by David Lehman
“Among other office/school supply poems that come to mind are Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘12 O’clock News’ and Cavafy’s early poem on an inkwell. But probably back, back in my mind the poem that makes this one possible is one by Roethke. I worked briefly in London in 1990 as a ‘tea girl’ at the Institute of Classical Studies, then in Gordon Square, and when I didn’t walk, took the Tube from Warren Street Station. My roommate and I lived around the corner from Fitzroy Square, once home to Virginia Woolf. I dreamed of being a writer. Among the advertisements on the Tube was the series of Poems on the Underground. At least two of those poems ended up laying down formative strata in my young poet brain: Robert Graves’s ‘Love without Hope’ and Theodore Roethke’s ‘Dolor,’ which begins ‘I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.’ I have often regretted that I didn’t just up and steal one of those posters. Maybe I am still trying.”
Born in Cambridge, England, of American parents in 1933, ANNE STEVENSON was brought up and educated in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Graduating from the University of Michigan in 1954 with a major Hopwood Award, she later published two collections of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, including an epistolary novel in verse called Correspondences (1974)—the first of ten collections to appear from Oxford University Press between 1974 and 1996. In 1998, after OUP stopped publishing new poetry, she moved with her family to Durham in the northeast of England and brought out two more collections with Bloodaxe Books in Newcastle before publishing in 2006 a more or less up-to-date Poems 1955–2005. She observes: “It was probably this hefty volume and its reviews that prompted the Poetry Foundation of America to remember that I was still an American and to present me with the Neglected Masters Award in 2007.” This honor was confirmed in 2008 by a Selected Poems in the American Poets Project series, sponsored by the Library of America, and a Life Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation. Since then, Bloodaxe Books has published two more collections, Stone Milk (2007) and Astonishment (2012).
Of “How Poems Arrive,” Stevenson writes: “At eighty-five, I am still writing poems, but fewer as I become older, slower, crazier, and more fastidious. My latest Bloodaxe publication is a book of lectures delivered in the past five or six years called About Poems: and how poems are not about. The title and to some extent all the lectures in this book dwell on and demonstrate how word-sounds and bodily rhythms (heartbeat and breathing) recorded in the accents of a language are essential to poetry. Although I didn’t write ‘How Poems Arrive’ with the purpose of using it as a preface to my arguments, when it was written I realized that my conscious and unconscious mind had been working in tandem to find a resonant form of words that would explain something of the mystery of how poems (real poems, gut poems) force themselves into being. Of course, poems are written for many reasons and for a variety of purposes. But if you are really and helplessly a poet, I’m sure lines often arrive, as it were, readymade, without your knowing why or how. It is incumbent on you to take them on, write them down, and then worry yourself, maybe half consciously or half asleep, until you find a form that will help you bring them to the surface. In the case of ‘How Poems Arrive’ it was deciding to write the poem in terza rima that helped my conscious brain to listen to what the poem was saying.”
ADRIENNE SU is the author of four books of poems, Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997), Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006), Having None of It (Manic D, 2009), and Living Quarters (Manic D, 2015). Born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1967, she studied at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and the University of Virginia and has held fellowships from The Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is professor of creative writing and poet-in-residence at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Links to poems and prose are available at adriennesu.ink.
Of “Substitutions,” Su writes: “I have long surrounded myself with two genres of books, poetry, and cookbooks, interests I usually consider separate and at odds. Over time, however, the language of cooking instruction has expanded my approach to poetry. The imperative voice evokes intimacy, a guiding hand, and possibly the voice of a late grandmother, while legitimizing second-person narration. That the shorthand of recipe writing—‘soft peaks,’ ‘a lively simmer,’ ‘pliable dough’—parallels the pointers writers give each other in revision—‘trust the reader,’ ‘starts in the middle,’ ‘ending too pat’—helps validate home cooking as an art form and makes it, in some small way, less of a violation of writing time. Meanwhile, I read cookbooks in part for pleasure, but also to inhabit the matrilineal history that otherwise seems to be missing. Unlike canonized literature, cookbooks are a genre in which the reader can go back in time and not find that the default pronoun has become an unquestioned ‘he.’ Although the cook in ‘Substitutions’ is male, he shares with most female cooks of the past the anonymity of the local or domestic artist.
“The description of the Sichuan noodle dish dan dan mian in Fuchsia Dunlop’s meticulously researched Land of Plenty brought about this poem by making me hungry, less for noodles than for the adventure of imagining noodles. Trying to give coherent shape to what I pictured became a chance to link rhymed couplets to a form that might otherwise be seen as purely functional, the ingredient-substitution list. The process also revealed a need to explore one of the ghost dishes that seemed to dwell in and around my childhood, both of my parents having immigrated, long before I was born, from China to the American South, where Asian Americans were so few that the term ‘Asian American’ had not reached us. Most days, my family’s kitchen table appeared quite assimilated. Yet behind our deviled eggs hovered the specter of tea eggs; behind our morning oatmeal lay the comfort of congee; behind our weeknight spaghetti and meat sauce lurked a street vendor’s noodles, cooked to order just about anywhere, day or night, in a place that lived mostly in memory.”
NATASHA TRETHEWEY was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She served two terms as the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States (2012–2014) and is the author of four collections of poetry: Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)—for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—and Thrall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). In 2010 she published a book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press). Monument, a volume of new and selected poems, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2018. She has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. At Northwestern University she is Board of Trustees Professor of English.
Of “Shooting Wild,” Trethewey writes: “I have been working on this poem for twenty years. I began writing it in 1997, twelve years after my mother’s death, in an attempt to explore why the sound of her voice was the part of my memory of her that I began to lose first. Once, a few years after she was gone, I found an old cassette recording of her speaking. I put the tape in the cassette player and she came back to me, vividly, for a few moments. Then the tape snagged and no matter how many times I took it out, unraveled and rewound it, it would no longer play. It caught again and again on the reels until it snapped.”
AGNIESZKA TWOREK was born in Lublin, Poland, in 1975. She came to the United States with her family when she was eighteen. She received a BA in romance languages and literature from the University of Chicago and a PhD in French from Yale. She lives in Vermont.
Of “Grief Runs Untamed,” Tworek writes: “I witnessed tanks and military trucks driving down the street behind my apartment building after martial law was declared in Poland when I was a child. This image has haunted me for years, reminding me that freedom and peace are fragile, and that war may be lurking around every corner. I have real
ized that it is important to look out the window of one’s own life, to see what is beyond it, to observe what is happening in the larger world, to be a witness. I was fortunate to be accepted as an immigrant in the United States in 1993, yet I am aware that many displaced people around the world today are not welcome anywhere. My poem ‘Grief Runs Untamed’ attempts to chronicle the plight of such people, who have been brutally uprooted from their lives in so many places because of wars, drought, tyranny, gang violence, and religious and ethnic persecution. I wrote it as an elegy for the countless lives lost, for people who may never reach safety, and for those forced into exile and makeshift existences, who may never feel at home anywhere.
“Initially, I included the phrase ‘grief runs untamed’ in one of the lines of the poem; grief in that earlier version was confined to the abandoned houses. However, in the present version, the grief is much larger: the refugees and the world are its captives. It is boundless, and so it became the title of my poem.”
G. C. WALDREP (b. 1968 in South Boston, Virginia) is the author most recently of a lyric collection, feast gently (Tupelo, 2018); a long poem, Testament (BOA Editions, 2015); and a chapbook, Susquehanna (Omnidawn, 2013). With Ilya Kaminsky, he is coeditor of Homage to Paul Celan (Marick Press, 2011); he and Joshua Corey are editors of The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012). He lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as editor at large for The Kenyon Review.
Of “Dear Office in Which I Must Account for Tears,” Waldrep writes: “I drafted this poem on 22 November 2013 in Marfa, Texas—I owe a great debt to the Lannan Foundation, which enabled me to live and write there for six taut weeks. At the time, I was battling neurological issues that were perhaps Parkinsonian, perhaps not—not, in the end, though I would not know that with any certainty until mid-2015. (Keith Waldrop: ‘I had not realized how dark it is, inside the body.’) I was also rereading Darwish and Reverdy, in translation, while struggling with the emotional and spiritual fallout of a failed courtship. All or none of these conditions may be relevant to the poem, which surprised me, as the gift-poems always do. It arrived verbatim in the form in which it was later published, less two excised stanzas. It was the first of seven poems that day—a red-letter day, a very good day, we all hope for such days.”
WANG PING was born in China and came to the United States in 1986. Her publications of poetry and prose include American Visa (Coffee House Press, 2008), Foreign Devil (Coffee House, 1996), Of Flesh & Spirit (Coffee House, 1998), Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (Anchor, 2002), The Last Communist Virgin (Coffee House, 2007), and Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi (2017 AWP Nonfiction Award, University of Georgia Press, 2018). She has received the Eugene Kayden Award, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Artist Fellowship for poetry, and the McKnight Fellowship for nonfiction. She was awarded the Distinct Immigrant Award in 2014 and was named Venezuela International Poet of Honor in 2015. A photographer and installation artist, she has had multimedia installations (Behind the Gate: After the Flood of the Three Gorges and We Are Water: Kinship of Rivers at Macalester College, Soap Factory Gallery, All My Relatives Gallery, Great River Museums, Bologna Art Gallery, Emily Carr Institute of Arts, and festivals in China, India, Peru, Venezuela, Nepal, and Canada). She is a professor of English at Macalester College and is the founder and director of the Kinship of Rivers project.
Of “Lao Jia,” Wang Ping writes: “I was born and grew up in Shanghai, and have been living in USA since 1986. My official Chinese residence is still registered as Shandong, Weihai, my lao jia, my old home, my identity.
“Every Chinese belongs to lao jia, the land of our ancestors, our name, spirit, roots, no matter where we go, how far we wander.
“I left home at fourteen, to work as a farmer in a fishing village on the island of East China Sea, in pursuit of my college dream. I never went back home.
“Three years later, I left the village to study English at Hangzhou Language School. I never went back to the island.
“I left Hangzhou for Beijing University. My college dream came true at twenty-two.
“I left China in 1986, and never went back.
“My ex-boyfriend screamed repeatedly: ‘Go back where you came from!!!’ Still, I never went back.
“I got farther and farther away, carrying Weihai, my lao jia, my old home, in my dreams and thoughts.
“When I was fifty, I took my sons to visit my old home on the shore of the Yellow Sea, for the first time.
“Factories and luxury buildings take over the place my father talked about every day. The wheat fields are gone. The village is gone. The sand beach is gone. My grandma’s grave, somehow, remains in the yam fields. I sit down in front of her stone, and everything floods back and up: memories, sorrow, joy, her voice and stories, my father’s longing. . . .
“I look at my sons. They are eating steamed bread, for the first time in their life, but they devour it as if it were their daily meal since birth, as if they were slurping Cheerios and milk. This is the bread my father craved all his life while living on the island of the East China Sea as a navy officer.
“My sons are tied to the ancestral land, even though they were born in NYC and Midwest prairie, even though they love pizza, play hockey and baseball, and speak little Chinese.
“We all belong to lao jia, old home, old land, that is part of us.
“We carry home 家 in our chests, as we wander, from continent to continent, from sea to sea.”
JAMES MATTHEW WILSON was born in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1975, and now lives in Pennsylvania, where he is associate professor of religion and literature in the department of humanities and Augustinian traditions at Villanova University. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently, The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (Catholic University of America Press, 2017), and a collection of poems, Some Permanent Things (Wiseblood Books, 2014). A two-time winner of the Lionel Basney Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, he was awarded the 2017 Hiett Prize by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, which recognizes younger scholars who are making significant contributions to the shaping of contemporary culture.
Of “On a Palm,” Wilson writes: “Years ago, I used to walk my oldest daughter to school every morning, and we would pass by the local psychic and palm reader’s shop. With its shabby exterior and big black sign out front, it seemed such an entrancing symbol of an age that has lost the bearings of genuine religious belief and has fallen, in consequence, into the decay of hokey superstitions. It is of course consoling to know that human nature does not change and that the mind cannot help but seek out a knowledge that transcends our everyday uses, even if it must do so in embarrassing ways. But there is also something a bit contemptible in the frequent settling for claptrap—claptrap pressed, moreover, into doing poor service for our psychological needs, when we should rather be offering ourselves in service to the truth itself. One day, not so long ago, I was driving past that shop and saw it had gone out of business. I set out to write a poem that portrayed just such a snarl of contempt, and I was delighted to see that it could find expression alongside candid acknowledgment of and sympathy for how badly our souls want to be known, cherished, taken into hand and held.”
RYAN WILSON was born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1982, and raised in nearby Macon. He holds degrees from the University of Georgia, Johns Hopkins University, and Boston University. The Stranger World, his first book (Measure Press, 2017), won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. He is the editor of Literary Matters (www.literarymatters.org) and the office manager of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW). He teaches at the Catholic University of America, where he is completing his doctorate. He and his wife, Kelly, live in Parkville, Maryland.
Wilson writes: “ ‘Face It’ was written in West Virginia at a mountaintop cabin b
elonging to my great friend, Ernest Suarez. During a break near dusk, I stepped out onto the porch, from which one can see more than fifty miles on a clear day. I was tantalized by a hawk hovering in a western gap, how it seemed to approach and to recede at once on the wind, never near enough for me to identify its species, or even its genus.
“The season, the bird, and perhaps my own uncertainties about the future recalled to mind Robert Penn Warren’s poem, ‘Heart of Autumn,’ a meditation on transformation that brilliantly transforms Horace’s Ode ii.20, itself a poem of transformation.
“The form of ‘Face It’ is the bref double, a French predecessor of the sonnet that has rarely been brought into English. Writing ‘Face It,’ I knew of no English-language examples. I chose the form because it seems to be both a sonnet and not a sonnet, inhabiting a kind of formal liminal state that I hoped would parallel my poem’s concerns with identity and transformation, being and becoming, selfhood and otherness.
“The choice of form derived from my study of Horace. In Ode ii.20, Horace refers to himself as a biformis vates, a ‘two-form poet,’ and he does so in part because he is bringing the Alcaic meter, a Greek form, into Latin-language poetry, and in part because the poem recounts the poet’s own transformation into a swan. The transformation in content matches the transformation of the form. While lacking Horace’s self-assurance, I hoped to create an analogous ‘two-form’ effect with my bref double, which, like the other poems in The Stranger World, seeks to promote what the ancient Greeks called ξενία (xenia), ‘hospitality to the stranger,’ whether that stranger be another individual or one’s self.”
