.
Question 7: What are you doing formally in this book that’s new for you?
Elizabeth Colen: Well, it’s a novel in prose poems, which is either not really a thing, or it is a hybrid genre, or it is an ambitious pile of poems, or it is a novel that can’t sit still. I took two characters from a poem I had written years before (“Fifty Miles of Shoulder” from Money for Sunsets) and decided to give them more life and a fuller history, really get to know them. Because for all their effed-up-edness, I really liked and wanted to spend more time with them. So the concept itself was new, shaping a pile of poems into a cohesive narrative arc when I’m not generally a “narrative” poet. Within the text of the book also exists an erasure—words bolded throughout, which creates another layer of the narrative when read in isolation.
In some ways it’s vital for me to feel I’m doing something entirely new with each book, formally and in terms of content. Because otherwise, why bother? I suppose it might be different if I made a living off my books. You know, would I hit that bar to get the cheese each time? But as it is I’m just being accountable to the obsessions and allowing whatever form emerges.
Dana Levin: The composition of “En Route” took the longest, was the most fraught and foreign to me, and I still worry about whether it, y’know, works. I loved working in such short fragments, working with overheard speech, finding, finally, an overall conception that felt like it could orchestrate the parts into something a little more than ephemeral. Book-wise, bringing in our engagement with the Digiverse, from social media to on-line scrabble to taking selfies: this was new material to figure out tonally, since it’s so banal and intense and fun and significant and ridiculous, and pervades us all.
Lee Sharkey: Like many poets I see my work as being in conversation with the poetry that has informed it. That sense was particularly acute when I was working on this book, where I was engaged in retrieving fragments of what was almost lost, particularly in the case of Markish and Abraham Sutzkever, condemned to present-day obscurity as a consequence of writing in a tongue largely annihilated by genocide. In poems such as “Old World,” “Lyric,” and “Something we might give” I conceived the page as a simultaneous present where poets whose voices were inflected by the Shoah and I might engage in intimate exchange—a risky enterprise but one I felt impelled to. Integrating words from their poems directly into my own gave me the sense that they were speaking through my mouth, a way of ceding space to them, an act of homage in which reading and writing, listening and speaking and, it seemed, self and other, merged.
Clint Smith: To be honest, the act of writing a book itself was a new formal process for me. My relationship to poetry was born out of performance. One of the first times I felt viscerally moved by art was as a college student at a Friday night poetry slam at the Nuyorican Poets Café. It is impossible for me to write a poem without considering how the poem will sound aloud. I want to hear the music of the lines, the way the mouth is rendered a different instrument by every stanza. The entire tradition of poetry comes not from the page, but from the tongue – the griots, Homer, Shakespeare. Still, translating that music to the page has been a new and wonderful artistic endeavor for me. To think about how a poem will be received when I no longer own the sound has been so fascinating to work through.
Megan Snyder-Camp: The three sequences that make up Wintering were initially composed as haibun, which fit the travelogue arc of the book and offered a way to shuttle between research and daylight. A few years into my research, I came across unpublished archival materials involving “Couch’s Ned,” an enslaved man prosecuted for destroying the “Indian vocabularies” Lewis and Clark collected. The urgency I felt in sharing this story, and particularly the parts of this story that had been missing for the past 200 years, was tempered by the responsibility I felt, as a white writer, to proceed slowly and with clarity. This gas-and-brake shaped the work formally (hopefully not into a figure 8 train race). I needed a between-form, a both-form: interrupted, dropped, doubling-back. One day I came up with what I call stanzagraphs: six(ish)-line text units that are both right and left-justified, with a volta between stanzagraphs.
It proved a strict and generative form, and a bane to later editors and formatters. Each press had their own font and spacing, prompting significant changes in content each time the piece was to be printed. I like that these sequences must shift depending on where they appear, each specifically shaped by the limits of the field in which it appears, each version equally final and yet built from the others.
Tony Trigilio: Like the first volume, this book is written entirely in couplets. Book 2 swallows forms that aren’t conventionally suitable to the couplet. In this book, I’m often creating formal challenges for myself, including a sestina written in couplets—which eventually became a two-and-one-half page, nineteen-couplet sestina (with one hanging final line). I felt like I was persuading the couplet to admit a form it’s not usually comfortable with. I noticed the couplet-sestina is sneakier than a conventional sestina. I mean, a traditional sestina just announces itself to you—loudly, unabashedly—with its six blocked-out, six-line stanzas and the deceptive finality of its three-line refrain. Of course, I love this about the conventional sestina. But a couplet-sestina is furtive; it seems to unfold on the page like any other set of couplet pairs, but it does so in a stealthy way—repeating its end words almost shyly at first, even as the obsessive repetitions start to accumulate. It defies our expectations for the couplet and the sestina, creating a clandestine sestina, which, I hope, actually heightens the tension that comes from the cyclical logic of the conventional sestina form.
I also wrote the longest ghazal of my life for this book: a three-and-one-half page monster that’s actually part of a longer four-and-one-half page sentence. One page into the sentence, the poem shifts into a ghazal, just as I’m beginning to summarize the show’s interminable sixty-episode “dream-curse” plotline. The ghazal suddenly insinuates itself into the sentence—just as, for the Dark Shadows viewer, the dream-curse abruptly takes over the show’s narrative arc. A sentence that begins with an account of a trip my wife Liz and I took to Seattle drifts backward in time to a memory of a farcical lost-luggage encounter I had with USAir in the 1990s, then lands back at the Seattle Sheraton in late-2014, with the sun coming through our hotel window as the two of us watched Dark Shadows; and then, without warning, the dream-curse ghazal begins, eventually unfolding in such a way that the ghazal mimics a recurring dream (fitting, since the “dream-curse” was itself an entire plotline built around a supernatural recurring dream passed on like a loopy, psychic contagion from one character to the next).
Monica Youn: I’ve always been pulled toward the minimal, to extreme compression, to cutting things down to their hinges. But in this book I was consciously trying to resist that impulse, to go for the long sustain. I wanted to push how long I could stay immersed in a particular image, a particular syntactical unit, long past the time at which I would normally have moved on. It’s an effort for me to resist the urge to cut away, to think in terms of integral wholeness rather than exquisite fragments, to opt for the slow build rather than the jump-cut. I wanted to give an image and/or the argument time to develop enough materiality that it could push back against my authorial control. I wanted to give the poem time to find its own shape, form its own strata.
Also, it seems important that this is the first book I’ve written since I’ve stopped being a lawyer in 2013. One of the side effects of legal practice is that it changes your perception of time. When I was in private practice, I billed my time in six-minute increments; once I moved into public interest election law, I often had to respond to 400 emails per day. That sort of pace changes the texture of your thoughts. Since I stopped practicing law, I can feel a slow unclenching, the occasional mind-cramp. I think of my work in longer forms as, in part, a long-overdue stretching practice, a necessary corrective to years spent living in intensified snippets.
Elizabeth Colen: Richard Siken’s Crush. That summer on the train I travelled light, only bringing one book I could read over and over again. What I wrote was not a response or an imitation of any kind, but was written while in the thrall of Siken’s work. I did crosswords, talked to strangers, read Crush, watched the landscape, and wrote.
Carole Maso’s The Art Lover. I had recently read The Art Lover, and was interested by Maso’s layering of time and tried to model this in the story I was telling. The ways in which we are never moving linearly through our days, but rather constantly time traveling, backwards and forwards mentally and emotionally.
Rachel Loden’s Hotel Imperium. I re-read Hotel Imperium at some point in the months of revising and shaping What Weaponry. My poem “No One Waits in the Side Yard” wouldn’t exist without Loden’s “Glasburyon.”
C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining. I never go long without re-reading Deepstep. I think the music of this book is speaking to and through me in everything I write.
And William Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
Carolina Ebeid: Most of the poems in this book were written during my MFA 2009-2012, though a few of them were written in the years before and after that; one of them was written as early as 2002! I have kept it, making little changes here and there. In other words, you could say, the book spans from 2002 to 2014. But I won’t tear my brain in trying to represent an eon. Instead, I will offer this list:
Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters and Trouble in Mind
Emily Dickinson’s Selected Letters
Anne Carson’s Plainwater
C.D Wright’s Steal Away
Kate Greenstreet’s The Last Four Things
Dana Levin: Lucy Corin: One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses
“Their brains burst from the noise. A spinning cow or lamp broke them. Their insides fell out. Their fingers crumbled. The inside of my skin was the earth, and grass took root and grew toward my heart. I had drunk and eaten enough pesticides to make it possible. My organs, robotic as zombies, worked with what they got. I saw myself clumping about, dribbling clippings from my razor-sharp teeth, pulsing with quotations.” (“The New Me”)
Emily St. John Mandel: Station Eleven.
An encouraging novel about the end of the world! As I read it, I started to think: if the lights come back on, I’m not sure I’m going to be happy about it.
T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
At some point in the composition of “En Route,” I realized that there were a lot of echoes and nods to ol’ Tom, not just in that poem, but here and there throughout the book: the snippets of voices of the modern, mad or dead; the way the chasm of centuries between the ancient and the contemporary seemed, at times, to collapse; and other, more overt, shout-outs, as well as the title and situation and mood of that essential, maddening poem.
Facebook feeds
No Banana Palace without Facebook! Which, while no book, is surely a journal: a word from Old French, says the OED, meaning daily; as noun, a day, a day's work (man, social media can feel like work, sometimes). Also a measure of land, a breviary, etc. (= Spanish jornal, Portuguese jornal, Italian giornale), which of course has the Latin word brevis embedded in it, meaning short. All from late Latin diurnāl-em of or belonging to a day: diurnal.
What was I saying?
Frank Herbert’s Dune and Children of Dune (SyFy channel miniseries, 2000 + 2003)
Okay, I know you all love David Lynch’s movie from 1984, but if you are at all fervent about Frank Herbert’s endless saga (cue masses chanting Muad’Dib) these SyFy movies are it, hilarious production values and all. Herbert’s universe is noteworthy for a few things: The Butlerian Jihad of the distant past, a revolution against “thinking machines”! Gigantic, terrifying, cinnamon-breathing worms! Bene Gesserit “witches” and their very complicated breeding program! Court intrigue meets desert guerilla mystical warfare! The strange hybrid of Zen and Islam that characterizes religion (Herbert concocting this in the 1960s!) And the most valuable drug/commodity of the universe, the Spice! Which must flow! Or no one will be able to fold space and visit other planets with more than one moon. “You’re drunk on too much time,” advises valiant resurrected-by-Tleilaxu-engineers-after-being-blown-up-by-Harkonnen-missiles Duncan Idaho. “I’m drunk on too much me,” replies Paul I-am-the-Messiah-Tyrant-Spice-Freak-Muad’Dib-Who-Can-See-Past-and-Future. I think about this exchange all the time. Must have something to do with Facebook.
David Rivard: Ashbery’s translation of The Illuminations and Stephen Berg’s versions of Rimbaud in still unilluminated I. No better help than Rimbaud in approaching the hallucinatory feel of life in the modern age.
Fanny Howe’s Selected Poems. Fanny’s poems have a compacted sonic effect that is bound up with the speed of feeling/thought, and they compel me. They get a lot in, without taking up much space. Like haiku operating at a different scale. Plus, she speaks American.
Patrizia Cavalli’s My Poems Won’t Change the World. There’s an impulsiveness and insouciance in Cavalli’s work, but she never loses sight of her moods, the feelings that she’s constantly reacting to and out of. Smart, lively, devious, sincere, candid, oblique, bemused, devastated—why can’t American poetry be more like this?
Michael O’Brien’s Sills. Because you can do a lot with an image, if you know what you’re doing with an image. His are deeply resonant, without any ornament or rhetorical effect. Quiet, clear, but strange, with an slight ache sometimes at their core, and ache that might be called an adult sense of wonder.
Robert Creeley’s Collected Poems. Because sometimes you don’t need images, you need a candor and intimacy of feeling and thinking. You just need somebody talking to you, talking like it simply matters, and making that talk into music.
Lee Sharkey: When I was writing the poems in Walking Backwards my reading became concentrated on work by and about Jewish poets whose voices have outlived attempts to silence not just them but an entire cultural heritage. Among the familiars on my bookshelf: Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger; Nelly Sachs’sGlowing Enigmas, trans. Michael Hamburger; Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs: Correspondence, trans. Christopher Clark; Joseph Leftwich’s An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Literature (particularly for his translations of Markish); and A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, trans. Barbara and Benjamin Harshav. Ilya Kaminsky and G. C. Waldrep’s anthology Homage to Paul Celan—may I slip in a sixth?—was also invaluable. Of many, these are but a few.
Clint Smith: I read Ross Gay’s Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude about halfway into the writing of the manuscript and from that moment, it fundamentally changed the trajectory of the poems that would be included in the collection. His commitment to joy and the celebration of the quotidian moved me deeply.
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has its hand imprinted throughout this collection. When I was a high school English teacher, I read the book with my seniors. I taught that class as a Socratic seminar, so most of the analysis of the text came from the students themselves. Their beautiful readings and interpretations of Ellison’s work were as essential as the book itself.
Safia Elhillo’s chapbook Asmarani is one of the most beautiful collections of work that I’ve ever read, her debut full-length collection, The January Children, is sure to dazzle. If it doesn’t it will be a travesty. The visual aesthetics of her work—her use of line breaks, punctuation, form—inspired many of my own aesthetic decisions. It showed me, more than anything else has, that the poem should inform the form, rather than attempting to fit a poem into a form that it is ill-suited for.
Gregory Pardlo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Digest, was an incredible example of navigating between, and embracing, a myriad of different worlds in one collection. I love how Greg, in his writing, seems to claim all of the world as his own. Which is to say, his work represents the plurality of the human experience while remaining deeply personal. There is no allusion, no translation, no world off limits.
If I had to select a final book, it would be Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action was White. Katnelson’s book is one of the most important historical texts that I’ve ever read, and completely recalibrated my understanding of American racial inequality. The way it outlined how the black community was purposefully and systemically left out of New Deal legislation, forever changed my relationship to historyand how I situate myself within it.
Megan Snyder-Camp: Wintering was research-driven, written with an ever-higher stack of nonfiction(ish) books beside me. To choose five books from those six years…okay, limiting this top-five list just to poetry and doubling it to eleven:
CS Giscombe’s Giscome Road
dg nanouk okpik’s corpse whale
Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior
Murder Ballads and A Murmuration of Starlings by Jake Adam York
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’sTwERK
James Thomas Stevens and Caroline Sinavaiana’s Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations
Lia Purpura’s King Baby
Frank X Walker’s Buffalo Dance
Martha Collins’s White Papers
Melinda Mueller’s What The Ice Gets by
Tributaries by Laura Da’
...well, plus Maps of the Imagination by Peter Turchi.
Tony Trigilio: David Trinidad, Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera: David’s book is a direct inspiration. We’re close friends, and we regularly exchange and critique each other’s poems. As we talked about his Peyton Place haiku—he wrote one haiku in response to every episode (and two made-for-TV movies) of the 1960s soap opera, Peyton Place—the soap opera subject matter often brought back memories for me of watching Dark Shadows with my mother. “You should write a Dark Shadows book,” David would say, but it wasn’t until he was nearing the end of the book, in 2011, that the architecture and procedural constraints for The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) started to take shape in my imagination.
Bram Stoker, Dracula: Well, Bram Stoker, of course. I’ll never forget receiving my copy in sixth grade from the Scholastic Book Services—expecting something like a comic book or a Hammer Films fright-fest and finding, instead, that this was even scarier, combining the restrained, mannered language of the kind of books assigned in school with the cold-blooded vampire tale that Dark Shadows was for me. Without knowing the concept of “genre,” the book was, all the same, my first experience of genre mashup: it was, for me, horror film and soap opera, comic book terror and canonical literary artifact. I remember at first being incredibly turned off that it was an epistolary novel. I had no idea what the term meant at the time, of course, but I knew how I felt about the form. My sixth-grade self needed some time with the book before I developed a fear of Dracula. I was initially unimpressed that the story was told in letters and diary entries written after the fact, after the immediate horror of the undead sneaking into a bedroom and biting someone’s neck. But now, as an adult, the epistolary element is just one more bit of productive/generative chaos that makes Dracula important to my book.
Jesse Reklaw, Ten Thousand Things to Do (a diary comic/graphic novel): As I started reading the book, what compelled me most of all was how deftly Reklaw executed his procedural constraint, especially how he managed to craft narrative tension into what otherwise could seem like relentlessly mundane dailiness. Each page is a four-panel diary comic of a day in his life from 9/17/08 to 9/16/09. I admire how Reklaw, at the core, is not trying to do anything but document a life—and I can’t imagine a more difficult and productive task as an artist.
A.R. Ammons, Garbage: The couplets, Alan. The couplets. An entire book of couplets—gripping, evocative, often self-referential couplets. I read Garbage for the first time in summer 2010, the summer before I started this project. Three pages into it, I couldn’t imagine Ammons’s book written in any other form (his winking tercets on pages forty-two and seventy-nine, too, inspire those few moments in my book when I confess to the reader that I’ve added an extra sentence—that a particular episode of Dark Shadows was so important it required two sentences instead of one).
On Kawara’s Date Paintings: This is not a book—I’m cheating for this part of the interview and including a visual conceptual art project as one of the “books” that inspired mine: On Kawara's Today series, a collection of 3,000 date paintings—each of which features only an inscription, painted in white on variously colored backgrounds, of the date it was composed. Each date painting itself had to be finished on the day it was started or Kawara would destroy it. Kawara composed the date paintings in over 112 cities during a thirty-seven-year period, and the project ended only with his death. My dear cousin Michael Trigilio, a multimedia artist in San Diego (and the artist who designed my book’s cover) first introduced me to Kawara a few weeks after I’d moved to Chicago in late-summer 1998. We were at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and he showed me one of the date paintings and explained the project’s conceptual framework. I was transfixed by the concept and procedural constraint Kawara was working from—and his serious sense of humor, fusing dailiness and mortality in the project—and I decided that I had to write something that could reflect what I was feeling in that moment at the museum. I had to write something that would translate Kawara’s concept from visual art into literature. The Dark Shadows project is that work for me.
Monica Youn: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée
Ovid, The Metamorphoses (especially Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid)
Claudia Rankine, Plot
Ariana Reines, The Cow
Virgil, The Georgics
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