Plume

This poem is part of a recently completed book manuscript, titled Auspices, which refers to an ancient practice of divining the future by the observation of birds.  In the book, I’m seeking legitimate grounds for happiness, in the face of the dire portents for the earth, and for ourselves, that we must live with. “Fairy Tale” is situated in a transitional, middle section of the book.  I wrote this poem out of events pretty much as described—external events and my internal responses.  Though the poem doesn’t (and needn’t) mention this, it is shaded by a book of French fairy tales I found in our house when I was 8 or 9 years old. They utterly horrified and fascinated me, exposing me to a range of fears that I see now were adult beyond my years.  Growing into adulthood I came to learn these fears directly. And so, to invert the cliche, the fears are fairy tales come true.

Matthew Thorburn on “Waiting for Someone”

To be honest, I’d always been a fairly casual Edward Hopper fan. I knew Nighthawks and a few other paintings, but in 2022 when I went to see Edward Hopper’s New York, an exhibit at the Whitney Museum, I didn’t know that he’d lived in the city for most of his life. The majority of his paintings I saw that day were new to me too. But as I walked around the galleries, I was hooked. I often write in response to paintings, and felt that I wanted to do that here. I wrote several other “Hopper poems” before turning to his Self-Portrait, which intrigued me in part because this spare figure in a spare setting seemed to offer so little to write about.

I thought about the painting for several months, finally deciding that what interests me about it is what’s not there. Hopper depicts himself with no tools of the trade in sight, and he’s not in his studio—he’s really not anywhere in particular. This image of him as a non-descript everyman made me think of someone who puts all the interesting stuff into their work, so that seeing them you’d never think they were intensely creative—or creative at all. I also thought about the painting’s setting—one of those bare, empty, interior spaces Hopper must have loved—and how often his work seems to be about space and light, how absence can be a kind of presence, how emptiness can take up so much room. In this way, the painting makes me think of Philip Larkin’s poem, “High Windows”: “The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

Beneath that, I think, are my early educational proclivities—both my own (questionable) aesthetic interests and the way certain notions of art, in my youth, still prioritized a more acutely socially oppositional stance. Let’s wallow in the corruptible. My teacher (Mr. P.) saw/encouraged in me a willingness to blur excitement with provocation, to explore the idea that what is arresting need not necessarily be what is polite or altogether good; that there is value in the trouble of a flame because the flame is destructive. Call it the Dionysian mode. Maybe I’ve learned better since. Maybe I was only hearing what I wanted to hear. Maybe, seeing this, my old teacher would sigh and shake his head. (He did, after all paint Eastern Orthodox altars as a side hustle.) But then these ideas were thrilling.

The next turn of the screw is that, although this teacher was immensely important to my early education (my only AP credits were in studio art), he had a long and complex last name, so he went by Mr. P. I can say his whole name aloud, but I have no idea how to render it in text. That limitation/imperfection is both interesting and bothersome. I like the idea that one can lose something that important. But I’d also really like to remember how to spell his name. I’ve researched county records online and even called the county public school offices to see whether anyone could help me find out how to spell his name, but all of those searches depend on knowing the spelling of a person’s name. So the research resembled the experience, also now lost, of going into a video store and asking the person at the counter whether they have a copy of that movie starring that guy who said that thing.

The poem is sentimental in that its occasion is memory, but it also presses against the limits of memory, trying to see where things disappear, and to embrace the remnants that remain.

David Dominguez on his poems:

Thanks to Danny Lawless for publishing side-by-side these three poems. Each poem focuses on a written work that has had profound influence on my writing: Longinus’s On the Sublime, Faulkner’s Nobel prize acceptance speech, and Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Plenty of other voices are singing as well, such as Lorca’s “Play and Theory on the Duende” and Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. I had wanted to write these poems for years but didn’t quite know how. The ideas rattled around in my brain until I finally decided to put them down as prose during freewriting exercises. For each poem I used a fountain pen and a favorite notebook, and once I gave myself permission to just let the ideas flow onto the page without regard for neatness, craft, syntax, grammar, or mechanics the poems began to emerge. Then, I took a pruning knife and honed the lines, line breaks, and images on paper. Finally, I took the poems to the computer. I must have drafted each poem a hundred times. In addition, I shared them with my pal the poet Christopher Buckley, who gave me immeasurable feedback. Still, I’m tempted to sharpen the pruning knife. In many ways, I wrote these three poems for my students. I wanted to inspire them. I wanted to show them that reading and writing has the power to change one’s life.