Richey, Clark and Olsen et. al.

Frances Richey on ‘Afterimage’:

Patricia Clark on ‘Grand Marais Estuary, in Fog (after the painting by Stanley Krohmer)’:It sat in front of me when I was writing, a small 4 x 4 inch painting, goatskin on a panel, by Stanley Krohmer (my husband). The place itself captured: majestic quiet beauty of shallow water over sand, birds on the wing and rare endangered plovers nesting nearby — warning signs posted. It has happened to me again & again: an image that starts to speak, as though it must urgently tell its tale. And this one, the story of someone we knew, his name synonymous with Grand Marais. In that sense, the poem is a brief elegy. It’s subject? The writer Jim Harrison who came to our campus for a while, in a few autumn semester visits, to talk with students. Apocryphal or not, the story of his death says he was in his studio and was found with pen in hand. I hope it’s true.

William Olsen On ‘False Darkness’:

In the summer of 2017 my wife and I had stayed in the house of Sawnie Morris and Brian Shields, an adobe house that Sawnie had built herself.  Far enough outside of Taos to see the skyscapes.  A walk around dusk became habit for us.  I say us.  We have been together for 45 years, have done a lot of looking, so when I see something now I almost assume Nancy is seeing it with me.  The feel of looking together in the instant and over the years.  In the case of this poem, a perception took over, how daylight vanished from under and around us, to become the light on hills, to become the light on mountains, to become the light on clouds.  An ascending progress amidst the descent of night.  The longer I stayed with the poem, the more this incongruity startled me.  The usual verifiable facts, whose house which mountains what state, sheered off.  A mock argument between two kids one night struck me as some absence in my life, of childhood, of having children?  Midway into the poem the title “False Darkness, a phrase from a devotional song by the largely neglected Judee Sill, lent itself to my uncertainties.  It became something like a steering wheel for the rest of the writing of the poem.

Suzanne Lummis on ‘It was 3 A.M, Winter, Nine Miles from Truckee’:

You know that thing where a memory or event, or maybe just some matter of concern, weighs on you, follows you, until you know something must be done about it? A poem must get itself written? And nobody around better than you to facilitate this? But how to approach this material, this object of mental, moral or material obsession, in a fresh, unexpected way, without just rehashing what we already know, in the language we’ve come to expect—that’s the problem.

I had that thing. I wanted to write a poem on the most enveloping crisis facing our world (that is, aside from the new enveloping crisis facing us right now). I wanted to write about the environment, climate change, but without boring the hell out of myself. I mean you can’t just go, the seas are rising, the wells are drying, species are vanishing—W-a-a-h!

And then, as is so often the way of it, I found my approach to this area while writing about something else.

The Los Angeles poet Henry Morro has commenced a decline from which he will not recover. His wife Amy asked me and his close friend, poet Carine Topal, to edit and assemble a manuscript of his poems for publication. (I’d suggested we call it The Zoot Suit Files, and the name stuck.) Carine and I decided that as a tribute to Henry, and to let some part of his writing carry on in a new context, we’d each select a line or fragment of his writing and work these into new poems. My eye fell on “It was 3 A.M, Winter,” and I was back in the Claire Tappaan ski lodge, a kid again.

I began the piece thinking it would be about my earliest recollections of insomnia, but suddenly—or maybe slowly—it was about something else. That evasive poem got itself written.