In Their Own Words

I almost never write a poem with a sense of what it will be about. I don't use preexisting forms (traditional or otherwise), writing exercises, or poetic formal devices to generate material. At this point in my writing life, I do tend to think about a whole manuscript while I'm composing individual poems, so I might begin a poem in relation to a manuscript with the thought that it should be a longer poem, or a shorter one, or perhaps lighter in tone, or maybe more fierce. But overall, I prefer to keep the parameters loose.

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The world of this poem grew from a simple wish to play on the word "felt."  I like the fact that the word houses both the material and the act of feeling (or the act of having felt). Also, at the time I wrote the poem, I was very interested in Joseph Beuys's work and was learning about his symbolic interest in materials like felt and wax. 

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"Bliss Street" was written in and about Beirut, where I lived for about a year, in faculty housing of the American University. My husband was teaching law, and I was tending to our two young sons. My first-grader was in the American school, which abuts the university campus; I was able to see a fragment of it from my balcony.

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A few years ago I was in a writing group with some amazing poets—Noelle Kocot, Dorothea Lasky, Anthony McCann, Damian Rogers, Matthew Rohrer, Richard Siken, and Matthew Zapruder. The idea was we'd each write a poem every day for a month, and we'd take turns giving writing prompts.

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This is a "distranslation" of the first poem in Alcools, by Guillaume Apollinaire. To say that I wrote it is less an offense than to say I translated it. Though it has everything to do with its correspondent text, the purpose of writing through "Zone" was not to reproduce it but to create an original work—the only real impediments put on the piece being its influences, which are many.

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"The Figure" is an attempt to capture this mysterious, mercurial process.  As a child, I remember painting in the art room, my favorite room at my elementary school. When my son went to kindergarten and we were given a tour of the art room all those memories of art class came forth.  I was both compelled and terrified.  What would I produce?

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This poem was written over the course of several months, during which fear vied with hope and the idea of "trying" anything at all became almost laughably fraught.  The poem became, in a sense, a meditation on effort, in which the suspension of effort was the aim of my efforts.

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This is the first poem in Mean Free Path. I wanted the dedication to be integral to the book, not something set apart on a prefatory page. Because the poems are largely concerned with the possibility of writing and being for, with finding a mode of address capable of something other than ironic detachment or expressing prefabricated structures of feeling, it seemed like cheating to have a prose dedication external to the poems and their pressures resolving all of these issues as if by fiat.

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In the summer of the year 2008, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to Berlin, where, in consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language: "Fauconnier and Turner argue that conceptualizing a situation in which the single monk becomes two monks, and then meets himself as the two of him walk in opposite directions involves a blending of mental spaces."

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"Army Cats" is the title poem of a book that will appear next spring. It comes out of a trip I took in the summer of 2007 when I went to Lebanon and Syria to do some journalism about Palestinian refugee camps, and the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanese Israeli War. I arrived just at the moment that the worst internal violence since the 1975-1990 Lebanese War broke out.

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This poem was one of 32 "recipes" commissioned from various writers by the visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra (the project was published in the June 2010 issue of Esopus magazine).

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There was a small neighborhood park in Carroll Gardens where I would sit almost every day after the weather turned warm.  Most of the people who stopped in the park were there to simply be:  two-year-olds with their fatigue-ecstatic mothers, quorums of older news-bearing women, a guy staring at the grass, patients from a nearby hospital who had been wheeled into scraps of shade for an hour.  I came to love this place.

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This poem is a direct response to the introduction of Coleridge's "Xanadu-Kubla Khan" in which he explains thata most unwelcome visitor from Porlock disturbed his "anodyne" vision and ruined his inspiration for his poem.I was always fascinated with this poem: who was this friend?  What business was Coleridge called to?

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How did I come to write this poem? Well the oddest thing started me off.

A friend told me that when she was in Chennai in the summer she had trouble with her computer. It wouldn't work. So she got a tech guy in,  and guess what—there were insects in her keyboard. I had never heard of such a thing before but later, asking around I did hear similar stories from others. In any case what my friend told me stayed in my head.

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At first the poem "The Cup" came in response to an assignment I gave myself:  try for 14 lines and a single domestic image.  Obviously I didn't make it!  But focusing on the cup let me channel the narrative drive of the poem.  Originally it was only about how the cup smashed, the pieces of the event all squashed into 14 lines.

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"Hollywood & God" is the title poem of my recent collection of poems, a book that combines poetry and prose, and coming late in the sequence distills and reflects back on the issues of the entire proceeding. From the outset, I viewed the alliance in the title as the intersection of two streets – Hollywood & Vine, Hollywood & Gower, and Hollywood & God. The book, as well as this poem particularly, tracks a continuum along what traditionally you might style transcendence and what we've today come to call celebrity culture.

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This poem arose from a coincidence: the phonetic and visual (but not, as far as I can tell, etymological) sameness between the word for a small dun-colored game bird and the verb, often used in reference to the heart, that means to wither or falter or give way to decline.

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I wrote this poem as part of a collaboration I did in spring of 2008 with the painter Chris Uphues. Chris and I met at a bar after a reading I had given, and he told me he was a painter. I had a feeling he would be good. He sent me photos of ten paintings via email and I was blown away by his work, so I took his titles and wrote ten corresponding poems.

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"The notion that wants do not become less urgent the more amply the individual is supplied is broadly repugnant to common sense. It is something to be believed only by those who wish to believe. Yet the conventional wisdom must be tackled on its own terrain. Intemporal comparisons of an individual's state of mind do rest on technically vulnerable ground. Who can say for sure that the deprivation which afflicts him with hunger is more painful than the deprivation which afflicts him with envy of his neighbor's new car? In the time that has passed since he was poor, his soul may have become subject to a new and deeper searing."

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