...with Rebecca Brock by Joanell Serra

 
 

Rebecca Brock is the author of The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023).  Her work appears in The Threepenny Review, CALYX, River Heron Review, THRUSH, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. In 2022, she won the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest at The Comstock Review, the Kelsay Books Woman’s Poetry Prize and the Editor's Choice Award at Sheila-Na-Gig. She is a reader for SWWIM. Rebecca has been a flight attendant for most of her adult life and is still surprised by this fact. You can find more of her work at www.rebeccabrock.org.

IG: @rebecca.brock_writer

A few months ago, I stumbled on one of Rebecca Brock’s poems, “I Remember How I Believed,” on the River Heron site. I was floored by her imagery of the Idaho foothills, of a baby’s gravestone, combined with truly concise and powerful language. I was also struck with her use of space and even grammar to create mood and meaning. 

I looked and found her work in other places online, and ultimately asked River Heron’s editor to introduce us. Before we met, I had the sincere pleasure of reading and re-reading Brock’s new book of poetry, The Way Land Breaks. 

This impressive collection, published by Sheila-Na-Gig in 2023, brings the reader into the various realms where the poet exists--as a mother to two growing and changing boys, as an airline attendant, as a wife and adult daughter, as a frequent traveler—especially to the landscapes of the West, and as homebound parent through the pandemic.  We feel the intimate moments of being in a body that is coping with chronic illness, the fear that swells when a child is ill, the humor that comes from spending time with small children, and the awe that accompanies deep attention to the natural world. 

Each poem holds a miniature journey, often into intimate places like the inside of a seashell or in the folds of a mushroom. But in a Lewis Carroll sort of way, these small places become deep and wide kingdoms to traverse—kingdoms of grief, of motherhood, of hope, and of despair. We enter them armed only with Rebecca’s shining poems, but ultimately that is enough. 

Like all excellent writers, Rebecca looks at the world with clear and observant eyes, including seeing how the climate crisis is affecting the planet, feeling the pain of the political landscape, accepting her own flaws when held up by her family, and seeing the stunning beauty of the world in surprising places. 

Our conversation was wide ranging—from the ways her editor helped her “birth” this book to the way motherhood both interrupts and informs the creative process.  I encourage you to join us as we unpack some of the layers of being a writer. Of course, reading her book is the best way to know her work. You can order The Way Land Breaks here. 

Joanell
Congratulations on the publication of The Way Land Breaks. I’ve read and reread it, and keep finding more ways to relate to the work. I’d love to start with the first few poems which I feel relates to one of your overall themes, embodiment.

In the first three poems, we feel and see parts of the body: jaws unhinged, the mouth loose, born and bone, acrimony on the tongue, tongue torn by her own teeth. We feel the suffering: 

 ....Swollen 
breaths like sharp stones--
tongue torn by her own teeth,
hurt that hurts after...

This theme, the bodily language, is present throughout the book. Can you share about the decision to ground your work in this way? Is it a choice? Or is this simply your window of understanding? 

Rebecca
This is an insight that actually surprised me—but once you called my attention to it, I saw it, too, and agree with you that it is just my window of understanding. It’s startling to find things in your work that you didn’t realize you were doing—startling and wonderful. 

I’ve struggled with embodiment since I was a child with emotions too big for everyone around me. I think I was overwhelming to my loved ones—or at least, I felt I was overwhelming. Reading, writing—all of that was a place to take my confusion or pain, fear or joy and let it rest. I chose those three poems to start the work because they felt so true to me—true to an opening, an introduction. 

The birth poem is personal but also, for me, what these last years have felt like in this country—the chaos and the sense of inevitably that pervades so many aspects of our daily lives: political, racial and, of course, the climate. Until 2020, freedom of movement was an absolute in my life—I work as a flight attendant. My home is in Virginia, and my family of origin in Idaho. I was often on the road (or in the sky) or about to be. During the pandemic, distance became tangible. It was strange to be so settled, all of us—two kids, my husband (working from home now) and the dog. It was a relief, in some ways, to pause. But it also reminded me of how much my sister and I, when we were children, loved to spin until we collapsed, our heads still swirling--that strange reformatting of everything that was familiar. 

“A Woman Might Say This Is What Birth Looks Like” was written in my parents’ backyard in the summer of 2020—we’d driven cross country in a mad three day dash and were staying in their RV/Camper until we were sure we weren’t infected. Their backyard is long and narrow and we would sit on one side, my parents on the other—together but not together. I wrote about that hurt, the sharp stones—the bending—and felt it in my body, that movement through birth, that rough rush of beginning. 

Pregnancy and birth are both experiences that absolutely placed me in my body in ways I’d never been before—I guess I mean awareness. As if, most of the time, I’m just a head walking around, dragging my body along without much thought or care. So, to finally circle back to your question, I think the answer is that bodily language is becoming my window of understanding—my way of moving what’s in my head into the physical world/time/place of the poem. The body as anchor. The earth as Mother—as body. The bones of the earth, say, or the scars on my body. It’s instinct, I think, in a moment of disconnect from so many other bodies.

Joanell
What a stunning answer! I love the idea of how often we are heads walking around in the world, forgetting the body below. 

Many of your poems are brimming with the experience of motherhood. In “Tiger,” you write of finding yourself …mother to a boy who would be interested in tigers. In “Amanita Phalloides” and “What to Tell Them,” we experience the fear that comes with motherhood, almost within days of conception and the dangers that erupt around us whether from a mass shooting or a mushroom. And of course, your mother’s lost child is an echo in several poems. 

I am always interested in how motherhood plays a role in a writer’s life whether it saps the creativity for some period of time, or infuses the work with more light or more gravity.  Did you see a major shift in your work after becoming a mother? Do you find “birthing” the book has any resonance with mothering? 

Rebecca
I did not find much resonance with the “birthing” of my book—it was and is still surreal to me that it’s done and out in the world. When people say, oh, I’m reading a poem a night or I read your poems by the Christmas Tree last night—I still can’t believe it’s out in the world—that I’m out in the world. It was more a work of revelation for me, a coming out of hiding, heart in hand, right? Hoping for connection, maybe, or reaching toward my own understanding.

Motherhood shifted me entirely—I think if I had just set down writing, allowed myself to fully set it down, I would have been a happier mother and, eventually, that’s what I had to do. I couldn’t carry the emotional load of both—when they were little, it hurt worse to try and write and be torn between those two worlds. I know other mothers have managed it, and my admiration for that is immense. I was not one of those mothers. 

The biggest change is that motherhood shifted me from writing fiction—short stories, novel drafts—to writing poems. My kids were my subject, myself as a mother was my subject—the days such rivers of time. By 10 AM, I would have lived ten lives with them, the whole day ahead. I began catching at moments—like catching lightning bugs, or seeking shells on the beach—and holding them still long enough to look, breathe, think. 

The intensity of poetry matched the brevity and intensity of the time I did have to write. But I did stop writing for almost a decade. My youngest was six and starting kindergarten when I began again with morning pages and, eventually, gave myself a day of writing every week. It had to be the same day—and I worked hard to schedule appointments, work and house chores all around that day. The more I wrote, the more urgent I became about keeping that day sacred. That lasted and worked for me until the pandemic years—and now, I write in snatches, since the book, during the book—my kids are in another stretch of needing so much from me. 

I didn’t expect to be so needed at this age, but I think the pandemic and the politics of these times has forced things into such dissonance for my kids. At least, for now, I’ve grown enough to know to give myself grace in these stretches of silence.

Joanell 
Ah, grown enough to give yourself grace. This is the work of lifetimes. Many of your poems are in relation to the natural world—your imagery suggests one might:

glide thermals
like a full bellied hawk
with time to spend
on pleasure...

Compares an earthquake to:

A horse losing patience 
with the bridle or the buzzing
of flies. 

You write about the goose that misses his mark when landing, the squirrel who leaves his bones behind for your son to puzzle over, enter a poem with your saving of a mollusk, and leave it with the longing to assure your son’s survival. 

Can you speak to the knowledge you carry about the natural world? Were you always interested in knowing the names and habits of creatures, or has that developed as a poet? Or as a mother—which is to say a tour guide to the natural world?

Rebecca
I’ve always loved the details. And when my children were small, I delighted in their curiosity and wonder. Any little interest they had, we’d pursue in books or travel: dinosaurs in Utah, a special exhibit on Egyptian hieroglyphics in the city, all those DK Eyewitness books. 

My oldest, especially, was a words person and wanted to know what, why, how, when. I was so immersed in their childhood—I think, in part, because it felt so clear: feed them, show them, love them. They would find caterpillars or squirrel bones and it would make me look again, look deeper or further. All of this was in me, but my kids woke me up, shined so much light on the world. They were sponges. And it was lovely to have answers to their questions. 

Also, two active kiddos in a smallish house with no backyard meant we had to get out into the day—everyday. The movement of our days felt more tangible when we learned something, saw something new—picked blueberries or went to a farm to watch bunnies and llamas. I am no good with useful routines. It’s taken me ages to realize there is so much freedom in structuring your days. But when they were little, even when they weren’t so little, we were wanderers. All of us, a little bit insatiable.

Joanell
Yes! I think being a little bit insatiable, such a funny phrase, but I completely get it. It might be the very definition of the creative mindset. 

It seems you visit the mountains and the West frequently, and the imagery from those areas infuses many of the poems. Would you say specific places inspire you?  

Rebecca 
Yes, absolutely, yes. I love the mountains of the American West—Rainier, Mount Hood, the Tetons, Sawtooths, the low foothills that surround Boise, Idaho. I love the way they rise up and stay. I love the Badlands, the desert sky. For me they are both like the ocean—which I also love, especially the Oregon and Washington Coasts—something so much more permanent, more telling than us—something to place me as human in this world, human in time and scope, that immensity made tangible and intangible at once.

Joanell 
Many of the poems have an awareness of the climate crisis. There is both the sense of desperation and the awe of the world and the anticipatory grief for what is to come. It is especially clear in the poem “Banana Bread.”

...what will I say when they ask 
what it was like to live knowing 
you were on the precipice 
Of time unsung-or, rather-end time...

It made me wonder, are there eco-poets that you specifically find inspiring or whose work you resonate with? Or are there other resources you find either informative or reassuring as you navigate this difficult but urgent topic? 

Rebecca
Mary Oliver feels too obvious to say, but she can bring a poem in for landing so gorgeously. Oliver speaks more of adoration and attention to the natural world than she does of crisis, but the devotion is key, isn’t it? That loving and seeing what’s here to save. Brittney Corrigan’s Solastalgia recently came out and Jared Beloff’s Who Will Cradle Your Head? Jane Hirshfield works with such minimalism in her book Ledger. Ada Limon resonates and, of course, Maggie Smith’s Good Bones and Goldenrod. The world we know now will not be the world our children know. Parenthood underscores the whole of this ache, our responsibility and our helplessness, our necessary hope. My poem “Raising Glaciers” really tries to reach for the complexity of how to do parenting at this time and place in our world—also my poem “ROVE” thinks about the Mars Rover: there is this, there is this and there is also you. There is also you. Don’t we tell that to our children? Look at this mountain, this crane, this wild fox—and you, also look at you. It’s so difficult and yet I think poetry comes the closest to addressing the whole.

Joanell
Finally, the book does a fabulous job of letting the pandemic arrive, and be part of the collection, without it being a “pandemic collection.” As someone who edited a book of essays about the pandemic, I was really moved by the poems that referenced it without making it central. We get a sense of life going on, albeit in a more challenging way. Late in the book, we arrive at the title poem, and it is both startlingly beautiful and heartbreaking. It is also very relatable. Who didn’t feel “broken” by the end of 2022? I appreciate that the writer does not apologize for breaking “the way land breaks” or even being “hard.” The poem ends by pointing out that we are close to being animals, creatures, even plants. 

 This reminds me of recent discoveries of the similarities in human and mushroom DNA. Also of the strange crossovers between the human and animal world in recent years, that Covid was rampant in the deer population, that mountain lions, coyotes and other predators are changing their behaviors due to their increased interactions with humans, that scientists are learning to “speak whale” in order to aid in protecting them. Is that some of what you meant? That the boundary between humans and the natural world is thin and permeable? And that the differences are less that we perceive? 

I’d love to hear any insights about your title poem. When was it written, how did it evolve, what made you choose the poem’s title for the collection’s title?

Rebecca
I’m so happy you saw the human connection to mushroom DNA! It’s exactly what I was referencing with that line. I’d also read several articles exploring how climate change sort of charged the pandemic—how fast it spread, how it spread, how it started.  Growing up out West, it is easy and obvious to remember my fragility—the landscape that much harsher, the wild just a bit away, by car or by foot. How more and more we struggle to define the thing that makes us human, that makes us separate from creatures, from plants.

I hoped the pandemic poems would hold at the end of this collection, the way it crept into everything—the way I saw my friends and family trying so hard to cope and adapt. It stripped so much away, revealing what was already broken in all levels of American society—all the systems—education, healthcare—already stretched, just fracturing. Even parents, but mothers especially. We were already asked to carry so much for free in society, that invisible work, emotional and mental loads, raising and educating the next workforce, the fact that there was some tangible relief knowing that, at least, our kids wouldn’t be in a school shooting because they were stuck at home. It was all too much, and it did feel like breaking to me.

That poem started with the title “I am too comfortable with absence,” which didn’t even survive as a line in the poem. I had, in a way, been isolating well before the pandemic as I worked through the complications from my Lyme Disease diagnosis in 2019.  I never knew when I would feel capable or when I might crash. My oldest began middle school and began struggling in ways I couldn’t help with or see. So, when the pandemic hit, there was a part of me that was relieved, I needed everything to stop. I was able to take a leave from my job and really pushed myself to tend to my family. I tried so hard. I baked. We had game nights and a semblance of order to our days. We got outside to walk or exercise. We called far away family often. 

But, of course, it just kept going and going. And more and more I let screen time go, I let dinner time go, I let go. We all did. My youngest was the only vibrant one among us, and his need, his energy would burst out with these questions—such as, do you ever feel bad for things? And he meant things: stuffed animals, toys, shoes he had outgrown. We were all cooped up in this small space of our home. I noticed how easily his dad, brother, and I had all checked out, on our phones, deep into the news stories of climate, Black Lives Matter, Trump threatening to gun down protestors. 

We know the human mind is not equipped for all the information, all of the time. I thought of the Badlands, dry desert stone, escarpments, and rock cliffs.

The actual innocence and loneliness in my son’s question was a jolt, the break in me felt unsubtle but also something I had missed happening. But it was there—like something I could point to, like in the poem “A Geology,” it was there, just there. I did not miss the ‘normal’ everyone was talking about. ‘Normal’ was not okay for many of us. My son’s question broke through my absence, so to speak, and that poem came fairly fluidly, fairly quickly. Mothering through these last years has so many threads—and the children, the children are watching as adults fail and falter and fail again.

Joanell
Yes. Your sons’ observations arise in various poems and did remind me of that feeling as a mother, of being seen in a different way.  I am interested in how this collection itself came to be shaped. By the end of the book, I have a sense of your life—your boys, your marriage, your relationship with your mother, a few insights on the life of a flight attendant, a sense of your interests in nature. Kudos, on giving us such a broad picture with so many fascinating details. I am curious about how you chose the order of the poems and any experiences you had along the way, such as a particular publication or award, that helped get you across the finishing line to creating a full-length collection. 

Rebecca
I won two Editor’s choice awards at Sheila-Na-Gig, in 2021 and 2022, and the editor, Hayley Mitchell Haugen, and I were emailing when she asked if I had a manuscript. I did not. But I knew I had poems. So many poems. Having someone ask for more of your writing was wonderful and tethering. I wanted to make her something beautiful. I took a long weekend and booked a stay at Porches, a writing residency outside the Washington D.C. area. I brought ALL my poems and folders of scraps of poems. I was able to drop in, fully, and immerse myself.

The book I thought I had in these poems became instead this book about home and distance, motherhood and time. I had the luxury and space to stretch poems all across the floor and read, reread, place, pace, replace.  In my mind, the book moves in three parts—the pandemic, as you noted, coming in slowly near the last half of the book. I left with a solid manuscript and worked on smaller edits at home. Before sending my manuscript to Hayley, I submitted individual poems and several poems received honors and awards that encouraged me to trust the manuscript would hold together, that it was ready. I think I would still be tinkering, moving poems, replacing poems but, eventually, once Hayley saw and worked through the manuscript with me several times, she said, “It’s time. She’s ready.” 

I’m so grateful for her faith and guidance through this process. I set my writing down for such a long stretch and then picked it up but working in an entirely different genre—every acceptance, every encouraging rejection. I’m grateful to be here, writing. My days are better, my mothering is better. I’m better for it.

Joanell
I love hearing about a positive and kind relationship with your publisher. Lovely.

Now, a few “fun” questions to finish off for our poetry writing readers: 

Are there any other classes or experiences that have really influenced your growth as a writer? 

Rebecca
I’ve really enjoy and learn from being a volunteer reader for SWIMM (Supporting Women Writers In Miami). I send in a “yes” or “no” on each piece I am assigned and offer short feedback. Often the small edits I recommend are accepted. This has helped my confidence as a writer and in my own editing process.  It’s a really impressive organization which I recommend to writers and readers.

I also sign up for “prompt a day” programs with several writers or organizations I follow. For instance, right now I am doing advent prompts from Two Sylvias Press. Responding means I write at least one poem a day, no matter what, and then I can use them, or not, later. It’s a helpful process to keep me writing through busy times. 

Joanell
I love meeting the challenge of daily prompts, as well. Next one, also for fun, but a tough question for many poets. If I said you could meet any poet you want for tea next week, dead or alive, who would you choose?

Rebecca
Oh, that’s a hard one! I don’t trust these questions or my answers! I’m so changeable. Off the top of my head, Lucille Clifton. Anna Ahkamatova, Jane Kenyon, maybe Rilke? Isn’t it strange I picture myself listening raptly, absorbing the energy and insight of Clifton, Ahkmatova, Kenyon—just reveling in their presence. But for Rilke I have questions.  

Joanell 
Rilke is mine! It’s been fabulous getting to know you and your work through this process, Rebecca. Thank you for sharing the journey. 


Rebecca Brock’s The Way Land Breaks is available to purchase from Shelia-Na-Gig Inc.

Joanell Serra is a Northern California writer with work published in numerous journals and anthologies. Her books include The Vines We Planted (Wido, 2018) and (Her)oics Anthology, a collection of women’s essays about the pandemic (Regal House Publishing, 2021). A licensed therapist, she offers personal coaching, women’s retreats, and writing workshops. She is currently an MFA student at Randolph College.

...with Tom Mallouk

 
 


Dr. Tom Mallouk has long been an integral part of the poetry community in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey regions sharing his poetry at readings and in journals. His work covers an intimate range of subjects including family, healing from trauma, and his view of the human spirit. He infuses his poetry with insights gained from his years as a psychotherapist, this perspective imbued with his unfailing belief in restoration and recovery. His generosity and support for the art of poetry is known and appreciated by many.

Tom has been a practicing psychotherapist for fifty years. For the past twelve, he has been transforming his interest in the healing possibilities of conversation and the spoken word into poetry. His poems have appeared in literary journals, including GW Review, The Pisgah Review, The Quercus Review, River Heron Review, US 1 Worksheets, The Schuylkill Valley Journal and The Sun. His chapbook Nantucket Revisited was published in May, 2013. A second chapbook The Write Metaphor will be coming out in June 2023, and a full-length volume titled Rupture, Repair and Redemption will follow in the fall. In addition to writing, Tom is an avid golfer and fisherman. He resides in Doylestown, PA with his wife Dr. Eileen Engle with whom he has raised two daughters, Kaitlin and Meghan.

RHR: Tell us about your role as Poet Laureate of Bucks County.

Tom Mallouk: I had no idea what it would feel like to be poet laureate. I tried for so many years and was runner up three times. All I knew was that I wanted to win but since I won, I have been surprised by my sense of duty to the poetry community. For this year, I represent poetry to and for Bucks County. My mission has been to both increase the audience for poetry and to promote the poets of Bucks County who I believe deserve a wider readership.

After vetting several possibilities, including posting poetry in the parks of Bucks County in prominent places on walking trails and park benches, I arrived at the idea of trying to find a local newspaper that would feature a poem on a regular basis in their publication. It turns out I have a connection with one of the members of the board of the Bucks County Herald. Marv Woodall, the board member to whom I had originally pitched the idea, stepped up and decided to use his charitable foundation to fund the first year of Poet’s Corner.

Since then I have applied for a grant from the Academy of American Poets to fund the second year of the project and provide seed money to help other local counties begin the process of getting poetry into local publications, thereby widening and deepening the audience for poetry. I have the fantasy of poems returning to the cultural landscape as part of everyday life. For that to happen, poetry needs to care about the audience and connecting with people at a level where they reside. For that reason, I’m a big fan of more accessible poetry that still maintains a high level of craft and nuance.


RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea?

Tom Mallouk: I feel as though poems reside just below the level of conscious thought. In that way, they are always with me but don’t get on the page until I turn my attention away from my conscious preoccupations and towards a less ordinary way of thinking. that requires me to suspend disbelief and put myself in a receptive frame of mind, a kind of gentle inquiring of what’s going on at that level of consciousness. I suppose you could say that I’m not exactly haunted by the poem and I don’t exactly hunt for it either.


RHR: How do you determine what makes a poem successful?

Tom Mallouk: For me a poem is successful when it pleases me to have written it and when the listener or reader is pleased as well. The most successful poems are ones that get at an emotional truth I have been struggling to articulate. When I am able to write in this way, I find myself more stably grounded and the poems tend to have an emotional impact on the reader or listener.


RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?

Tom Mallouk: There is not one name at my “shrine to poetry“ but among the candidates are: Rilke, Jack Gilbert, Mary Oliver, Charles Simic, Maxine Kumin, William Stafford, Seamus Heaney and WB Yeats. There are also many living poets I admire.


RHR: Tell us about your writing process.

Tom Mallouk: A poem, for me, generally begins in one of two ways: with a fragment of thought or image that I write down before it dissipates or a nearly fully formed poem. In the first case, I may write a few lines at that moment but I don’t push the process if the flow stops. I never throw it away but keep yellow writing pads with these scribblings. At some point later and often much later I’ll return to whatever I’ve written, and something germinates. Once it’s sufficiently fleshed out, I’ll show it to my wife and then to other poetry friends to workshop. Eventually, I decide I’ve done enough with it and file it in a word folder. I don’t submit a lot of work for publication but when I do, I often revise the poem yet again before sending it out.

The poems that come to me more or less fully formed are increasingly rare. But I always feel blessed when they arrive. And try not to mess with them too much. The more common version where I have to build the poem from the ground up can sometimes lead to an awful lot of machinations. This little poem I’ve recently written, articulates it pretty well.

How to Give Up Writing a Poem

First try like hell to write one. No fair
if all you do is refuse to get started. Stare
at the blank page and regret how writing
a poem is so tied to your self-esteem,
you feel it (the page I mean) like a weight

sitting on your chest, a bully challenging
you to make it get off. Then, notice how hard
it is to breathe, how all this effort snuffs out
whatever comes into your head before you can
grasp a pen or get your fingers to the keyboard.

Next, search through random word files
on your laptop, for abandoned fragments.
Then, work them into a longer fragment
or combine them with other fragments
before discarding the whole sad mess

because among other things you realize
how often you repeat the word “fragment.“
Finally, circle back to the original blank page,
yell “Go fuck yourself!“ and lean your forehead
on the edge of the desk to pray. This will not produce

any poetry but makes for a good visual when you hand
your workshop mates a blank page and tell this story.


RHR: If you could bequeath a skill or attitude to other poets, what would it be?

Tom Mallouk: The one skill I would bequeath to other poets is the ability to present their poems to an audience. The attitude should be an intense desire to connect with the audience and this requires that the poet not simply read from the page but to look up and make a kind of eye contact with the listener and “tell“ the poem to the listener. Writing a poem, while solitary, always involves in my experience an imaginary other. But presenting a poem is a relational process. Too often, I have been to readings that essentially consists of the poet reading words on a page in a barely audible voice followed by polite applause where it’s hard for me to imagine that the audience has either actually heard the words or been moved by them. It has been said that a good ritual should produce tears and in my mind a poetry reading is a ritual.


RHR: What in your life prepared you to become a poet?

Tom Mallouk: More than anything what prepared me to be a poet was to live a childhood and early adult life that left me entirely bewildered. By age 20, I was in that famous state of chaos that Gregory Orr speaks about when he asserts that poetry takes place at the threshold between chaos and order in the life of the poet. That state was paired with an intense need to understand and propelled me to write poetry.

...with J. C. Todd

 

J. C. Todd

 

J. C. Todd’s books are Beyond Repair (2021), an Able Muse Press Award special selection, What Space This Body (Wind, 2008), The Damages of Morning (Moonstone Press, 2019) and three chapbooks. A bilingual (English/Lithuanian) book of her selected poems is forthcoming in 2023 from the PDR Festival in Lithuania. Winner of the 2016 Rita Dove Poetry Prize and a commended winner in the 2021 National Poetry Competition of the Poetry Society of the UK, she also has been a finalist in the Robert H. Winner and Lucille Medwick contests of the Poetry Society of America and held fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Poems and interviews have appeared in Baltimore Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Night Heron Barks, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has been a faculty member in the Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College, Kutztown College, and the MFA Program at Rosemont College. Learn more about J. C. Todd by visiting her Website.

We first met J. C. at a Geraldine R. Dodge poetry workshop back in 1996. There, she generously led her workshop participants in a concluding cento-like poem exercise, a copy of which remains in one of our special binders devoted to noteworthy poetry-related experiences. From the start, we were taken by J. C.’s intelligent and creative approach to grappling with societal, personal, and political issues. She has a keen eye and heart for the nuances of human nature and uses impactful langaguage to engage her readers in ways that are thought-provoking and lingering. We are pleased to present her RHR interview.

RHR: What is the best piece of writing advice you have ever been given?

JCT: You learn to write by writing.

As a writer, I want the elements of craft I have studied and practiced to become deeply inscribed in me so that they feel intuitive at a cellular level. In this way the writing becomes my teacher, leading to a moment when I let go and the writing takes over. Each word carries the trace of the word or phrase it emerges from and evolves toward, shaping grammar, syntax, etymological reverberations, sonics, image, story.

This is the experience I open to when I write, or perhaps it opens in me, or opens me. A flicker in the corner of my mind, an awareness. I pick up the pencil and journal/tablet/paper scrap and jot it down. In this moment, I don’t know what the ‘it’ is, I am writing to catch up with it, to see it, a kind of chase that sometimes leads to letting go.

Sometimes when I am on the computer, there will be a gap between what I am writing and something that flashes from a tangent—a glimpse or a word heard out of nowhere—and in that moment, I will leap into or be drawn into a different voice that pours words onto the screen. These are moments of impulse; some might say insight. I am not recording them or writing a poem from them; I am seeking them, hunting them down because they haunt me. And so a draft begins. It has no purpose; it is pure expression, not a poem but perhaps the place where a poem may grow.

I may have first heard “you learn to write by writing’ in a training session for teaching artists offered by the New Jersey State Arts Council. It has become so embedded in my practice as a teaching and writing artist that I do not recall the point of origin. As advice, it may be a corollary of  “you learn to write by reading.” Joyce Carol Oates has written, “Reading is the sole means by which we slip involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” I suspect she writes with more intention than I often do; the slipping into she describes also occurs, not “solely” but often, when I write, undirected and unfettered by personal intention.

Understood in its broadest scope, writing encompasses reading in that you read what you write; you read the subject and tone of its content and context which informs what you write next or what you revise; you read others’ work to discover possibility for your own. Any reader engaged with a piece of writing is inscribed by it, becoming a de-constructor and reviser, an active consciousness entering the text, discovering secrets and variants the writer may not be aware of, conveying the text into interactions the writer has not imagined. As a reader of their own writing, the writer enters into revision (seeing again), whether or not that is their intention. Here is where a poem may begin to emerge.

 

RHR: What have you learned about the way poems can speak to one another?

JCT: My most recent book, Beyond Repair, focuses on the effects of war trauma on women, both civilians and combatants. The first months of COVID isolation offered the ideal environment for curating it. The manuscript had already been chosen as a winner in the Able Muse Poetry Book contest, but I did not think it was ready for publication. Despite the strength of many of its poems, or perhaps because of their strength, its gravitational balance was off-kilter. It felt like an unstable planetary system.

There were two related sticking points. First, the center did not hold. Recognizing that imbalance, I realized that the relationships between the poems had not coalesced, meaning the force they exerted on each other had not formed a unified system of sound and sense. Once I addressed the manuscript as a solar system, I was able to edit: reorder poems so that their alliances/resonances/echoes were more palpable, adjust the tonal and prosodic range and variations, remove a few poems I loved that didn’t belong, and write new ones that strengthened cohesion. In this way the manuscript revealed its story to me, a story so interior I could not articulate it, although I could sense it.

Working with the knit of the poems showed me the shape that would hold them together. That story, which is multi-voiced and told in segments, has found a reader who articulates it eloquently, the poet Michael Collins. You can read his review of Beyond Repair in the January 2023 issue of North of Oxford.

RHR: Do you believe a poem can be overly crafted?

JCT: You can work a poem to death. Over-practicing craft can inflate a poem with ornament, stuff it beyond capacity with figures of speech, turn it into an obese, overblown performer of prosody. Craft can perform excisions of vitals, dull the poem’s appetite, hinder its curiosity, extinguish the spark of its origin. Or it can starve the poem, take away the nourishment of intuition, impulse, experimentation, play. In short, craft can be a form of abuse, malpractice, and authoritarian control. But craft is also the agent of art when used in the service of coherence of meaning and music. Applying craft with awareness can allow the poet to let go and leave behind her “darlings,” and it can nudge or catapult the poem beyond the poet’s original intentions into unexpected resonances, mysteries, discoveries.

 

RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?

JCT: I do not worship poetry, nor do I adore it in the sense of paying divine honors to it. Poetry itself and the writing of it can be an act of adoration, in that it beseeches, entreats, asks as in prayer. In this sense there might be a shrine to poetry, but I have not made one, not even in an ars poetica. I did worship at a shrine in my childhood home—a bookcase in the living room. It was about three feet high, its wood dark, perhaps mahogany, built to hold the twenty-four volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th edition, A new survey of universal knowledge. I couldn’t actually read the title but I memorized the first two words, asking my mother to say them repeatedly, and saying them over and over until I gathered the gold-toned letters into words I recognized, even that strange ‘ae’ configuration which didn’t appear in my Weekly Reader or in the Dick and Jane books used as early readers in primary school. The letters, so bright against the stolid navy blue of the book cloth, were the only gold in our home except for my parents’ wedding rings and a bracelet my mother wore on special occasions, so I understood they were valuable, although I didn’t know that word. I was maybe six when the bookcase and its contents became a shrine to language, where I performed the ritual of selecting a letter, pulling the heavy volume from the shelf onto the floor where I knelt, opening to random crinkly pages. I would choose a subject heading to spell to my mother: what is J-a-g-u-a-r? what is J-e-r-u-s-a-l-e-m?, then stare at the word and chant its sound until the two merged. That initial fascination with individual words, as units of printed letters and the sounds they are keyed to, continues. Saying aloud is an aspect of shaping every draft and revision I make.

Although I have not made a shrine to poetry, poetry has made a sanctuary for me, a refuge where I can tune to the conjoined mind-heart, to image, story, and sound. It is a space to evoke rather than invoke. I am not calling on others as authorities but rather calling forth resonances with them (writers, visual artists, composers, musicians, artisans, scientists, historians, social scientists) and with what I observe. If I invoke anything, it is vision—the first glimpse. And re-vision—seeing again, uncovering the layers so that the resonances rise.


RHR: Notebook paper or computer? Pen or pencil?

JCT: All, plus voice.

Paper and pencil for journal, notes on scraps of paper, longhand drafts on legal tablets. Pen when a pencil isn’t available. Writing by hand is akin to drawing, accessing the brain through pathways different than the percussive of the keyboard. Initially, I prefer to freewrite drafts by hand, making early revisions or asking questions. From there, I move to the computer to key in the draft, its early edits, notes on alternative phrasing, and ideas about how the draft might develop, although often when I’m keyboarding, I will also make notes by hand that I later enter into a computer file. After that, I work between the hand written versions and the printed-out digital versions to produce revised drafts that I save as a separate digital files. As you can see, despite the computer screen, it’s paper all the way. I usually handwrite lines to work on scansion or rephrasing. To concentrate on lineation, stanza breaks, punctuation, and spacing within lines and to check etymology, synonyms, and spelling, working with a digital file is more efficient. Throughout this process, which may continue for weeks, months, or years, I read aloud as I edit, so each draft is modified by voice, which is to say by breath. I do not record the voice iterations. One time I constructed poems primarily by voice was the sonnet crown “FUBAR’d” in Beyond Repair. I built each poem by voice and ear, line by line, then preserved the voiced drafts by hand. During the first spring of Covid, I composed one haiku by voice during a daily walk. With both of these voice-initiated poem series, the drafts ended up as computer documents.

Read J. C. Todd’s poem, “It’s War, Fadwa Says,” originally published in The Baha’i Review (Spring ‘2016) and in Beyond Repair (Able Muse Press, 2021):

...with John Sibley Williams

John Sibley Williams

We have been longtime fans of John Sibley Williams and his poetry. His were among the first poems we accepted for River Heron’s debut issue back in 2018. An award-winning poet in his own right, John is the author of nine poetry collections, five of which are winners of top poetry awards. We were so taken with his work that we invited him to serve as the final judge of the inaugural (2019) River Heron Poetry Prize. Over time, we have only grown in our admiration for John’s talents as a wordsmith as well as his gracious and consistent support of River Heron Review. When we wondered, Who is one of the most talented poets we know?, John’s name was high on our list. We are honored to present our recent interview with him.

John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translated form by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A twenty-seven-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.Learn more about John via Facebook or visit his website.

RHR: What is the best piece of writing advice you have ever been given?

JSW: There’s a reason “keep writing, keep reading” has become clichéd advice; it’s absolutely true. You need to study as many books as possible from authors of various genres and from various cultures. Listen to their voices. Watch how they manipulate and celebrate language. Delve deep into their themes and structures and take notes on the stylistic and linguistic tools they employ. And never, ever stop writing. Write every free moment you have. Bring a notebook and pen everywhere you go (and I mean everywhere). It’s okay if you’re only taking notes. Notes are critical. It’s okay if that first book doesn’t find a publisher. There will be more books to come. And it’s okay if those first poems aren’t all that great. You have a lifetime to grow as a writer.

Do we write to be cool, to be popular, to make money? We write because we have to, because we love crafting stories and poems, because stringing words together into meaning is one of life’s true joys. So, rejections are par for the course. Writing poems that just aren’t as strong as they could be is par for the course. But we must all retain that burning passion for language and storytelling. That flame is what keeps us maturing as writers.


RHR: Tell us about your writing process.

JSW: Many, perhaps most, of my poems begin with a single image. Be it a dead horse bloated by a river, my young daughter tearing up the paper swans I made for her, or children playing in the vast ribcage of a beached whale, I usually start with a single haunting image written at the top of a page. Then I try to weave a world in which that image makes sense. I have multiple notebooks filled with individual lines, words, images without context, and I tend to flip through these while writing to see if any previous little inspirations might tie into the new world I’m creating. That said, I do sometimes start with a concept, theme, or other larger motivation, often cultural or political. But I tend to find these ideas and themes spring naturally from whatever I write, and it usually feels more organic if I begin with an image and let the context find its voice. From there, I read aloud whatever lines I’ve written over and over until the next line springs forth. I find reading aloud during the composition process integral as the ear seems to pick up on slight awkwardnesses and ensures a smoother flow and consistent voice.


 RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?

JSW: Although not a poetry collection, it would have to be Man's Search for Meaning by psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl. This seminal work frames much of my understanding of human nature, and I don’t think a day goes by in which its insights aren’t validated in my daily life. As opposed to abstractions like truth or beauty, that purpose, motivational drive, is the “meaning of life” that sustains us feels ground-breaking and true to life. Reading Frankl’s work, it’s as if the earth shifts beneath me. Every time. I don’t know who or what I would be without having read it.


RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea? 

JSW : Well, I think we all write about what haunts us, what keeps us up at night, what questions we just can’t find answers for. So, in that regard, many of my books explore the same larger human concerns, be they personal or cultural. The themes are interconnected, are threads that together form a single tapestry. Be it national prejudice or fears of how I’m raising my children, our bloody history or the search for self when the self just keeps vanishing into the communal. Certain poems may push one or another theme more to the forefront, often based on our current political climate or internal changes that have reprioritized my daily life, but in the end, I recognize pretty clear thematic threads running from my early chapbooks all the way to my two new books. I never really hunt for or seek out topics or themes, as I feel that would end up molding the poem into what I want it to be, instead of listening to and following what the poem itself is saying.


 RHR: Should writers keep or discard their old notebooks over the years?

JSW: I still have every notebook. I have a mover’s box full of them in my office. Admittedly, I tend to only comb through the latest notebook or two for inspiration on new poems, but I cannot bring myself to get rid of older ones. They may end up heavied by so much dust I’d dirty my hands opening them. But even if I never revisit them, those unused phrases and past inspirations will always be there waiting for me.


 RHR: What is most satisfying about writing (and finishing?) a poem? 

JSW: Honestly, every line that really shines feels satisfying. Even if the rest of the poem doesn’t quite live up to it, just one potent image worded in a way that hurts me in the right way feels like, oddly enough, a breath of fresh air. But the two most satisfying aspects are when: a poem is complete, and I reread it a few times, each time feeling that tingle, that bodily spark that tells me “this is the best I’m ever going to be able to do here”, which isn’t every poem, trust me; and feeling that warmth and empathy and understanding from readers when a poem really strikes them, when what began as a glimpse into my world becomes an exploration of their world.  

 

 RHR: Notebook paper or computer? Pen or pencil?

JSW: Although I spent the first fifteen or so years of my poetry life composing in a notebook, the past five or six years I’ve found it easier and equally inspiring to use my computer. The main benefit of forgoing the initial notebook stage is purely visual; I need to see and be able to easily manipulate a poem’s structure. We don’t always know immediately if a poem should be in couplets or prose blocks or of an experimental nature. I used to waste many sheets of paper playing with possible structures, while now I can do so with a few clicks and can return to a poem’s original form with a back arrow. It’s also nice, again visually, to see what a poem will look like on a standard 8 ½ x 11 white sheet, mirroring a book’s format closer than my little notebook. I mentioned earlier how important sound is to my composition process. I consider the visual equally important, and computers simplify that process. That said, I do still carry a notebook with me everywhere to jot down notes and unexpected inspirations, which often weave their way into my poems.

Read John’s recently published poem, “My American Ghost”, appearing in Verse Daily.

Read some of John’s earlier poems as they appeared in River Heron Review:


...with Natasha Rao

Headshot NR.jpeg

Natasha Rao


Natasha Rao is a poet and educator from New Jersey. Her debut poetry collection, Latitude, won the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and is forthcoming in September 2021.

She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. Natasha has received support from Bread Loaf, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, Narrative, and elsewhere, and she was a finalist in Narrative’s 30 Below Contest.

She is a managing editor of American Chordata and lives in Brooklyn. Most recently, (April 2021), Natasha was named a 2021 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry by Adroit Journal. Update: In September, Natasha was named a 2021 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.

Whenever we came across one of Natasha Rao’s poems, there were always lines and moments that stayed with us. Like so many others who are familiar with her poetry, we are taken by her intelligent use of language, and imagery to conjure a sense of story. We are thrilled to present her interview.

RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?

Natasha Rao: So many names! Bhanu Kapil, Ada Limón, Anne Carson, Robert Hass, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Rita Dove, Jane Hirshfield, and W.S. Merwin, to name a few.

RHR: Tell us about your writing process.

Natasha Rao: My process can be generalized as a perpetual state of note-taking followed by a concentrated period of building. I’m habitually jotting down things that strike me (phrases, thoughts, dreams, memories) in the Notes app on my phone. I try to read as much as I can, as well, and transcribe compelling lines and ideas. These phone notes have become almost reflexive and happen reliably every day. The other, rarer type of note-taking occurs when the muse/spirit/inspiration takes over. In those moments when it feels as though the pen is moving of its own accord, I write long blocks of prose by hand in a notebook. I can tell retroactively when I wrote something under one of these spells because my handwriting becomes a frenzied, looping cursive, rather than my standard narrow print. Once I feel I no longer have anything else to say, I type everything I’ve written into a long, running Word doc and label the entry with the date and which notebook it came from, with a heading like “blue notebook” or “spiral bound sketchbook”—a small gesture toward organization in an otherwise rather chaotic system. This accumulation of material is the precursor to the actual poem-making.  

 I like to write most of a poem in one sitting and am not able to step away from the page until at least the general scaffolding is laid out, so I usually plan to “write a poem” on a day when I have a solid block of free time. I prefer to write in the daylight, so I try to start early if I can. Once I’m set up and sufficiently caffeinated, I open my Notes app and the Word doc of transcribed prose, then comb through both to gather lines that resonate.  

What follows is a lot of rearranging, pacing, and reading aloud to myself. Often it feels like puzzle-solving to think, for example, how can I connect this image of salmon with this idea about vulnerability? I love the aha moments when a phrase finally fits where it was meant to be. Once I feel committed to the movement within the poem and the music that is starting to come from inside of it, I step back, at which point it is usually quite late at night, and I fall asleep thinking about the poem. I’ll return to it the next day or a couple of days later to tinker with line breaks and word choice, and usually, my very last step is to choose a title.


RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea?

Natasha Rao: I am definitely in the camp of the haunted. It’s like the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon, where once I’ve made a connection to something I’ll see it everywhere. I might suddenly remember that years ago, my brother and I used to build small paper houses and fill them with ladybugs. Soon after, I’ll overhear someone saying the word ladybug, then I’ll notice ladybugs on an episode of TV, a ladybug will appear in my kitchen, I’ll encounter someone with a ladybug tattoo, and I’ll know my brain is telling me to write a poem about ladybugs. I looked back at some old poems to properly answer this question and am actually surprised how easy it is to remember the exact line or image that haunted the poem into being.    

That’s not to say I’ve never hunted for an idea. If I simply waited around for a subject to rattle inside my mind, I would probably write very few poems. In those cases, where I need or want to write a poem but don’t have an obsession thrumming inside me, I usually turn to formal rigor as a way of reaching an idea. I took a class with Anne Carson during my MFA program in which she described formal constraints as a way “to avoid being a slave to the muse,” and I’ve taken that to heart.


RHR: What is most satisfying about writing (and finishing) a poem?

Natasha Rao: The reminder that I have an endless capacity to surprise myself. One joy of writing poems is to be beheld thinking, and I love the way a finished poem can become a kind of record of an idea’s evolution. I never know where the poem will lead, and I cherish that moment of reading a final draft and feeling bewildered at where I’ve ended up, at what the poem knew all along and was trying to guide me toward. It’s like deciding to go on a walk, setting off down a random path, and eventually reaching the summit of a very tall mountain. You’re sweating and exhausted but then you see a view that you never expected, and you think to yourself, wow, how did I somehow take all the right twists and turns to end up in this beautiful place? Which is to say, there’s a kind of magic in following poetry’s compass.


RHR: Should writers keep or discard their old notebooks over the years?

Natasha Rao: Absolutely keep! Aside from all the potential material within them, I also think old notebooks can be wonderful physical objects to have, like artifacts from previous lives. I was a different version of myself when I wrote exclusively with a fountain pen in a hardbound journal, and another version when I drew in the margins of a composition book. Revisiting old notebooks is a way to reconnect to those former selves and is much more intimate than, say, looking at old photographs. Maybe I’m an extreme example, but I’ve saved all my notebooks from as far back as childhood. I like to think that each notebook is a piece in a larger narrative, and saving a lifetime of written words might someday create a whole more eloquent than its parts.

***

 

Read Natasha Rao’s poem, “Old Growth,” originally published in Narrative (July 2020).

OLD GROWTH

Today I want to be free of this salt-streaked season,
backward crossovers into years before: airy
afternoons licking the wooden spoon, pouring soft blades
of grass from a shoe, all ways of saying I miss
my mother. I wish I could remember the gentle lilt
of my brother’s early voice. Instead I hear clearly
the dripping of a basalt fountain. What gets saved—

My father fed my sick goldfish a frozen pea and it lived
for another six years. Outside, pears swathed in socks
ripened, protected from birds. Those bulbous
multicolored days, I felt safe before I knew
the word for it. But how to fossilize a feeling, sustain it
in amber? I keep dreaming in reverse until I reach
a quiet expanse of forest. The dragonflies are large
and prehistoric. Mother watches from a distance
as I move wildly, without fear.

...with Chad Frame

Chad Fra

Chad Frame

Chad Frame’s work appears in Rattle, Pedestal, Mom Egg Review, Philadelphia Stories, Barrelhouse, Rust+Moth, and other journals and anthologies, as well as on iTunes from the Library of Congress. He is the Director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program and Poet Laureate Emeritus of Montgomery County. He is also the Poetry Editor of Ovunque Siamo: New Italian-American Writing, a founding member of the No River Twice poetry improv performance troupe, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival and Retreat.

We met Chad a number of years back through various Bucks County poetry workshops and readings. We were immediately taken by the manner in which his work incorporates voice and a strong use of imagery. His contributions to poetry and poets on the county, state, and national levels speak for themselves. Chad’s poem, “Harmonica Man,” appears in Issue 3.1 of River Heron Review.

RHR: What is the best piece of writing advice you have ever been given?

Chad Frame: "Be more vulnerable." For a long time, I was too distant from my poetry. I treated poems as puzzles to put together, and I was engaging with the page and the reader intellectually, but not emotionally. A poem must necessarily do both.

It wasn't until I started writing from personal experience and really opening up that my work really resonated with an audience. It may seem like an overly simplistic mantra, but every time I follow it, I find success.

RHR: Tell us about your writing process.

Chad Frame: My process can vary wildly, but usually I have an idea or line I've been mulling over for a while that eventually troubles me enough that I sit down to write a poem. When I do, the poem generally happens in one sitting. I've been told this is an enviable quality by many poets, but honestly, it's always been how it happens for me. The tradeoff of this, however, is that I can't really schedule writing time--it tends to happen of its own accord. This makes it difficult when dealing with deadlines or focusing on specific projects, but I compensate by having several plates spinning at a time, so I can switch as inspiration strikes. I also do a lot of research for any given poem. I'm sure I'm not alone in having dozens of browser tabs open on my computer or phone at any given time, but it's become integral to the process. Of course, this is in addition to countless physical books (usually several at once), graphic novels (of which I'm a huge fan), and audiobooks (storytime while driving!) simultaneously, any of which could--and often do--spark ideas.

RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea? Usually the former, though I'm no stranger to the hunt.

Chad Frame: I'm fond of prompts, and love a challenge to write outside my comfort zone. I also write a lot of found poetry whenever I hit a wall with my more conventional work. Writing a cento, for example, is an easy way to still engage creatively even while otherwise afflicted with writer's block. I keep a lot of lists of quotes and found lines just in case I ever decide to Frankenstein them into a poem some day (with attribution, of course). Essentially, I won't turn down an idea from any source. I'm happy when they haunt me, but also happy to seek them out when they're less forthcoming.

RHR: How do you arrive at a title for a poem?

Chad Frame: I usually have the title in mind before I write a poem, strangely enough, and it tends to shape what I write. I'm not always sure where they come from. I'll get it in my head that I'm going to write a poem called, for example, "Two-Step Charlie" (which is the title poem from my forthcoming chapbook about my father's death), because I remembered a story my father told about his platoon-mates in Vietnam telling him after he woke up that a huge snake slithered over him in his sleeping bag. I researched all the indigenous snakes, and then read up on the fascinating lore surrounding the many-banded krait, which the American servicemen called "Two-Step Charlie," out of the mistaken belief that anyone bitten could only walk two steps before dropping dead from its venom. The phrase lent itself to a metaphor about his second bout with cancer being the one that ultimately claimed his life, and the poem sort of came about organically from there. Usually, I'll hear a word or phrase and decide it should inspire a poem, and then jot that title down and let it torture me until I feel I have no choice but to write the whole poem in one sitting.

RHR: Do you believe a poem can be overly crafted?

Chad Frame: In a word, no. But I do believe a poem can look overly crafted.

Craft, when properly applied, should look effortless. It's the equivalent of spending an inordinate amount of time styling one's hair to give the illusion of perfectly disheveled bedhead. I like to think of myself as a "sneaky Neoformalist." With few exceptions, my poems have strict craft rules I set for myself like syllabics (almost always, I write in ten syllable lines, regardless of stresses). I'm fond of literary devices and sonic cohesion, but I try to work these aspects in subtly. Just because I've studied an obnoxious amount of the Classics and happen to know what a synchysis, chiasmus, or zeugma is doesn't mean I'm going to make it obvious when I use any of them in a poem. I work very hard to sneak in as many elements of craft as I can while maintaining accessibility and the general cadence of speech in my poetry. The end result--I hope--is a poem accessible and aesthetically pleasing upon a cursory reading, but which rewards the close and studied reading with significantly more depth.

RHR: How do you determine what makes a poem successful?

Chad Frame: Well, publication is probably the most obvious measure, but I don't think it's the most accurate. As an editor myself, I know publications can reject work for any number of reasons, some of which can be as arbitrary as an unintended oversight in submission guidelines, or because they already have a poem about a similar topic accepted for a given issue. It may not be one editor's cup of tea, but may otherwise resonate a lot with an audience.

Ultimately, to me, what makes a poem successful is accessibility. I don't like writing poems just for other poets to read. I want to write poems that cause people to say things like, "I don't really read poetry, but I liked this." Or to say, "I went through something similar." I want poetry to resonate, to touch on both the personal and the profound, to demonstrate both narrative cohesion and crafted, lyric beauty. I never listen to feedback and think, "Well, you're just not the target audience." Frankly, my target is everyone.

With my most recent manuscript, I wanted to chronicle my father's death, ranging from childhood memories establishing our (at times strained) relationship, to terminal diagnosis, to hospice, to eventual death, and the aftermath. I think these poems are successful in that they served as therapy for me while all this was going on, they serve as a memorial for my father, they're pleasing enough (I hope!) as poems to anyone reading them, and they remain to offer guidance and support to anyone going through a similar loss. Successful poetry, I believe, attempts much and achieves at least a portion of that ambition. That risk is inextricably part of the process.

RHR: How do you know when a poem has reached an end?

Chad Frame: My writing tends to have a narrative to it more often than not, so I'll usually end a poem when the story I'm trying to impart comes to its end. When I'm writing more abstractly, I suppose I feel drawn to end on an impactful line. This may seem obvious, but it isn't always easy to recognize or determine. I try to bear in mind that it's usually the last line (or at least last few lines) that the reader remembers, and I try to make them count.

RHR: Should writers keep or discard their old notebooks over the years?

Chad Frame: I'd be mortified if anyone advocated for throwing away their notebooks! Why do that? Inspiration can come from anywhere, and even if I do tend to cringe at some of my older work, I can't say I won't revisit it from time to time to edit, rework, or even shamelessly lift one or two of my own lines for use in something current. Even if we don't treat everything as grist for the mill (and don't get me wrong, we absolutely should), that writing, those scribbled notes, and even the doodles in the margin should be kept as a chronicle of the time they were written. I may admittedly take this too far in saving just about everything, but I rarely have organized notebooks. Despite all the nice journals I've been given as gifts over the years, I still tend to do most of my writing on any scrap of paper that comes to hand. This is why I get paranoid if anyone ever decides to "help" me clean up. I even catch myself frantically going through piles and even the trash to make sure no "important" scrap of paper was discarded.

RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?

Chad Frame: Without question, the Roman poet Catullus has resonated with me more than any poet from any time. I studied and translated him extensively in high school and college, and still do to this day, and that his work remains relevant and accessible over two thousand years later is nothing short of miraculous. Catullus may not have started the Neoteric movement in his day, but he was certainly one of its most prominent practitioners. No poet since has been as good, in my opinion, at shifting from comedy to tragedy, wooing to invective, satire to earnestness. From the timeless and heart-rending beauty of his elegy-as-eulogy for his brother in Carmina 101 to the perfectly composed elegiac couplet of Carmina 85: Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris. / Nesciō, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior. What else is there to say? I hate and I love. Why do I do this, you may ask. / I don't know, but I feel it happening, and I am consumed.

By itself, it's beautiful and profound. But in the context of his collection, it's the climax--the clutch in breath after the rhythm of in-out, in-out for page after page of alternating between longing, musing, and even throwing shade at other poets or men-about-town. He shows the full range of poetic technique and human emotion throughout his book, but also specifically in the microcosm of this one poem. It's brilliant.


Read him--in any language. You won't be disappointed.

RHR: Notebook paper or computer? Pen or pencil?

Chad Frame: Any and all! I write on the computer and my phone, I email and text ideas to myself, and I've even written poems on my smartwatch or gaming console, when we're talking digital. When it comes to analog, I write on anything I can. In margins, on scraps of paper, on receipts, and I even have one of those waterproof shower notepads. As I mentioned before, people like to give me nice journals for all gift-giving occasions. Truth be told, though, I rarely use them. I have some strange anxiety about writing in them, and usually default to a cheap college-ruled notebook or the aforementioned scraps when writing. I'm equally happy with a pen or pencil, but I'm particular about the type I use of each. I love the Bic .5mm mechanical pencils (the ones with the different colored clips) and Uni-Ball Signo black gel pens, and buy both in absurd quantities, then proceed to bafflingly lose them at almost the same rate.

Read Chad Frame’s poem, “Wisdom”:

Wisdom


The doctors for his palliative care
review options in a small room reserved
for this at the end of the hall, but I

stare past them at the painting on the wall
of a flaking farmhouse, a drab grass field,
an overturned white rowboat, basically

Wyeth's Christina's World if Christina
were an overturned white rowboat. Okay,
I hear someone say, and realize it's me.

We return to tell my father, wired
to the bed, gaunt as picked chicken breast, arm
raised, rattling chains from a hoist above him

like some Dickensian ghost. A beep sounds,
insistent, of something being released
in his bloodstream. He flips it off, finger

shaking like a baby bird, and grumbles
Blow it out your ass, voice heavy with phlegm
and pain. We're going to move you, I say.

I hold his hand as nurses wheel the bed
through the halls to his final apartment,
and he tells me a story—or maybe

it's the morphine telling me a story.
Either way, an old plumber he met once
gave him three pieces of advice. Shit stinks—

and I smile at this, long ago immune
to the mingled stench of bile and bowels
from colon cancer—Water flows downhill.

He pauses, drawn face twisting in a wince.
And the third thing? I prompt, when it passes.
Don't bite your fingernails, he says, eyes closed.

My other hand quickly drops from my mouth
to my side, fingertips still sore and wet.
Wise man, I say, giving his hand a squeeze.

...with Emari DiGiorgio

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Emari DiGiorgio

Emari DiGiorgio is the author of two poetry collections, Girl Torpedo, winner of the Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become. She is the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, the NJ Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet. She hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.

Most recently, she’s read in the Wild & Precious Reading Series, Get Fresh Books Instagram Series, and Murphy Writing's Virtual Friday Night Series, and will soon be hosting a workshop for Wild & Precious.

We first met Emari and experienced her poetry several years ago at Peter Murphy’s Winter Poetry and Prose Get-a-way where she did readings and facilitated poetry writing workshops. We were immediately taken by her powerful use of accessible and multifaceted language.

RHR: Tell us about your writing process.

Emari DiGiorgio: These days, I am not writing poems as often as I might like. I’m the grievance officer of my union, and I’m running first-grade-at-home during quarantine. I will carry an idea or image in my head for a few days. Sometimes I’ll jot a few key phrases or images in the Notes section of my phone and look up things that might inform the idea, such as which kinds of snakes might have lived in ancient Mesopotamia or how we know dark matter exists. Then, I will actually block two hours on my calendar and shut my office door. My daughter calls this my “independent work,” since I am not teaching or in a Zoom meeting. 

In that two-hour block, I’ll start with a handwritten draft because I’m less likely to censor myself, to tell myself that an idea or image is silly or wrong. This will usually be in a prose block. I’m just trying to get the material I’ve been accumulating out. I’ll write until I feel like I have nothing else to say and then try to write a little more. Then, I’ll read through and identify the best images and the strongest music in the draft. I’ll type these into a Word document. Sometimes I’ll write something entirely new with the four or five lines I’ve plucked; other times, the poem will be a collage of that original draft, pulling lines from throughout. I rarely arrive at a full draft in my two-hour block, but the progress of having something on the page will inspire me to block another two hours later in the week. 

Sometimes poems take me many, many drafts. I like order and control, and poems are wild. The sooner I can abandon what I think a poem is about, the sooner I will discover what it’s actually about. 

RHR: What is the best piece of writing advice you have ever been given?

Emari DiGiorgio: When I was a graduate student, I was fortunate to study with Marie Howe. Once in office hours, she asked me, “Where is the woman in these poems?” I was confused; there were women in my poems. However, she was asking me something else. She was asking me to own the voices and stories on the page. It was an invitation to value my story and perspective, to write it unapologetically. 

RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea? 

Emari DiGiorgio: I am haunted by ideas, but I hunt for an entry into the idea. These days, I’m trying to write into white complicity. But why do I need/want to write about this and what might I discover about myself and whiteness? How can I engage with this idea without making it a story about white tears? Recently, I was taking an online writing class that explored form–traditional and invented–with Stephanie Cawley (she’s amazing), and one of our assignments was to pick a “borrowed form.” I’ve spent so much time reading recipes trying to mix-up our quarantine kitchen that I was drawn to borrow from the recipe form, and suddenly, I knew exactly how to enter an idea I’ve been carrying for months: Assimilation (Italian Style). Each previous time I tried to write about the conscious and unconscious ways that Italian Americans traded their culture and roots to earn their whiteness, I couldn’t find a poem, just an idea. But as a recipe, something integral to my identity as an Italian-American, I found an entry to explore the complexities of assimilation. 

RHR: How do you know when a poem has reached an end?

Emari DiGiorgio: When I used to play softball, I knew as soon as my bat made contact with the ball if I’d driven it safely into the outfield. Everything in my body felt lined up–feet pivoting, hips turning, arms fully extended. Something similar happens when a poem has reached its end. Everything feels lined up–the rhythms of the poem are linked to the emotional/narrative arc, the line breaks create tension or surprise, and the images feel essential. There’s a little magic in reading it. 

RHR: How do you determine what makes a poem successful?

Emari DiGiorgio: It’s interesting to modify “poem” with “successful.” Perhaps because “success” feels goal-oriented, or in our culture, connected to money or acclaim. I’ve heard Gregory Pardlo talk about how the best poems resonate in the head, heart, and body, as in we experience them intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally. Are all poems meant to be experienced this way? I’m not sure. I would say that a successful poem arrives at its form and images so that they seem inseparable, that it had to be written exactly this way. Though truly, if someone stays after a reading or contacts me via email or social media to tell me how much one of my poems affected them, I would say that poem was successful because it bridged the shared experiences of strangers. 

***

Read Emari DiGiorgio’s poem, "Punchline" which originally appeared in the Southern Humanities Review (Volume 50.1&2) and was awarded the 2016 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. It was subsequently published in her poetry collection, Girl Torpedo.

Punchline

The joke wishes it wasn’t the joke.

It calls a helpline—the joke wants to punch
a bullet through its brow, and it’s hard for the operator
to talk the joke down. She says, help is on the way.

No, don’t send the cops. But it’s too late. The joke
doesn’t have enough pills or a tongue to swallow them.
The joke doesn’t have knees to pray. A black man
and a Hispanic are riding in a car. Leave it there.
Leave them in the Sentra at the QuikChek. Let them
drop off their kids at school. Let the cops

bust down the joke’s door. Who’s driving?
Who the fuck is driving this joke?

                                                          What a relief.
The black man and the Hispanic are both breathing, cuffed
upright in the back of a cruiser. No blood on the cop’s hands.

Let’s make you the cop. Let’s make you the law.
What sound does a body make when it’s in a chokehold?

A black cop is driving his Hispanic partner. A white cop
is driving himself crazy. He’s tired of telling the same group
of young men to stop loitering on the platform. Every night,
just milling around, blocking people, pushing, shoving
each other, a game, intimidating passengers.

Today you’re the black man. You’ve read the script, memorized
your lines, Yes, officer, perfected the least intimidating pitch,
a walk that won’t draw attention, should you enter
a convenience store, a bank.

The car is driving itself. The car is the joke.
The tires smoke and the brakes sink to the floorboard.

Two cops are in a car—this one isn’t a joke (turns out
the first one wasn’t either)—parked, gunned down.
As if these young men’s deaths will bring another
back to his children. Some illogical exchange
fallen angels run.

                                    A black car, driving rain,
eye whites, night, the drawbridge of gritted teeth opening,
no such thing as bulletproof words, floodlight, that
deer stare, the moment before a buck turns, threatened,
having done nothing.

                                    This joke is a loaded Glock 19.
Between box spring and mattress, in the glove box.
A siren wails. Two cops sit in a car. Two cops die in a car.
This isn’t a joke. This was supposed to be a joke.
We were supposed to laugh and say, Oh, that’s not right,
and shake our heads and go on with our days, all of us--
black man, Hispanic, cop, you, reader, sitting there
waiting for the punch line, the big haha aha.

Maybe you’re saying, No, that’s not funny, or
It’s true, you know. Maybe you’re telling the joke.

When the cops arrive the joke is sobbing. The joke asks
to be locked up. It won’t tell itself anymore. It wants
a new punch line. It wants to reform itself, to be
elegy for cop, black man, his panic.

~ fini ~

...with Jonathan Andrew Pérez

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Jonathan Andrew Pérez

Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq.’s work has appeared in POETRY, Split Lip Magazine, Prelude, The Write Launch, TRACK // FOUR, The Tulane Review, The Florida Review’s Latinx publication, Barnhouse, The Tiny Journal, The Chicago Quarterly Review and numerous others. He is a 2019 Pushcart Prize Poetry Nominee and has been featured in Crack the Spine’s Anthology of the Year for 2019.

His debut poetry collection, Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies (Finishing Line Press, 2020) will be released in March 2020, although pre-orders are being taken now.

Jonathan Andrew Pérez first came to our attention when his poem, “Beasts of the American Wilderness“, appeared in Issue 2.1 of River Heron Review. We were taken with his use of imagery and language to speak to a sense of history and the past. His work appears consistently in national journals, reviews, and anthologies. His new collection, Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies (Finishing Line Press, 2020) speaks to his experiences as a trial attorney as well as his keen eye for the world’s injustices.

RHR: Tell us about your writing process.

Jonathan Andrew Pérez: As a senior trial attorney devoted to Social Justice policy I develop policy and am actively involved in the intersection of procedural justice and cultural trauma at the forefront of the criminal justice reform movement. My first published book of poetry is slated for March 2020 from Finishing Line Press.  

The writing process, for me, is very routine.  I am an amalgamation of my routine – and in the spirit of sharing and community:

  • Title and subject/ as I walk around the week, a thought about a poetic subject, a title, or a series of poems, I write it into my I Phone notes. 

  • I have a series of folders on my desktop one to twelve, “I- XII”, each marks the migration of title poems from beginning to end.  The poems stay in the “funnel” and move up toward completion. If they are not working out, I sometimes combine poems.

  • They go into what I call the “Freeze Locker” once they are published.

My revisiting of poems really relates to the amount of time I have had them in the “funnel.”  I update them as time progresses and sometimes create new material by “blowing up” old poems.

To be honest, I believe the internal rhyme and foundation of a poem absolutely cannot be created on the first pass. The foundation usually comes out after some time revising and revisiting. Usually a poem has an internal logic. My personal interests veer toward nature, colonization, ecological crises, the U.S. history of race and systemic inequity, so I usually try to find a vehicle for these ideas, and movements.  

Lastly, I read! I read my favorite poems over and over again, and try new genres, and incorporate them into my writing. At all times, I push my vocabulary, visual, and rhythmic muscle. Break tradition!

RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea?

Jonathan Andrew Pérez: An idea for a poem haunts me! I feel like I’ve been writing the same poem over and over, in different variations. The poems are like blocks going block-by-block mapping out my work. I am still obsessed with roughly what could be called “the Criminal Justice Pastoral” or, “The Anxiety of White Privilege.” Strangely, that was also the name of my Master’s thesis at UVA, as a graduate student in English and American Studies.  

I am fascinated by the way the urban environment, sociology, consciousness, community, and inequity, could come through the aesthetic disruptions of poems.  I am also obsessed with artists like WALTON FORD, who brings in politics, sociological statements, and radical disruptions to the traditional pastoral of Audubon’s prints. 

RHR: Do you believe a poem can be overly crafted?

Jonathan Andrew Pérez: Absolutely not. Unless yes. I believe the use of techniques that are the-opposite-of-chaotic and which some might see as overwrought- like sonnets, erasure-poems, centos, crostics, the cut-up poem, and ekphrasis to speak from a point of view that is under-represented and newly found in the poetry community offer vehicles to some of the most creative works.  (See Nicole Sealey’s ekphrasis work, or any number of erasure or cut-ups like Tracy K Smith, or the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets.  

One of my favorites to read, in my chaotic process is the black out processes, and to use online-generator like e-diastic from L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poet Jackson MacLow.

RHR: What is the role of justice in poetry?

Jonathan Andrew Pérez: My latest project is a book of poetry, The Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies and is “focused on the meeting of the pastoral, law, justice and the reclaiming of history for communities that have been on the wrong side of justice.” My goal is to combine the mythos of the Savior, Hero, and extra-worldly fable to interrupt critical moments in the history of systemic inequity in the U.S. This debut book is a culmination of all the internal narratives and pursuits throughout the years. In it, the narrator travels through early slavery accounts, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and maps a consciousness of communities in large urban areas that have been alienated, in form and geography, because of systemic inequity.

During my day job, I develop policy and am actively involved in the intersection of procedural justice and cultural trauma, and at the forefront of the criminal justice reform movement.

In each poem, the pastoral features prominently as a metaphor and a historical moment from racial oppression. The work, I hope, will allow the reader to envision a reclaiming of the painful experiences that communities of color had been subject to, while also envisioning a rewriting of the history with a new future of both moral and environmental ownerships over the many landscapes that have marginalized and oppressed communities.

RHR: . How do you determine what makes a poem successful?

Jonathan Andrew Pérez: The simple answer is that it is finished when it is published. But then, the question is, where is it published? Secondly, despite publication…the poem itself is a living breathing entity. It lives in the world, and it fits with your block-by-block world that you created in the sequence of other poems. Are there any accents you can add? Any dressing or framing that would it make it fit in the entire family of work or, using the older metaphor, fit in the neighborhood and architecture of the entire sequence.?

RHR: Should writers keep or discard their old notebooks over the years?

Jonathan Andrew Pérez: Absolutely KEEP. I am now on folder number 12, or what I call “individual poems XII” which are worked, and reworked recycled poems that travel on my desktop through the systems of folders until they are published. Then I do less editing on them. Some of these are five years old, or more. However, over time, I have been shifting and reworking the poem.  

A lot of times, when I think of the whole “world” of my poems and put two up side-by-side, I see similarities and lineages. Since I began writing I have been obsessed with the world of race, justice, and natural environments in U.S. History. I personally take my metaphors and motifs from the natural world and 19th century American Renaissance-type poems (Whitman, who has inherited Wordsworth and Keats) to American Modernist poems obsessed with symbolism (Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane), then rework them as contemporary issues of race, justice, and law. 

This is where my poem you see here (below): “The Bobolinks as a Flock of Signifiers” has come from.  My debut book is based on this same motif, often each poem dedicated to a single bird species, or migratory avian flock, and the poem itself has historical nods to U.S. systemic inequity, in particular Jim Crow, U.S. Slavery, and later forms of de jure segregation like housing politics. 

I truly believe that whatever is your influence, aesthetic, or politically-motivated, and the change you narrative and pain or joy you wish to transfer to a poet-audience should be alive in your work. 

RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?

Jonathan Andrew Pérez: the contemporary poetry of Cortney Lamar Charleston, Hanif Abdurraqib, Ada Limon, Jericho Brown, Nicole Sealey, Terrance Hayes' Sonnets, Reginald Dwayne Betts' Yale Law fellow, and poet-author of "Felon" against earlier Afro-American and Latinx writers in the Harlem Renaissance and California Chicano/a movement, such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gloria Anzaldua, and the New York Lower East Side writers loosely associated with the Puerto Rican poetry collective.

RHR: Notebook or paper or computer? Pen or Pencil?

Jonathan Andrew Pérez: Believe it or not, I am all DIGITAL baby!  I use my I Phone notepad for notes when I think about a poem subject, or poem title, or a few lines as I walk around during the day or wake up in the middle of the night. Then I transfer them into my 12-folder sequence, and move it up the ranks. 

~~~

Read Jonathan Andrews Perez’s poem, “These Signifiers as a Flock of Bobolinks” which appeared in POETRY (January 2020):

These Signifiers as a Flock of Bobolinks

This neighborhood map thrives on rising sentences,
arbitrary Icterid with signified arms; Ventriloquist!
shook-throated, a rock-hard reed-lance thorn by the landfill—
a bird almost-mistook-for erasure shared in a thin migration,
like marauding packs of boys who fight or make out, discover song, hinge:
on the talk or sheen of feeling, grass-rooted as if contra-the-wind enough to prevent erasure?
Its moat of fear, reinvented burps, throbbing streetlamp burst on the fritz,
the self-appointed-like throat, chewed on ambition, held choked as a corn-flavored chip,

fed and left to dust the milk of the park, where seaward, another earth throws shade:
the moon, almost, or a hurricane, we dawn and we signify our own sentences’
justice, justice, built on migration from conjugations the winds once institutionally appointed:
at last—this hurricane!

from POETRY (January 2020)

This poem also appears in Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq.’s debut poetry collection, Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies (Finishing Line Press, March 2020).


~ fini ~

...with Donna J. Gelagotis Lee

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee’s poetry is noted for its image-rich depictions of a life lived in Greece and in the suburban towns of New Jersey and New York. Her poetry is lush with imagery and nods to the past and the present. We were pleased when she recently agreed to a River Heron interview.

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee is the author of two award-winning collections, Intersection on Neptune (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2019), winner of the Prize Americana for Poetry 2018, and On the Altar of Greece (Gival Press, 2006), winner of the 2005 Gival Press Poetry Award and recipient of a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category. Her poetry has appeared in publications internationally, including The Bitter Oleander, Cimarron Review, Feminist Studies, The Massachusetts Review, Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.

RHR: What is the best piece of writing advice you have ever been given?

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee: Follow where the poem leads you. Keep writing, even when you hesitate at where the poem is taking you. Don’t stop midway and edit yourself. You may be avoiding the heart of that poem. You can always revise or even discard what you’ve written. Not everything you write is going to be published or even read by anyone else. Sometimes a poem is just taking you on a journey to another poem. Sometimes it’s getting to hard truths.

RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea?

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee: There is not usually a haunting—more like someone taking me by the hand and saying, Hey, have a look at this—and rarely a search for an idea. I’ve never needed to search for an idea. As for haunting, if I don’t write the poem when the impulse occurs, it usually disappears. If an impulse presents with an image or idea or a thought and I try to write later, I more often than not have a contrived poem. And that’s not what I want. It may be a decent poem, but it’s not the poem that wanted to be written. I’d take Ginsberg’s first thought, best thought a step further. I’d suggest first impulse, best impulse, with writing, that is. That doesn’t mean the impulse is the poem. The poem probably needs to be revised, or edited, but if you don’t edit the essence out of it and if you are practiced enough that writing is as easy as driving likely is for someone who has driven for years, you’ve probably got a poem that wanted to be written. That doesn’t mean you didn’t take a wrong turn. You’ll probably find that out sooner or later. But if you’ve reached a destination, or a discovering, or an opening of some sort, it’s a good feeling. Even if it’s not where you thought you were going to go.

RHR: Do you believe a poem can be overly crafted?

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee: Yes. Definitely. I save my drafts. You can definitely overwork a poem. The poem will tell you when it’s had enough. You have to listen. If you get your head in the way, thinking about what the poem should be, you can ruin it. While revising is a different process, that doesn’t mean you ignore, or override the impulses of the poem unless, of course, you want another poem.

RHR: Tell us about your writing process.

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee: My writing process has changed over the years. In Greece, I had a small hardbound notebook and a spiral notepad to write in. I liked to spend evenings reading, usually Ritsos in English and Greek. Occasionally I’d write afterwards or after walks by the sea. Back in the States, I wrote while in bed, with pen and a piece of paper. I used to read in bed also. And that often led to writing a poem. Most often, an image would come into my mind, and that would lead to the poem.

I thought that handwriting was integral to the poem. Getting an iPhone changed everything about how I wrote. I discovered Notes. Once when I was in bed and without pen and paper close by, I opened Notes and began to write. I’ve rarely used pen and paper since, which surprised me because I’d previously felt an almost symbiotic relationship between how the poem evolved and the use of the pen in relation to the body, as if it were an extension of my fingers—the ink flowing, the blood flowing, the shape of the pen, the shape of the fingers. Every movement of the pen was connected with the hand writing, the finger’s pause, the lines and flows of the body. Using Notes and a keyboard on the device was quite different. Writing on a device feels almost mechanical, the way the typewriter did at one time. But I can input quickly, with one finger! And while an image can sometimes still lead to a poem, it could well be the title itself or a line or a phrase or even a word of the poem. It could be an idea.

I also don’t necessarily read before writing and will write at just about any time, whereas before I usually wrote at night before sleep. I’m not a morning person. And have never been one. Lots of sunsets. Very few sunrises. I like the stillness and quiet at night. And the dark. It’s full of monsters. It’s full of memories surfacing. It’s harder to be distracted by the demands and minutiae of daily life. Revision is different. It is, after all, re-vision. You may see something you didn’t during the writing. You may even see a different form for the poem. I’m sometimes surprised when I see the originals of poems I’ve revised numerous times over many years.

RHR: How do you determine what makes a poem successful?

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee: That’s a challenging question. So many things . . . or so few. I may not know at first. On the other hand, I may have a clear notion that the poem is as good as it’s going to be. It’s usually more evident in the revision stage, with the perspective of time and distance. By then I’m approaching the poem more as a reader and an editor. Successful is a loaded word. Successful by what standards and to whom? A poem may fall short on some level and to someone. I’m satisfied with the poem if I feel it has lived up to its potential. And that may be different for every poem. I’m more concerned with discovery and the journey, the artistic progression over time. Is the work reaching, as in reaching out, not as in reaching a conclusion? I may have a good poem as in lines that work, sentences that cohere, form that works, some sort of resonance, emotional or intellectual, etc., but what’s it doing, if anything? Is it pushing any boundaries; has it made any new ones? Or is it happy within them? Has it dispensed with or re-turned any poetic ideas as we know them? 

RHR: How do you know when a poem has reached an end?

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee: I usually sense when a poem is coming to a close, but sometimes I’m surprised. Sometimes I am writing and will suddenly stop. Sometimes I’ll stop writing, but on revisiting the poem, I’ll discover the poem’s needs. Sometimes the process of proofing and editing can reveal. This is where I save my drafts. There’s a wonderful poem, by Dean Kostos, “The Sentence That Ends with a Comma,” which reminds me that an ending can even be a pause. 

RHR: Should writers keep or discard their old notebooks over the years?

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee: If you can, why not keep them (if you have them)? I’ve found poems in notebooks from decades ago. But more importantly, I’ve seen my poems change over time. That’s useful, I think. It can also point to recurring thoughts or motifs and how preoccupations may have changed over the years. Sometimes early drafts become a revised poem much later. It’s interesting to look back and see how that occurs. Sometimes themes are abandoned, or they develop. Notebooks are historical (on a personal level and to a broader degree). They can always be mined, or minded. They can rekindle thoughts. Or they may signal what is no longer visited, or need be.

~~~

Read Donna J. Gelagotis Lee’s poem, "On the Edge of a City”:

On the Edge of a City    

As Sheepshead Bay curves into
Brooklyn, the coastal street
shimmies into town,
its flashes of light like
the glitter of a Coney Island
Ferris wheel, or the Parachute
Jump pumping its way into
the sun-cut history. I am
drenched with a Brooklyn
afternoon, like the wet-bottomed
boats floating on a slice of muted
bay. Only one sailboat
drifts to shore, seemingly
haphazard
but on course. Today, we
are just as randomly choosing
our direction, fastened
to a quick-moving city
in a lull. It is Sun-
day. It is brilliance
at work. It is a white
building shooting like a
flower to life, although the maple
and oak are leaning
towards fall,
their half-baked color
on the verge of a fantastic
catastrophe. There are many
windows casually playing
tick-tac-toe. And
even at 22 stories, a black-
winged butterfly does not
hesitate to comb the sheltered
air outside
our multilayered lives. We have
sprawled out. We are going on an
intentional trip, flashes of
light from bedecked and bejeweled lives
on a sensible outline of streets.

From Intersection on Neptune (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2019), winner of the Prize Americana for Poetry.

First published in You Are Here: New York City Streets in Poetry (Peggy Garrison, Victoria Hallerman, and David Quintavalle, eds., P & Q Press, 2006).  

~ fini ~







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Donna J. Gelagotis Lee

...with C.T. Salazar

 

C. T. Salazar

 

C.T. Salazar  (@CTsalazar_) is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. He is the author of This Might Have Meant Fire (Bull City Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, RHINO, 32 Poems, Tinderbox, Foundry, Tampa Review, and elsewhere.

C.T. and RHR editor, Judith Lagana first met on Twitter in July 2018 when C.T. took to tweeting one Mary Oliver poem a day throughout the month of July. Taken by his dedication to the poetic form, his obvious talent as a poet in his own right, and his consistency in promoting the work of other contemporary poets, C.T. was a natural choice for an RHR conversation.

RHR: What in your life prepared you to be a poet?

C.T. Salazar: Mississippi. Growing up here led me to poetry. I love this absurd state, and I’m forever wanting it to be better.

RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?

C.T. Salazar: My shrine is abundant! C.D. Wright; Lucille Clifton; Mary Oliver; John Keats; Eduardo Corral; Natasha Trethewey; Osip Mandelstam; Tennessee Williams 

RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea?

C.T. Salazar: I think other poets’ lines haunt me until I chew it into something I can chase after. My writing process relies heavily on reading first. I think I read 70% more than I write, and I prefer it that way. I usually spend four to five months reading, and then a month writing, and start over. 

RHR: Notebook or paper, pen or pencil?

C.T. Salazar: I'm forever carrying a notebook and pen. I also love the everywhere-at-once-ness of Google docs

RHR: In terms of form, your poetry has this lovely sense of line breaks and use of space. An example of this is detailed in your poem, “Portrait of the Dalmatian that Bit My Mother,” which was originally published in Noble/Gas QRTLY (Issue 205.3). What is your process in terms of using space and the break of line?

C.T. Salazar: Thanks. I am very big on form. I love form, I love being acute to form. I always think that a poem has a physical architecture to itself. There is the content of the poem and then there is the way the poem even looks physically on the page, whether or not the poem builds up like a tower...or digs down. Henry David Thoreau has that great quote, “my head is an organ of burrowing…” and I think about that a  lot, To start at the top and then dig down as they move.

But, I always want to consider the physicalness of the poem, is an extension of its content, which goes back to Charles Olson, that the form itself, when the poem has a strong unity, that unity comes from the physicalness being in tune to the content of the poem itself.  I always want the layout of the poem to be very intentional.

RHR: Do you believe a poem can be overly crafted?

C.T. Salazar: This is such a hard question. One of my favorite poems is Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazal “Tonight” —it’s form is absolutely flawless. I return to that poem over and over, each time learning something new about craft and faithfulness to form. 

RHR: What is your take on the impact of your surroundings on your writing?

C.T. Salazar: For visual images I lean on Mississippi. Mississippi is unique. Our history is not linear as we think of it, because Mississippi has relics in its everyday life from the 19th century, from the 20th century You know, in my town, there are these old barns and Antebellum homes which were built by slaves. In my town, people still live in these homes. These homes have their historical look still. So, I am very captivated by Mississippi's history and how it is not as linear as maybe it is in other parts of the world. Part of our past is still very much alive in Mississippi. I incorporate images of dilapidation, the fact that we have these barns that are slowly collapsing but have been standing since the 19th century and some really old churches. 

A more natural phenomena is the river in my city and where I grew up.  There are usually recurring rivers in my poems because of this. My town is Columbus, Mississippi. There is a runoff of the Mississippi River called the Tombigbee Waterway that goes straight through our town. I've grown up with that high moving current. People drown in it a lot it. It is a man-made runoff, made for barges and has a very narrow, deep, and fast moving current. So, typically if someone drowns here in Columbus, Mississippi in the Ten-Tom, their body will be recovered in the Gulf within 48 hours. It is a fast-moving current. and unlike our history, that river is very linear.

RHR: Your poems are full of surprises and have such strong and lovely images. Would you share your process of building and combining images?

C.T. Salazar: As far as building images and arriving at a connecting factor, I think in poetry a lot of how I think in music. I am a pianist. I’m fascinated by how musicians build notes into these very surprising chords and how the good part of a song is that moment that you didn’t think could work and you’ve never heard it before, but it works, and... it sounds great. It gives you the chill-bombs because it is so surprising to you. I love when I’m building images because I am trying to find harmonies similar to chords and get to those moments where sometimes there is tension. Disharmony is a real thing in music of two notes that don’t go together. But the resolution afterward has to be twice as strong to connect them together. 

RHR: Interesting.

C.T. Salazar: Yes, I am really interested in either resolutions from disharmonies, whether it is like my personal competing narratives of being a Southerner, being Latino...and those are two very competing narratives.  But, I live in this one body, so there is some resolution in trying in the body of the poem to find that resolution. This always leads to this combination of really odd, juxtaposed images.

RHR: You are also an editor of Dirty Paws. Do you find when you are reading submissions, that you see how some images can be used so amazingly but also how there is a fine line between amazing imagery and what is cliched?

C.T. Salazar: Oh, yeah. You know, when a poet has possession of it, you know it is very organic. And, it is very easy to pick out the cliches. I have heard the phrase thrown out like how many poets are writing about deer that have never seen a deer in their life? But when you do connect with it, when you do get that poem that is very much a yes... when you get to that poem that is very much a poet who is writing in their habitat, a poet who is writing in their atmosphere, and you connect with it, that is something. You know I have read things and I am like this poet must be a Southerner or they must be from Mississippi and then I read the bio and learn they are from nowhere close to me.

RHR: Latinx voices are under represented in many academic core reading lists.  When you were younger, what influences were around for you to help you draw your voice out?

C.T. Salazar: Visibility is the biggest factor. Growing up, I had my family here in the South which was my mom’s family, lovely people, but then there was my Dad’s family who didn’t live here, and didn’t speak the same language as me. I knew that they were my family, but because I never saw them because I had very little interaction with them, I never connected myself to that same family until I was much older. So, I didn’t own it until I was about the age children notice these differences, nine, ten, or eleven. I started seeing that my family is a little more complicated than some of my peer’s families. You know, in Mississippi, I wasn’t reading books that Latino people were writing. Now, as a librarian, I am very aware of that. I want to make sure that our children’s books feature brown characters and are written by brown people or shed positive light on Latino people because there is a lot of American literature that is not that way. 

If you are walking, and you see a plant, you notice that a plant is there by the leaves and not by the roots. If you didn’t see the plant yourself you wouldn’t know the roots were there. So, when we start this investigation of the you as the product, and then move down from there, back to Thoreau, and his lines, “...my head is an organ for  burrowing…” notice yourself and then notice the roots under you. That movement of self recognition is very vital I think.

RHR:  You are generous in promoting other poets and sharing lines and poems and books that you really love. Does that stem in part from your experience as a librarian? Being one who loves words to read as well as to write?

C.T. Salazar:  That’s a really cool connection. My personal identity is that I am just as much a librarian as I am a writer. I am a researcher, a holder of information. I love to gather and accumulate. But also, my favorite job as a poet is getting to be a cheerleader for other poets.  

I love promoting. Some of my favorite writers are my friends and I love sharing their writing.  Having those moments of connection are so simple, it takes no time to you know, read someone’s writing and say, “You know, that is really great…” share it and then 40 other people read it and, that’s a lot.

RHR:  That is so true. I know I have learned a lot from reading your (Twitter) feed and have read other poets, you know, who I might not have been privy to. Thank you for that. 

C.T. Salazar: I am trying to do something every July with a theme now ...this July (2019)  I am trying to do 31 days of Latin-X poets. So yeah, everyday a different Chicano or Latino or Puerto Rican or Cuban poet a day, and just share that. And see if anyone else will tag on too.

RHR: If you could bequeath a skill or attitude to other poets, what would it be?

C.T. Salazar: 1. That you can love something and still criticize it. 2.That vulnerability means you’re willing to love yourself and your subject in ways that could put you at risk. 3. & joy is worth the risk.                                              
                                                          ~~~ fini ~~~



Link to micro chapbook: micro-chap: https://bullcitypress.com/product/this-might-have-meant-fire-inch-39/


Noble Gas QTRLY, "Portrait of the Dalmatian that Bit My Mother" : http://noblegas.org/issue-205-3/c-t-salazar/portrait-of-the-dalmatian-that-bit-my-mother/

...with Jericho Brown

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Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition, which will be published this spring. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory.

Jericho Brown Skyped with River Heron Review co-editors Robbin Farr and Judith Lagana on December 17 to discuss his insights into the influence of music, other writers, and his youth on his writing, among other observations. What follows is the interview.

RHR: What is the one bit of advice you offer to your students which you feel is most valuable?

Jericho Brown: I think that it’s important that when you are writing a poem you have a metaphor for poetry. Meaning, something that is not poetry. Something that is completely separate from poetry.

For me, music is the metaphor. For somebody else it might be roller skating or running or cooking. The thing is, it must be something that you really have some other interest in, so you can look at the poem and say, “How is this thing like that thing?”

When I’m writing a poem, I  might be able to say, “Look, there's not enough bass right here. I can’t translate what that means, but I know that’s true.” Somebody else might say, “I need some spice right here,” like somebody who cooks might say, “I need oregano.” They would be able to translate, “This should cook a little longer, and this should actually be served cold. Why was I thinking it had to be served hot?”

RHR:  How do you find time to write?

Jericho Brown: I’ve always been very good, for whatever reason. No matter what’s going on, I just won’t sleep or I will just pull my car over, because I don’t want to forget the line. I have become very aware. What usually happens for me is there are these long periods where I feel like I am not writing at all, which isn’t true. The one thing that being in a long term relationship taught me, is that I was indeed writing all the time. You don’t think you're writing. You have to have a boyfriend to say, “you’re always writing” to realize, “Oh, it is true.”  I do take time. I do sort of have a practice and I am scribbling here and there. But you know, those little moments of scribbling here and there will, in my experience, round up to one larger moment.

RHR:  Tell us about your writing process

Jericho Brown: If I am traveling, I know that I can only do so much. I have a journal with me, and I try to push around a thought or a line, and I sort of try to make it musical.  I am always scribbling down lines, things I overhear, things that come to me, so that there is this running list of sentences or lines in a literary page of my notes, in my iPhone. On Sunday, whatever lines are there, I’ll cut and paste and dump them into an email and send it to myself, then dump that into a core document. Then I start looking at what I have and pretty much, that’s what I’m working on through the week. Can I push this line around? Does this line have some type of formal suggestion to it?  

There is a part of my mind that wants to escape all of the things that are going on and wants to create this space of introspection and solitude, which I can find when I am about to, or am in the middle of, writing a poem. So ultimately, to answer your question, the process varies. But, there is always something going on, and then I can be disciplined, you know, during those months in the summer and definitely during the holidays.

RHR:  As you go through the process of writing, do you get to a place where you feel you are over-crafting? How do you know when a poem is finished? Have you ever been in a situation when you are crafting and say, “Ah, that’s too much.”?

Jericho Brown: That is a really interesting question. Talking to my students about their writing leads me to a better explanation about my own writing. I was speaking with a student and explaining certain differences about abstract language and different kinds of concrete language. I was explaining to her that it's not that you can’t use abstract language in a poem; it’s that you have to earn it.  It is a matter of intuitive or instinctual timing so that you have a certain amount of concretes that lead to an opportunity or an abstraction. But, you can’t do that if you are just talking abstractions in your writing. That amounts to a sermon. Then, you are not writing a poem.

So I’m telling her this, and she was asking me about revisions (for her portfolio) and I said, “One of the ways which you will know that you’ve taken the poem as far as you can is that every part of the poem has to do with at least another part of the poem. There is that resonance singing all the way down, and there is a resonance singing all the way back up, right? That resonance is throughout the poem. That something you say at the beginning of the poem is answered in some way or responded to at the end.”

I know I am done with a poem when revising the poem some things have or will say something to something else in that unit.  You know, I’m really interested in the poem itself as an object, really interested in it as a single unit of something.

Like this earpiece, this is real, like this water bottle or this pen, you know?  What are the parts of this pen? When I explain this to my students, I actually use a microwave. The door of the microwave is its own thing, and yet the door of a microwave only has meaning to the microwave. What I am thinking about when I am finishing a poem, I’m sort of going back to the microwave to see, do you have your own door? Do you have your own keypad? Do you have your own tray? And those are different elements. Sometimes that’s metaphor. Sometimes that’s story. Sometimes that’s the line itself or the music or rhythm that the line creates and does it have something to do with the eating of food?  Use what is useful to yourself as an object. That's the way I think about revision for the single poem.

RHR:  When you were creating the duplex, was that something you set out to do? Or was it an evolution of sorts? Would you just share a little bit about your process in the creation of the duplex?

Jericho Brown: I’ve been writing these duplexes in my mind for about ten years. I’ll tell you all something very strange. My dad had a lawn and landscaping service when I was growing up. My mom would clean houses and my dad would do these yards, and often they would do both for any one family, right? So you know, I grew up doing the same, the same kind of work. More on the outside than on the inside, and whenever anyone asks me about the inception of a poem or of an idea I always think well, I was mowing the lawn.

Let me tell you all something that is weird about that. There is something about mowing the lawn for so many years and something about that work. I mean when I was a kid growing up, I was always mowing the lawn and because something in me was always a poet. I was always making up stories, and I was always trying to write rhymes. I was always trying to make poems. My mother was putting poems on the refrigerator as far back as I can remember, so once I figured out what rhyme was, that was it.  I would just write words down that could rhyme.

Looking back at those yards, I will never forget how, when we would drive away, we would be looking at the yard and we’d be like...hmmm, that’s pretty. Do you know what I mean?

I think there is something about that process. And it was hard work, you know?  I am from Louisiana, so it was hot and you know, the days are long. Which, I think is the way I think about writing in that I was doing the labor to make something pretty. That’s sort of how I think about it.

So, when you ask me about that, the first thing I thought was oh, when I was mowing the lawn. There is something about that. Anytime anyone asks me about writing, I think of mowing the lawn which is so funny because I have not mowed the lawn in years.

You are always making patterns. Any work you are doing, particularly outside, you are literally making patterns in the grass or patterns in planting or making rows, so you are making lines.

RHR:  Isn’t that true, you are making lines on so many levels.

Jericho Brown:  Exactly. And I think that has a lot to do with the way I think about form and about structure, which I do think of as two different things.

So the duplexes came because I had written formal poems in my first book in particular. There were many formal poems. For whatever reason I didn’t trust the sonnet. I wanted to do something other than that. I wanted to write these poems that were sonnet descendents.  If you read my first book there are all these 14-line poems. They are not exactly sonnets. All these 13 or 15-line poems could have been exact sonnets, but I clearly wouldn’t let them be. And that was a very conscious decision at the time. I had this idea that if the poem was a sonnet, then it would sing back to the tradition of poetry and that I could establish my individual will or my individual ideas. I don’t know why I though that, I mean, I was a very young person and you know, I was an idealist. But, I was under that impression.

And then, years later, having written a second book and thinking about it, there is a ghazal called “Hustle” in my second book. I was also thinking about the duplex and the sonnet. I have a blues poem in the second book, as well, so I was sort of always was thinking about, how do I write a sonnet crown that allows me to get where something happens in the last line? And in that last line, you make that last line, the first line of the next poem. And when writing these, my goal is always to write a ghazal that is also a sonnet that is also a blues poem.

So, there is something that happens in those last two lines. There is something that happens, I think, from the first line of each sonnet...right?  Like, if you only look at the first line of each sonnet in a crown, it is sort of like looking at the topic sentences of an essay, I mean, it is the essay a sixteen year old gets, but supposedly, something in my mind thinks, oh, if I just read the first line then I should know everything….right?

RHR: Like knowing the gist of it, right?

Jericho Brown:  Yeah, I wanted to make a poem that made that true. I was concerned and thinking about how I was going to have to do certain kinds of juxtaposition that we already make way for and accept when we see ghazals. I had that in mind. And then I knew, I mean, what changes the poem? Why isn’t it just a ghazal?  And I think that had to do with sort of the storification of the repeated lines that are changed by the following line. That something, after the repeated line, makes the repeated line sound like singing, sound like spell-casting. That is the part of the poem that I think of as the blues.

RHR:  Your work has many references to music. There is clearly an honoring of music. Were you surrounded by it while growing up, and was it part of your life?

Jericho Brown: Yeah, it was there when I was growing up. I think it is part of everybody’s life, but because I was such a sensitive kid  I made much more of it than what other people might make of it. I paid attention to the way it would change a room.

I paid attention to people.  I’m from a card playing family, so when people would be playing cards and having a good time and smoking cigarettes and all that, there were certain songs that would come on when the music would be playing, and everyone would sort of pause. I mirrored that. I watched that. I paid a lot of attention to the music that was being sung at the church where I grew up. I was always fascinated by how different people would sing the same song different ways, and I was fascinated by people’s reactions to those songs.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in the library, so I got really obsessed.  I would play records in the library, and I wanted to know what Aretha Franklin sounded like in 1960, and then I wanted to know what she sounded like in 1970, and then I wanted to know what she sounded like in 1980. These are things I wanted to know when I was 12 years old for whatever reason. I wanted to chart that, and I wanted to think that, oh, she could do this now or oh, now she’s scatting a song. There are songs in the ‘80’s Luther Vandross was recording for her, and she’s scatting.  She hadn’t scat like that in years. So, those are the kinds of things that as a kid, I was obsessed with, much in the same way kids are obsessed with Marvel comics, or that kids are obsessed with certain video games. I just could not afford Marvel comic books, but I could listen to music, and music was much more. Although my parents didn’t give me any lessons in music, they sort of supported me or were interested in buying tapes that became the music that was being played around the house.

RHR: When you are writing, what ghosts hover in the background for you?

Jericho Brown: I’ll say this about music, and I think this has to do with the ghosts. What I am thinking about when writing a poem is I am thinking of this poem as object. The other thing I think about is poem as song. When I say poem as song I mean if a poem is like a song, then I can create metaphors that speak to me when I am trying to revise the poem.

What I mean by that is the ghosts in the room for me are people like those singers, like Diana Ross or Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston. But also the people who wrote and produced those songs where people who had ideas about what songs should be like during certain periods.  So, the truth is, Kenneth Babyface Edmonds is over my shoulder, and Barry Gordy is over my shoulder, and Michael Masse is over my shoulder, and Holland-Dozier-Holland is over my shoulder and so is Valerie Simpson.

Those people are people I think of as being over my shoulder because when I am writing a poem and I’m having a problem, I try to think about what they would do? And these are very inventive people. We don’t really think about how inventive these people were. Holland-Dozier-Holland because they were always trying to make for new sounds. They would have instruments that did not even exist in the United States flown to the United States until they could find ways to use them. Or they would do things like have people bring in bike chains and just throw the chains on the floor and find ways to use those sounds later.

I think that it’s important that when you are writing a poem, you have a metaphor for poetry that is not poetry but something completely separate from poetry. For me,  music is the metaphor. For somebody else it might be roller skating or running or cooking or going shopping at the mall. The thing is that you really have to have some other interest so you can look at the poem and say, “How is this thing like that thing?”

Somebody like LeBron James might be in the room because I’m thinking about just plain old excellence. Somebody like Serena Williams might be in the room because I’m thinking about excellence. Because you know, I am thinking I need to make a poem that is like what they do when they hit a tennis ball or when they put a the ball through the net. My poem needs to be like that.

And then there are all those writers. Baldwin is very important to me because he is and was such a truth teller, such a spiritual person who was really trying, in my opinion, really trying to figure out how to make use of his spiritual self in his writing and how to reconcile the person he was as an adult to the Christian he was as a child.

Essex Hemphill is a very powerful poet, but he also wrote essays. He was a community oriented poet, you know. He helps me think about my poems as useful objects. That’s the  reason that I like to say or use “microwave.” I think about music in the way I do is because I know it creates in people a feeling, and that feeling allows for a different sense of how they can relate to one another when they are in a space or in the space together.

I am interested in poems that can be used. Those are two of the people, Baldwin, Essex Hemphill, and you know, people that are just pop culture famous. I mean, I am a big Lucille Clifton fan. I think she is the greatest. I’ve met Gwendolyn Brooks. I think Gwendolyn Brooks is actually, well, my closest friends who are poets are astounded by the fact that I can’t talk about Gwendolyn Brooks without crying. I think meeting her became a huge influence for me.

I met her when I was writing poetry, but I wasn’t yet a poet.  I might have been 21-22 years old or something like that. She was an example to me of, and I mean to this day I believe Gwendolyn Brooks is the kindest person who ever walked the earth. Definitely in the 20th Century.

Gwendolyn Brooks had a conversation with me where she was talking to me like I was an adult when I really, really wasn’t, which made me feel like I wanted to be an adult. I went to Dillard University, and because she was visiting the college and since I was a halfway smart kid, I was asked to go to the dinner, which is what we do with half-way smart kids, right? So I’m sitting next to her, and she turns to me and she says, “So what is your conception of the line?” And all I got from that was that I needed to have a conception of the line.

She had a way of talking to a person. She had this way. She mentioned to me this new anthology that had been edited, this anthology of African American literature. She asked me what I thought of it. I hadn’t even known it existed. She was putting me in a position to think about what my life needed to be, but I thought whatever that book was, that is the cool thing, and maybe I should have an answer or maybe I should consciously have an answer.  And she asked me about this book. Of course I told her I hadn’t read it or seen it. She started talking about decisions that were made and selections that were made and a week later, in my college mailbox, who knows how, was that book, signed by Gwendolyn Brooks. I mean in retrospect, even in that moment when I got it, I was like , “Oh, I have to go do something. I need to meet that.

Yeah, so, she is there. You know, she loved poetry. She really believed in it as a spirit that could change the way we saw things in this nation in particular. She believed in poetry as a guiding cultural force, and I loved that about her.

So she is in the room. She says this one thing in her lecture when she became the United States Poet Laureate, “no cliches in poetry, and no cliches in life.” When she says “no cliches in life” she says it like it comes from on high, so that’s something I’m always thinking about. I mean I want every line to be a surprise, and I really got that from her. In Brooks’ poems every line is a surprise.

There are a lot of people who are in the room. I’m in the room too, you know. There is a me when I was nineteen years old who was really an at-risk kid. I was really using poems when I was nineteen to stay alive. I would read something, and I would find out about a poet, and I would say, “Oh, I should just read all of the poems by Essex Hemphill,” and I was like, “Oh, if I read all of the poems by Essex Hemphill, I won’t kill myself until after I have read all of those poems.” Then it was Melvin Dixon, then I read about Essex Hemphill which led me to Melvin Dixon and I was like, “Oh, I’ll just read all of the poems by Melvin Dixon. Then I’ll kill myself.”  This is really weird logic, but poems really, a lot of poems kept me alive.

Maybe some people say that, but I really mean it.  It gave me something else to do, something that I could really concentrate on and love and feel and experience and have inward experiences through, and it was for a period of my life when the inward experience I was having through reading poetry was the only time that inward experience was not an experience of dread.

We do gain, who knows if it is good or bad, but we do gain pleasure from some of the most dour of poems. Hopefully some of that pleasure is derived from an idea that having read the poem we can make for a situation that is less dour.

Order Jericho Brown’s new book, The Tradition

...with Ethel Rackin

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Dr. Ethel Rackin, poet and revered professor of Language and Literature at Bucks County Community College, currently in residence at the MacDowell Colony where she is working on a new set of poems, agreed to an interview with River Heron Review and answered some of our must-know questions. Here, then, is an inside look at her practices and craft.

 RHR: Tell us about your writing process.

ER: I generally try to "trick" myself into writing by scribbling in a notebook at cafes, circling back on previous pieces in the notebook to recopy and revise. Once I've filled up a notebook or two and have let them sit for a while, I begin typing up the most promising pieces. Then, I keep revising on the computer, sometimes a little, often a lot. At some point, I share my work with friends whose work and opinion I value.

 RHR: How do you center yourself prior to writing? 

ER: I find that walking or meditating before writing helps to shake loose unhelpful distractions. Feeling loose mentally and physically is key to the process for me. Though, that being said, I've also written a lot when I've been sick in bed.

RHR: What is one piece of advice you offer to all of your students that you feel is most valuable? 

ER: Separate your process into two parts, and erect a mental firewall between the two. First, write whatever you like, without criticism or critique. Banish the voice that says "I can't do this" or "this is awful." Second, go back to the work once it has sat for a while and revise continually until it feels complete. In order to revise, use strategies you've learned (in class or elsewhere) and consider constructive critique you've received from others.

RHR: What inspires you to write? 

ER: Nature. Politics. Spirituality. Relationships. The work of writers I admire. So many things! Most importantly, something has to be nagging or haunting me a bit for me to write about it. 

RHR: Whose name(s) do you invoke at your shrine to poetry? 

ER: Emily Dickinson. Gertrude Stein.

RHR: When you sit down to write, what fears nag at you? 

ER: I try to banish fears when I'm writing, and reserve my judgement of my work until much later. It's impossible to tell whether my work is any good when I first start.

RHR: How do you determine what makes a poem successful? 

ER: At a certain point (about 25 years after I began writing), I started to get an intuitive hunch when a poem is complete. In general, I believe that a poem is successful when it has lived up to its own implied promises. For example, if the poem is a narrative, we can ask whether the story seems satisfying. If it's a poem that relies heavily on images, we can ask whether those images are evocative. In my opinion, all poems should offer an experience, take us on a journey, and move us. It sounds mystical, but I do believe that if we listen, poems tell us what they want to be.


...with Katherine Falk

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Katherine Falk, the current Bucks County Poet Laureate, considers museums her sanctuaries, cooks by color, and works for underserved populations. We are not surprised that her life is as wonderfully diverse as her work. Here, she takes time from her busy day to answer a few questions about her craft. 

RHR: What rituals do you repeat prior to or during writing? 

KF: The only ritual might be when I go to bed at night, to make sure that I have a journal and pen on my bedside table, within easy reach, or ideally right on my bed.  Then when I first wake up in the early morning, when ideas are new, clear and plentiful or a dream offers itself for a poem, my journal is near enough to access without requiring me to move far from my sleeping position. 

My experience has been that when I get up or move too much from my original position, I lose the ideas, whereas, if/when I am able to stay in, or reclaim, the position, I remember the ideas. I believe our bodies have cellular memory and that is why it works for me to return to the position to regain the ideas. 

RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea? 

KF: Both.  I get ideas and then let them germinate until I can sit down and work on them.  Some I carry around for a while. Others demand that I give them attention more quickly.  I am struck that the poems that come my way are usually not about the subjects I think I should be writing. Often, wayward, lost poems arrive on my doorstep looking for a place to live and some nourishment.

I am an art lover and regularly hunt for ideas in museums while viewing art. Music inspires and so do other people’s poetry, nature, animals and comedy.

Basically, though, poetry is the vehicle by which I process the world, the way I understand it and the way I think. It’s not a choice.  As a result, often, rather than hunting, finding or being haunted by a poem, I am just thinking my way through life with lines of poetry in my head. I consider it a process for seeking to make sense of life and the universe. Shared human experience, connections, understanding of a new way of looking at something are what I am after.

RHR: Notebook or paper or computer? Pen or pencil?

KF: All of the above. Just as J. Adams Lagana writes encouragement for us all to use any or all in the GBH – The Great Blue Heron, A Blog, I use any method that I can and usually it’s determined by where I am and what’s available. I used to hand write all my poems until a few years ago. Then, I started to use a computer too, though hand writing still prevails especially in the middle of the night when I awaken to write something down. There was a period of about ten years when I wrote every morning, in bed, from 3:30 a.m. – 5:30 a.m. In my earliest poetry writing years, I wrote on scraps of paper or napkins and then took them home and tried to make sense of them. 

Also, back then, I used only pencils so that I could erase. Then I got comfortable with crossing out which opened up the possibility of pens and I eliminated pencils until late last year. I was in a hotel that had the loveliest pencils and I was inspired to let them back in. Some years ago, my husband gave me a little recorder as a gift so I could dictate poems or poetic fragments when I was in the car or on the go and couldn’t actually write thoughts down. I didn’t use it enough to make it a habit then but am ready to find it and use it now.

RHR: When you sit down to write, what fears nag at you?

KF: That what I write will be stupid and embarrassing. 

For most of my adult life, making a living has competed and won over the time and respect it requires to write regularly so I have been making a concerted effort, especially this past year, to make changes. Before, old fears included work or volunteer deadlines, phone calls and emails that needed responses, family responsibilities and even laundry. They competed for attention and nagged at me to complete my to-do list and interrupt my own writing. Over the years, my poems have been like children waiting for their mother to come home from work. Now, I have several series of poems I have started and I have to push aside the fears and just forge ahead.

RHR: Whose ghost hovers in the background when you write?

KF: The Verb Ghost hovers and encourages me to search for verbs with muscle. The Editing Ghost reminds me that for every word I take out, I might gain a reader. These “ghosts” call out regularly when I write.

And, if I may substitute angels for ghosts, as in relatives or dear friends that are no longer here, or deceased poets whose work I respect and from which I have learned, I can say that I strive to consider traditions -- literary, philosophical/religious, artistic or family – and to bring them into my work. Thoughts of Pamela Perkins-Frederick and Herb Perkins-Frederick, and lessons they taught, often propel me forward.

RHR: What items do you carry with you in your “tote bag” of poetry?

KF: On the literal side, I always seek to carry a writing implement and something on which to write.  If I go into a museum and want to lighten my load and check my bag, I might bring a couple of sheets of copy paper that I will fold into quarters.

I research subjects about which I write so my tool kit contains research materials: A dictionary, book on the subject of the poem or access to the internet. I check definitions of words and strive to use the first definition of a word.

Books or information on poetic forms. I want to work my way through traditional and more modern forms.

Books by and about other poets as well as poetry journals. My daily poetry fix is to read other people’s poetry.

RHR: In your tenure as Poet Laureate thus far, in what area do you feel you most make an impact?

KF: The poet laureateship is an ambassadorial position so an area of potential impact, thus far, has been to encourage people who may not be as familiar with poetry to read poetry and to create their own poems and to encourage young people that are writing poems. Part of the Poet Laureate job description is to judge the annual High School Poet of the Year contest with the Poet Laureate from the preceding year, in this case, 2016 Poet Laureate, Laren McClung. At the Poet of the Year reading, I met the winners and finalists, heard them read and offered support and encouragement. Subsequently, I was able to invite a few to join me at a special event to read their poems to a different audience.

An especially fun experience this Spring was the opportunity to teach and offer writing prompts to 100 fourth-grade students, in their classrooms, and to hear them read their poems aloud. A student named Kyle, in response to one of the prompts wrote, “I used to be a bored balloon and now I am popping with ideas”.

...with Christopher Bursk

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Dr. Christopher Bursk has influenced and inspired poets for more than 45 years as a professor, mentor, and fellow poet traveler. Author of 14 books of poetry, his boundless energy and love for the genre astounds his grateful following. He generously agreed to answer a few questions.

RHR: Whose ghost hovers in the background when you write?

CB: Pamela Perkins-Frederick hovers near me as I write. For over four decades I met with her once a week; she was the only one to whom I dared show my poetry. Her spirit is with me still, even as I grieve her passing. However, the other ghosts that haunt my poetry are my parents --and my brother Timothy -- though Timothy is a fictional creation of my mind. And the ghosts of the man who smelled of forest fires on the Boston city  bus and the football coach who  taught us Sex Ed and the cops that put handcuffs on me and the girls who voted me best girl in fifth grade.

RHR: Tell us about your writing process.

CB: I do not wait for inspiration. I turn to the page the way I turned to my toy soldiers. I'd wait for the Arabs and Grenadiers, the outlaws and pirates to decide what we'd play today. The only rule was that the game had to be different from the game the day before. Some days I watch the page until a few words come -- and then I find myself inside the world they invite me into. Some days I come to the page with something pressing on my mind -- a longing, a grief, a puzzlement, and then get a line or two. Then I repeat the lines I have until I have the next few lines and that process continues. Then I type the poem up and wait for days to revisit it.

RHR: What rituals do you repeat prior to or during writing?

CB: I have no rituals --except if I am home and anyone else is in the house I put on Pachelbel and keep playing him over and over -- the same c.d. over and over until I am done.

RHR: Notebook or paper or computer? Pen or pencil?

CB: I write with precisely sharpened 6 or 7 #2 Ticonderoga pencils right next to me -- though once I get started I tend to stick with the same pencil and keep sharpening over and over. It's got have a fine point. The words want that and so I oblige them.

RHR: If you could bequeath a skill or attitude to your students, what would it be?

CB: I write because I can not write; I wish I could live without the need to write. I do not wish that on anyone. I do not consider anyone in the Spring poetry workshop my students; they are the generous companions who have agreed to go on a journey with me. As a kid I played alone most of the time. It's nice to have someone now -- in my advanced years -- to play with. I think the gift I have to offer is my faith in the journey -- in poetry itself, the risky play to which it invites us.

RHR: How do you know when a poem reaches its end?

CB: Ah, the poem tells you when it's done. And if it doesn't on the first draft, it does on the second or maybe the seventh.

RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?

CB: It's Pamela whose name I invoke -- and Beverly Foss Stoughton and Doug Hughes and Bob Fraser and Gloria DelVecchio and my beloved David Kime and my beloved Herb Perkins-Frederick. Much of my poetry is written out of the grief. The rest is written out of longing.