DA: In writer bios, we often get lists of awards, books, and other publications. Rarely do I read what inspired a writer to pick up a pen and attempt to write a poem. What do you remember about what compelled you to write? When did you start writing?

JP: Awards mean little, but it feels good to get one now and then. It can be encouraging. But when they are not forthcoming, a writer still writes. I was studying nuclear engineering at Georgia Tech. In short, I was unhappy, and I knew that writing (and reading) made me intensely happy, so I ignorantly set out for the territories. I am still ignorantly plodding my way along, perhaps a little smarter through making mistakes and occasionally doing something right.

DA: In “Backwards,” the speaker thinks of Chernobyl and asks, “In their dreams, is the glow out there like embers/on the bed of a dead fire?” How did this poem come into being?

JP: I read an article about those who still live in the villages closest to Chernobyl and how they dealt with some of the fallout and how they tried to continue to live where they had always lived. It was quite horrific, knowing a thing or two about nuclear energy and the lumped burnable poisons that come along with it. That, combined with the fact that my friend´s dog was chewing up our couch like there was no tomorrow became the beginning of the poem. I wrote it while a grad student at Florida, but I was never happy with it, and I finally found a way (I think) to make it work just a few years ago. So the poem really took over 10 years to write.

DA: Over the seven years we’ve worked together on 32 Poems, I’ve noticed your love for the sonnet. What do you like about this particular form? What about the form challenges you? Lastly, what do you dislike about the form?

JP: To continue with the engineering theme, I truly believe I love the math of it. The 8\6 or 4\4\4\2 of it and all the patterns nestled in between. When a poet is able to map language and ideas into and out of this patterning, excellent things can happen. Now, I get a lot of really awful sonnets, as well, and I don’t take those. I get competent ones, and I don’t take those. I take the excellent ones, and there is something about the form that allows for excellence. There aren’t many excellent villanelles, or pantoums, or ghazals, I feel. But the sonnet, there are hundreds. I could probably write an essay about what makes them tick, but I will just leave it at that.

DA: This past month, I’ve been re-reading Edna St. VIncent Millay’s sonnets. In the collection I’m reading of her work, J.D. McClatchy points out that Millay was nearly forgotten for several decades. At one point, Edmund Wilson claimed she was one of our best poets. What are your thoughts on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets? Secondly, what are your thoughts on poets who will last into the next century?

JP: I’ve read a lot of her poems. She has some good ones, some fine ones, but most of them, I don’t think they are powerful. Not in the way that Shakespeare’s work, or Spencer, or even Cummings, is powerful. I’m in Spain, right now, so I don’t have my Millay at hand, but I remember that I found them more abstract than I liked. Shakespeare’s are abstract, in the old high way, but his rhetorical structures, his diction and syntax, are extraordinary beyond the pale. But Cummings. There’s a sonneteer who has been overlooked a bit, because people are more interested in his tricks and his punctuation. I haven’t read them in a while, but I remember reading his sonnets a while back and thinking that they were extremely well-wrought. Greg Williamson is extraordinary. His sonnets are smart and funny. The review of his recent book in POETRY, well, that woman is about as stupid a critic as comes around the bend. She talked about rhyming couplets in his poems. There are no rhyming couplets. She suggested some of the poems turned on the word, “until.” They ALL turn on the word until. She suggested they needed a deeper theme. They are ALL about DEATH. I wish I had a better word for her, but the best I can come up with is “stupid.” Carrie Jerrell has a killer group of sonnets in her recent book. She was a student of Greg’s and of mine, so she had better write a good sonnet. But I tell you, she is better than good. I like what Hopkins does now and then, but I think his greater achievement is the curtal sonnet. Sometimes the longer poems are a bit overly exclamatory in their intensity of alliteration and assonance. It’s like the food you see on that website, I think it’s called, ThisIsWhyYou’reFat.com. I mean, some of it, you could actually eat it and it would taste good. But it’s over the top a lot of the time. Well, that’s probably an exaggeration. I know William Logan thinks Hopkins is too much. Alicia Stallings has a few perfect sonnets I wouldn’t trade for anything.

We need to move along from some of these “prettier” or “stylish” modes and just write good sentences and good lines.

DA: For the past twelve months, I’ve visited several colleges and answered student questions about running a literary magazine and poetry writing. One of the questions I am asked most is: “How do you select poems?” Could you explain for 32 Poems blog readers what you look for in a poem?

JP: I look for language that is not used up. Fresh language. A lot of poets write like other poets. I steer away from that. Twenty years ago, I might have taken some of these poems. But now, we need to move along from some of these “prettier” or “stylish” modes and just write good sentences and good lines. I prize the beautiful image as much as anybody else, but the most rare thing is the beautiful sentence. I wish poets could write sentences like Herman Melville or Marilyn Robinson. That said, Melville was a horrible poet. I went back to his poems recently, to make sure, and no one need bother. Everyone should read Moby Dick and his short stories and Pierre, among his other fiction.

DA: Another question I’m often asked — and so think blog readers may be interested in your answer — is how long did it take for you to write your book? What steps did you take to get it published?

JP: My first book took a long long time to write. I was sending it out for about ten years. Now, the first six years of sending it out, I thank God it wasn’t published. And rejection does, most often, make the poems and the manuscript improve. The second book and the third book came out relatively quickly, but many of those poems had been in the works for a long time (SEE above). I’m not always sure which poem will end up in which manuscript. I’ve been holding back some love poems for a while, and I hope these will be a part of the book manuscript I’m now composing. I sent that first book to contest after contest. I must have sent it to 50 of them over the years. Maybe more. I was a finalist a handful of times (or more—I lost count). Finally, Roger Lathbury, with Orchises Press, took it. He helped me sort out a few of the weaknesses and to ditch a few very poor titles for the less showy, yet very austere and traditional title, POEMS.

We invited fans of the 32 Poems Facebook page to ask questions of John Poch. How often do readers get to ask the editor of a magazine their questions? Their questions, and John Poch’s answers, follow:

Questions from Fans of the 32 Poems Facebook Page

Facebook Fan: With what journal(s) have you had trouble placing work?

The New Yorker, Field, The Atlantic, and Black Warrior Review have never taken my poems — and many, many others. Even places that have taken poems rejected me many times and continue to say no to new batches of poems. POETRY finally took two of my poems after twenty years of sending to them. They may very well never take another. I don´t think I´ll ever get to the point where someone always wants one of my poems. I mean, I´d hate that. Wouldn´t you? W.S. Merwin writes some awful poems, but who is going to say no to a Merwin poem? Probably not many editors. I might be wrong about that. And Merwin writes wonderful poems, which I´d like him to send to 32 Poems.

Facebook Fan: Whither poetry? Do the problems in publishing pass poetry by, with the subculture growing among its acolytes?

I don´t understand this question. Which subculture and which acolytes? But I will say that, sure, problems in publishing have little to do with poetry. Hardly anyone publishes and promotes poetry to any remarkable end. That makes sense, though, because hardly anyone buys it. The problem isn´t with publishing, but with reading. Americans, in general, don´t read and, especially, don´t buy poetry. Oh well. I love it. I read it. I buy it.

Facebook Fan: Do you see self-publishing making an impact within the poetry community?

I don´t think it makes much of an impact, but I´d have to say WHAT poetry community. The bookfair at AWP? The POETRY Foundation? The local SLAM cafe?

Some good poets have self-published their early work. If I´m not mistaken, Yeats published his own work. You can´t beat that, can you? You haven´t asked me this, but I´ll say that I don´t want to publish my own work in bookform right now. Maybe a broadside or a little chapbook I give to friends. Other than this, I sorta like the rejection, the refining fire of the whole process as one SUBMITS to another reader at a rigorous level in publishing and goes through that process for a while, letting the whole process change one´s work. For the better, one hopes. Certainly, more than 99 percent of poetry mss. being submitted to publishers are not ready for publication. Sadly, many of these slip through and are published. It´s not sad for the person who has been waiting for years and trying really hard, but it´s sad for their work, which could have been better. I hope that doesn´t sound snobby, but it´s true. I speak of my own books. They are much better for the rejection their earlier incarnations “suffered.” Perhaps they should have waited longer. Poems can almost always improve, but one does get tired of waiting. We want approval, to connect with a reader in the best possible way.

Q: Though relatively new to the publishing world, 32 Poems has already become a respected source for talented poets. How do you and your editors select the poems for each issue?

Rosemary Winslow, poet published in 32 Poems poetry magazine

Serena, I want to thank you for the opportunity to think more about what I do as a poet and why. I’ve been fortunate to have many poems published in 32 Poems and other really fine places. And, yes, I’ve won the Larry Neal Award for Poetry three times–-third place in 2001, second place in 2002, and first place in 2006. Awards can be a wonderful affirmation of one’s work, and I’ve been pleased that there are folks out there who like poems I’ve written. I wish there were more awards and more recognition for others who write at least as well if not better than and get less recognition.

I love teaching, especially teaching poetry. To work with students in small classes–-which I’ve been given the good fortune and opportunity to do–-is enormously rewarding. I’ve stayed in touch with many of my former students through the years–I get to experience the amazing transformation of students into friends, each time as interesting and unique as a poem

Opening up ways of reading, both understanding meaning and also the other forces at work in fine poems, is a real joy. I feel it enriches students’ lives, and teaching them certainly enriches mine. I can’t say which is most rewarding. They go together. I couldn’t teach what, nor the way, I do if I weren’t writing poems. The first excellent teachers and critics of literature in the U.S. were writers, they started this business and I’m pleased to be able to do in some measure what they did and envisioned for the future. Writing literature gives a teacher the capacity to teach poems from the inside, from the perspective of how they are made, how they are put together. It’s possible to teach poems as poems, as made, and verbal art, in a way not possible without knowing how to make them.

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why? Also, do you believe that writing can be an equalizer to help humanity become more tolerant or collaborative? Why or why not?

Being a “white page” poet, as Ed Hirsch put it at the Spoken Word finals in Washington, D.C., a few years ago, I prefer poems that are complexly textured, difficult to get on one read even on the page. I can’t help it! I admire the energy of spoken poetry, but I love the complex multi-faceted nature of certain kinds of poetry that has to be read and reread. What I really admire are poems that have both. I keep striving for that, even though I don’t know how far one can go in both directions.

I am startled and stimulated by poems that are written first for the access of listeners, and more and more appreciative of what those word-artists do. Their work has an immediate power, and a directness, that page poetry too often lacks. I think spoken word poetry brings readers into poetry who may then read other kinds. It is, in my experience working with students and homeless women, a conductor into the richly diverse field contemporary poetry is. I’m not a fan of performance poetry, only because I find movement distracting for me as a listener. It’s too much to attend to, and I want to go with the words, which is where my love is. But I wouldn’t want to dismiss performance poetry. The more kinds of poetry, the richer we are, I believe, as readers and as a culture. I wouldn’t want to dictate to anyone what they should like. As a teacher, I aim to open up awareness of many kinds of poetry, and hope that students gain insight into and strategies for reading even very difficult poems.

I do believe poetry can be an equalizer, yes, and can help people to travel through the world with greater understanding of themselves and each other. And therefore of each other. I don’t think this is the only function of art, but it is one very important one. When I teach poetry, I make sure to include writers for whom this is explicitly or implicitly a major thrust, writers such as Adrienne Rich, Robery Bly, Galway Kinnell, and of course Walt Whitman.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

Obsessions? I haven’t tried to discover what obsessions I might have. I try to confine my obsessiveness to poetry, to getting every word, line, mark of punctuation perfect, which is a way of saying a poem’s done, finished, it looks and feels right to me. Poetry’s a good place for that, much better than in other areas of life! Eamon Grennan once said a particular long poem of mine was obsessive when he read it in draft. “Obsessiveness is good,” he said. He meant, in poetry, and that’s fine with me to have it if it makes for good art. As long as it enriches instead of dampening my life!

4. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any “writing” books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott).

I learned to use writing groups in composition classes when I first started out as a teacher. I still value writing groups for the feedback on how different people, poets and not-poets, read the poems I’m working on. That’s all I need to know how what I’ve done is working, is being received. I can then decide whether I want , or need, to make changes, given what I was trying to do in a poem. I don’t like others rewriting words or phrases, as I’ve seen some groups do. And I was so strongly trained against doing that. I find it’s enough just to listen to what readers make of what I’ve written. Very often I don’t know what to make of poems that come out of my pencil and get themselves down on pages. Possibly I don’t like how-to books because they are of no help to me. I write what’s there is for me to write, and the form finds itself. I’ve read and taught poetry for so long that imagine I have a storehouse, you could say, to draw from, and that place inside that cooks up the poetry uses ingredients from wherever. Often I can’t tell the wherever, but sometimes I know whose poems have gotten into my mix. I actually bought Anne Lamont’s book three years ago while at a writer’s colony in Vermont, but I could read only a few pages. It wasn’t helpful to me, though it was recommended so highly by others, so I know some writers find Lamont’s, and other books helpful.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

I don’t think poets have an obligation to do anything but write the poetry that is theirs to write. For me, I’ve found that trying to write for a specific kind of reader or write to be understood is deadly for the poems. That’s not at all the same thing as writing an inside-the-poem listener, or being aware that one has reader-listeners. But I don’t think an artist can change his work to be something it’s not. We seem to have in the mainstream U.S. not only a low value on poetry but little need for it. I suspect that comes from a satisfaction with life, a relative ease, or at least a mind of relative ease. There isn’t a sense among so many of our population for anything significant and deeply rich and valuable to struggle for.

Garrison Keillor is doing a lot to bring people into the habit of listening to poetry. I’m of the mind that what he does is a great service to poetry, but it is only a beginning, an easseful easing in to the pleasures of poetry. American artists at their best have traditionally been out to stimulate wonder and awe, to disturb, even shock. Some poetry will always be “elitist” and needs to be if poetry is to take in all of our collective life. Same for “inaccessible.” It would be a terrible loss if the poets writing difficult verse stopped writing it. Emily Dickinson was difficult, and now she is far less so. Same for so many poets–we learned to read them later, and they have changed poetry and enriched it immeasurably. Who can imagine what poetry in the U.S. would be without Whitman and Dickinson, without Eliot, Stevens, Moore, Lowell, Lorde, the early Bly, Rich and so on? Certainly the terrific and more “accessible” poetry by others would be very different than it is.

6. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don’t listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

I don’t listen to music when I’m working with words (reading or writing or thinking). It distracts and I can’t focus. As a result, I’m appalling ignorant of current music. My husband John is a painter, and he listens to music and PBS stations all day every day in his studio while he paints. I often wish I’d been a painter instead so I could listen all day to other things while I work.

When I’m ready for poems I get a number 2 pencil out of my pencil vase and a pad of legal size paper, or else a pen and plain white paper, and sit down to write. I have preferred places–my desk, a particular chair, a porch, a lawn, the metro–but that’s about it. A cup of tea is sometimes nice. I know I have a way of “going to the place where poetry is” as I call it, but I can’t describe in words what it is that I do. It’s a moment and matter of taking a certain kind of attention.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

Yes, Serena, I have to say that friendships have changed. I have so many more friends since focusing on writing poetry. I’ve met so many–so many–poets through writing and going to poetry readings and being in writing groups. There is a shared way of thinking among people who make art. Not they always agree, by any means! But they tend to think alike, in metaphors, images, movements, and so on. And in poetry most folks are so caring and supportive, and not just with respect to the art. I have many more friends, but less time to give because I need time to write. Often I have to choose between writing and seeing friends or talking on the phone or e-mailing. I tend to go in spurts of writing and spurts of seeing friends. I write intensely for periods of time, and then I don’t write if no poems are pressing. I’m not a poem-a-day writer. But when the poems are pouring I might get 12 or 15 drafts of new poems in a week.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

Staying fit is, for me, a given. I have difficulty going more than a day without exercise. Living in downtown D.C., I walk a lot instead of driving, so the time I used to spend on commuting from the suburbs is now used in walking to and from places–the metro, my office, appointments, shopping. Then I do yoga several times a week, and try swim regularly if I can manage, which is every day in the summer.

If I have an appointment out by the Beltway, I’ll walk there and back on a weekend, to keep in shape for mountain hiking in the summer. People think it’s far, but 16 or 20 miles on level ground is easy compared to going up and down a mountain. I enjoy those hikes immensely. I grew up on a dairy farm, and getting that much exercise still feels right to me. Something feels terribly off in my body if I don’t get it. So I consider myself fortunate that I am made to exercise and don’t have to make myself do it. I love to feel the body moving. It’s one of the best parts of our life. It’s the best part of writing–-thinking to the regular rhythm of the moving feet and the breath.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

I have way too many favorite foods to list! Food doesn’t inspire, as far as I’ve noticed. When I’m focused on writing, I may not even know how much time has passed, and can miss meals entirely.

I don’t think of having “writer’s block” because I don’t expect to be writing all the time. I always have more new poems coming or drafts to be revising—more than I ever have time to work on. My husband is the same way. He’s always working on several paintings at a time, in various stages of production, and never has any downtime, even though he paints every day, for much of each day. I wouldn’t know what to say to someone who might ask me what to do about it. William Stafford said “lower your standards.” Well, that is the same idea said another way, I imagine. At the moment I sit down to write, I don’t expect to write good poems, just poems. Then I’ll see if a good poem comes of it. Not all the drafts are good, but I have more potentially good poems than I can possibly find time to work on. Ask me again when I’m retired!

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I don’t have an ideal writing space. I gather myself in with the paper and pen or pencil and write. That’s my writing space. It’s much more internal than external. I would love to have a separate room, but we live in loft space, so I’ve had to develop a way of shutting out the space around me and making my own place wherever I am.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

Right now I’m working on poems about a week last month when my mother died. I’ve never written about experiences so close in time to their happening before, and I was surprised that I both felt pressured to and could actually write so soon. The experience was so intense, because I stayed with her during her last two days and nights. The sheer physicality stripped away from everything that normally occupies us, and the huge emotional range were so indescribable that I found I was too restless to sit still, or even think straight, afterward. Then one afternoon I decided to sit down and try to write poems about that week, and from that moment the restlessness ceased and hasn’t returned.

Before my mother died, I had been working on a series of poems about genocide, and then some poems that I still don’t know what they are about. Something inner, but expressed in a kind of half-surrealistic half-realistic imagery taken from nature. I grew up immersed in nature on the farm, so my mind naturally goes there. I’ve lived in cities for 20 years, but I’ve given up hoping I might write much urban poetry.

Going Home

There is no going home
as usual
the vehicle stalls
in reverse gear
in mud tracks

as essential as
the flat fields, the blades
of shadowed pines over the drive,
the sun bleeding
from the west.

On the rise the house,
painted clapboard, the color of cream,
is rented now like bodies
of water and minerals made
living by some miracle

which is to say some process
we don’t understand.
Some day we’ll have a
different owner,
a different lover,

pine trees and whirling wind
that primitive communion
a new testament
of each generation.
All going home is never going back—

there may be ruin and mud tracks
deep to make wheels spin. The only way
is slogging on,
or else walking
on water.

Or yet it may be dry
the sand flying in your nostrils
but you must breathe, must go, must go
on, which is to say, go on making
required visits, like stations

of a cross. It is a way
of finding what we lost
or never had, of learning we are only
renters, and making new covenants,
going where we belong.