David Wojahn was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953, and educated at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. His first collection, Icehouse Lights, was chosen by Richard Hugo as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, and published in 1982. The collection was also the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award. His second collection, Glassworks, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987, and was awarded the Society of Midland Authors’ Award for best volume of poetry to be published during that year. Pittsburgh is also the publisher of four of his subsequent books, Mystery Train (1990), Late Empire (1994), The Falling Hour (1997), and Spirit Cabinet (2002).

Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004, published by Pittsburgh in 2006, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He is also the author of a collection of essays on contemporary poetry, Strange Good Fortune (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), and editor with Jack Myers of A Profile of 20th Century American Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), and two posthumous collections of Lynda Hull’s poetry, The Only World (HarperCollins, 1995) and Collected Poems (Graywolf, 2006).

He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois and Indiana Councils for the Arts, and was the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholar in 1987-1988.  He has taught at a number of institutions, among them Indiana University, the University of Chicago, the University of Houston, the University of Alabama, and the University of New Orleans. He is presently Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and is also a member of the program faculty of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of the Fine Arts. His newest collection, World Tree, was published by Pittsburgh in the winter of 2011.

The interview was recorded in April 2013. To listen to the mp3, press the play button below; the transcript follows.

“No Subject Should Be Taboo”: An Audio Interview David Wojahn by Emilia Phillips

Emilia Phillips: I’m Emilia Phillips, and I am the prose editor of 32 Poems, and I am here for the Weekly Prose Feature with poet David Wojahn on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Thank you for being with us, David.

David Wojahn: I’m happy to be here.

EP: Looking again through your eight collections of poetry, I feel like each remains immediate and distinctly David Wojahn. I have to say, I feel like they’ve aged well and the later work, for me at least, undermine the earlier, and yet I can mark several shifts in the work. Being that this is from a reader’s point of view, however, the shifts I’ve identified may wax superficial in that they are based on biographical details, the obsessions and subject matter, and the tendencies in form. I’m curious as to whether or not you feel like you’ve reinvented yourself as a poet one or more times throughout your career the way Lowell did or if you see yourself as honing the same kind of poem or writing installments to one long poem.

DW: Boy, that’s a good question. I think poets tend to think, or would like to think, that they, over the course of a career, remake themselves again and again, and in some respects, I think that’s true. A lot of poets have made radical stylistic shifts over the course of their lifetime: James Wright, being somebody who’s always cited as a terrific example, but then, you know, there are other poets who I really dearly love like Thomas Hardy, and you can’t really tell a poem that he wrote in the 1860s from one he wrote in the 1920s. So, it’s just really hard to self-appraise that sort of thing. I do think that, as the work develops over the years, and partly this is because I, when I first started writing, there was a kind of almost tyranny of a particular sort of subjectivist poetry. Be it the surrealism the Deep Image poets practiced or a kind of autobiographical poetry that was a sort of dumbing down of what people like Berryman and Lowell and Plath had done in Confessional writing. And, so, I kind of felt that poetry was a mode of solipsistic self-expression and autobiographical sort of regurgitation. Of course it is to a very large degree, but if it’s only that—and I think that between about 1970 and maybe around 1990 in American poetry, it often felt like it was only that—it’s not doing the job of poetry. And I think as I’ve grown older as a writer, I’ve remained true to those roots because those roots of poetry as some autobiographical testimony seem very important, but there are also other kind of cultural and historical and literary sources that have started to almost involuntarily but inevitably get mixed up with those original sources of my poetry. So, yeah, I think the work has changed insofar as it’s been able to incorporate a little more of not just the lived life of the poet but the cultural and historical life of the poet’s time.

EP: You often talk about obsession in relation to poetry and, in another interview, you’ve said, “subjects can be quite various, but obsessions tend not to be; in fact, they’re apt to be severely limited . . .” [sic] Readers and reviewers have focused on a few of your touchstone subject—rock ‘n’ roll, the deaths of your parents and your first wife, the poet Lynda Hull—but it strikes me that, though you remain close to or, at the very least, conversant with these subjects in the later work, it never feels that you’re painting over an old canvas. Though you say that obsessions tend to be severely limited, it seems that obsessions, in the case of your work, like a whirlpool, pull what comes downstream into them. In that way, obsessions don’t limit the poems but allow the poet access to other subjects through associations that work away and back to the original obsession. But I wondered if you had any poems that you felt like were too much of a repeat of an earlier poem, that you’ve scrapped.

DW: Sometimes that’s the case, and I guess in that situation or the issue of what we write about, I do really believe that very few poets have a palette that is huge. We write from a limited number of sort of holes in our lives that we feel have to be filled and the trick often of growing as a writer is to just find new ways formally to address those obsessions and there are all sorts of implications by what I mean formally. It can be finding ways to address your obsessive subject matter in a way that seems to be completely unrelated to that subject matter. It can mean new formal sort of strategies that come toward that subject matter slantwise rather than directly. And, in certain respect, I really don’t mind the fact that I still write about the deaths of my parents or about Lynda Hull or about things that have mattered to me—the music, the films, and the poetry—that continue to inspire me. It’s also that if I keep returning to those things, it’s because they’re important. Somebody asked why he wrote poetry and he said, well, you write poetry because you must. I do think sometimes that the feeling I have, in terms of repeating myself, is not in repeating myself in terms of revisiting the same old subject. I mean Philip Levine will always be a kid who worked in auto-factories in Detroit. He’ll never leave that landscape behind and that’s a source of his integrity. I feel that when I’m repeating myself or imitating myself it’s usually through trying strategies within the poems, formal strategies that seem like they’re the same old’ same old’ or something that I’ve done before and probably have done better because I was discovering something rather than consciously trying to imitate myself.

EP: So, let’s talk about the sonnet. I don’t think I could’ve interviewed you without talking about the sonnet. It’s a form that appears in all of your collections except the first. They’re in these rhapsodic sequences like the rock ’n’roll title poem of Mystery Train; “Wartime Photos of My Father” and “White Lanterns” from Late Empire; as well as others including “Ochre.” These sequences often function as a hinge in a collection, near the center or between two distinct sections. Do you generally begin work on a new collection with a sonnet sequence? Do you write the other poems around the sequence? Why does the sonnet sequence work for you in shaping a collection?

DW: Well, that’s a good question. I’ve never consciously decided at any point that I’m going to have to write a sonnet sequence that’s going to be the trademark of a collection, but they always seem to, for one reason or another, become very significant within the individual books and that’s been happening for twenty five, thirty years now, and I just think the sonnet is such as supple and such a flexible and just such an endearing form. I just love the way that you can manipulate those hundred and forty syllables in such a no-two-snowflakes-are-alike variety of ways. You know one of the things that will destroy one’s career as a writer, I think, is if you take yourself too seriously and my subject matter is often not just serious but aggressively so, but you always have to have fun with writing and there’s something that’s just a delight about fooling around with the form of the sonnet and it’s always different. It’s always instructive. And, there’s a kind of Lay’s Potato Chips element of it that I find it very difficult to write a single sonnet and not want to find an imaginary playmate and the sequences often develop because I want to add one to it then a third one comes and then a fourth one comes and then, you know, sometimes as many as twenty five or thirty come. Sometimes as in the case [of] Mystery Train years ago, I probably wrote twice as many for that sequence than actually appeared in the book. The other thing that’s great about the sonnet is it’s not exactly that it’s a dispensable form, but it’s also a form that sometimes gets generated by the very fact that you can write five and two of them will be good and you won’t feel like you’ve wasted your time.

EP: Why do you think it works so well with contemporary American poetry? It seems like, out of all the forms, it just has survived and is even, perhaps, in some ways, more forceful because there’s so much more immediacy in what you can do with a sonnet.

DW: The variety of what we now define as a sonnet is just, in the last fifty or sixty years, is astonishing. You look on the one hand at how inventive Ted Berrigan was with his sonnets or how The Dream Songs by Berryman functions, even though they’re eighteen lines long, as a kind of supernoval sort of sonnet sequence. It is just such an adaptable form, and one of the sources of its endurance I think is that, I hate to say it, but we live in a very attention-deprived sort of culture. We really do feel a certain impatience with long forms, even though I love long American twentieth century epics like Paterson or Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend. Remember the origin of the word’s “little song,” to me the kind of poetic equivalent to the three-minute AM radio song from the 1960s that you can’t get out of your head. So, I like the compactedness of it, and yet it’s very expansive within that compactedness.

EP: In your first few collections, it seemed like you were left-margin centric and you were kind of hugging that left margin, but now you drift off that margin quite frequently, I think, in a majority of the poems in World Tree, you’re doing things like the staggered/jagged tercets like Williams’s Bruegel sequence, or long lines alternately followed by an indented short line, and you use drop lines as well. I just wondered how long it takes you to find the right form for your poems?

DW: As the years go on, I find it harder and harder to write in free verse, though I love writing in free verse, and I think naturally my ear gravitates toward a line that, no matter how you how you parse it, even it were coming out as a prose poem, would start to look like blank verse. And I think that a lot of the arguments I have with the forms of the poems, the various versions that I do with the poems, are trying to find a way to decide whether it looks good as pentameter or whether I should fight against the pentameter. That’s often a determining force for where the poem should go. Now, sometimes you want to evoke that mighty pentameter line pretty overtly, in an in-your-face way, but sometimes you want to bury it a little bit in some sort of formal construct. So I look at people like Charles Wright or C.K. Williams and they look often as though they’re writing very long and sometimes very prosy lines, but if you scan a Williams poem, especially those characteristic ones he writes in those super long lines, they’re often two lines of blank verse that have been spliced together. There’s the same kind of very, very strongly iambic kind of quality to all of Charles Wright’s poems, and I just like forms that are haircuts that don’t look like haircuts. Often, the revision process for me has first and foremost to do with trying a poem out in a whole plethora of different sorts of forms without necessarily changing the wording and then when I find the shape that looks the most promising then I will start do a lot of nickel-and-dime revision on individual lines and syntax, on word choice. You know sometimes it’s just the shape of the poem is the first thing that I really want to consider when I’m writing the poem.

EP: I think you had a poem recently in, was it in AGNI? It was all really intensive rhymes at the end of the lines.

DW: For the last several years I’ve decided that every year one of the few things I must do annually is write a poem against the NRA, and the trick is to try to do it in a way that doesn’t sound polemical. In the case of that poem, I have a cousin that’s a gun nut but also a practicing Buddhist, and I needed to write about that because it’s so fascinating and so scary to figure out what’s going on in his character, and it ended up to be a sonnet in all A rhymes. I don’t think I could’ve written about that subject, because it’s such a loaded subject so to speak, without having to give myself some wild formal sort of challenge that would allow me some entrance to it in a way that wasn’t too polemical, and it’s great, too, because he’ll never know about the poem and he’ll never read it, and so that’s all right.

EP: Do you ever worry about writing about those that you know and them being offended or they feel as if they’ve been slighted in some way?

DW: Sure, all the time. You feel that you’re either not doing justice to the person or that, in some ways, you’ve been indiscreet. That’s always the worry, but no subject should be taboo as long as you can bring it off.

EP: In my last year in the MFA program here at VCU, you assigned me the task of reading works that were in what you called “English that’s not English,” including Scots poets, the 1537 Matthews Bible, and others. I loved the task, though it was challenging, because it exploded some of the discursive, unmusical syntax that I thought I had to write as a contemporary poet. Do you ever find yourself falling into a rut in your syntax and, if so, how do you get out of it? Do you do it through reading and, if so, what texts do you go to?

DW: So many contemporary poems, despite what I’ve been saying about received forms, are composed by the sentence as much as they’re composed by the line and the line almost seems secondary to how one arranges the sentence. I find that I’m very, very interested in times or in opportunities for a particular syntax and the diction that that syntax implies to collide with the very, very different diction and the syntax that that diction implies. I love what you can do in a poem that you can’t do in a lot of other forms of discourse—move very, very quickly from high falutin’ rhetorical language to very, very vernacular language—and it’s not so much the issue of syntax is so connected to, with the issue of diction. You almost can’t discern the difference between the two of them, and so I like to play with those sorts of collisions, dictional collisions which turn into then rhythmic collisions, and they also often give me an opportunity to do what I like to do a lot is steal, quote, and sample from other poets, from music, and when you’re in that groove, when you’re in that zone where there’s a lot of possibility for associational and syntactical variety, you can end up throwing in a lot of things that you didn’t know you were going to throw in. It’s also a question, I think, of sampling.

EP: Many poets who encounter the language of religious rites and rituals at a young age often cite those sources as being influential in their choice to become a poet. If I remember correctly, and correct me if I’m wrong, you were raised in the Anglican/Episcopal church. When I approach a poem like your poem “Ode to Black 6” in World Tree, I see syntactical moves like from The Book of Common Prayer, and I just thought I would read a quick section from that poem, the opening:

To your veins we’ve clogged with butter
we give thanks, to your brain tumor withering

the use of your left side, to Alzheimer’s
befuddling your stumble through the labyrinth,

indifferent now to females in estrous,
to positive reinforcement, merci.

Likewise, looking back, I can’t help but think about your poem “Stammer” from The Falling Hour in which, among other things, the speaker’s going through speech therapy with exercises of “AH AH AH E E E” and “Ruth rang Randy rarely.” These exercises, because of their repetition, seem almost liturgical, as well. Could you speak more about your early interactions with language and how conscious you are about their influence on your writing today?

DW: The Book of Common Prayer which Thomas Cramer composed in the 1530s [sic] has some of the most gorgeous language in English, and since going to old style Anglican services when I was a kid and hearing that sort of language was maybe my first encounter with literary language, with language that could be different from spoken language, at least in a serious way that wasn’t like nursery rhymes. The inventiveness of the language that Cranmer put into those texts, and they’re wonderful texts too because they’re practical as well as lyrical, that they’re whole passages from it that I know I’m not even consciously aping when I write a poem, just because they were such an early and essential part of my poetic DNA. You know, like in the Communion service, there’s this line about being so unworthy “through our manifold sins of wickedness as to gather the crumbs from under thy table.” [sic] I remember just loving that live above almost anything I’d ever heard in English, and I think it’s just because it’s such a strange image but it’s a made even stranger just because of that crazy Jamesian periodic sentence that introduces it. So, I think I came very early on into what is probably a condition that’s pretty good for a poet is I have a hard time making a distinction between whether something engages me poetically because of its imagery or simply because of its sound. I see the two as coming always in tandem in these weird entwinings. An image like that from the Communion service is a really, really good example of it, and I think it kind of imprinted me in that respect.

I was an altar boy for a long time. I even thought that maybe I’d be an Episcopal priest but then I was about sixteen and became a Quaker so I entered into a long period where there wasn’t that much interesting language in my religious experience. No offence to the Quakers.

EP: You were talking a few minutes ago and a couple questions back taking language from other sources and looking through World Tree, I see where you’re borrowing song lyrics from Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” and the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” Elsewhere, you’re grabbing from Walden, a former student, Alan Dugan, etc. I can’t help but think of Coca-Cola warning Andy Warhol about using Coke as a title for his film, but, of course, poets don’t have the same kind of visibility as an artist like Andy Warhol, but I wondered if you’ve ever been tapped on the shoulder and been told, “Don’t use that in a poem.”

DW: No, I haven’t, and I think one of the issues at stake now is that copyright law is so complex and there’s so many ways of interpreting it that I think it’s gotten to be a little bit creepy. My friend Mary Ruefle wonderful book of essays called Madness, Rack, and Honey last year and there’s a beautiful essay she had to completely leave out because it stole two or three lines from Leonard Cohen and the people who were controlling the rights to Cohen’s lyrics were asking so much money for it, to have done it would’ve cost more than printing the entire book. A lot of people play hardball with borrowings, but the sad thing is that the whole tradition of English literature is a kind of borrowing and thievery and reshaping. That’s what The Wasteland is made of, and, you know, one of the contemporary poets I most admire, David Ferry who’s eighty-nine years old now, has a poem in his new book that is this encratical but absolutely faithful borrowing from Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me.” You know, the fact that a poet who is eighty-eight years old can borrow and steal and make his own a poem by a jilted courtier from five hundred years ago, it’s just an amazing thing to me. The whole tradition of the way the blues have evolved in the twentieth century to so many wonderful permutations is just another example of just how tradition lives in a very, very vital way, and so many of the utterances that we make as poets, as musicians, you’re always reinterpreting the atmosphere of earlier cultures that have influenced you and been important to you. I think it’s very, very dangerous when someone who doesn’t have an understanding of how art functions in that way gets in the way of the process in order to simply make money. We’re not talking about fair use then, we’re talking about something very much akin to suppression. It’s Orwellian.

EP: Well, with the twenty-five-section long poem—a sonnet sequence—“Ochre” in World Tree, you pair up each section with an image. Most of them are actual images that you wrote about, but then there’s a few in the sequence that were actually created after the poems were written, based on the poems.

When I worked for Blackbird, we helped make some of those images. The three in the poem that are created after the fact of the poem are the one with Dick Cheney in a gas mask, the Scrabble board, and the photo of twin bed (“the photo that Davey took when Johnny and I were asleep” section. Why situate these poems in ekphrasis? How does it complicate or inform the rest of the long poem?

DW: Again it’s a question of one is establishing a kind of fidelity so that you’re writing a series of ekphrastic poems and you feel as if the ekphrasis has to be of something that you’re actually describing, you’re limiting a lot of your imaginative choices. Most of the images in that series are real photographs or real images that I am trying to riff on or describe, but there are also a few images in there that could have existed, and so the poem sort of had to proceed the reconstruction of that thing had it existed. That sequence of poems is trying to juxtapose Paleolithic art with novice nineteenth-century photographs and with certain political statements that I want to make and, so, more and more as the sequence goes on, it tries to mine, go from memory in a big cultural way to memory in a smaller and more personal way. The more recent ones from my own past were harder to create sometimes than the ones from Chauvet Cave. So, yeah, it was very fun to write a poem about an image that didn’t exist and then later on create the image literally. But they’re not to far from reality. In the case of Cheney­—and you see this in Jane Mayer’s wonderful book, savage book, about the War on Terror, The Dark Side—Cheney didn’t go anywhere for several years after 9/11 without a briefcase of his papers and a briefcase with hazmat suit. I think it indicates the level of monstrous paranoia that so motivated Cheney especially and all of his cohorts in the Bush administration. And so, you know, he did have the gas mask; we just don’t have any photographs of the gas mask. In some ways, I’m doing the reality a favor by Photoshopping a version of Dick Cheney with a gas mask.

EP: Well, I mean, you’ve used plenty of visual elements elsewhere in your poems, including “Crayola” from Spirit Cabinet. You have the speech bubbles as if it’s almost like a comic book and then you started, in that same collection, doing these poems that are one-line stanzas separated by breaks that are diamonds or leaves or whatever, and I’m thinking about in “Ochre” as well, one of the sections in particular is the Scrabble poem in which, in the left-hand margin, you have “QUIXOTIC” and each letter, as it goes down, has the amount it would get in Scrabble points. So, it’s like “Q₁₀,” etcetera. Because you’re balancing visuals and sonics often in your poems, I wondered, when you read aloud the poems, do you feel like you risk losing some of what the poem’s doing, to a reading audience, or is that the case with all poems?

DW: I think that’s the case with all poems. In the examples you’re citing is sonnets that have an asterisk that is just there to simultaneously do something that’s almost paradoxical: one, make the reader pay more attention to the individual lines and, two, make the reader not be aware, at least right away, that what he or she is reading is a sonnet. So, in some ways, it’s an attempt to help to reinvigorate the essential musicality of the sonnet that we tend to, a lot of the time, take for granted. I think if you read poetry often enough that you open up a page and see that a poem is thirty-seven lines long, and if like me don’t particularly like sestinas, you’re first impulse is to either not read the poem or say, “Show me what you can do.” So it’s, again, a kind of thing that you want a haircut that doesn’t look like a haircut. I love sestinas that don’t allow me to know they’re sestinas until I’m pretty much finished with them and ditto with sonnets, some of the time.

EP: You’ve confided that you’re a synesthete, and can you tell us what that exactly means in terms of perception for you and how it’s affected your poetry?

DW: Like a lot of poets, I’m probably a synesthete and I’m probably a little dyslexic. For a long time, when I would finally get a draft of a poem, for example, I would use an ivory-colored paper that’s about twenty-five weight, that was really expensive, to get that final draft on there because I wanted the poems to have a particular look and smell and even a kind of, you know, implied taste that made me feel like the poem not just was finished but it was my poem that was finished because I had such strange and probably dysfunctional ways of looking at that poem.

Rimbaud was very, very right in that vowel sonnet in understanding that, you know for poets especially, the components of language are something that are not just visual but address simultaneously all of the senses together and never in a way that makes a lot of associative sense. They intermingle. They interact. And, one of the reasons I’m interested in languages like Sumerian where some of the images are visual, some of them are syllabic ones, I think a lot of times what I try to do in poetry is to get back to that sort of language where we’re painting with literal word pictures as well as symbolic concepts and syllabic concepts. And, the poem is this great sort of field, I think, because all those things can coexist at once, but we’re trained not to read like that, and we’re trained increasingly to read for information. A really good example of that is, you know, all the weird contractions that people use in text messaging and I don’t think they’re aware while they’re using it that they’re radically reshaping the language. They’re making the language fundamentally strange, and the possibilities of that linguistically or poetically are really, really interesting. And they’re just focusing on a task and not on the way language is being subtly but very radically reshaped.

EP: Your work, collection to collection, is increasingly conversant with other poets. I went through World Tree and I started listing off all the poets that you either address or mention blatantly in the poems. I’m sure there’s plenty of others that are a little bit more buried. I’m seeing Thoreau and Hikmet and Rimbaud and Lynda Hull, W.S. Graham, William Carlos Williams, Aleda Shirley, Tomas Tranströmer, Frank O’Hara, George Oppen, Rilke, Berryman, Jon Anderson, Alan Dugan, Miłosz, Vallejo, and others. Can you speak a little bit about what you feel is the obligation that poets have to be conversant with other work and other poets? Or is it simply impossible not to be in conversation?

DW: I think it’s impossible not to be and, that notion of thieving from one’s sources is not necessarily, to my mind, an act of robbery as much as it’s an act of homage. You know, one of my favorite albums is an album of the rock ‘n’ roll surrealist Robyn Hitchcock called Robyn Sings and what Hitchcock and his band attempt to do in that album is recreate, note for note, Dylan and The Band’s 1966 Albert Hall concert, doing it to the point where there’s that moment right before “Like a Rolling Stone” when they have somebody in the audience say, “Judas,” and Hitchcock does the thing where he says, “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar.” And, Robyn Hitchcock’s a great singer but he’s not Dylan, right? He’s not doing the incredible sorts of absolutely new thing that Dylan was doing with The Band at that concert, but it seems an act of incredible kind homage to try to imitate it in that way and in the liner notes of that album, Hitchcock basically says “I’ve listened to that album and listened to those songs for so long that part of me doesn’t remember that I didn’t write them.” And he doesn’t say that from the stance of, I think, egotism, as much as, if you live with writers and singers and the books and movies that you love, they’re at a certain point so much a part of your consciousness that if you don’t rely on them, if you don’t quote from them, you’re almost doing an injustice to that. I don’t think it’s egotistical today to say that I’ve read, say, Vallejo’s “Black Stone on a White” so often for so many years that sometimes I forget the fact that I didn’t write it. You know, I think it’s more what you do as a poet over the years is you have this poetic playlist that has become so entwined in your synapses and your DNA that, yeah, those poems are yours. I am so grateful that I’ve had the opportunity over the years to get to that point that I want to celebrate that and do homage to that by throwing those quotes in. So, I don’t think that they’re opportunistic; I think they’re, in a certain sense, acknowledging the fact that I’m a completely derivative poet. And, I’m happy to be a completely derivative poet and I’m happy to celebrate those people whose work has meant a lot to me. And, I look at that list you just gave me and it’s a pretty long list, but I think it’s probably only about half as long as it really should be.

EP: Well, I mean, in some respects all language is derivative, and most of us aren’t creating new words in our poems so it seems only natural that the phrases that are coming in or even some of the modes of syntax, expression, or approach to their subjects would come into your own work.

DW: Yeah, well, it’s just that you reuse things and make them your own, you translate them into your own vernacular, and they remain absolutely the property of those people that you have borrowed from but they’re your property, too. And, I do think poetry, without getting all sentimental about it, is a transactional endeavor in which the great democracy of poetry has to do with the fact that you assume that your reader can understand a poem in the same way that you understand the poems that you’ve read and the poems that you write. There’s a quality about reading poems or, more specifically, about re-reading poems that, despite the loneliness of the poetic vocation, is deeply, deeply communal. Any community that’s a real community has a set of tradition, and I just like to remind, I guess my readers, that in terms of poetry, no matter how eccentric my own poetry is, it is part of a continuity.

EP: It also strikes me that in the same way that re-reading poems by your favorite poets can make those poems feel like yours, reading your own poems again they feel somewhat distant or strange. I mean, at least in the case of writing my own poems. Do you ever feel that way?

DW: Well, if you’re written as many poems as I have now, which is not a huge number but the number’s getting up there, sometimes I’ll look at a book and completely forget that I wrote a poem and you have a choice then of looking at that poem and saying, “Boy, that is a piece of shit, I should never remember again that I wrote it” or say, “Hey, that’s kind of far out, I’d forgotten that I wrote that and it’s not half bad.” Poems are not meant to be read but meant to be re-read.

EP: I believe you did a translation of some Anglo-Saxon work for an anthology, is that correct?

DW: Yeah, it’s called The Word Exchange, and you know there are great things in it like Heaney’s translation of “The Sea-farer” and a poem by David Ferry called “The Sacrifice of Isaac” that I think are wonderful. So I did a couple translations from the Exeter Book of Riddles, which are, again, very, very strange sorts of literary endeavors that I really find fascinating.

EP: Have you ever done any other translation work?

DW: You know, I used to translate a little bit from the Spanish, but my Spanish isn’t as good as I would like it to be to really feel like I could be a legitimate Spanish translator. I would love to more.

EP: Every now and then I hear some discussion about literary lineages. Being a student of yours, your teacher would be like my literary grandfather or something. Do you think that’s a bullshit notion or do you think there is something to it, like there’s some way to inherit?

DW: You know, when you put it in familiar terms, it’s kind of interesting because if you’re a parent, what you want for your children is to have a good life but you, ideally, don’t want them to be given the notion that what you do, they should do. You know, it’s not like you’re in medieval guilds where if you’re a tinkerer, your son has to be a tinkerer. There is that element in poetry, and in any art form, of people, in a multi-generational way, passing down your expertise as an artist. On the other hand, though, if you’re going to be a teacher that’s in any way worth the definition of being a teacher, you don’t want to replicate yourself. You have to do something that is really hard and analytical and sort of help them to find out what sort of poem they must write and encourage them in that sort of poem, and always be aware of that that sort of poem is not necessarily the sort of poem you want to write. So, it’s a question of looking at every student’s work diagnostically and trying to see that Platonic ideal of what kind of poem the student really feels, more than anything else, compelled to write and help that student along the way. That’s the kind of relationship that a mentor should have to a mentee and it is a kind of parental relationship, in that respect.

EP: Were there any poets you idolized early on that you later came to realize weren’t exactly A1?

DW: Boy, that’s a tough one. The thing that’s lovely when you’re a young poet, you want to read everything or, at least, when I was growing up, that was the case because there so many interesting and competing schools in American poetry in the 60s and 70s that then became a little more uniform, in the period style. I have found poets that I loved early on that I understand they’re deeply flawed. I mentioned James Wright earlier and he was one of the first poets that I discovered and I know that there are problems in Wright’s work that are much more easy for me to identify now that I don’t idealize him in that way. And, yeah, there were poets that I loved in those days like, for example, James Tate. I still think James Tate is a fabulous writer but there’s nothing I can get from his work. Ditto, Ashbery who is a writer who has profoundly changed the way we look at the whole act of poetry and the ways in which poetry capture consciousness. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, even write a passable imitation of an Ashbery poem and, as much as I love his work, I wouldn’t want to. So, you, it’s less that there’s poets that I would reject out of hand as much as I feel there are a lot of poets who are sort of those eccentric cousins and eccentric uncles who, you know, come in for the Thanksgiving dinner and then I don’t seem them for another year.

EP: In thinking a little bit more about kind of like this lineage and, kind of, adoration of poets, Larry Levis taught here at VCU at the time of his death in 1996, and I know a lot of students come into the MFA program pretty familiar with Levis at this point and wanting to be where Levis was. How is it to be the senior poet in a program where you have this kind of monolithic presence still informing the student and the program?

You teach at Virginia Commonwealth University where Larry Levis taught at the time of his death in 1996. Levis has developed a bit of a cult following, and rightly so, but I wondered what it’s like to be the senior poet at an institution where there’s a monolithic past presence. Do you notice certain trends in Levis’s reputation? Do you find yourself having to temper or encourage fascination with his work?

DW: Part of it is that Larry was such a genius as a poet and developed with, for a relatively short life, with incredible rapidity and incredible sort of ambition. And, I continue to learn immensely from his work. If I were coming to a place where that sort of deity were somebody I didn’t like, that would be a problem, but he really is a poet of a certain crucial importance in American poetry of the last several decades. And, yeah, people like Levis or like Frank Stanford and like Lynda Hull to some degree. There are always going to be people that, I guess, some people would be cult poets. But the great thing about having an audience of readers who are passionate about your work, however small, is that they’re passionate about your work and they keep a reputation alive in ways that are guaranteed to keep the readers, if you have that sort of following. Larry has that. I think Lynda has that.

I teach an Afro-American poetry since 1980 course and we were reading Etheridge Knight’s poems a few weeks ago and, to some degree, Etheridge Knight is half-forgotten in ways that I think are appalling and criminal, but Ed Ochester, his publisher, said, after I taught that course, that every year Etheridge Knight sells about five hundred to a thousand copies of his book. And, if you are a poet and you can get five hundred or a thousand new readers every year, after having been dead for a couple of decades, you’re doing all right. I think the fact that poets have limited audiences isn’t wholly a bad thing.

EP: In addition to being a poet and a teacher, you’re also a pretty prolific book critic and reviewer. You have a book of essays called Strange Good Fortune and now you’ve now got a new collection, From the Valley of Making: Essays on the Craft of Poetry. Do you believe that the art of poetry criticism has been lost? What’s happened to the book review and the essay on craft?

DW: I think the condition we’re in now is just vile. It’s terrible. You have occasionally people like Dan Chiasson and Charles Simic when he was writing pieces for the New York Review of Books who, because they were given a lot of space in a magazine like The New Yorker and New York Review, could actually write reviews that are actually worth the designations of review. But, you know, when I look at, say, what New York Times Book Review tries to do in its lip service to poetry, they may as well not do it. The Middle Generation of Poets, the generation of Lowell and Jarrell and Bishop and Berryman, they all wrote reviews as something that they thought of as essential to the discipline and, when they wrote reviews, they weren’t perfunctory, they weren’t the three sentences in Publisher’s Weekly. A lot of publishers now, when you do, say, a jack blurb for a book, you’re told that you can’t do a blurb over thirty words long because, if it’s longer than that, Amazon won’t quote from it in the description of the book, and I think it’s just that, part of it is that, again, we’re such an attention deprived culture that we have a lot of impatience with doing a thoroughgoing piece of reviewing.

Fifty years ago, a lot of Sunday papers would have a literary supplement and so the number of reviews that a solid book of poetry from a commercial or university press would get was far, far more extensive than it is now. I think that the reasonably good reviews that occur for contemporary poetry are printed on the web in various blogs like Ron Slate’s From the Seawall [sic] which I think does a real great service to poetry, but you’re not seeing it in a print medium and that’s something really should be changed.

EP: A lot of publishers have even moved their review section out of print and put it on their website. In some ways, it makes it more accessible.

DW: In a certain sense, it makes it immediately accessible if you know it’s there. Poets don’t seem to understand that if you want to be a serious poet in most cases, [you have] an obligation to review the work of your peers, and an obligation to write essays about poetry as well as write about the poems. You know there’s certain illuminations and understandings you can have about the art of poetry that you can’t make within a poem but you can certainly make within an essay or a lecture. And, I certainly don’t consider myself enough to, say, write a book-length study on a writer or school of poetry, but I love writing a twenty to thirty page essay on topics that interest me and Strange Good Fortune and this new book are the evidence of my trying to exercise that.

EP: Since you allowed me a little bit of access into the new book of essays, I’ve been really fascinated with this one essay titled ‘And Not Releasing the Genie’: On the Poetry of Stuff vs. the Poetry of Knowledge.” I wanted to just very briefly read an excerpt from that collection in which you talk about “The Poem of Knowledge” which you find to be the superior type of poem

The Poem of Knowledge, like the Poem of Stuff, values the strange, the particular, the special fact, but not merely for the sake of novelty in the manner of circus sideshows or the Guinness Book. The Poem of Knowledge picks such facts and particulars out not because of a desire to dupe and mystify the reader, but because some facts are better than others, and it is the task of poetry to draw meaningful combinations, not arbitrary ones. The poem of knowledge derives from a desire to synthesize—or alchemize—one’s learning and command of craft into a new reality, a new reckoning. This is no easy task during a time when both literature and facts themselves are debased.

Adversely, you despair that the “Poem of Stuff” or, as Tony Hoagland identifies it, “the skittery poem of the moment” is here to stay and that students often “feel a great deal of anxiety when they seek to break the conventions of skitteriness, or when they try to deliberately mask situations which call for clarity of dramatic situation and context in the trappings of irony and discontinuity.”

With those two sort of poles of the poem, how do you go about guiding students toward writing a poem of knowledge as opposed to the poem of stuff, especially in a week-to-week workshop that demands the quick turnaround of new drafts?

DW: One of the reasons why I wrote that essay is I do think that because of the way that we live now and our increasing inability or unwillingness to pay attention and concentrate on something like even a short lyric poem, I literally think we’re becoming synaptically challenged. That kind of concentration is no longer as available to us as it once was. We’re multitaskers. Students tend these days to have lots and lots of superficial knowledge about lots and lots of things and not a lot of deep knowledge about fewer things. That’s not a situation I necessarily complain about because that’s how it is and it will create it’s own sort of art in a while, perhaps not now, but I guess I see so many poems that seem to be the result of a few minutes of Google searching about a subject that is interesting, and a little bit of study of that thing is enough to generate that poem. And, the Web can become like this gigantic Guiness Book of World Records where there’s lots and lots of special facts and interesting things that are available to you that you feel tempted to turn into poetry, but the superstructure of that, the willfulness of that, ultimately the superficiality of that starts to bleed into the poems. We’re always looking for new metaphors. And, when you do a Google search, you have the possibility of not just of a few new metaphors but billions, literally billions of new metaphors that you’re looking at, and then it becomes a question of selection. How do you create from learning those special facts, learning those oddball things, something that is a more enduring and last endeavor as poem? Poems are meant not just to amaze you but to change your consciousness, and you don’t think about those things when you’re doing a Google search.

[end of main interview audio]

Tomás Q. Morin*: Since poetry long ago first appeared on the scene as the one and only written genre, it has given up ground to fiction, plays, history, etc. Are there any poets who you feel are taking back some of that ceded ground and reclaiming it for poetry?

Wojahn’s response to Morin’s question

DW: Absolutely, the people I think of first of all are not necessarily Americans but poets from Modern Europe and elsewhere. I think I’ve learned more about how consciousness works and the intricacies of consciousness from reading Tranströmer’s poems that any other poet I know of and I’ve learned more about how the personal and the historical converge from reading Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert and a lot of the other Polish poets than I have from any other source. And, yeah, poetry has lost ground or supposedly lost ground to all sorts of other art forms, but as Tranströmer has said more than once, he wants people to be reminded that they have rich private lives. The richness of that private life that poetry can address and foster and remind readers of in a way that no other art form can. So, it may have what seems to be a diminished importance in the world today, but that function that it performs is so crucial and so necessary and is not as easy to find emergent in other art forms that people will always read poetry. It won’t die. It has too much wisdom to teach its readers and its writers.

EP: Now, David, provide us with a question for our next interview.

DW: What is the single aspect of contemporary poetry which most frustrates or infuriates you?**

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Emilia Phillips is the prose editor of 32 Poems.

*As a part of our interview series, we ask each interviewee to provide us with a question for the next interview. To view Tomás Q. Morin’s interview, go to March 28th’s Weekly Prose Feature: “Tame Form + Wild Content: An Interview with Tomás Q. Morín
**See Curtis Bauer’s answer in May 3rd’s Weekly Prose Feature: The Written Line Perceived as a Drawing: An Interview with Curtis Bauer”

Each Friday we will publish a new essay, review, or interview for the 32 Poems Weekly Prose Feature, edited by Emilia Phillips. If you have any questions or comments about the series, please contact Emilia at emiliaphillips@32poems.com.

The titles alone in Rousing the Machinery speak to the personal, familial, and sociological struggles that dominate its poems: “Notes on Prison,” “Patron Saint of the Toothache,” “Estranged Labor,” and “How to Leave Home” all appear in the book’s first of three sections. A conjurer of rust and ruin, MacDonald frequently turns her gaze to America’s bleakest corners to search out any thread or wisp or rumor worthy of salvage. In “Grace,” the collection’s opener, MacDonald makes a muscular melody from such shards:

In this raw corner of a no-rank town, rusting
swing sets wobble under the weight of fierce

children as thunderstorm torrents ride pin-
straight alleys down the backsides

of backyards. When they think no one
is looking, my brothers pee on the alley

storm-grates…

The imaginative particulars of this rough-and-tumble realm reinforce the tidal forces of home, memory, and longing: St. Pauli Girl, The Rifleman, an alcoholic father’s Chevrolet Impala, homemade Halloween costumes, a dingy sippy cup faded with age.

The book’s middle section inhabits a calmer domestic realm, as the joys, anxieties, and pangs of motherhood increasingly dominate MacDonald’s subject matter and themes. Though shorter than the other sections in Rousing the Machinery, we see MacDonald’s voice at its most lyrical and contemplative here in a string of narratives that exhibit a deftness of tone and pacing. “Leda at Work in the World,” “Appetite,” “Sweet Box,” and the longer sequence “Some Mothers Ask” explore the boundaries of parental protection, the limits of innocence, and the myriad ways in which our world strains the tethers between mother and son. We also encounter the collection’s title poem, a diptych of loose sonnets that invoke and beseech the spirit of William Blake. Its rich diction, taut concision, and kinetic syntax show MacDonald at her best:

Rousing the Machinery

        The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

i.
Observe the perpetual boy, as one
with the pop-eyed crowd. He’s come
to see the King’s menagerie: camel, bear,
leopard, lion, tyger: stripe over stripe,
swinging its heavy head with each sullen
step. He notes the fixed pit of its pupil,
the eyes’ bulge and slow blink. Who will extol
this captive, pacing the round tower room?
Who will grind its bones for luck, pluck
stiff whiskers for a paintbrush, rend fat
for an aphrodisiac? Who will inhale
scent of musk, tang of urine soaked
in stone, sing, Marvelous, its assets?
A boy.

ii.
This morning in Raleigh’s exurban flank,
I watch the bad boys of Selma
Alternative High School craft paper wasps.
They loft them across the bedlam
of the classroom to where the tyger, perfect-
bound, sleeps in my hands. With a stroke,
a stroke, a stroke, the machinery is roused
and in the corner of the classroom,
above our heads, gangly wasps disgorge wood
to make paper. Watch: the miracle
occurs in a vessel, an enclosure, in a lidded pot
on a hot stove, in a woman’s body
where a child grows, or in the insect
jaw, ganglia, and lobe.

For all of its proletarian blues and maternal yearning, however, Rousing the Machinery remains a nuanced and capacious book, studded with overt and covert allusions to a vast constellation of artists—from Jefferson to Degas to Akhmatova to Frederick Douglass to Morris Rosenfield, among a host of others. Indeed, one of MacDonald’s prevailing themes reinforces the notion that our inner lives—half remembered, half invented, brimming with nostalgic totems—have the power to revise, redeem, and at times remake the world, or at the very least our understanding of the world. Later poems, such as “Azores Time,” “Teaching Myself to Sew,” and “Sing Whatever Is Well Made” broach more political subject matter that offers welcome counterpoint to the book’s largely confessional preoccupations, and perhaps foreshadow the ambitiousness we can expect from MacDonald in her future work.

A handful of flatly prosaic poems in Rousing the Machinery suffer from a lack of editorial control, such as the rambling “At the Registry of Regrets,” which attempts to gain too much mileage from its conceit: “May, the pretzel shop lady, tells me stories, / which are not unlike the pretzels / we bake, wrap, and sell at the mall…” Moreover, “Wasps in the Kitchen” never moves beyond the mere situation its title describes, and becomes a quaint exercise in anthropomorphizing a drone and queen. We encounter another stalled effort in “Empire and the Evangelical Sublime,” which juxtaposes a moment of introspection with a fragmentary reference to colonial smallpox in 1587, and the cluttered result fails to do justice to either impulse. It’s remarkable for a reader to count a first book’s failures on one hand, however, and it speaks to MacDonald’s talents that these missteps remain episodic and innocuous.

The front flap of Rousing the Machinery announces that its contents “detail the passages of an ordinary life.” This pithy summary correctly places MacDonald’s work in the tradition of Bishop and Levine while simultaneously attracting readers grown weary of contemporary poetry’s tendency to avoid direct confrontations with experience. Nevertheless, such sentiments seem reductive for this reviewer, as they fail to represent the range and tenderness of MacDonald’s poems, as well as her brave ambition to, in the words of Adrienne Rich, dive into the wreck. Indeed, MacDonald dares her open heart in these pages, and her clear, rising voice shines in this tenacious debut.

—Adam Tavel

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Adam Tavel received the 2010 Robert Frost Award, and his forthcoming collections are The Fawn Abyss (Salmon, 2014) and Red Flag Up (Kattywompus, 2013), a chapbook. His recent poems appear or will soon appear in Quarterly West, The Massachusetts Review, Passages North, West Branch, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. Tavel is an associate professor of English at Wor-Wic Community College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Each Friday we will publish a new essay, review, or interview for the 32 Poems Weekly Prose Feature, edited by Emilia Phillips. If you have any questions or comments about the series, please contact Emilia at emiliaphillips@32poems.com.

Emilia Phillips: Zbigniew Herbert wrote, “The most beautiful is the object / which does not exist.” Because of the title, I was primed to look for absence in your collection, an action that, in effect, insists absence as a kind of presence, something almost tangible, the ghost of a form. In the same way that a space where a tooth once was retains a tooth’s shape when framed by other teeth, your collection is full of imagistic negatives that hold the shape of something more solid: shadows, snow, memory. Poetry, with its white spaces and breaks, can provide a formal semblance for absence. It strikes me, however, that many of the poems—with their large or single stanza forms or long lines—insist themselves as a presence, a solid state in counterbalance to what’s missing. In “Still Life with a Man Falling Through It,” made up of long-lined couplets, we see a character on a ladder “slip, tilt, plunge to the ground” as if it’s “a stunt requiring a man to cling to what was not / there.” In some ways, does the poem become what was not there? How does poetry act as a kind of understudy to an absent person, object, or idea?

Curtis Bauer: Writing in general, and the poem in particular, is a way for me to stave off absence, loss. I am writing to someone who is not present in my immediate life, so I’m surrounded by absence. I grew up with absence, people I loved being away, and many of my closest friendships, those people I talk to about the world, are with people not in my immediate proximity. Even my marriage to a woman I’ve been with for close to twenty years has been made up of long periods of absence. Absence is such a strange word: it identifies what is not present, but should be. I suppose “Still Life with a Man Falling Through It,” attempts to fill in for what the character has lost—his footing on the ladder, the ladder itself, ultimately his life—as well as what the woman in the poem eventually loses—her man. So there is a literal absence alluded to in the poem, which I’m very interested in, but there’s also the perceived absence of being unable to get something or someone back. And yet we tell stories, recall moments in which that other is once again present. A poem calls those moments back, brings them back to life for me. This gets complicated when you consider this recovery through the lens of Herbert’s quote: there is a danger of sentimentality in recalling and reviving an experience or a relationship that has been lost; it becomes more beautiful, more precious than the actual. I hope not to do that.

EP: I don’t think you do! Even at their most tender and elegiac, your poems resist lyric stasis. For me, sentimentality thrives on stagnation like a scum on a pool of water. When I read a poem like “Drawing of a Boy Forgetting” or “Becoming a Crow,” I have the feeling of being inside a long hall with an open door on each end, the wind rushing through. The arc of a poem, any great poem, is an act of leaving, of moving from an entrance to an exit, even if the point of the poem is to return to the subject—to, as you said, “bring them back to life.” Is it difficult to leave certain poems, to finish them, because of attachment to a subject or idea?

CB: At the moment, I can’t think of a poem that was difficult to leave or finish due to the subject or idea alone. Poems are hard to write for many reasons: I have the most difficulty with poems I don’t think capture the idea or essence of the subject I’m writing about. I’m honest with myself when it comes to writing. I throw away or abandon quite a bit of work that does not satisfy me. I’ll write in a notebook or in a letter to a friend about something, and continue to write about it, in different incarnations of different poems most likely, until I feel like I get it right. Maybe that’s the wrong way of going about it, but that’s how it works for me.

EP: Assuming that some of your poems are based on personal experiences (and correct me here if I’m wrong), do you ever find yourself rewriting a memory for the sake of poem and, in doing so, perhaps rewrite the memory so that you suspect yourself for no longer accurately remembering what actually happened but for remembering what happened in the poem instead?

CB: Wow, that’s interesting. Especially because I’m trying to imagine what poems of mine may have led you to this question. All poems are based on personal experiences in one way or another, aren’t they? Just as a photographer experiences what she observes and captures in an image, I think a poet can have an experience of someone or something through observation, even if it is at a distance. It’s our ability…maybe I should just speak for myself…my wiring in how I see the world that causes me to empathize to the point of actually feeling like I’ve taken on a life. Those observations influence how I see, how I move on to observe other things. I believe that we can acquire memories of experiences that we haven’t actually had. I heard a lot of stories growing up, saw a lot of photographs of people I didn’t know, but somehow I have the impression that I knew them, that I actually had an experience with them. Maybe some would call that a lie, but I don’t; it’s an experience that I carry with me, that grows in my memory. I think of “Whiteout,” for example, which came from a picture a friend sent me one winter, a winter that wasn’t at all cold in Texas, but looking at that blizzard blur made me cold, made me think of growing up cold and freezing during winters in Iowa. So I remember the cold there, and I remember the view of snow and drifts and whiteout conditions from my grandfather’s house, but the rest of that poem is a composite of stories and experiences, some of which maybe happened, but most of them didn’t. At least not to me.

EP: What you said about your emotional hardwiring fascinates me, particularly in a discussion about “Whiteout,” a poem in which the we go from knowing nothing (“You are suddenly in a life, not knowing which / way your face is facing in the white before you.”) to discovering context, following association toward the harrowing image of the grandfather’s horse “frozen in the middle of the pasture, its eyes / suddenly glass” and landing on that redoubtable ending when the grandfather says, the horse “forgot what standing meant, / and sometimes when you forget you fall.”

For me, “Looking at 12 White Things,” which appears earlier in the collection, provides so much insight on how you’re able to move through poems. It’s like a primer for reading the rest of the book, though likewise a deft poem itself. For our readers, I’ll provide an excerpt:

                    Space is
a thing—the thingness, the gap
it creates. What lay beyond
the space, but a button I can’t fit
to a shirt (attached to a notch
of fabric from the shirt I wore
yesterday). The hand that ripped it
off was white, too, but it won’t stay
stuck to the paper sheet. I write
white hand and the letters form
the word that becomes the thing

Here we have a kind of alchemical recreation of experience: the substance is broken down into words and, if at the right temperature and stirred in the right way, those words cook into substance again—experience—and the experience occurs in an emotional/empathetic space. I’m able to join you there as a reader because the emotional/empathetic space feigns physical space through the poem’s form. While I wouldn’t identify you as a formal poet, your attention to line breaks, in particular, play toward the dynamism of emotion, space, and experience, imagined or remembered.

In this passage, the breaks act as a kind of imagistic cue or emphasis: “the gap” and “a notch,” supported by a break, behave like what they are; “the space” physically lays beyond “What lay beyond”; “to a shirt” literally “can’t fit” on the previous line; “off” is literally ripped off of “The hand that ripped it”; and “the letters form” the next line. I see this sort of attention paid to the line throughout The Real Cause For Your Absence. Will you speak to how you find what one could call “the mood of the line”? Is it based on sonics/rhythm? The sentence? Emotion? And how do you know when the breaks are right for what you’re trying to convey, what kind of space you want to create, in the poem?

CB: I like the idea of the “mood of the line” but I have no idea how to answer this question. Maybe I’m not so good at identifying moods until I’m in the midst of one. But how do I get there? I usually get into a mood through talking, so in the case of poems, through writing in response to something seen, heard, touched . . . Perhaps your question is one about process. I’m fascinated by process, by figuring out how things work. Many writers I love and respect are not, and they don’t want to talk about it; they’d rather talk about the final product, but that makes me think of a comic strip my father used to have hanging in his studio, a strip about how to draw a Dick Tracy comic, I think it was. As I recall, the first frame had a few circles for heads; the next had some stick-like lines for arms, bodies and legs; the third frame was the perfectly drawn and colored, the completed comic strip. There’s mystery in process that can never be explained, but it’s important for me to approximate mine in order to know how I can remind myself when I forget…a bit like that horse, I suppose. So I write in a notebook, as I mentioned before, and I write and I write.

First there are ideas: I suppose that refers to the sentence you mentioned, and those are driven by emotions—what causes me to write about something to begin with, some kind of emotional response, or lack of response. Those initial ideas quickly become secondary, however; then the complexities of language—semantics, sounds, grammar—take over. I like to play with multiple meanings—I think of the poem “Drawings” for example, which is an exploration of meaning and emotion and a gesture at a notation of diversity in the most basic sense. My interest and joy in the multiple also comes out in my enjambed lines; I love how a line is a unit of meaning; knowing this can make sentences all the more interesting, because there are many possibilities for not only meaning, but also rhythm and sound inside that sentence. This pleasure and play can be dangerous of course. I think it was Heather McHugh who warned me against an enamoration (I’m sure she didn’t use that word . . . does it even exist?) with the enjambed line. It’s easy to get carried away and break a line for a quick thrill, shock or surprise. This is where sonics, prosody and rhythm come in. I have to thank the gods for Sarah Lawrence College because that’s where my ear for an evenly cadenced and sturdy line was formed by Thomas Lux; that’s where I studied prosody with Suzanne Hoover; and that’s also where I met most of my friends and readers, two in particular—Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal—have taught me a lot about music and rhythm over the years.

A few of the poems in this book are in blank verse, but that’s not at all common for me. I do scan lines when I’m revising, and that also helps me understand line length. My gut reaction to your question about knowing when the breaks are right for what I want to convey is to say that I’m lucky. I don’t believe that, though. I arrive at my lines like a painter might in a drawing, through sketching and discovering what functions for the subject; or like someone going for a long walk, taking steps to figure out what the cadence, the pace needs to be in order to arrive from point A to point B. But that’s the start; I think knowing what works doesn’t come until the final stages of composition, in those final revisions when all the elements are nearly aligned. I keep revising until they are right.

EP: The Dick Tracy comic reminds me of that moment in the book, in “Still Life With a Bed In the Middle,” in which the speaker’s wife writes on his back: “the letter Q boils between my shoulder blades.” An element of language becomes a visual element, an image. The Q’s almost like the circle for a head in the initial stages of a sketch. Since you mention that you think of drafting a poem in much the same way that a painter approaches a piece through sketching, and since there’s several poems about drawings and sketches in the collection, I wondered if you work in visual art in addition to poetry. If so, please tell us a little bit about it. If not, what attracts you to writing about visual art and its process?

CB: I wish I could use the present tense here, but I haven’t painted for years. I used to, though, and I have paintings and sketchbooks and drawings around the house. I draw, too, but I can’t say I’m as dedicated to my drawings as I am to writing. That said, I’m attracted to visual art and process partly because I grew up with it: my father and step-mother are painters, so when I would see them as a kid that was the world they inhabited, and though I didn’t know it, I became adept at inhabiting different worlds—at that time those worlds were the farms where my mother, step-father and grandparents lived, and the studio, towns and cities where my father and step-mother lived. I should also say that there were paintings and drawings hanging in my mom’s house, too, which were like windows into these other places. I remember three pieces in particular she kept after the divorce, and they hung outside the upstairs bathroom—I spent a lot of time waiting outside that bathroom, and because they were there, I would get lost in thinking about the stories they were telling, the fine details in the foreground and background, as well as the naked bodies. I knew they were special, but I had no conception of the fact that they were 19^th Century classical engravings, that this was art. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have that kind of education until much much later. I thought everyone had paintings and drawings in their rooms, and that everyone went to museums and galleries. So that part of my life coupled with a physical connection to the land definitely influenced me.

All this to say that I think about drawing and painting all the time. I said before that I’m not as dedicated to drawing as I am to writing, but in the moments since I said that I’ve been thinking that I disagree. I’m reminded of Robert Walser’s microscripts, Walter Benjamin’s notebooks and letters, and that spectacular book of correspondence between John Berger and John Christie, I Send You This Cadmium Red: all of them have handwriting that is nearly incomprehensible, but spectacular as art. My handwriting isn’t the greatest, and I’ve had friends tell me that they can’t read the letters or postcards that I send them, but I believe the written line could be perceived as a drawing. When you dwell with drawings some narrative, some image, some lyric is revealed over time. Maybe this sounds like an apology or excuse for sloppiness, but I don’t see it that way: I love letters, as I’ve mentioned, but I continue to savor the notes my friends Elaine, Ross and Sebastian scrawl to me long after the “news” they want to relate has passed.

One final note relating to process. Painters and writers have a lot in common in terms of practice. Alberto Giacometti’s paintings and drawings, for example, are a result of his relentless revisions, his need to blend, cover up, layer, use a mistake to his advantage and perhaps most important, his attempt to capture the mystery of what was in front of him and translate what he saw into a series of lines on the canvas or paper. I find his work fascinating and have learned a lot from studying his work.

EP: How aware are you of how a poem looks on the page? Do you have pet peeves about design and presentation of poetry?

CB: I’m very much aware of how the poem occupies the page, which means that I also think about emptiness, white space. I don’t approach a poem thinking that I’m going to spread it all across the page, with long lines like “To A Woman Standing In A Doorway Watching The Rain” or “Colony Collapse Disorder”; instead, I arrive at it through writing and revising the poem. When I see poems like those, I know that I need to read them differently. There’s a reason they appear in space the way they do. If I have any pet peeve about presentation of poetry, it’s that I can’t identify the reason behind the presentation, or I can’t even approximate it. I don’t have to understand it completely, but I’d like to think I at least have an idea of what’s going on.

EP: How long did it take you to write the collection? On average, how long does a poem take you? How quick do you jump into revising after the initial draft?

CB: I’ve been writing the book since before my first collection came out in 2004. Well, I’ve been writing the poems for this book since then, but this book, the idea of this incarnation came about a couple of years ago when I was up at the Vermont Studio Center.

I wish I could say that a poem takes a specific amount of time, or that I spend X number of hours on a poem. I used to write and complete poems really quickly, but I’ve slowed down. As I’ve mentioned, I write in a notebook. When I’m stuck, or when I feel like I’m repeating myself, or when I see something either in a book or in the world that reminds me of something I’ve written, I’ll go back to what I’ve written. I know it’s not the most efficient way of writing, but I do that until I find that fixation, that kernel for a poem that I can’t set aside. Once I find that I work on the poem steadily until I can’t do anything else. That might be anywhere from a few days to a week. Before I’d send that poem out then; now I hold on to it, put it in a folder on my computer and return to it a month or so later. If the poem still holds that initial energy I know I’m close to being done with it.

EP: You’re a translator of Spanish poets. Can you describe a little bit about what you’ve worked on and what you may be working on now? Do you think your work with translation influences your own poems? If so, how?

CB: I have translated prose, too: a short story and a novel excerpt by José Manuel Fajardo, short stories by the Argentinian writer Leopoldo Brizuela, and others…but I mainly translate poetry, I guess. I translated a book of poems by the Spanish poet Juan Antonio González Iglesias, and Alice James Books will put that out in 2014; another book of my translations of José de María Romero Barea’s poems was published in Spain last fall; and I’ve completed another book by a Mexican poet that’s floating around out in the world. I’ve also translated individual poems—and continue to do so—by a number of other Spanish poets for the From The Fishouse website, for which I’m the Spanish Translations Editor. Right now I’m working on books by Jorge Gimeno, Carlos Pardo and Luis Muñoz, all three Spanish poets who are in their 40s and have been huge influences on the emerging poets of Spain. I’m translating their work while also putting together an anthology of emerging Spanish poets.

This whole translation endeavor is another full time activity, one that often eats into my own writing time. I do it, however, because I think it’s important for poets in the US to be aware of what our contemporaries in other countries are writing. Ask anyone to name a poet from Spain and he’ll say Lorca or Machado, maybe Cernuda. Great, but what about the poets Pere Gimferrer, Miguel Ullán, Jaime Gil de Biedma and Olvido García Valdés, to name only a few who have been instrumental poets for the emerging generation of Spanish poets? And who are our contemporaries, that group of poets who in the US would be in MFA programs or teaching in them? In addition to the ones I’ve already mentioned, a good sample would be Mariano Peyrou, Lorenzo Plana, Elena Medel, Julieta Valero, Ada Salas, Juan Andrés García Román, Andrés Navarro… I should stop there, but I could go on, of course.

Finally, my work is most definitely influenced by translation. I’m a better reader, of course, and listener; my ear is tuned into different sounds and rhythms, and there are different linguistic and syntactical surprises in many of these poets that I think stick somewhere in my head, and if I’m lucky it breaks loose when I sit down to write my own poems. So being a translator has provided me with a flexibility in my own syntax, since both languages have different syntactical structures, and that has enriched the way I write in English, but also how I translate. Another thing that happens that happens to me when I translate, even when I’m listening to conversations in English, is that I often misunderstand. In fact, I’m in a fairly constant state of confusion. Since learning Spanish my language usage has changed:, I confuse prepositions, use words differently, write sentences with huge digressions. I used to get really worried about this, but I’ve grown to enjoy my confusion. Learn from it.

EP: How do you think American poets should involve themselves in the international poetry community, outside of working as a translator: hosting readings, traveling, teaching the work of non-American poets? When there’s so much work being produced in the United States each year, how do we get a handle on our own country’s poetry and have the time to seek out the work of other countries? What, in your opinion, does Spanish-language poetry provide that’s missing in our own poetry culture?

CB: One of the easiest ways is reading the work of poets from around the world. There are quite a few great anthologies out there that can open doors for those who can’t read the work in the original language. One of the first ones I read from cover to cover was Simic and Strand’s Another Republic. I still read through that anthology; that’s where I met Fernando Pessoa, Jean Follain, Nicanor Parra, Yannis Ritsos, Czeslaw Milosz…and so many other poets who have been influential on my own work. There’s McClatchy’s Vintage Anthology of World Poetry, too, which is also great. But there are so many other anthologies now that offer introductions to younger generations of writers. And if people disagree with that statement, I encourage them to put together a new one; that’s how it works, right? Also, there are great web and print journals, Words Without Borders and A Public Space to name only two. The point is, world literature is available to readers in the US. So why don’t we read contemporary or emerging poets from other countries? Because we haven’t been told that we should, perhaps? Because, as you say, we don’t have the time to do this and get a handle on what’s being written in our own country? I think this last one is an easy excuse. I have to make time to read, and I have the responsibility as a writer and teacher to expose myself to as much as possible. I can’t read everything, but I can try.

Reading poets, writers from other countries, we can learn a lot about our own poetics, as well as about what’s going on in the literary and social communities outside our borders. I was lucky to have teachers nudge me toward global writers, and I teach this work in my classes when I can, whether they are lit courses, creative writing or composition classes (I haven’t taught composition for a while now, but I used to teach Hikmet’s poem “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” in my Comp 1 and Comp 2 classes). We can use literature in translation to discuss about just about anything. Not everyone can take a trip to Spain or Vietnam or the Philippines to attend a poetry reading or buy books by foreign authors in the original language, but reading and talking about poems from some other place can relocate us, move us out of our little world for a while. Also bringing international writers to campus or communities isn’t so difficult. I used to do some translation work for the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa; every fall they have about 30 writers from all over the world in residency and part of their residency is to give readings and lectures. We’d never be able to afford to bring in writers from Venezuela or Belorussia to Texas Tech, but through the IWP we have.

I travel to Spain quite a bit, and a few years ago the publisher of From the Fishouse, an audio archive of emerging poets, asked me to take a recorder along with me and try to record some emerging Spanish poets. This is a whole other question I suppose, but I mention it because it wasn’t so difficult to find the more than 50 poets I’ve recorded so far, to find public readings or bookstores where I could buy books of poetry and literary journals. A little curiosity goes a long way. And what does Spanish-language poetry provide that’s missing in our own poetry culture? Good question. The simplest response is that poetry from other places offers distinct perspectives on social, political and cultural subjects. One of the things I’ve learned from living abroad is that looking at the US from the outside helps me better understand what’s happening in the US that I might often overlook: the outsider sees and fixates on different details; has distinct poetic orientations and uses them differently; and then there’s the simple surprise that comes from reading in a different language.

EP: Gerald Stern says that you’re “one of the most tender new poets.” That said, I wouldn’t call it tenderness, exactly. I’d call it—if I’m allowed to nuance Gerald Stern’s—is sincerity.

I think we confuse sincerity too often with sentimentality, a mistake that’s perhaps inflated trust in what Hoagland calls “the skittery poem of the moment.” For me, however, sincerity isn’t a cloying certitude, like a fundamentalist belief. Instead, it’s a willingness to follow the subject without knowing where it will take you, to admit that, as poets, we don’t have total control over a poem or that there may be no resolution to the tensions that are found there. I think of Dickinson saying, “I am afraid to own a Body — / I am afraid to own a soul”—what a simple and yet severe admission! But that’s Dickinson writing as Dickinson. Perhaps it’s easier to be sincere when we write as “ourselves.” Let’s look at a section of your poem “Becoming a Crow”:

I’m learning to squat and cackle
at the men on the street. This one
with the hat stares and smokes.

I’m learning to read the fear in his body.
My brothers tell me I was a fool,
But so is everyone else.
They watch the man on a ladder,
the jet trails,
the boy burning a doll with a match.

It’s part of, they bark, your nature.

Though the poem acts through an extended metaphor, there’s sincerity here in addressing human nature, as well as the body. The crows are a vehicle for your concerns drive. How do you balance conceit with sincerity?

CB: I like how you distinguish sentimentality from sincerity, and I think you’re dead on—at least in terms of how I write poems—about that willingness to follow the subject without knowing where it will take me. My biggest failures come about when I start writing with something specific in mind, with an idea of what the poem is going to be like when it’s done. One would think that I’d learn my lesson, but I still try to do that. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve started poems knowing that I’m going to follow some received form, but I think that’s different. You’re talking about the direction a poem heads inside the form, the frame of the poem, right?

I like surprise, and I like to discover ideas and images I hadn’t been thinking about through the process of writing. Stafford talks about that, and Strand, and so many writers I admire work this way, discovering what they want to say through the writing of the poem. This can be applied to the poem you just quoted as well, and it’s important you mention Stern. Not because of what he says about me, but what he has taught me. He’s a bird lover if ever there was one, but his poems also masterfully balance their conceit in an honest way. He isn’t afraid of exposing himself, his emotions, confusion and anger. One can understand how loving and angry and relentless he is by reading his poems.

I wonder if I’m talking around the answer to this question. I just read an interview J.D. McClatchy did with Charles Wright for The Paris Review in which Wright talks about how he writes from what he observes, unlike Strand, who writes from ideas. I’m like Wright in that sense; I look outside, and “Becoming A Crow” was an exercise in looking. Maybe “lesson” is a better way of putting it; I’ve learned a lot from crows, but not in the attempt to observe the crows that would fly over my house in Iowa City every afternoon, but as a consideration of apartness, being on the periphery. Crows seem to possess some knowledge I want to tap into. But it comes at a price.

David Wojahn*: What is the single aspect of contemporary poetry which most frustrates or infuriates you?

CB: I’m not sure how to answer that. My first inclination is to say that I’m frustrated by the fact that there is so much out there that I haven’t had the opportunity to read, but that has more to do with my deficiencies than anything in contemporary American poetry. But in addition to that, I think I’m frustrated by a lot of poetry that doesn’t take itself seriously. Or the poets who write it, I guess. There’s this tendency toward the flippant that I find annoying. But I don’t want to generalize. That isn’t all contemporary American poetry, just some that I’ve seen, that I start to read and then get annoyed because I’ve wasted my time with it.

EP: Now, Curtis, provide us with a question for our next interviewee.

CB: Do you find yourself returning to any particular subject matter across your writing career? Why do you think that is?

*As a part of our interview series, we ask each interviewee to provide us with a question for the next interview. David Wojahn’s interview has yet to be published, however, but we’ll let you know as soon as it goes live.

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An excerpt from The Real Cause for Your Absence (C&R Press, 2013) by Curtis Bauer, courtesy of the author and the press.

Looking at 12 White Things

I forget to count the ticket stub
in my back pocket. A paperclip.
An envelope folded twelve times
to fit on the 4th row. A space
between the 2nd and 4th. Space is
a thing—the thingness, the gap
it creates. What lay beyond
the space, but a button I can’t fit
to a shirt (attached to a notch
of fabric from the shirt I wore
yesterday). The hand that ripped it
off was white, too, but it won’t stay
stuck to the paper sheet. I write
white hand and the letters form
the word that becomes the thing.
And while I’m cheating color,
lamp, though it’s on the red table.
I write edge of letter though
the rest is coffee stained, and covered
with books. I have no white books,
so I write no white book and try
to get away with it. I own
an ink rag that’s slowly turning blue.
A used stamp I’ve pealed off
an envelope. There’s the dull sheen
on a needle threaded with red string.
If only I could put that sheen in there.
And the noise we call white, how
to put that on the page so when you
look at it, you don’t hear me drowned out.

The Real Cause for Your Absence

In the afternoon the river thawed
and not one ice plate remained—
you could sit on the bank and watch
the flow float seed pods and tampon
boxes out of town, as if it were
a road you could stand beside
with your thumb out. Or skip a stone
from a pile the strange neighbor
boy mounded at your feet again.

This year, when the milk cartons
bobbed and twirled on the current,
the grocer seemed a little smaller
and our child gave her pocket stones
back to the riverbed. Suddenly tired,
the greasy mechanic had to look away
from the weasel dipping in and out
of the oak leaves lilting and twirling
in a mid-stream pool. Like last year,

like every year, the days were still
short and dropped their thick dark
hard like a wool quilt over the water.
The whole town went likewise to bed.
Not one lamp burned, which could have
given us a reason to stay. For a while
our bed felt perfect—firm, warm,
occupied—until the water drew our noise
from the windows and we followed—

You went upstream. I climbed down.

While Reading I Think About Drawing

Flowers grow inside my wife—

red, pink, white petunias, poppies and lilacs—the petals
dry on the stems of her ribs.

Every morning is a new year here.

I’m waiting for the jittery red and blue birds I have never seen
before tonight to fall asleep.

My grandfather used to say, If swallows rest before
midnight the stars will shine until dawn, but

that’s not written in any book.

The landscape of Atxondo is like a memory of lost birds and fitful sleep,
and waiting wide awake for the first glimmers of a red dawn.

Listen

to the chimney swifts.
They don’t know how to be dishonest.

Or to the dogs playing with water.

These mountains make me a new man.

I still learn from the cherry trees, the barbed wire
stretching up the hill, and the grass blades lapping

on a rock, and that space between each blade.

Seeing a Tan Woman’s Face, Late Winter

It’s January, New York, so she must be
back from somewhere nicer than here, but
sometimes I’ll think about the big picture,
about my skin and perspective. I wonder
when I started to lie, when I began to trip
up and push all the verbs and nouns down
deep and flatten them out. I wonder where
green went, where joyous left tan and orange
and soft, smooth, yellowish coffee color
left my hand, and these blue eyes turned
their sight on some little grass blade and to
the mirror and my ruddy face. This morning
on my way to the airport, a woman on Lexington
with flowers, she’s not just a woman, excuse me,
but she’s not Sybil either because she wants to live
and she’s beautiful and the flowers are white lilies
that make me think of spring, humming diesel engines
doing laps around fields and soil ready for planting,
ready for blooms, ready to germinate what touches it
and I want that it to be my hands, my eyes and why
do I have to think she looks like she can’t afford those
cut flowers and now that I’m a thousand miles away
I see the flowers but not the hands, I can hear
the paper crinkle though I was in a car and speeding
and I want to hear her breath because it’s even,
like the ambulance siren passing on the left
the taxi doesn’t move over to let pass. The man
in the back is on a gurney and I hope he has
just had a long night at work and is tired,
so the sweat on his forehead and spittle
dribble at his mouth is natural and could be
a perfect reflection of me, right now seeing her.

Experienced Worker, Employment Wanted

I watch the dead gather on the sidewalks
from my car. Every Friday I remind
the garbage man of his promises. I talk

to the old women stranded on the street
corners, pick up their teeth when they fall
from their mouths; I know how to wait

for traffic to thin, for the Dutch bakers
to throw out their scraps and the butcher
to kill a hog. I should add that I am multi-

lingual and the translator of last squeals:
in this instance it means the pig is confused.
I understand pigs; they don’t like confusion.

I dig back yard crypts, line them with pine
paneling and shelves; I stock them with wine
and fine cheeses. I’d like to add spoons,

guitars and cellos, but music sounds off
when it’s tarnished and warped. Still, I will
teach myself to play these instruments.

I am not honest. I bake stale bread for the starving
swallows shivering in the cold air. They are nervous
little birds, always afraid. I know their history:

a man threw a torch down the chimney of their temple
because he wanted to see fire fly. It flew as it burned
an arc in the tails of swallows small enough to fit

in the palm of his hand. Their song repeats,
repeats this memory—they keen for their brothers
and sisters when pecking crumbs from my palm.

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Emilia Phillips is the prose editor of 32 Poems.

Each Friday we will publish a new essay, review, or interview for the 32 Poems Weekly Prose Feature, edited by Emilia Phillips. If you have any questions or comments about the series, please contact Emilia at emiliaphillips@32poems.com.

Chattanooga sits in a valley along the Tennessee River, surrounded by mountains, where it cradles restaurants, bars, the Tennessee Aquarium, the Riverbend Music Festival, and much more. Not only has Outside Magazine consistently rated the town as one of the best cities to live in, I’m now telling you: It’s got an intimate and avid literary scene.

Case in point, unus: Meacham Writers’ Workshop, a three-day all-day junket of readings, lectures, workshops, and social gatherings. This perennial blossom’s been cultivated by poet Richard Jackson for over twenty-five years, primarily in partnership with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Chattanooga State Community College. Rick now has a team of coordinators, including faculty from both institutions, as well as the always-eager writing students from UTC.

Once I was one of those students. I volunteered for the conference as a driver to the visiting writers, and it provided me with access to rare interactions with writers. I learned how to talk to writers, to ask them questions about their work, to ask for advice about grad school and beyond. As a student, this was an invaluable boon to my growth not only as a poet but as a citizen of the poetry community. The conference isn’t just for the students, however; it’s free and open to the public. And if you’re anywhere within a four-hour radius of Chattanooga, I suggest you go. Buy books. Talk—actually talk—to writers. (Check out a list of their past guests.) Ask Rick for a wine recommendation. Shake out those little bees in your bonnet: for three days, live your life for writing and writing only.

Of course, I’m biased. And nostalgic. Which brings me to my next counsel—something new, something that attests to the growth of Chattanooga as a hub for literary, visual, and performing arts in the Southeast. Now introducing: the FUSEBOX art&word series, a year-old reading series that’s happening on a near-monthly basis.

Meet Aubrey Lenahan, founder of the program and graduate of UNC–Greensboro and George Mason University, a hella-stylish poet herself. You may ask, How does she bring in the likes of Matt Hart and Jenny Sadre-Orafai and other scribblers from the far-flung states of the nation?

A. Out of her own pocket. And donations.

That’s part of the miracle of the program, a testament to Lenahan’s tenacity and insistence that Chattanooga have a literary scene throughout the year, beyond the biannual Meacham conference. It’s unpretentious, stylistically diverse, and solicitous of the audience and readers’ needs. Now hosted in the Folk School of Chattanooga, one feels as if literature does indeed speak to other forms of art. How do you find out more? Facebook’s your best bet, although I’ve heard rumors that they’re expanding their online presence in the near future.

The longer I’ve been writing and working with journals, the more I’ve become aware of how important good citizens of our community are, like those who run the Meacham Writers’ Workshop and FUSEBOX art&word. So often, after toiling over a few words and nitpicking our writing decisions, we feel we deserve praise, and we do, but let’s not forget to give the laurels to our champions, too, beyond National Poetry Month, beyond this venue.

 —Emilia Phillips

*Throughout Poetry Month 32 Poems will use this space to praise presses, journals, and readings series that bring poetry to us in a special way. Our hope is that we can point new fans in their direction and publicly thank editors and curators for their work. Check in with us again tomorrow for another poet’s recommendation.

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Emilia Phillips is the author of Signaletics (University of Akron Press, August 2013) and the prose editor of 32 Poems. She teaches poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University and, in August, will join Gettysburg College as the 2013–2014 Emerging Writer Lecturer.

—Carol Light

*Throughout Poetry Month 32 Poems will use this space to praise presses, journals, and readings series that bring poetry to us in a special way. Our hope is that we can point new fans in their direction and publicly thank editors and curators for their work. Check in with us again tomorrow for another poet’s recommendation.

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Carol Light’s first book, Heaven from Steam, will be published in 2013 by Able Muse Press. Her poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, American Life in Poetry, Literary Bohemian, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Port Townsend, Washington.

They also have a storied past. Long before it was an online journal, The Blue Pencil was edited by Elizabeth Bishop, who was a student at Walnut Hill from 1927-1930. In her honor, the magazine gives its annual Elizabeth Bishop Prize to the writers of the best fiction and poetry submissions from the past year. This prize is a $3000 full tuition scholarship to the Walnut Hill Summer Writing Program.

Having taught high school poets in the UVA Young Writers Workshop, I know how eager they are to be taken seriously as writers and to have a distinguished forum for publishing their work. I can’t help but think back at my own teenage self and wonder at how important places like TBPO (and the UVA YWW) would have been to me.

I’ll leave you with this gem of an ending from “1959,” a poem by this year’s Elizabeth Bishop Prize winner in poetry, Ian Burnett: “perhaps he knew the South / was going out like a filament and / was afraid to / let himself burn with it.”

—Lilah Hegnauer

*Throughout Poetry Month 32 Poems will use this space to praise presses, journals, and readings series that bring poetry to us in a special way. Our hope is that we can point new fans in their direction and publicly thank editors and curators for their work. Check in with us again tomorrow for another poet’s recommendation.

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Lilah Hegnauer is the author of Dark Under Kiganda Stars (Ausable Press 2005). She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she teaches poetry and American literature at James Madison and UVA. She is the 2013 Amy Clampitt resident in Lenox, MA.

Likestarlings was begun in 2009 by Caleb Klaces, a terrific British poet I met in Austin, TX. The poetry editors are David Hawkins in the UK, and Jeffrey Pethybridge in the US. While most of the collaborations have been between British poets, or between North American poets, there is always the happy occasion when the poem exchange takes place across the Atlantic. We are waving to each other from our continents. Likestarlings plumbs the nature of correspondence and collaboration while proliferating the very act. How is the poem a meeting ground, a place for slowing and listening? Likestarlings offers a space for experimentation (though isn’t all writing experimental?). They welcome statements on correspondence, dialogue, the possibilities of poetic address, etc. in their prose section edited by poet-scholar Anat Bensvi. She calls these slant/angled poetics.

Here are some recent collaborations and essays that I find engaging, though the entire archive is a treasure-house. Truly!

Brian Blanchfield & Richard Siken
Ishion Hutchinson & Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Kirun Kapur & Sarah Howe
Benjamin Paloff & Jon Woodward
Jessica Murray & Jennifer Moxley
Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Hoa Nguyen

On the Poems of Heaven by Katie Peterson
Left to a Room by Shamala Gallagher
On Epistolary Poetics by GC Waldrep

And can I have a moment to say something about the name: Likestarlings! Isn’t it a glory? It is an imperative and half-simile all at once! Yes, I’m already fond of starlings, thank you. How is anything like a starling-flock? I’ve only seen them in video––the lot of them in flight making something of a cloth that billows then folds and pivots back. Synchronicity, change, splendor! This has much to do with poetry! Here’s something on youtube:

—Carolina Ebeid

*Throughout Poetry Month 32 Poems will use this space to praise presses, journals, and readings series that bring poetry to us in a special way. Our hope is that we can point new fans in their direction and publicly thank editors and curators for their work. Check in with us again tomorrow for another poet’s recommendation.

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Carolina Ebeid was selected as the 2012-2014 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, where she  works on the editing staff of West Branch.  She holds a degree from the Michener Center for  Writers. She is also a 2011 CantoMundo Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Anti-, Forklift, Ohio; 32 Poems, Indiana Review and other journals.

The Laurel Review is published by Green Tower Press, which also runs the Midwest Chapbook Contest every year: the winner receives $250, a one -year subscription to the magazine, and an all-expenses-paid trip to read at Northwest Missouri State. I had the pleasure of judging this contest in 2011 and found the intriguing poetry of Elizabeth Clark Wessel. I was just as delighted by the finished chapbook: hand-stitched, turquoise green, with a terrific cover image. Check out the photo: ain’t it cool?

—Dana Levin

*Throughout Poetry Month 32 Poems will use this space to praise presses, journals, and readings series that bring poetry to us in a special way. Our hope is that we can point new fans in their direction and publicly thank editors and curators for their work. Check in with us again tomorrow for another poet’s recommendation.

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 Dana Levin is the author of In the Surgical Theatre, Wedding Day, and Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared recently in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, APR, Agni, and Poetry. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations, Levin teaches at Santa Fe University of Art and Design and in the Warren Wilson College MFA program.

I feel fortunate to have this recording because it has served to ground much of my own reading of this poet who, in recent years, has been admired to the point of his work becoming trendy. But don’t get me wrong. I don’t fault Levis’s work for this phenomenon. I fault how we read it. And that’s what leads me to my recommendation: Blackbird’s Larry Levis features.

Dig around in the archive some. There’s a trove of valuables just a few clicks away. Here’s just some of what you’ll find if you put in the time:

Rare audio of Levis reading:
“Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand”
“Winter Stars”
“Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex”
“In 1967”
“Some Grass Along a Ditch Bank”

Facsimile drafts of “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gate”

Previously unpublished work:
“The Space”

Rare video of Levis reading:
“Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage”
“Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire”

David Freed’s Drawings of Levis

Read Blackbird. Trace its Levis reading loops. Listen to the Levis Reading Prize recordings. Track his influence.

Let’s get back to the man and his work. The legend can take care of itself.

—Joshua Robbins

*Throughout Poetry Month 32 Poems will use this space to praise presses, journals, and readings series that bring poetry to us in a special way. Our hope is that we can point new fans in their direction and publicly thank editors and curators for their work. Check in with us again tomorrow for another poet’s recommendation.

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Joshua Robbins is the author of Praise Nothing (University of Arkansas Press, 2013). He teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Tennessee. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Mid-American Review, Copper Nickel, Southern Poetry Review, Anti-, and elsewhere.

One identifying element of WordFarm’s approach is a willingness to confront and include matters of belief. Luci Shaw, John Leax, and Paul Willis have long been writing poems that have offered challenge and solace to readers within American Protestant circles, and their collections for WordFarm have given their work an opportunity to find readers beyond that faithful niche. At the same time, WordFarm’s poets also include writers whose work, while earnest and concerned with ultimate questions, bears more tell-tale marks of doubt and surprise than of belief. The science fiction-like work in Rane Arroyo’s The Roswell Poems and Bryan Dietrich’s The Assumption represent two of the press’ gestures towards inquiry over settledness.

Two poets in particular represent the best of WordFarm’s work at this juncture of poetic belief and honest doubt. Erin Keane’s two collections, The Gravity Soundtrack and Death Defying Acts, grit their way through a whole panoply of lyrical and broken characters. The dramatic monologues of various circus folk in the second collection draw on Keane’s engagement with theater (she is also a playwright and drama critic), and this shows in Keane’s evocation of character through the use of both vernacular and lyrical language. It’s hard not to share the existential dilemma of the tattooed lady who speaks in five of the book’s poems, beginning with her “Lectio Divina”: “outlining this rollercoaster / of a body” and ending with her worry that “Some day I’ll run out of skin.” Keane never gives in to an easy version of hope, but her poems still contain a deep, humane desire to offer something more to the reader than cleverness or skill. “Grievous Angel,” the final piece in her first collection, is a direct and smart and devastating look at the strange death of musician Gram Parsons. And it’s a wonderful way, too, of thinking about what poems can offer us, even in the face of loss. “I couldn’t give you / anything to hold” says the speaker, as he considers the uncertainty of our stories, but he can offer the poem: “so take this wakeful night/ know it can’t make sense. What’s left? At least / make it a good story. An offering, one last.”

The second poet at this juncture, perhaps with a foot more firmly on the road to belief, is Tania Runyan and her collection A Thousand Vessels. In her evocations of ten biblical women—Ruth, Sarah, Dinah, and Eve among them, Runyan contends with the possibility that “God creates women for no reason / but grief. He can’t cry himself / and needs a thousand vessels for his tears” as Mary says while watching her son die. To measure these tears, Runyan weaves back and forth between her biblical meditations and equally candid considerations of contemporary married and domestic life. After a poem about Boaz eyeing Ruth, Runyan shifts to “Honeymoon at Monterey Bay” where a contemporary young couple struggles to become familiar with one another as husband and wife. A little shy, still, about their return to the hotel room, they stop at a “long counter of microscopes” and intimately take “turns behind the lens, the skeletons / forming a latticework of cones and spheres, / silica arrows weaving through the openings, / holding the bodies together for good.”

The dialogues created within and between books like Keane’s and Runyan’s work reflect the vision of the publishers and the sensibility of poetry editor, Marci Rae Johnson. The resulting books are beautifully designed (by Craft) and thoughtfully edited. And the press’ literary range is expanding with two recent anthologies, one a collection of essays on the work of W. S. Merwin edited by Jonathan Wienert and Kevin Prufer and the other a collection of highlighted work from the first ten years of 32 Poems. Future work scheduled to appear includes Jeanne Murray Walker’s New and Selected Poems in the coming year.

—David Wright

*Throughout Poetry Month 32 Poems will use this space to praise presses, journals, and readings series that bring poetry to us in a special way. Our hope is that we can point new fans in their direction and publicly thank editors and curators for their work. Check in with us again tomorrow for another poet’s recommendation.

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David Wright’s poems have appeared in Ecotone, Image, Poetry East, and Hobart, among others. In 2003, he published A Liturgy for Stones (Cascadia) and was awarded an Illinois Arts Council Artist’s Fellowship for Poetry. Most recently he has taught at Wheaton College (IL) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In the fall he’ll begin a new position teaching creative writing and American literature at Monmouth College (IL). You can find him online at http://sweatervestboy.tumblr.com