Sarah Dunphy-Lelii on “in common” and “gentrify”:
I spent five months tent-living at a field site in western Uganda, hiking much of most days, and during the hours devoted to body respite I would craft emails to friends and family. These could not be written “live” – internet connectivity was too unstable – rather I created documents of compilations (Dear Gina, Phil, Mom), and sent them off en masse in moments that a satellite passed overhead. In this way I ended up with a journal, the first I’d ever written, and one with several tweaked, customized versions of each bit of news. On my return, I discovered my front porch offered a similar opportunity, for four lives (in the case of “in common”) to converge on one small neighborhood crossroads. That I could refer to “The Steves” delighted me. When I saw the display tables at my local hipster spot as a home for stories perched also in the balance between community and autonomy, I wrote “gentrify”, starting with the third paragraph. I saw afterward that my love of the loose and blown (herbs, steam, hair, ferns) bookends both pieces; this makes me glad, and returns me to those hours of rainforest watching.
Rae Armantrout on Other Minds:
This poem began with wondering how much my thinking really resembles that of other people. That’s a common thing to wonder about, I suppose. I’m no solipsist! I’m sure we all think and feel in more or less similar ways. But how more or less similar are we? Specifically, I was thinking about my son. He is a scientist who, as it happens, has never had much connection to literature or visual art. (I’m not saying all scientists are like this. I’m only thinking of him.) I was wondering how often metaphors occur to him. I know all people use metaphor, but does the reliance on it vary from person to person? For me, words are almost alive. They occur in clusters or clouds of possible relation. He is the “you” in this poem, though, of course, it’s directed to the reader as well. I can’t ask him how he thinks. That’s a big, vague question. I feel like he would brush it off as a waste of time. So, instead, I wrote this. It’s a series of specific speculations on the subject. Sometimes I agonize over revisions, but this poem was fairly easy to write. The only place I got stuck for any length of time was in the third section where I go off on a bit of a tangent thinking of ways to include body language. I know I had several words at the end of that section before I got to “business,” which, now, seems like the obvious solution.
Peter Johnson on “Vaccination, in the Broadest Sense of the Term”:
A few words about influence. Russell Edson once told me that an influence is nothing more than a writer or poem that gives one “permission” to do what one was probably going to do anyway. I would add that sometimes one can be influenced by a poet or a specific poem without even knowing it. I wrote “Vaccination, in the Broadest Sense of the Term” during the pandemic. Imagine my surprise a few weeks later when I decided to reread Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen and came across “One O’clock in the Morning.” In it, after a long day’s night, the speaker decides to relax “in a bath of darkness” and separate himself from the rest of the world. “Horrible life! Horrible city!” he writes. “Let us glance back over the events of the day: . . .” What follows is a litany of events and complaints, which is very reminiscent of the mood and rhythm of my poem, though I was fortunate to stumble upon my spider, which also provided me with a narrative strategy and some humor. Rereading Baudelaire’s poem, I recalled Robert Bly’s “Eleven O’clock at Night,” which is a homage to “One O’clock in the Morning.” It begins with Bly lying alone in bed. He writes: “And what did I do today? I wrote down some thoughts on sacrifice other people had, but couldn’t relate them to my own life. I brought my daughter to the bus . . . ,” and then, like Baudelaire, he goes on to list other mundane activities and to reflect on them. I swear I never thought of these poems when I wrote mine, even though I have taught them both many times. This raises the question of how much of the creative process is owed to originality, influence, or flat-out theft, though perhaps a better question might be: Who cares?
DeWitt Henry on “On Lust”:
I continue to write “poems like essays / essays like poems”—hence the “on.” As for lust, where the carpe diem tradition celebrates its power and the moral one urges restraint, what about love and sex in later life? Hamlet finds his mother’s lust grotesque. Leontes’ eye “hath too much youth.” The elder Yeats seeks rejuvenation.
Megan Wildhood on “Physics” and “Green Room”:
What sparked most of my poems in my under-construction full-length collection, which Physics and Green Room are included in, is my mishearing of a song lyric or snippet of conversation. Physics, which has multiple versions since I can’t seem to kick my revision addiction,is one of the poems that crawled down my arm from my lay obsession with quantum mechanics/unified-field theory. My Bachelor’s is in theology and I spend an inordinate amount of my though power at the intersection of theology and quantum physics. Green Room was me exercising that play circuit hardwired into all mammals, the regular use of which is required for proper development and sustained health.
Jan Freeman on “Hanging the Dirty Laundry”:
The poem began when I noticed one of my father’s ties in my bedroom closet. I’d forgotten that I had it. The tie was covered with images of fish, and I’d kept it when my mother was clearing out my father’s clothing, following his death. This was many years before my mother told me about the fear in her marriage and the fallacy of her “attempted suicide.” When I saw the tie, I remembered how much I’d adored my father, and that we all villainized my mother after the frightening and violent incident. The poem spilled onto a page in my notebook. When I completed it months later, I thought about the taboo of writing family secrets, and the scorn, the guilt when “airing dirty laundry.” As much as I needed to write this poem (and others in my new manuscript, which addresses the legacy of tyranny and the confusion of love in families), I was afraid of the poem’s truth. I wanted the title to include “dirty laundry,” and I thought of Ruth Stone’s “Things I Say to Myself While Hanging Laundry,” a brilliant, celebratory poem with Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and ants climbing a clothesline. So, in conversation with Ruth, who was one of my poetry mothers, I titled the poem Hanging the Dirty Laundry, which completed it, moving it along her “imaginary line from here to there.” I think she would have appreciated the mother’s liberation in the last stanza.
Megan Wildhood on “Physics” & “Green Room”:
What sparked most of my poems in my under-construction full-length collection, which Physics and Green Room are included in, is my mishearing of a song lyric or snippet of conversation. Physics, which has multiple versions since I can’t seem to kick my revision addiction,is one of the poems that crawled down my arm from my lay obsession with quantum mechanics/unified-field theory. My Bachelor’s is in theology and I spend an inordinate amount of my though power at the intersection of theology and quantum physics. Green Room was me exercising that play circuit hardwired into all mammals, the regular use of which is required for proper development and sustained health.
Jonathan Weinert on “Squirrel Hour”:
Like many, I’ve spent almost all of my time this past pandemic year at home. I’m fortunate to have a pleasant house to hunker down in, with a large deck out back that overlooks a meadow and, about a hundred yards away, a line of old pines and oaks that edge a woodland. Social distancing is easy when your nearest neighbors are woodpeckers, deer, rabbits, and the occasional red fox who patrols the edge of the meadow.
In Lyric Philosophy, Jan Zwicky writes, “Domesticity, itself a natural order, accommodates the natural orders of other beings. The other is other—but it is also that with which we are inextricably entwined.” “Squirrel Hour” is domestic in exactly this sense. Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” which the poem explicitly references, sets the human and natural orders at variance. In “Squirrel Hour,” the human and natural orders relate in several different ways. The squirrel may wield a gimlet eye, but he is neighbor, guest, and friend. And the unnamed bird earlier in the poem opens a sort of space in the air where it is possible for one to journey beyond oneself. Domesticity “is capable of serenity in the face of the losability of the world revealed by presence,” Zwicky writes. Losability of the self, too, I might add. Never has this kind of serenity been more needed than it is now.
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