(Adrian Blevins, Brian Brodeur, Bob Hicok, Dorianne Laux, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Eric Pankey) Each of the five poets on this panel will explore the making of one of their poems from genesis to publication. Each poet, who has been featured on the popular weblog How a Poem Happens, will discuss their own process of poetic composition, addressing the following questions: How was this poem initiated? How did it arrive at its final form? Were any principles of technique consciously employed? What is American about this poem? Was it finished or abandoned? For more information, please visit the blog.

Published Date: June 8, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Washington, DC on February 5th, 2011.

The recording features Brian Brodeur, Bob Hicok, Dorianne Laux, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Eric Pankey, and Adrian Blevins.

Brian Brodeur:

Five poets explore how their poems were made. My name is Brian Brodeur, and I'll be the moderator for this panel. I'd like to thank the five panelists for agreeing to participate. After I briefly introduce our panelists, they will present in alphabetical order by last name. Each poet will have 10 minutes to read one poem and discuss how that poem came into existence. Time permitting, there will be a Q&A at the end.

Please remember that a selection of books written by the panelists are on sale in the back. I encourage you to buy one or two, or 10 or as many as you want. How a Poem Happens is a blog I launched in January of 2009, an online anthology of interviews with over 100 poets. The format for the blog is simple. I choose a single poem, ask the poet to answer 10 to 15 questions about the poem.

And post those questions and answers along with the poem itself and a brief bio of the poet. A new interview is posted once or twice a week. Some of the questions typically asked include, when was this poem composed? How did it start? How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique? Was this poem finished or abandoned?

For more information about the project, please visit howapoemhappens.blogspot.com. Now I'd like to introduce our panelists. We have Dorianne Laux, Bob Hicok, Adrian Blevins, Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Eric Pankey. Please help me welcome Adrian Blevins.

Adrian Blevins:

I'm going to read a poem from Live from the Homesick Jamboree. Then what I think I'm going to do, is one of the weird things that happens when you publish a book that you don't expect to happen, is people start asking you questions. I really love How a Poem Happens, I love the blog. The thing that's difficult about it is how do you deal with the questions, especially when you don't know the answers?

What I thought I would do was just give 20 answers and not give you the questions that Brian didn't ask. This is just a little poem called Hey You. Back when my head like an egg in a nest was vowel-keen and dawdling, I shed my slick beautiful and put it in a basket and laid it barefaced at the river among the taxing rocks. My beautiful was all hush and glitter. It was too moist to grasp.

My beautiful had no tongue with which to lick, no discernible, wallowing gnaw. It was really a breed of destruction like a nick in a knife. It was a notch in the works or a wound like a bell in a fat iron mess. My beautiful was a drink too sopping to haul up and swig. Therefore, with the trees watching and the beavers abiding, I tossed my beautiful down at the waterway against the screwball rocks.

Even then there was no hum. My beautiful was never ill-bred enough, no matter what you say. If you want my blue yes everlasting, try my she, instead. Try the why not of my low down, Sugar, my windswept and wrecked. These are 20 answers. There used to be a game you could play called 20 questions. This is just 20 answers of the questions that Brian didn't ask me. No, yes, no.

No, the poem wrote me. I was trying to prove to my students that adjectives could be anything, even nouns. When the poem said, "Adrian, do not use me to make a point. I am not a dagger. I'm not a pike or a pick. I am not two lines coming together at an acute angle. I am not a table of contents," it said. For Christ's sake, I was trying to get to class, but my three kids were calling me or texting me or messaging me on Facebook.

As you know, my kids are mostly grown up, but they call me 10 or 20 times a day, it's some kind of addiction. "Hey mom, where do I get my tires changed? Hey mom, I have a rash upon me in the nether regions. Do you have 20 bucks?" All this pissed me off and made me anxious, so I got stupid drunk. Winter, bee, plow, bread, celery, Extra Strength Tylenol. I would rather be cremated. No, I don't like it.

It's just too explicit about things getting off-kilter when they get too explicit. By narrative, do you mean a form in which speculative or imaginative or metaphorical events happen, which can be said to cause other speculative or imaginative or metaphorical events to happen? Yes. As everyone knows, the head has to be dawdling before it can drag the body down to the river and pray.

But if by narrative you mean something along the lines of out of date or old-fashioned, or defunct or outmoded, no, God, shit. It's a lyric poem. A little barn outside of Rumford, Maine at 8:45 PM in the middle of July. Oh yes, it did happen. It's totally autobiographical, 110%. Oh, I don't know, Brian. Stuck, sticky, fed up, on the verge of claustrophobic, hot. Honestly, it's amazing how little they mean to me.

The only ones I am desperate for are the ones I have not yet written. I think so, give her my best. Fish sticks, Dr. Pepper. Fuck theory, not Jeff Bridges, not Megan Fox, not Christian Bale, maybe Betty White. Probably Betty White. No, the poem wrote me. You're very welcome, Brian. Thank you.

Bob Hicok:

I'm going to read a poem called A Letter: The Genesis Poem, and then surprise, I'm going to talk about that poem. Hello. You've read your way into a time machine disguised as a poem, inside a book called This Clumsy Living, a title taken from a Roca poem. For you it's sometime after March of 2007, though the words you're reading, such as that word reading, are being typed on May 23rd, 2006. It's sunny here.

On my desk, a Bible open to Genesis rests on a short story about a man whose son is heading off to Paris Island for basic training. Which sits on a History of Zero I printed out from a website, which is on top of the book, The Last Place on Earth, about Amundsens and Scotts' journeys to the South Pole. I'm thinking of writing a series of poems using only words in the first chapter of Genesis. Then God creeps on the fruitful behold.

Let us rule the expanse with seed and trees bearing darkness. When I look up from the keyboard, I face a casement window that's full of the Blue Ridge. That's why mountains show up in many of these poems. In sky, 33 times is why three of those, because 28 altocumulus twice 23 windows. We're at war as I write in Iraq, in case we've moved on to Iran by the time you read this. Most of the talk right now is about gas prices and illegal immigrants.

Many people here don't want elsewhere people to become here people. To every bird and evening cattle let there be yielding. I write with an old version of Word Perfect that allows me to look at little more than a black screen with a blinking, white cursor. I've been staring at that blinking cursor for some time trying to figure out what I want to say about this book or writing poems, or God or the Defense Department or Eve, or my parents or the simultaneous cravings for order and disorder.

I think trust is what I need to address, for me that you exist so that my words are in your hands. That I've said what I've said, that I've been clear, sometimes muddled clear and sometimes simple clear. That's hard for me to believe, which is why I write so much, which is why this book where it left to me, would be infinity pages long. Always the sense that every night created him.

That who I am is just up ahead, looking back saying, "I have given you image in the midst of waters and the waters swarmed, formless and void." Trust that faith needn't be a weapon, a sharpened Christ or exploding Muhammad. That here or there is all the same. Who knows? That words can change us. If you sit alone with words long enough, it's easy to believe the mind and the moments of its conception.

That we might, male and female beasts, give light and let birds fly from our living. That mine doesn't create a thing but is the created thing, so saying thank you. We are thanks. So kissing a thigh, we are the shiver. Whether I believe that or not, I want to. The question, what is the definite thing I believe, is in the Bible. In every book, Adam, though not the answer.

Answers aren't so much fun, the hypotonus, the Superconducting Super Collider, but what's behind them? The need to cherish shapes, the smash and grab of physics. God blessed them. Trust in steps and reach in failure. God creating them in His own image and God said to them, "Be fruitful and fill the light with darkness and the darkness with waters, and waters with sky." Everything has life.

This book, the mouth openings into more. These poems are me looking forward at you looking back at me. 23 windows, 13 moons, 32 dreams, one instance of the cloud that is described as small heaps arranged in layers or sheets. A book of poems, small heaps arranged in layers or sheets. The poem of wondering right now who you are. I wrote out some stuff this morning and I'm just going to rip through this.

That poem was basically me stopping being a coward about books. I'd never really put much effort into books. At a certain point, I wanted a poem in that book that spoke about the book. That was all the intention I had when I started writing, which is common for me. I rarely know what I'm going to write about. That's probably why so many of my poems begin situationally, since I'm likely trying to situate my mind in a way that allows an associative plane to begin.

Just before starting to work on these comments, I misunderstood something a hotel cashier said, and wrote down in the front of this book, "My listening was mumbling." That's a thought into which I could lean and from which push away into a poem. Beyond that node of interest, I don't know what I'd do with that, which is the mystery that fundamentally attracts me to writing. I like the feeling that I'm about to create my mind.

It's not a poem I'm after so much as the record of that coming into existence. This matters so much to me because I don't believe I think much at all. I told myself I'd pause after that, or feel very deeply or thoroughly without a cause. Without some end, I'm trying to achieve the demands concentration for a purpose. The phrase, "I was sitting and thinking," rarely applies to me.

For whatever's going on in my mind or as my mind minus an activity, is too random and floaty to be called much other than noise. Poems for me are that focusing device, that lens, and have a fundamental quality of performance, and that I'm able to draw a sense of meaning out of the moment or I'm not. Revision for me is much more a matter of keeping or letting go entire poems, than reworking the mind of any one poem.

This poem really took off for me when I struck upon the notion of writing a series of poems from the language of Genesis. A notion that came out of a stuck moment out of turning my head, seeing a Bible, opening it and finding that language compelling and relevant to the direction my mind was already moving. In this way, I think a lot of what we're trying to do as poets, and more importantly as people, is to learn to be open to the opportunities the moment presents.

To go all Robin Williams on your ass, seize the day, but for me while writing, what I want to be able to do is seize the second. To exist at the point of time when time itself is coming into existence. This is impossible since consciousness is always retroactive, but I still have the desire to live and write without hesitation. From that immediacy, find that I have surprised myself out of the known patterns of my mind.

In that sense, this poem is very much an Ars Poetica. The passage always the sense that night created him. That who I am is just up ahead looking back saying, "I have given you image in the midst of waters and the waters swarmed formless and void," is a stew of these ideas about being I've touched upon here. I'm struggling right now with how to put this.

And that desire to speak or know, to clarify, and in a basic sense create the self, is also oddly where I feel the most selfless. That I now have to serve this sentence more than myself, have to serve the moment as it is taking shape. It's my sentence, but it has a life of its own. It's the same with poems. They take on a life in the moment that is part of me, part of us, but they are so clearly their own objects, words on pages.

Their own beings that we end up creating as we're writing a poem, the very space, the only space into which that poem can be received. I mean this in both the tiniest and largest sense. When we write, we change the material existence of the universe. While this is the case with any action, when we write, these changes embody our most basic curiosities and tendernesses. What I'm trying to get across is I think basically a notion of freedom.

A sense of making as the activity that lets us escape from the past, by deciding what that past will be, to occupy the present as it slips away. This poem, whatever its public value, is a poem that I write, just wrote just slightly ahead of my own pulse, which is all I want, to get ahead of myself and turn around. Thank you.

Dorianne Laux:

Facts About the Moon. The moon is backing away from us an inch and a half each year. That means if you're like me and were born around fifty years ago, the moon was a full six feet closer to the earth. What's a person supposed to do? I feel the gray cloud of consternation travel across my face. I begin thinking about the moon-lit past, how if you go back far enough you can imagine the breathtaking hugeness of the moon.

Prehistoric solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun so completely there was no corona, only a darkness we had no word for. And future eclipses will look like this. The moon, a small, black pupil in the eye of the sun. But these are bald facts. What bothers me most is that someday the moon will spiral right out of orbit and all land-based life will die.

The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields in check at the polar ends of the earth. And please don't tell me what I already know, that it won't happen for a long time. I don't care. I'm afraid of what will happen to the moon. Forget us, we don't deserve the moon. Maybe we once did but not now after all we've done. These nights I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling around alone in space without her milky planet, her only love.

A mother who's lost a child, a bad child, a greedy child, or maybe a grown boy who's murdered and raped. A mother can't help it, she loves that boy anyway, and in spite of herself she misses him. If you sit beside her on the padded hospital bench outside the door to his room, you can't not take her hand, listen to her while she weeps. Telling you how sweet he was, how blue his eyes, and you know she's only romanticizing.

That she's conveniently forgotten the bruises and booze, the stolen car, the day he ripped the phones from the walls. You want to slap her back to sanity, remind her of the truth: he was a leech, a fuck-up, a little shit, and you almost do, until she lifts her pale, puffy face, her eyes two craters, and then you can't help it either. You know love when you see it, you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull. I'm just going to answer a few of the questions.

The first one is when was this poem composed? How did it start? The poem began in the summer of 2004, as I had a dinner table conversation with our friends in Eugene, Oregon, poet Maxine Scates and her husband, Bill Cadbury, and my husband Joseph Millar. We were sitting on a deck overlooking the Willamette River, and the full moon was out in all its midsummer glory. One of us asked, probably me since I know next to nothing about how the solar or lunar system works.

I think Bill began to tell us, and he was fine up until how it came to how the earth, sun and moon rotate in tandem. The candle was the sun, the sugar bowl was the moon, the Sweet'n Low ramekin was the earth. For planets, we had to steal more salt and pepper shakers from neighboring tables. No matter how we twisted and turned them, we just couldn't quite figure it out. Hardly anything stumps Bill, and so over the next few weeks it became a game.

One of us would look something up and then try to explain it to the others. We were not getting very far. No one could really visualize it. Sometime later, I happened to be watching the Discovery Channel and there was a special about the moon. It was amazing. Among the many facts I learned that night, was the one that stuck with me. The fact that since the expansion of the universe, the moon has been steadily and significantly backing away from the earth.

Which meant the moon once appeared much larger in the past, and would only appear smaller in the future. I couldn't get over it. I went to bed trying to imagine it and woke up thinking about it. I was obsessed. I even rewatched the movie, Joe and the Volcano with Tom Hanks, because there's this scene in it where he's left everything behind, his job, his country, his life, and is floating in a makeshift raft on the ocean and wakes to the moon rising over the water.

He struggles to stand and face it and is dwarfed by it, and says, "Dear God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life. I forgot how big. Thank you for my life". I also read everything I could get my hands on about the moon. That fascination has been long-lived, as I'm still reading about the universe, and I'm just now finishing up Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way.

The second aspect of the poem is that my extended family was going through a midlife crisis, a not uncommon state of affairs for them, so that was also in the back of my mind. I was in the process of working to pull away from them. Maybe I became obsessed with the moon, as a way to curb my obsession with the latest family crisis. But the tug of the family is tremendous. Even a crazy family can seem better than no family. The poem is too obsessions and collision.

Then one of the other questions he asks is, "Do you believe in inspiration?" I was inspired first by the moon, then by the facts, then by the human affairs in relation to the facts. Then love versus the facts. The sweat and tears occurred in trying to figure out how the lunar system worked. In trying to imagine how the sky looked to people eons ago, wondering what it was like to be made so small by the moon.

How bright it must have been at night, how dark the night sky will be in the future, which was fun, curious, a childlike kind of thinking. Not too much sweat and few tears, except for thinking about the suffering of my family and the moon. How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique? That the listing of the facts was in some way interesting, was my only concern.

The form is open and easy just to voice speaking in a fairly regular broken line. The leap from the planetary to the personal might've been a technique had I thought of it consciously, but I didn't. It happened naturally, organically without my being aware of it until I had finished the poem. I really thought the poem was about the moon and these two people I had made up, the woman and her boy, strangers to me.

But realized later, it was my mother and my sister or my sister and my niece in disguise. One of the other questions he asks is, "Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it?" I called Bill Cadbury, if you remember, that's the man who was helping me try to figure out the lunar system, right after I wrote the poem, as it felt like the culmination of all our failed research. He said, "I think you've got a winner there."

It felt good. In that sense, the poem was written for Bill, who was a linguistics professor for 30 years at the University of Oregon, and our little group of moon-gazing poets. Clearly, I write for him and them too. I showed the poem to my husband when he got home from work, and he made some suggestions, then to my writing friends who made a few more. Mostly I share work now with my husband and my friend, poet Ellen Bass.

Phil Levine always takes a good look at my book before I publish it. My editor at Norton, Carol Houck Smith, recently died. She edited the book, Facts about the Moon, and was the one to suggest that the poem be the title of the book. My friend, Maxine Scates, found the painting by Magritte, a tree with a moon in its crown. It takes a village. Then he asks one of the final questions, "What is American about this poem?"

The violence of it, the adolescence out of control of it, the mother alone of it. The fuck-up, little shit of it, the family in crisis of it. The Philip Levine-ish forget us of it. The guilt and shame and what we have done of it, and the final hour love of it.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil:

This poem is called Small Murders. When Cleopatra received Antony on her cedarwood ship, she made sure he would smell him clear across the sea. Perfumed sails, net sagging with rose hips and crocus draped over her bed, her hands and feet rubbed in almond oil, cinnamon and henna. I knew I had you when you told me you could not live without my scent, bought pink bottles of it, creamy lotions, a tiny vial of perfume.

One drop could last all day. They say Napoleon told Josephine not to bathe for two whole weeks so he could savor her raw scent, but hardly any mention is ever made of their love of violets. Her signature fragrance, a special sample of these crushed purple blooms for wrist, cleavage and earlobe. Some expected to discover a valuable painting inside the locket around Napoleon's neck when he died, but they found a powder of these violet petals from his wife's grave instead.

Just yesterday, a new boy leaned in close to whisper that he loved the smell of my perfume, the one you gave me years ago. I could tell he wanted to kiss me. His breath was heavy and slow against my neck. My face lit blue from the movie screen and I said nothing, only sat up and stared straight ahead, but by evening's end, I let him have it. 27 kisses on my neck, 27 small murders of you and the count is correct, I know.

Each sweet press one less number to weigh heavy in the next boy's cupped hands. Your mark on me was washed away with each kiss. The last one was so cold, so filled with mist and tiny daggers, I already smelled blood on my hands. I'm not going to embarrass him, but the little backstory on this is that the boy in the movie theater, who's now grown up to be a man obviously, neither of us can escape this poem.

This was written many, many years ago, both of us are happily married to other people and don't feel sorry for him. He's a New York Times fiction darling, so he's nothing to feel sorry about. But what I found so interesting about this poem in particular, is that this poem is the single most requested poem when I go to high schools or when I visit colleges, things like that.

When I first got my job at SUNY Fredonia, they have a reception for new faculty members. I was the youngest faculty member on campus that year, and the president makes a whole to-do of trotting you out in front of everybody. For the new poet on campus, he actually made a special request. He called me at home and said that his wife was specially requesting this poem to read. This is basically to the community, the campus community.

I was so just freaked out by this because, again, this is one of my most autobiographical poems. But at the same time, this is not how I want to be introduced to the president, administration, that kind of thing as well. But I wanted to say in terms of the origins of this poem, this poem came fairly easy to me. It's not to say at all, especially to the students in this room, that this is just I can sit at a desk for one evening and voila.

This won a Pushcart Prize and that is not normal. I only mention this because now I actually have a three and a half year old and a seven month old at home and I don't write every day. I actually don't have a really writing routine. There is no routine in my life right now, but I find that when I am at least in a continuous practice of writing, at least in that continuous mode of thinking of poems.

Or even if I make it to the desk and sit on my computer screen, even if nothing but one word or one fragment comes out maybe twice a week, twice a week, maybe once a week if I'm being realistic now. I feel like my pores become more open and alive to the possibilities of language and wordplay. The musical delight on your tongue when you're crafting a poem, for me that's my absolute favorite part of writing.

When I don't get to that mode, unless I actually sit down and get my butt in the chair, that kind of thing. Even if it's not, again, even I always am amazed at the people who wake up at the crack of dawn and sit down for four hours before work and write. I don't know how they do that. I don't know how it's possible. More power to you if you can do it, but I just can't. I love sleeping way too much.

I wanted to mention that. Just to say as well, for me and that poem in particular, the writing of that poem was a mix of being deliberate in that I wanted to get this background story of the romance. The very tumultuous romance of Napoleon and Josephine in there, but also this idea of writing a poetry of supposition. It's interesting, Bob had mentioned that earlier, a lot of my writing too is what if this, suppose this happens, et cetera, et cetera.

Then from that, the final piece to it all, is just that simple delight and surprise that you get in the poems that are successful for me, anyway. When I was in my 20s, all love in your 20s is moony, swoony love poems. Nobody wants to read those. I don't want to write them and I didn't want to just regurgitate a diary entry by any means. For me, I think coming from a science background and a biology background, that kind of thing, and my reading of natural history books.

I tried making notes here this morning of what are the books that are on my shelf right now, my writing desk? None of them are poetry books, which I found really interesting actually. I've got an encyclopedia of pirates. I've got an autobiography of a sword swallower, and then a field guide to shells. I don't know, it's not like I'm writing about pirates right now. I'm not writing about shells.

I'm not writing about sword swallowers, but that's the kind of stuff that just again, keeps your pores open and alive to music and to poetry. That's a little bit of the behind the scenes of my poetry practices. I just wanted to end with a poem from my newest collection. This is a response to when I go and travel and be a guest speaker at different high schools in particular. This is the second most asked question.

The first is, "Can you read Small Murders?" The second one is not about my process, nothing else, but this is Are All the Break-Ups in your Poems Real? If by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck in your heel, the wetness of a finished lollipop stick, the surprise of a thumbtack in your purse. Then yes, every last page is true, every nuance, every bit and bite. Wait, I have made them up, all of them.

When I say I am now married, it means I married all of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves. Can you imagine the number of bouquets? How many slices of cake? Even now, my husbands plan a great, great meal for us. One chops up some parsley, one stirs a bubbling pot on the stove, one changes our baby, and another one sleeps in a fat chair. One flips through the newspaper, another one whistles while he shaves in the shower. Every single one of my husbands wonder what time I am finally coming home. Thank you.

Eric Pankey:

Well, I want to say thanks to Brian for getting us all together here. I'll read the poem first and then say what I was just about to say. It's called The Old Brickyard Road Quarry. The world begins with a gaze impromptu. The first light, endlessly divisible, starless, submerged in vapor. Unscored, loosed, so that one does not think of proportion, abrupt edges, magnetic poles, remnants, or for instance, the quality of mercy or the maker.

To dispense with narrative, to let go of the ledger, the inventory. The 10,000 stains where blood redeemed, is to believe in the dreams, irrational counter-history. The limestone scree, the said and to-be-said held in solution. The weight a body takes on inch by inch, as it's pulled from the quarry's clouded water. A body bloated, radiant, jade-tinged, pearl. Well, when Brian first asked me to answer some questions about the poem, and even while I was answering the questions that he asked me, I found myself resistant.

Because in some ways, he has this blog called How a Poetry Happens, and once I start talking about it, it's in the past tense. It's no longer happening. It's like if you have that IKEA furniture at home, if you take it apart, you really see just how crappy and useless it is. You can't even take it apart with the Allen wrench they gave you to put it together. I don't want to bring up the sausage making, but there is a sense in which as a poet, you see everything that didn't get into the poem.

You see everything that did get into the poem. But what you're really trying to do, is to convince everybody out there that this is really a nice piece of furniture. That these joints are tight and smooth, so why you want to look behind the curtain? I don't know. I was looking back at the answers to his questions, and I found myself very resistant to actually interrogating the process. Because at least for me as a writer, I find myself most interested in the act of making the poem.

After the poem is made, it seems well, much less interesting. One is always working towards the future in their poems. I worry a little bit that in taking apart the poem, I'm looking at the poem as this object and that objecthood becomes essentially the afterlife of the poem. In some ways, I would rather have that afterlife be in the hands of somebody else. In a minute I'll come back to that, but I thought I would answer one of the questions that Brian asked because I've thought a lot about it.

That is the question, do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was received and how much was the result of sweat and tears? I said, "I do not believe in inspiration. I think that there are times when things do open up before one, as if a gift from some unknown source, but those times are usually because one has prepared oneself for writing. Reading, thinking, note-taking conversation, meditation, brooding, daydreaming, fretting, and then one gets the time and space to write."

If one's lucky, things open up before one as if a miracle. For me, that's usually the summer months because like many of you, I spend my time reading other people's poems nine months of the semester of the year. It takes up a lot of time, a lot of fun energy. But it's a very similar to me creative energy to think what are they doing in their poems? How do their poems make themselves come alive? But I think reading, as Aimee was mentioning, the autobiography of the sword swallower is pre-writing.

In fact, I've given myself the privilege to call everything I do pre-writing. If I'm pumping gas, I'm pre-writing. If I'm mopping the kitchen floor, it's pre-writing. It all adds up. I think Jack Gilbert said, somebody asked him, "What do you do between poems?" He said, "I prepare for death." While you're preparing for death, you might as well be doing pre-writing, right? I want to get time for conversation. But what was exciting for me, I've avoided the blog world because I feel like I have too many other things to read.

It seems endlessly endless, the blog world. But on my entry, there's actually a response, a comment, and I thought I would read that to you, because as I said a minute ago, maybe better to let somebody else think about my poem than me. This is someone, DH Vibe said, "A poet for every reader and for every poet is what I come away with after reading this man's interview. He is far more famous than I shall ever be as a poet. The truth is, however, I do not especially enjoy his poetry. Inspiration does exist.

"Without it, poetry cannot happen. Naturally, it is a starting point and I am much put off by the notion that a poem could be complete in a first draft. To me, poetry must have its roots in events. The poem may or may not be about that event, but it is not fiction." Just so you know, I'm not reading this in any way to, I take sincerely what this person says. As you will hear, and I've gone back and looked at a lot of my work, and everything he says is true about so many of my poems.

Perhaps what I call inspiration, he calls observation, such as this poem, the Plum on the Sill. He quotes another one of my poems, which goes like this. The cold at its poles and blush of blue at its equator, do not equal a planet. Composed as an example, as object, this inspired shadow, this timorous flourishing, this dimpled orb does not move. Violet and gold, the whole spectrum of a grackle's wing, a static arpeggio, the plum in its plumness sits.

The linear and mythic in its presence, veer and curve, put anywhere it stays put. "When I read a poem by Mr. Pankey, I'm at a loss. He seems to have a habit of pulling back from his subject in a way that is disengaging. When, for example, he opens this poem, we are lulled into the analogy of a plum not equaling a planet. He's in point of fact playing a game that is almost insulting to the reader." I have to admit, I never ever imagined that I was insulting my reader.

Again in the next stanza, we have him stacking up images only to dismiss them as unimportant. They fail to move the poet, even though he is writing about the Plum on the Sill. In the third and final stanza, he overshadows the reader with what seems like a dangerous image of a mysterious black bird, only to shrink back into the simple form of the fruit. I think I'll stop there with what he has to say. He goes on to dislike the poem some more.

But I guess what I would say in response, not in defense, is that for me at least in the making of a poem, it isn't a place where I'm going to pour in some things I've already thought. It's not a vessel to hold something. It really is for me a place, a locust, a time in which thinking happens. And like most thinking, it's haphazard and stuttering and what else? Anyway, you try to then in revision, get a lot of that stuff out and make it seem like that nice piece of Ikea furniture tightly made and useful.

But really the poem is a place for me not to write about what I know, but to write into the unknown, to follow where the language takes me. I quoted Jack Gilbert earlier, I'll quote another person with the same initials, Joy Graham, who used to say back in the early '80s, that the language is smarter than you are. I like to believe that. I like to play around with the words and see where they take me. I'll stop there so we can talk.

Brian Brodeur:

Do we have any questions? Yes.

Speaker 8:

Do you guys all have the same process when you write poems, or do you find a different process every time you write?

Brian Brodeur:

The question was do you all have the same process or do the processes differ between people or maybe even poems or between poems?

Eric Pankey:

I try to switch things up at least on a long-term basis. I try to, let's say, for six or seven months work only doing handwritten work. I find myself really susceptible to whatever my medium is. If I'm writing on an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper, I tend to write like 22 line poems.

But if it's an 8 1/2 by 14 inch legal pad, they're like 33 line poems. If I work on the screen, there's whatever I can see at one moment. Sometimes I work with music, sometimes I don't have music. Anyway, it goes on and on, let somebody else talk.

Adrian Blevins:

Are you guys addicted to Ted videos? Does anybody else go to those? I'll do anything to avoid writing. But there's this one guy, and I can't remember what his name was, but he was talking about work and he was talking about creative work. He said that when you aren't sleeping well, or if you sleep and then wake up a lot throughout the night, you'll wake up and say, "I didn't sleep at all last night," and you actually did.

It was because you're constantly interrupted. I think we live in a time of constant interruption and so I feel like I'm not doing anything. I'm not getting any work done. I haven't done any work in like 14 years. It's because of email and Facebook, and the phone rings and the kids texts. I think the whole process, being technological I think is a form of psychic trauma. I feel that I'm traumatized by the culture that I'm in.

I feel like it's really hard to write such a beautiful sustained thing, such as Dorianne's poem for instance, because the world has not given me the time that I need. If I could get anything, it would just be uninterrupted time, which I don't get very much of.

Brian Brodeur:

Anyone else? Questions, concerns? Yes.

Speaker 9:

I just think what's so endlessly fascinating that you do about your blog, it's just that it's talking about the thing that I think that so many people don't really want to talk about, which is process. How did you get to define this poem?

There's so much emphasis in the academic world on thinking about the critical angle toward looking at the poem as an object and forgetting about the author, but the author sort of lost that voice. I think that this is a venue for giving back that voice and bringing it back up into the public world.

I'd like to hear about what is that resistance talking about the process? Where does that come from? Does it somehow rob you of the poem in a way or the critical angle? Why is that coming out now more and more openly?

Brian Brodeur:

The question is why is there so much resistance to talking about process? Anyway, Dorianne?

Dorianne Laux:

I don't know, you would assume that it was because we all have this secret that we're trying to keep from you about how it all works. But I don't think it's that as much as I think it's difficult to talk about process. You know when you write a poem, you start writing, you start writing, and then suddenly something happens. You're lost in the poem and you forget that you are a young woman living somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, and write the universe of the Milky Way and whatever, and you're gone.

You're in another world. Then you finish the last line or whatever, and you look up and you say, "Shit, I've been in here for an hour. Jesus, what the hell?" Then you try to reconstruct that time. You look at what you wrote and you say, "How did I do that? How did that happen? Who was I when I was doing this? This is smarter than I am." For instance, that moment where I talk about, I think I'm writing about the moon, but really I'm writing about my sister and my mom.

I just don't even know that. I'm just in another land. I think that's one of the very real problems here, is that it's very difficult to talk about something that is, and I'm not saying it's mystical, I'm just saying that's how it is. You get lost in this little world and then it's hard to go back and reconstruct it. All of us are just talking about what we can reconstruct from being away on a trip.

Adrian Blevins:

Tony Hoagland has a poem, I'm not going to remember the title of it, but he's talking about happiness. One line and one stanza is don't drop it, don't drop it, don't drop it. I think thinking about it explicitly, there's a way in which you're afraid that you'll fuck it up, you'll lose it.

Somebody once said, "I'm writing a lot of poems," or they were saying they writing a lot of poems. I'm like, "You're writing a lot of poems because got them all. You could give some back to me." There's this fear that if you name it, it will go away.

Brian Brodeur:

Yes.

Speaker 10:

That's really great because I feel that, that it's like a dream. You're trying to remember what it was, but then it's gone as soon as you try to. Then I think that I can always speak for myself. I don't know about anybody else in the audience, but I think that when I looked at people who are established and consistently produce, and I struggle with that.

What I want to know is I get that moment, but is there something that any of you or each of you does to get to that moment more consistently? Is there some way that you create a rhythm for yourself? I know pinning down what that is is hard, but I don't need you to pin it down necessarily, just point me in the direction.

Brian Brodeur:

The question was about productivity and how in the world productive people do it. Any productive poets up here want to?

Eric Pankey:

I think at least for me, it's very good to have routine and to have time, whatever it is. If it's one day a week, if it's every morning at 4:30 in the morning. Whatever it is you do for your schedule, but to have a space that you're not going to allow the world to come into. I think it is good to have a space to go to, that is that in that space you don't do anything else but sit and think about writing. Or write words down or read and think about the words you like and what you've read.

But again, like I was saying, I try to think of everything as pre-writing, but whatever I do in that space usually ends up turning into a poem. What I've tried to learn myself though, because life is complicated, is not to have to have that be a beautiful attic room overlooking the Long Island sound or something like that, which I actually used to have, which was nice. Of course. It had no window overlooking, it just had a skylight.

But now I have a desk I go to at the university library, sometimes I see Brian hanging out. He's supposed to be working, but he's writing. Anyway, I'll pass it on to someone else.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil:

Again, I feel so just cheesy saying what is my process and everything? When Brian asked me to be on this panel, I was like, "Process, there's no process," in terms of the only consistency I can see in the times that I'm writing. What I feel as well in writing often, is when I'm sitting down either with a notebook or in front of the computer. Gary Soto, the only advice that seems to make sense, there's all kinds of advice to give to a young writer, advice to do this, to do that.

The only consistency is he said just simply two words, "Sit, stay." Honestly, when I've got, I don't know, someone's trying to convince me to go to a movie or to whatever restaurant, or I've got some party to go to, or that's not my life now. More like pushing Matchbox cars around the living room floor or cleaning up applesauce from whatever has spilled. That's fine and dandy, and everybody has their own baggage and their own time constraints and stuff like that.

But if you're not carving out just a little bit of time, get your butt in the chair. Again, whatever, I don't know. I am not even giving advice except for just sit, stay, I guess, that kind of thing. The times that I'm not writing, I am not in one place and I'm not thinking about the sword swallower or shells, or anything like that. I don't know.

Adrian Blevins:

I probably have thought about this a lot, but about the poets, the other poets, I call the mother, father poets who we need to read in order to, not for many formally and for content reasons. But when I am reading the right people, I am being given by those people a permission to find a way.

I haven't given up on the idea that really that poetry in all forms of literature, is just spiritually cathartic and it's something that we desperately need. But it worries me when it's commoditized and commercialized, and all these kinds of things in any way that we get away from how healing it can be.

The people I think that are important to me, the poets who are important to me to read, are the poets who give me permission to say what the world tells me not to say. I don't have permission to do that. That is a motivating force, because we only have so many years on the planet. I feel there's this desperate need to say these things before I go.

Bob Hicok:

What they said.

Eric Pankey:

I can remember one bit of advice Marvin Bell gave a bunch of us when we were in graduate school back in the early '80s. When he said it, it seemed to me blasphemous.

It seemed like, "God forbid, what are you talking about?" But he said, "If you're having trouble writing, lower your standards." That works for me now.

Brian Brodeur:

Yes.

Speaker 11:

Like you were saying, sit, stay. I've had so many professors telling me that good poets or to be a good poet, you have to sit down every day and write for so long every day, even if you don't want to write, and the thought of writing just makes you want to just kill yourself or whatever.

But I find when I do that, that everything I write is a piece of shit. If I just pretend that the desk in my living room is not even there and just ignore it, and ignore the fact that I even have paper and writing utensils in the house, that's when I'm more productive than when I'm doing this. What is going wrong here?

Bob Hicok:

The mistake a lot of people make who do this, is they try to teach what they do and it doesn't work for everyone. I am an everyday writer. I'm a basher, and that works for me. A friend of mine, if he was to try to do that, he would be trying to write through my head, someone else's head, and it does not work. He needs a pressure to build up.

If it doesn't build up, there's no motor behind the words. Whereas for me, that for whatever reason, that's always there. As I said, I tend to pitch a lot of stuff. The rhythm that's important for me is a daily kind of rhythm. You each have to find your own way. That, I think, is one of the key things to focus on early on, is just these moments when things work for you and then do more of that.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah.

Speaker 12:

[inaudible 00:59:52].

Brian Brodeur:

The question was about the relationship between reader and writer and what the writer does, if anything, when a reader does not like their work.

Eric Pankey:

Well, since I brought up a reader who didn't like my work, that's a question Brian asked, which is, who do you imagine as your reader? I say this and I think people often think it's a smart aleck answer, but it's really true.

That is I say I write poems for people who love all the poets I love, and we're all aiming at the same sort of thing. If they don't love the poets I love, then they probably love other poet, and they should be reading other poets and that's fine.

Adrian Blevins:

I think one of my biggest fears is a fear of being boring. I think that's one of my main. This is a southern female thing about my culture that I think I'm inheriting. I don't think it's so much about me, I think it's in my culture. I somehow got the message that I was supposed to be polite and kind and not assertive.

Assertive women are bitchy and wrong, and that really just pisses me off. I think a lot, I don't want to be boring, but I also feel like there's underneath everything when I first am trying to write is an apology. "I'm sorry, I'm going to talk now." Then I have this compulsion to make it interesting because I don't want to bore you.

Brian Brodeur:

I think we have to leave it there actually. It's about that time. Thank you everyone for coming, and thank you to the poets for participating.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP Podcast Series. For other podcasts, please tune into our website at www.awpwriter.org.