by David Lehman
JENNIFER CHANG was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1976, and was educated at the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia. She is the author of The History of Anonymity (VQR Poetry Series/University of Georgia Press, 2008). She cochairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a nonprofit organization that supports and promotes Asian-American poetry, and is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Bowling Green State University.
Of “Dorothy Wordsworth,” Chang writes: “The first draft came swiftly, and then I spent nearly two years revising it. I’d written it for National Poetry Month’s ‘write a poem a day’ challenge, which I’d never participated in before, but I was being wooed by a non-poet trying to impress me by gamely writing poems and I was wooing as a poet trying to impress him by writing obstreperously. The title was initially ‘Wordsworth’ and I had the word ‘jaunty’ somewhere. It was pure dreck, not jaunty at all, but I liked the first line and took the trouble of revising it into quatrains. Later, after further ill-fated tweaking, I made the poem worse, retitling it ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality,’ and shared it at a reading, where no one laughed or sighed or knew what to make of it.
“I had been thinking a lot about Dorothy Wordsworth, too. ‘I do not remember this day,’ reads one entry from Alfoxden Journal, which is one way of staying quiet. I couldn’t help comparing this to the Dorothy we find in ‘Tintern Abbey,’ silently absorbing her brother’s lyric exertions. What did she remember of that day? I wanted more words from her, from myself, but I was done. The poem was kaput. Until one afternoon, sparked by impertinence, a good impetus for revision, I surprised myself by taking the poem out and arriving at a new ending and title. And then I stuck my own name on it!”
JOSEPH CHAPMAN was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1982. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a BA in English, and the University of Virginia, where he earned an MFA in poetry writing. From 2007 to 2008, he served as poetry editor for Meridian magazine. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife, Julia Hansen.
Chapman writes: “When the editors of The Cincinnati Review originally took ‘Sparrow,’ they invited me to write a brief explanation of the poem’s genesis. I wrote about the sources of the poem—St. John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel and the Psalms—and the way the poem’s borrowed language animates a speaker who then becomes language again.
“Rereading the poem more than a year later, I’m less fascinated by its sources. Instead I find myself drawn to its surfaces: the oil spot becoming a closed garden becoming a sealed fountain; the dark habit of St. John of the Cross that doubles as a rib cage and a bird’s oily, feathered wings. The end of the poem remains startling to me, which is a good thing, I guess. Every image in the poem metamorphoses into ‘words / & the Sparrow.’ That shift is my attempt at a fancy enactment of the simple truth that language consumes everything. That God consumes us.
“I couldn’t have said any of this after I initially wrote the poem. But I think it’s important that the poem wants to preserve the life of all things outside us, including the things we imagine and the word we imagine them with. Even though I can picture the exact parking garage in which I set the poem—the Water Street garage near the downtown mall in Charlottesville—the sparrow and the language I used in the poem are no longer my own, if they ever were.”
HEATHER CHRISTLE was born in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, in 1980. She is the author of three poetry collections: What Is Amazing (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), and The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009). She has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and at Emory University, where she was the 2009–2011 Poetry Writing Fellow. She is the web editor for jubilat and lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband, Christopher DeWeese, a poet, and her cat, Hastings.
Of “BASIC,” Christle writes: “This poem occurred to me fairly quickly, though not all at once. It began (as things often do) with an image/premise, and then grew through the imagination of consequences. The initial image came from a childhood memory I have of learning how to use Logo, a computer programming language designed as an educational tool. We’d type in ‘FD 100 RT 120 FD 100 RT 120’ and this little turtle icon would draw a triangle. Magic! I chose the name of a different programming language—BASIC—as the title, because it had a few more shades of meaning to it. For me, the heart of this poem lies in its belief that whatever happens (beginning on the screen, and then moving out into the world) is the result of the program’s design. I would like to write a program that makes people cry, but I do not know how, and so instead I have to write poems.”
HENRI COLE was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published eight collections of poetry, including Middle Earth. He has received the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lenore Marshall Award. His most recent collection is Touch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). He teaches at Ohio State University and is poetry editor of The New Republic. He lives in Boston.
Of “Broom,” Cole writes: “I wrote this poem after the death of Mother, a Frenchwoman who came to this country as a young military bride. Though she spent sixty years trying to be an American, at the end of her life she became a Frenchwoman again, only speaking the language I love. I think of her every day.”
BILLY COLLINS was born in the French Hospital in New York City in 1941. He was an undergraduate at Holy Cross College and received his PhD from the University of California, Riverside. His books of poetry include Horoscopes for the Dead (Random House, 2011), Ballistics (Random House, 2008), The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems (Random House, 2005), a collection of haiku titled She Was Just Seventeen (Modern Haiku Press, 2006), Nine Horses (Random House, 2002), Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2001), Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), The Art of Drowning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), and Questions About Angels (William Morrow, 1991), which was selected for the National Poetry Series by Edward Hirsch and reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1999. He is the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House, 2003) and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Everyday (Random House, 2005). He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College (City University of New York) and a Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College. A frequent contributor and former guest editor of The Best American Poetry series, he was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001–2003 and served as New York State Poet 2004–2006. He also edited Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, illustrated by David Sibley (Columbia University Press, 2010).
Of “Delivery,” Collins writes: “Here we are back at lyric poetry’s oldest subject, only instead of the hooded no-face ready to cut you down with a scythe, we have a delivery truck. To associate a vehicle with death is nothing new; whether the fancy is for a sweet chariot, a ferryboat across Stygian waters, or a horse-drawn carriage heading toward ‘Eternity,’ we like to think of dying as a journey, especially one that begins with someone picking us up and taking us somewhere. It beats being alone. Here, the truck is only delivering the news, but even that is too frightening for ‘the speaker,’ who substitutes the benign image of a drawing of a truck and then gets busy adding some endearing boyhood details. As I look back at the poem, it seems nothing more than a futile attempt at avoidance, but at least it echoes a theme both noble and ancient. I don’t know if I had in mind Yannis Ritsos’s amazing poem ‘Miniature,’ in which death arrives in a fairy-tale carriage whose wheels are made of lemon slices, but even if I wasn’t, my poem lies uneasily in that poem’s shadow.”
PETER COOLEY was born in Detroit in 1940 and grew up there and in the suburbs of the city. He is a graduate of Shimer College, the University of Chicago, and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. From 1970 to 2000 he was poetry editor of North American Review. Since 1975 he has lived in New Orleans, where he teaches creative
writing at Tulane University. He has published eight volumes of poetry, seven of them with Carnegie Mellon University Press. That press will soon release his latest, Night Bus to the Afterlife. He is currently finishing a volume of ekphrastic poems on Rembrandt, Rodin, and Michelangelo.
Cooley writes: “I am irritated by our contemporary mania for mandating ‘relevant’ topics for the poet. For years I have been told I should be writing about New Orleans since it is such an interesting city. When Katrina hit and people found out my wife and I stayed in town for the hurricane, I was told I should be writing about the storm. I have been warned repeatedly that I should not be writing about religious subjects unless I express healthy disbelief. This poem is my perverse way of answering clarion calls for poems about tourism and disaster but still maintaining ‘I’ll write religious poems if I damn well please.’”
EDUARDO C. CORRAL was born in Casa Grande, Arizona, in 1973. His work has been honored with a “Discovery”/The Nation award and residencies from Yaddo and from the MacDowell Colony. He is the recipient of a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award. Slow Lightning, his first book, won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He lives in New York City.
Of “To the Angelbeast,” Corral writes: “The poem is dedicated to Arthur Russell, a musician/composer who died from AIDS in 1992. Formally trained as a cellist, Russell worked in many genres (disco, classical, rock, folk, experimental) but his cello-centric compositions are the songs that haunt me. In songs like ‘A Sudden Chill,’ ‘Losing My Taste for the Night Life,’ and ‘Another Thought,’ the cello becomes an animal-like presence that devours everything: melody, lyrics, voice. Everything but death.”
ERICA DAWSON was born in Columbia, Maryland, in 1979. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2008, Barrow Street, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, and Harvard Review. Her collection of poems, Big-Eyed Afraid (The Waywiser Press, 2007), won the 2006 Anthony Hecht Prize. Contemporary Poetry Review named it the Best Debut of 2007. An assistant professor of English at the University of Tampa, she serves as poetry editor for Tampa Review and teaches in the university’s new low-residency MFA program.
Dawson writes: “ ‘Back Matter’ exists because someone calls me ‘street,’ perhaps too much for poetry with a capital P. Insert the wipe-your-hands-clean gesture and the shrug-it-off neck cracking.
“Irritated (understatement), I sit down to write ‘Back Matter.’ I’ll just say the process involves the inability to read your handwriting on last night’s draft. I conflate a small narrative in Cincinnati, weaving in various definitions of the word ‘back.’ With the narrative and countless denotations and connotations in my head, I try capturing moments when I’m part of the world with my back to it at the same time—in that cage of loneliness.”
STEPHEN DUNN was born in Forest Hills, New York, in 1939 and is a distinguished professor (emeritus) of creative writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. A graduate of Hofstra and Syracuse Universities, he is the author of Walking Light (BOA Editions, 2001), a book of essays and memoirs, and of sixteen books of poetry, including Here and Now (W. W. Norton, 2011, in which “The Imagined” appears). Different Hours (W. W. Norton, 2000) won the Pulitzer Prize. He has received fellowship awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations.
Dunn writes: “I began ‘The Imagined’ at Yaddo in the summer of 2010, and ‘finished’ it a few weeks later. At this point the poem consisted of its first half, with which I was somewhat but not fully pleased. A few days later I gave an ‘imagined man’ to the woman. This seemed not only fair, but finally truer to the likelihood of my concerns. For a while, the poem ended with ‘just the two of you,’ which I still believe could be a satisfactory ending. But on revisiting the poem, I added the last three lines, then crossed them out, then put them back in again.
“When I’ve read this poem at readings, very solemn-faced women in the audience seem to be registering disapproval with the first half of the poem. Their demeanor changes in the second half—many seem delighted that their secret man has been acknowledged and identified.”
ELAINE EQUI was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1953. She has published six books with Coffee House Press. They include Voice-Over (1998), which won a San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems (2007), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize; and most recently, Click and Clone (2011). She teaches at New York University and in the MFA programs at the New School and City College. She lives in New York City.
Of “A Story Begins,” Equi writes: “I like to write about reading, to reflect on how we become absorbed in books, and how in a strange way, books read us—call to us at particular moments. I was especially frustrated when I wrote this poem because it was summer, my apartment was undergoing a seemingly endless renovation, and I couldn’t find a novel, mystery, or any kind of book to lose myself in. Even the most outlandish and exotic narratives sounded contrived and predictable. In the end, I gave up altogether on the idea of literary escapism. Instead, I opted to read a number of poets known for their pessimism, spleen, and generally grouchy tone. This proved to be quite entertaining and, in fact, helped me write several new poems, including this one.”
ROBERT GIBB was born in 1946 in the steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania. He is the author of eight books of poetry: The Names of the Earth in Summer (Stone Country, 1983), The Winter House (University of Missouri Press, 1984), Momentary Days (Walt Whitman Center, 1989), Fugue for a Late Snow (University of Missouri Press, 1993), The Origins of Evening (W. W. Norton, 1997), The Burning World (University of Arkansas Press, 2004), World over Water (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), and What the Heart Can Bear: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1979–1993 (Autumn House Press, 2009). He has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Two new books will appear in 2012: Sheet Music (Autumn House Press), which includes “Spirit in the Dark,” and The Empty Loom (University of Arkansas Press). He lives on New Homestead Hill above the Monongahela River.
Gibb writes: “ ‘Spirit in the Dark’ details an instance of ‘another world’s intrusion into this one,’ to borrow from a character in The Crying of Lot 49. The encounter took place late one night in an old house partitioned into apartments. We’d plated the second side of the Ninth Symphony and as the final movement began building toward the choral ‘Ode to Joy,’ whatever it was—ghost, spirit—entered from the hallway. Somber, it seemed drawn by the music, moving slowly toward the record player, in front of which it hovered and then, for whatever reason, simply withdrew again, leaving us—but leaving us how? Hadn’t we just witnessed the inexplicable? Was the experience transformative, with reality now turned numinous and specter-laden, inhabited by wonder and amazement? Or had something like Weber’s routine simply reasserted itself through strength of numbers, the weight of the everyday, apparitionless, world? As if we’re not fit company for charisma after all. And music, the poem’s other presence, what’s the impact, the afterlife there? The meaning of our experience exceeds us, the poem seems to be saying, no matter how revelatory that experience may seem. We’re all in the dark, left to guesswork.”
KATHLEEN GRABER was born in Cape May County, New Jersey, in 1959. She teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University, and she divides her time between Richmond, Virginia, and her hometown of Wildwood, New Jersey, where for twenty-five years she and her husband operated a music shop on the Boardwalk. She is the author of two books of poetry, Correspondence (Saturnalia Books, 2005) and The Eternal City (Princeton University Press, 2010).
Of “Self-Portrait with No Internal Navigation,” Graber writes: “When I travel back home to South Jersey from Virginia, I drive almost directly northeast so that I end up in Lewes, Delaware. A ferry runs between Cape Henlopen and Cape May. The journey across the Delaware Bay takes about eighty-five minutes, and because I often travel with my big dog, I usually sit in my car to keep him company and to read in the rocking silence. It didn’t take long before I notice
d the pigeons nesting on the pipes over my head. Unlike many people, I’ve always found pigeons remarkably beautiful and interesting. Not long before I wrote this poem, I had a strange dream that I was sleeping on a tightrope. I could speculate a lot about the meaning of that, but the immediate result was that I finally made the time to watch Man on Wire, the documentary about Philippe Petit and his walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. I have a great fear of heights (though I was not frightened in my dream!). I visited the World Trade Center only once—around 1980. I was a college student, and a friend who had come to NY to visit me wanted to do the sort of things tourists do. I could not even exit the elevator when its doors opened onto the observation deck of floor-to-ceiling glass. There are many things that lose some of their mystery when we dwell deeply upon them, but the idea that Philippe Petit walked between those buildings only becomes more and more astonishing to me the longer I consider it. And that particular feat has now been freighted by history with a unique poignancy. This poem was originally called ‘Self-Portrait with Love Story,’ but that seemed too sentimental to me.”
AMY GLYNN GREACEN was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1972. She holds degrees from Mount Holyoke College and Lancaster University, England. She is a poet, a novelist, a food writer, an occasional essayist, and a contributing book reviewer for The New York Quarterly. She has also moonlighted as a jazz vocalist since 1998. She lives outside San Francisco with her husband and two daughters.
