Please tell us about the making of “Self-Portrait Without a Body” and “Pica of Unsaid Things.”
I composed “Self-Portrait Without a Body” in a very bodily way: I spoke it aloud, engaging in the mouthfeel of the poem, finding its heart cadence. I stood in the shower and repeated its opening lines over and over until I could get to the next line, and the next, and the next. This composition method appealed to my desire to introduce tension, even conflict, into a poem. A poem about bodylessness arrived through the body. The poem likewise subverts its conceit by grafting onto the speaker the poem’s body.
“Pica of Unsaid Things,” however, arrived quietly, at my dining room table. How raw my bitten tongue, I thought. How I have eaten my words. The poem arrived in almost one go, with only a few scratches to polish out in revision.
Do you consider yourself a fast or slow writer?
I’ve been told I’m a fast writer, but I feel like a slow writer. I’m always juggling ideas for poems, and sometimes they make it to paper and sometimes they don’t. I’m always taking notes in my writing journal—on scientific articles I read, on signs I see on the side of the road, images I encounter or invent, passages from books I’m reading—and I consider all of this a part of my writing process. These are the coals I keep burning so that the flame of the poem can catch when it’s ready.
A few years ago, when I was diagnosed with melanoma, I felt a great sense of urgency in writing my second book Groundspeed and my third chapbook Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike. I wrote because I didn’t know how long I had to write. Now I leap through fallow fields and then find myself tilling earth again. It’s a very stop-start operation right now, especially while I’m teaching.
When do you admit to yourself that you are working on a new book? Do you decide at the outset or realize it after a certain number of pages?
I have to have a project at all times, otherwise I feel as unmoored as a little boat washed out to sea, so I’m always, and perhaps selfishly, working on a book. Otherwise, the metal detector of my poem-brain never screams while I swing it over the field, never finds anything to loot. I used to think that a book was a book if it held a single shape, if it was a solid wall. This is perhaps why my first book definitely seems to be more of a “project” book. Now, however, I find that I work much better if I’m quarrying out stones to stack. Each poem holds as much weight as it can. Each poem contributes to the structure but doesn’t necessarily have to be from the same rock. The most difficult question I have is where does a poem belong, especially if it arrives at the end of a manuscript and the beginning of another. Last summer, I finished my third book Empty Clip, and since then I’ve been working on a fourth manuscript titled The Seconds Between Lightning and Thunder. These two books have some of the same weather, but they’re as different as New Jersey and Florida, although both get storms.
You recently launched Offset: A Broadside Digitization Project, an online gallery of broadsides. Why do you think readers are so drawn to broadsides? How does this particular form of publication change a reader’s experience of a poem compared to, say, encountering it in a print or online journal?
Thanks for this question, as it’s something that I’ve been asking myself over and over. Although I don’t have a definitive answer, I can provide some ideas. When I was setting Claudia Emerson’s poem “I” for a letterpress broadside, I had a great “conversion moment” when I looked at the lead letters, its three-dimensionality, its thingness, and I recalled Damion Searls, over on The Paris Review, reminding us that “It is worth remembering that there once was a time when every letter, number, and punctuation mark printed on paper started life as a sculpture.” The poem lived off the page, and it asserted itself as not only idea but object that, when read, seemed to be moving, a kind of fixed flip-book guide for the imagination. To see a letterpress printed broadside is a reminder, a trace of that. Additionally, a broadside reveals itself as new in every edition—a slight shift in pressure, fading ink, etc. This allows me to revel in, even support, my own sense that a poem changes every time one returns to it.
When you feel uninspired, what poet might you read for guidance and motivation?
The poet who helps me the most, again and again, across years, across dabblings is Wislawa Szymborska, whose poems are like nails that hold my poem-brain together. There’s always a wink in her poems, but one that never feels easy or slight. Ultimately, she’s the poet who keeps me afloat, who asks me to cultivate, to maintain my inner life, its silliness and consequence, even in the darkest of times, in turmoil, in grief and pain. She’s also given me permission to be self-deprecatory in poems, to recognize what a strange new species I am to myself every day. Here’s a few stanzas of “In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself” (trans. Cavanagh and Baranczak), with which I’ll close:
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.
A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they’re right?
Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they’re light.
I composed “Self-Portrait Without a Body” in a very bodily way: I spoke it aloud, engaging in the mouthfeel of the poem, finding its heart cadence. I stood in the shower and repeated its opening lines over and over until I could get to the next line, and the next, and the next. This composition method appealed to my desire to introduce tension, even conflict, into a poem. A poem about bodylessness arrived through the body. The poem likewise subverts its conceit by grafting onto the speaker the poem’s body.
“Pica of Unsaid Things,” however, arrived quietly, at my dining room table. How raw my bitten tongue, I thought. How I have eaten my words. The poem arrived in almost one go, with only a few scratches to polish out in revision.
Do you consider yourself a fast or slow writer?
I’ve been told I’m a fast writer, but I feel like a slow writer. I’m always juggling ideas for poems, and sometimes they make it to paper and sometimes they don’t. I’m always taking notes in my writing journal—on scientific articles I read, on signs I see on the side of the road, images I encounter or invent, passages from books I’m reading—and I consider all of this a part of my writing process. These are the coals I keep burning so that the flame of the poem can catch when it’s ready.
A few years ago, when I was diagnosed with melanoma, I felt a great sense of urgency in writing my second book Groundspeed and my third chapbook Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike. I wrote because I didn’t know how long I had to write. Now I leap through fallow fields and then find myself tilling earth again. It’s a very stop-start operation right now, especially while I’m teaching.
When do you admit to yourself that you are working on a new book? Do you decide at the outset or realize it after a certain number of pages?
I have to have a project at all times, otherwise I feel as unmoored as a little boat washed out to sea, so I’m always, and perhaps selfishly, working on a book. Otherwise, the metal detector of my poem-brain never screams while I swing it over the field, never finds anything to loot. I used to think that a book was a book if it held a single shape, if it was a solid wall. This is perhaps why my first book definitely seems to be more of a “project” book. Now, however, I find that I work much better if I’m quarrying out stones to stack. Each poem holds as much weight as it can. Each poem contributes to the structure but doesn’t necessarily have to be from the same rock. The most difficult question I have is where does a poem belong, especially if it arrives at the end of a manuscript and the beginning of another. Last summer, I finished my third book Empty Clip, and since then I’ve been working on a fourth manuscript titled The Seconds Between Lightning and Thunder. These two books have some of the same weather, but they’re as different as New Jersey and Florida, although both get storms.
You recently launched Offset: A Broadside Digitization Project, an online gallery of broadsides. Why do you think readers are so drawn to broadsides? How does this particular form of publication change a reader’s experience of a poem compared to, say, encountering it in a print or online journal?
Thanks for this question, as it’s something that I’ve been asking myself over and over. Although I don’t have a definitive answer, I can provide some ideas. When I was setting Claudia Emerson’s poem “I” for a letterpress broadside, I had a great “conversion moment” when I looked at the lead letters, its three-dimensionality, its thingness, and I recalled Damion Searls, over on The Paris Review, reminding us that “It is worth remembering that there once was a time when every letter, number, and punctuation mark printed on paper started life as a sculpture.” The poem lived off the page, and it asserted itself as not only idea but object that, when read, seemed to be moving, a kind of fixed flip-book guide for the imagination. To see a letterpress printed broadside is a reminder, a trace of that. Additionally, a broadside reveals itself as new in every edition—a slight shift in pressure, fading ink, etc. This allows me to revel in, even support, my own sense that a poem changes every time one returns to it.
When you feel uninspired, what poet might you read for guidance and motivation?
The poet who helps me the most, again and again, across years, across dabblings is Wislawa Szymborska, whose poems are like nails that hold my poem-brain together. There’s always a wink in her poems, but one that never feels easy or slight. Ultimately, she’s the poet who keeps me afloat, who asks me to cultivate, to maintain my inner life, its silliness and consequence, even in the darkest of times, in turmoil, in grief and pain. She’s also given me permission to be self-deprecatory in poems, to recognize what a strange new species I am to myself every day. Here’s a few stanzas of “In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself” (trans. Cavanagh and Baranczak), with which I’ll close:
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.
A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they’re right?
Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they’re light.