by David Lehman
“I wanted to be attentive to moments that usually pass without notice. I wanted to preserve a fragment of each day. I was interested in what might be unique or idiosyncratic, but also in what is cyclical and what might be timeless.
“My aim for this project was to get myself moving. Tying the act of writing to a daily habit of walking was the impetus for this project. It gave me a little push to get past my inertia, to start the momentum of walking and writing.
“To walk in Los Angeles is to go against the way the city is constructed, with long blocks and wide streets built for cars and drivers, not pedestrians. Yet there are wonderful places for walking, on the beaches, in the canyons, and in neighborhoods where yards are planted with roses, lavender, hibiscus, and bird-of-paradise blooming year-round, along with abundant avocado, lemon, persimmon, apricot, and fig trees. Even the freeways are landscaped with oleander and bougainvillea.”
EILEEN MYLES was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in December 1949, and generally occupies herself by writing and traveling and sometimes teaching at NYU and Columbia. She is the author of eighteen books of poetry (most recently Snowflake/different streets from Wave Books, 2012), fiction, and nonfiction.
Myles writes: “Certainly this poem was born at dinner when we were talking about conditions in the building we were dining in and the social ecology of women who could probably practically hear us talking about them. There was a painter who could pretty much lift any painting style; do anything. Thus the title, which seemed like a really generous way she could use her super powers. I think I also read about a famous male author who didn’t like to hear about dreams at breakfast. What else is breakfast for? I definitely feel like this poem is about relatedness. In time and space.”
D. NURKSE was born in New York City in 1949. He is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently A Night in Brooklyn, The Border Kingdom, Burnt Island, and The Fall (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, 2008, 2005, and 2002). Voices over Water, an earlier book, was reprinted by CB Editions in the United Kingdom and shortlisted for the 2011 Forward Prize. He has received a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Of “Release from Stella Maris,” Nurkse writes: “Soul, ego, neural network, illusion? I’m the person who reads the first hundred pages of a book on neuroscience or theology, then skips to the last ten. The answers must be in the middle. I’m comfortable being clueless. But the years roll.”
SHARON OLDS is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Dead and the Living, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Stag’s Leap (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. She teaches at New York University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, where she has been involved with NYU’s outreach workshops, including the Goldwater Hospital workshop, in its twenty-eighth year, and the workshop for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Of “Stanley Kunitz Ode,” Olds writes: “When I visited Stanley, I would go home and write down in my diary what had happened, what he had said, how he had looked. I was storing up Stanley memories. Years before, with Muriel Rukeyser, and George and Mary Oppen, I had done the same thing—always in prose. But on this particular day, after I wrote the first five words, it had the feeling of a poem, ready to shape itself, gathering itself around the totem creature of the bobcat. So (with pen and ink) I moved the words out of paragraph position, over to the left margin, and we were off. And as I just read it over, I noticed more than usually the four-accent Anglo Saxon line—the old story line. Whatever Stanley said and did had such a glow of significance, my wish was to try to transpose it whole into a narrative poem form.”
GREGORY PARDLO was born in Philadelphia in 1968 and raised in Willingboro, New Jersey. He is the author of Totem (2007), which received The American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize, and Digest (Four Way Books, 2014). He has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a fellowship for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an associate editor of Callaloo and teaches undergraduate writing at Columbia University.
Pardlo writes: “ ‘Wishing Well’ is a true, which is to say, ‘New York,’ story.”
KIKI PETROSINO (b. 1979 in Baltimore) is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville. She has written two poetry collections: Fort Red Border (2009) and Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013), both from Sarabande. She holds an MA in humanities from the University of Chicago and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Petrosino writes: “My poem ‘Story Problem’ came from an assignment I gave myself: to compose a poem that sounds logical but doesn’t really know where it’s going. As a youngster, I found mathematical word problems especially baffling to solve. Each problem contained just enough of a narrative stem (‘Two trains depart from Chicago at precisely 12:23 PM, traveling in opposite directions’) to spark my interest, but I never found the main task of ‘getting an answer’ through arithmetic or algebra very rewarding. Instead, I wanted to think and write about the people on those afternoon trains, speeding away from Chicago and into mystery. In poems, sentences are like that: wonderful locomotives that lead us across landscapes of new thought.”
D. A. POWELL was born in 1963 in Albany, Georgia, but has lived most of his life in California. He knows how to hunt, fish, plow, prune, and butcher, but doubts that he could make a living at any of these things. He therefore has taught for a living since 2001. His books include Chronic (Graywolf Press, 2009) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012), recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
Powell writes: “ ‘See You Later.’ is part of a series of six-line poems inspired by the language of murder mysteries, along with other forms of puzzles.”
ROGER REEVES was awarded a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and Ruth Lilly Fellowship. King Me, his first book of poems, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2013. He is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Reeves writes: “ ‘The Field Museum’ began when my partner and I took our niece to the Field Museum in Chicago. While folks go to museums with children all the time, the visit was strange and disconcerting for me, because it was the first time that I was in a museum not as a gawker or a man on a reconnaissance mission but as a guardian, as a parental surrogate. I wanted my niece to ‘learn’ something. But I knew, from past experience with my own parents and guardians, that my self-consciousness could ruin the whole visit. As we walked through the bird wing of the Field Museum, I began to pronounce all the strange bird names, and my niece slowed her hurried pace and became mesmerized as well. I wrote down as many of the bird names as I could. I remembered that in Crush Richard Siken had a poem that began as a celebration of names, and I am fascinated with the way lists—grocery lists, to-do lists, rosters—can sound like poems. So the poem began to take shape around the names of the birds—nightjar, grebe, artic loon, pewit—and from the experience of walking with my niece through the museum. I began to think about what it might be like to raise a child, particularly a daughter, without a mother; the fatigue of grief and loss. I created a persona that more fully allowed me to think through the inability to reckon and explain death not only to a child but also to oneself.”
Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1954, DONALD REVELL was educated at Harpur College (BA 1975) and the University of Buffalo (PhD 1980). He is the author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently Tantivy (2012) and The Bitter Withy (2009), both from Alice James Books. He has published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools (Wesleyan), Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (Omnidawn), Laforgue’s Last Verses (Omnidawn), and Verlaine’s Songs without Words (Omnidawn). His critical writings have been colle
cted as The Art of Attention (Graywolf) and Invisible Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn). Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also received the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. He has twice been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. A former editor-in-chief of Denver Quarterly, he now serves as poetry editor of Colorado Review. He is director of graduate studies and professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He lives with his wife, the poet Claudia Keelan, and their children, Benjamin and Lucie, in the Spring Mountains of Nevada.
Of “To Shakespeare,” Revell writes: “Since my graduate school days, I’ve been an ardent if amateur Miltonist. Whenever granted a respite from poetry workshops and thesis guidance, I have opted to teach Milton—in seminars, in surveys, in any academic setting at all. For ten happy years, I fancied myself to be the city of Denver’s Municipal Miltonist, offering classes on Paradise Lost at both Denver University and the University of Colorado, Denver, often concurrently. When ambition and dollars lured me away to a different city, my students presented me with a beautiful wooden chair, painted all over with images and passages from the clamorous, baroque epic of disobedience and renovation. The chair is my most valued possession.
“About a year ago, a glitch in scheduling found me teaching, for the first time in thirty years, a course in Shakespeare: the Other Poet; the Crowd-Pleaser; the King’s Man to my Regicide; the Macy to my Gimbel. And then I was surprised by joy. I cannot speak for the students, but to me, the course became a rapture. I’d chosen to cover the late romances—Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale—and in them I found such true bliss of reunion and reconciliation, particularly between fathers and their children, that my soul rejoiced. I immediately wrote my poem ‘To Shakespeare’ in gratitude.”
PATRICK ROSAL was born in Belleville, New Jersey, in 1969. He is the author of three full-length collections of poems: Boneshepherds (Persea Books, 2011), My American Kundiman (Persea, 2006), and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (Persea, 2003). A former Fulbright fellow in the Philippines, he teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden.
Of “You Cannot Go to the God You Love with Your Two Legs,” Rosal writes: “This poem, several years in the making, was triggered by a short passage from the book On Love by José Ortega y Gasset, an early-twentieth-century Spanish philosopher. (Ortega y Gasset edited a magazine called Revista de Occidente that published the likes of Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda.) This is the passage in its entirety: ‘You cannot go to the God that you love with the legs of your body, and yet loving Him means going toward Him. In loving we abandon the tranquility and permanence within ourselves, and virtually migrate toward the object. And this constant state of migration is what it is to be in love.’
“It’s difficult to remember the exact process, but I think I picked up on the implications of the words ‘legs of your body’ and ‘migration.’ One could read that first sentence as having to borrow legs or put into use some legs that aren’t of your conventional body. Perhaps one’s animal self has another pair of legs that we aren’t always aware of. Perhaps the ‘constant state of migration’ that is the experience of love requires us to engage our animal selves.
“That was the lyric data for the poem’s inception. I finished two thirds of the text in early drafts. Perhaps five years later, I completed the poem just as a particularly violent incident was everywhere in the news. The poem has reverberations of particular personal sorrow as well as the public grief of that time.”
MARY RUEFLE was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1952. Her latest book is Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013). Her Selected Poems was published in 2010, and a collection of essays, Madness, Rack, and Honey, appeared in 2012. She lives in Vermont and teaches in the MFA Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Of “Saga,” Ruefle writes: “A friend gave me a copy of one of the great Icelandic sagas; I felt bad that I couldn’t finish it, but not so bad that I couldn’t write a poem! Another friend told me about the geological rift—some kind of fault line, I suppose—that runs the length of Iceland, and I was struck (once again) by how our human narratives replicate or echo the narratives of our physical planet. On another note, so many things seem both clear and unclear at the same time; can you really see what you can see through? Of course the poem is not ‘about’ any of this, but these back thoughts bubble up. And this: all things have to go on much longer than a single story, generations and eons have to pass before anything can be said to have an end.”
JON SANDS was born in 1983 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is a poet, essayist, and the author of The New Clean (Write Bloody Publishing, 2011). He starred in the award-winning web series Verse: A Poetic Murder Mystery from Rattapallax Films. He is an adjunct with the City University of New York, is a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC, and heads creative writing programs at Bailey House in Harlem (an HIV/AIDS service center) and The Positive Health Project (a syringe exchange center located in Midtown Manhattan). He is the cofounder of Poets in Unexpected Places. He lives in Brooklyn and tours regularly.
Sands writes: “In ‘Decoded,’ I wanted to produce an effect similar to what you get when you examine a photograph beside its negative. I am struck by how much of what I see in life contains—or is a direct result of—what I don’t (or won’t) see. There is a blindness, and thus a danger, in privilege, deriving often from what one does not know, or does not wish to know. The creation of the form of this poem helped me to excavate and spotlight ideas or narratives around racial identity that were previously hidden from me. I could not have written ‘Decoded’ without the work and personhood of Eboni Hogan.”
STEVE SCAFIDI was born in Virginia in 1967. He is the author of four books of poetry: Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (2001), For Love of Common Words (2006), The Cabinetmaker’s Window (2014), all from LSU Press, and To the Bramble and the Briar (University of Arkansas Press, 2014). He works as a cabinetmaker and lives with his family in Summit Point, West Virginia.
Of “Thank You Lord for the Dark Ablaze,” Scafidi writes: “This poem took me a few years to write, because I didn’t know what I was doing for so long. To write it was to spin and spin and be lost. If you put an irregular or lopsided chunk of wood on the lathe, it will spin and break off if the speed is too high. I had to slow this thing down enough to work on it properly—to understand what I was doing. Once you work that irregular chunk into balance—into a form—then you can speed up the lathe again and it will go beautiful and blurry. I like that. For me, writing poems (and reading them) always involves being lost. I like it that the word ‘bewildered’ echoes the first syllable in ‘wilderness.’ I like it that the word ‘wilderness’ has an anagram for the word ‘deer’ near the center of it. In this poem that deer is dead and death always bewilders. I write this poem constantly.”
FREDERICK SEIDEL was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1936. He earned an undergraduate degree at Harvard University in 1957. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Ooga-Booga (2006), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; The Cosmos Trilogy (2003); and Going Fast (1998), all from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
DIANE SEUSS was born in 1956 in Michigan City, Indiana, and raised in Edwardsburg and Niles, Michigan. Her people are old-school barbers, small-town morticians, telephone operators, nurses, teachers, one-eyed pool players, and furniture salespeople (specializing in the swivel rocker). Her first book, It Blows You Hollow, was published by New Issues Press in 1998. Her second collection, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, received the Juniper Prize for Poetry and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. Her third book, Four-Legged Girl, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2015. She is writer-in-residence at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.
Seuss writes: “ ‘Free Beer’ represents the crossroads between two seemingly disconnected subjects. I did, as a young child, i
nvite all of the adults in the neighborhood to a puppet show at our home, promising them free beer if they showed up. My father was dying; our family was penniless. We were living on cans of pork and beans delivered in cardboard boxes by the minister of the Fulkerson Park Baptist Church. Needless to say, there was no beer, were no puppets. The show, I guess, was wishful thinking. The intersecting subject that collided with the small narrative of that pocket-sized memory came to me via all of the mass shootings that happened in the United States over the last few years. Did I have the spiritual chops, I wondered, to pray for the bastard perpetrators?
“What happened when the two subjects met in this poem is a mystery I’d prefer not to solve. It’s not about their intersection, of course, but it’s the little song that arose out of their meeting in the puppet theater behind my eyes.”
SANDRA SIMONDS was born in Washington, DC, in 1977. She is the author of four books of poetry: Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Press, 2012), The Sonnets (Bloof, 2014), and The Glass Box (forthcoming, Saturnalia Books, 2015). She is assistant professor of English and humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.
Simonds writes: “ ‘I Grade Online Humanities Tests’ is a political poem insofar as I tried to write about capitalism, patriarchy, and race without a lot of filter. I wanted to push myself to encounter the limit of the intersection of taboo, autobiography, and art. I wanted to know how much can you say honestly in a poem without your life falling apart? In a sense, this is a response to Auden’s assertion that poetry makes nothing happen. Is this true for everyone? Is it true for women? Is it true for people with little power in society? I wanted to investigate the undercurrents of political and sexual power that are just below the surface of everyday life. Can a poem get you fired? Can a poem threaten your marriage? I wanted to see how much power a poem can have when it responds to the fictions of the world.”
