Joanne Merriam: What is your writing process? Diane Lockward: I am not a morning person, but I am a morning writer. I like to show up at the kitchen table with a cup of ginger tea and do my first drafts there. Those are typically wild free writings. To get myself started, I often first read some poems in a journal and then find a line or an image that I want to respond to. Or I might find a strategy that I want to try my hand at. Some of these beginnings go somewhere; some don’t. I wish I were an everyday writer but I’m not. I can go for stretches without getting any new poems underway. This makes me feel a bit guilty, especially during April when so many poets are cranking out a poem a day. But I’ve come to accept my process for what it is and I like to think of the non-writing days as gathering days. Some of these seemingly unproductive days are spent on revisions, for me often the place where the real writing gets done. I usually spend several weeks on revisions. When I think the poem is done, I put it aside and don’t look at it for a few weeks. When I take it out again, I discover that it isn’t done after all. Then I do more revisions. I almost never send out a poem for submission without sitting on it for a while.

Joanne Merriam: What’s some writing advice you’ve received, that works for you?

Diane Lockward: Some years ago at The Frost Place I sat down for a conference with the poet Jeffrey Harrison. I handed him a rather long and, for me, unusual poem, and said, “This is a weird one.” I distrusted the poem, was afraid of it and of what Jeffrey’s response might be. But he said, “Weird is good.” I’ve always remembered his words. They’ve become a kind of mantra for me, reminding me not to be overly literal, not to explain what should be merely suggested, not to edit out the surprises.

Joanne Merriam: Can you say a little bit about the genesis of Twelve for the Record and the process of putting it online?

Diane Lockward: This was originally a print chapbook, part of the Greatest Hits series. I wanted to get more mileage out of it. So I thought about the possibility of doing it as an ebook. With some help from people like you, I figured out how to do it. It took a good deal of time and patience to get the formatting right, something that’s more challenging for poetry than for prose. It took me a few weeks to get it done. But I did it and I’m happy with the result. I also had some trepidation about moving into this fairly new mode of publication, but the response has been gratifying.

Joanne Merriam: Do you think writing poetry helps you to understand more about yourself and the world, or is advancing as a poet more about learning how to communicate the things you already know? Diane Lockward: Some of both, but the poems that excite me the most fall into the first category. Those are the poems that pull something out of me that I didn’t know was there, that lead me to some new discovery or understanding, the ones that surprise me. When I’ve got one of those poems underway, it’s intensely exciting. I walk around feeling somewhat electrified. What keeps me going as a poet is the possibility of writing a poem that says what I haven’t said before.

Check out more poetry-related interviews, reviews and guest posts at Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour.

Molly Peacock is a poet, essayist and creative nonfiction writer. She has published six volumes of poems including Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems and, most recently, The Second Blush (both from W.W. Norton and Company). Her poems are widely anthologized, included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry and The Best of the Best American Poetry. Her latest work of nonfiction is The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 [warning: site autoplays audio], at once a biography of an extraordinary 18th century artist and a meditation on late-life creativity. She is the author of the memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece. One of the creators of New York’s Poetry in Motion program, she co-edited Poetry In Motion: One Hundred Poems From the Subways and Buses. She is also the editor of an anthology of essays, The Private I, and a book about reading poetry, How to Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle. She serves as a Faculty Mentor at the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Program and as the Series Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English.

A dual citizen of the US and Canada, Molly Peacock is a former New Yorker who makes her home in Toronto with her husband, two cats, and a jam-packed terrace garden. I interviewed her for Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour. She was so generous in her answers that I’ve decided, at her suggestion, to break this interview into two parts: here is part two.   Joanne Merriam: When you read at Vanderbilt last year, you talked a little about what it was like to move to a new country from your birth country. I was particularly interested in that, because I’m a relatively new immigrant to the States from Canada. Can you comment on what it has meant to your writing to become Canadian, and how your American roots have also informed your writing? Molly Peacock: I was born in the States and the young woman I was, who gathered herself up and moved to New York City to write her sonnets, always in some ways writes my poems in her inquisitive, definitive American voice. But I came to Canada in mid-life, where I began to write prose. The mid-life woman, searching for a broader expression, curious about others, secure in her quirky perceptions, always emerges in my prose. Both these women live comfortably inside me. I cross the border between Canada and the US all the time. I keep two passports and two currencies in my wallet, and two bank cards, too! Part of my grandparents’ generation on both sides of my family had Canadian roots. I’m really a hybrid. Buffalo, where I was born, is smack up against the border.

And yet. I wonder what hybridized plants feel; I wonder what grafted fruit trees feel. If you are not a gardener or a farmer or a writer about horticulture, or a botanist, you might not think of the slow, defined movements of plants and their growth, but since I do write about plants, and I do think about horticultural things, I wonder about how they absorb their new homes as they are transplanted. I’m a transplant, yet I uproot myself, sometimes weekly. But it is a strange life to be so dual. At this point in my life, I can’t give either country up. When the American border guard says, “Welcome home,” I think, “New York City! On what streets am I more at home?” But when I return to the high, gray skies of Toronto, walking into our apartment, I feel utterly at rest. “Where are you?” is the first question any of my friends asks me. In my little office looking out over Toronto, “I’m home,” I respond. In a literary way, where I am is a key question. I write in two genres, poetry and nonfiction, never giving one up for the other. My poetry has lost some of the anxiety I talk about in my answer to your next question, it’s much more free verse and less formal. I don’t always wear my city shoes.

Joanne Merriam: I realize this is difficult ground, and Canada has at least two great poetic traditions to go with its two official languages (not to mention its long First Nations history), but can you comment on any general national characteristics of the poetry being produced by Canadians vs that being written by Americans? Molly Peacock: Absolutely. I can happily talk about poetry in English written by Anglophone Canadians, and that includes Anglophone aboriginal Canadians, too. Although I sometimes read Francophone Canadian poetry, I really don’t know enough about it to comment. The big difference between Canadian and American poetry in English is the trust in the reader. Canadian poets trust that their readers will stay with them. If the poets start slow, if they let their poems wander, they seem to feel that the reader will be patient, will come with them. The poets trust that, eventually, their careful, engaged readers will get why this oddball journey of the poem is going on. The Canadian poet and the Canadian reader walk into the lake of the poem together.

But in the U.S., that poet-reader contract is entirely different. The poet can’t trust the reader to be an ally. The poet has to show the reader from the very first line why the poem is worth that impatient, distracted reader’s time. The American poet has to start the poem on the highest diving board, then jackknife into the pool below. After the reader is wowed and amazed, then the poem proceeds. It’s an entirely different agreement, one in the pool, the other on the side watching. The lanky, longer, meditative-narrative of Canadian poetry proceeds entirely differently from the shorter lyric-narrative of American poetry.   Joanne Merriam: I’m amazed at how much you do to promote poetry, between all your teaching and lecturing engagements, co-creating Poetry in Motion, helping with Representative Poetry On Line, editing Best Canadian Poetry in English, and so on. What strategies do you feel work best in getting poetry in front of people who don’t usually read it, and what is it about poetry that drives you to champion it?

Molly Peacock: I grew up in a household where there were very few books except the Bible and Popular Mechanics Magazine. However, there were library books. Once a week my mother went to the library and got out a stack of novels which she gleefully ploughed through, almost one a day. So I got the idea that everyday people who weren’t educated and didn’t have the cash to buy books could enjoy them, appreciate them and educate themselves. My mother coming down the steps of the Kenmore Public Library and my father swinging his black metal lunch pail are permanent images in my mind, and the source, however eventually obscured, of all the public efforts I have made on behalf of poetry. I wanted them to read me. They never did. But luckily I had other readers, like you Joanne Merriam, and others at Vanderbilt University where our paths crossed. That impulse to gather and educate the potential readers of poetry has never left me. What strategies work? Oh, elbow grease! And enthusiasm. And persistence. And getting your friends absorbed in an idea you have—or joining others’ ideas. You can’t do it alone. Poetry itself isn’t written alone. That’s a myth. You need a friend’s encouragement, a friend’s ear. And you need that for reading, too.

Check out more poetry-related interviews, reviews and guest posts at Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour.

Molly Peacock is a poet, essayist and creative nonfiction writer. She has published six volumes of poems including Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems and, most recently, The Second Blush (both from W.W. Norton and Company). Her poems are widely anthologized, included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry and The Best of the Best American Poetry. Her latest work of nonfiction is The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 [warning: site autoplays audio], at once a biography of an extraordinary 18th century artist and a meditation on late-life creativity. She is the author of the memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece. One of the creators of New York’s Poetry in Motion program, she co-edited Poetry In Motion: One Hundred Poems From the Subways and Buses. She is also the editor of an anthology of essays, The Private I, and a book about reading poetry, How to Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle. She serves as a Faculty Mentor at the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Program and as the Series Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English.

A dual citizen of the US and Canada, Molly Peacock is a former New Yorker who makes her home in Toronto with her husband, two cats, and a jam-packed terrace garden. I interviewed her for Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour. She was so generous in her answers that I’ve decided, at her suggestion, to break this interview into two parts: here is part one.

Joanne Merriam: You write many formal poems, especially sonnets, which are of particular interest to me right now since I’m spending the month of April working on sonnets, so (selfishly) I’ll start by asking about them. What is your writing process when you write a formal poem?

Molly Peacock: Let’s begin with a little personal history of a writing process: I began writing sonnets in the late 1970′s when I was attending The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University. It wasn’t part of any course. My professors didn’t teach anything technical or “how to.” So I decided to teach myself. I’m a happy autodidact; the teacher MOLLY can let the student Molly learn at her own pace. First I had to teach myself to write in ten-syllable lines. Just counting syllables felt accomplished. I never wanted to write “exercises” or practice poems, so I integrated the syllable counting into my real poems, things I genuinely wanted to write. And I limited the number of lines to fourteen, though I didn’t always hit fourteen exactly. (I often overran both syllables and lines.) I’d congratulate myself at every bit of accomplishment, believing, along with Gertrude Stein, that it’s praise that moves an artist forward. Then I started working on rhyme schemes, allowing myself any sound correspondences that felt right to my ear. I depended on my own ear for language. I knew I had a good internal ear, and that sound was connected to my deepest emotions, so I relied on that, even when what I heard seemed contradicted by what I thought of as “exterior” criteria, like formal meter. I didn’t seriously tackle meter for at least a decade, probably more. I so cherished that inner ear that I couldn’t bend the music in my head (and body) to what I thought of as an external marching order. But in fact many of my ten-syllable lines were pentameter lines.

I just let the formally metrical lines infiltrate and whirl around in the poem, mixing with the voice I had always depended on, my own voice, the working class Buffalo girl who was going to write “low” sonnets, using her own mix of both blue collar and high art images and sounds. Just last week I visited the fabulous collection of abstract expressionists at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. It is so vigorous and inspiring. When I was in high school, in the early 1960′s, I took the bus from the little house in the suburbs where I grew up to the Art Gallery time after time, and I loved escorting myself to see that collection. Again, the teacher MOLLY was taking the student Molly on a little art trip. The reward for student Molly was to eat cinnamon ice cream in the Gallery restaurant in my dopey pleated skirt next to these glamorous art-y women with black hair and red lipstick. Somehow those images found their way inside me along with the vocal rhythms of my family. That was the mix of high and low I had in my sonnets.

But now, after decades of writing them, what is my process? I begin with the subject AND the form. If it’s a sonnet I intend, I don’t try to make something else I abandoned into a sonnet. And I work and work on the first line so it sits right. The first step determines all the rest. I don’t over-manage the rhymes. I ease into them with the syntax. If a sound doesn’t ease in, I turn to another rhyme. I never use a rhyming dictionary. All the sounds must come from the interior. I do make lists of rhymes and I write them either on the side of the page if I’m writing on a violet or a blue legal pad, or on the opposite page if I’m writing in a book-size, bound notebook. (I write all first drafts of poems by hand, obviously, but then I type them into my computer and continue the drafts on the computer.) If the meter doesn’t fall into smooth units, I don’t worry too much about it until later. If I use the same vocabulary over and over, I don’t worry about that either, if it’s in the middle of the line. I can fix that later. I don’t always know what the sonnet will be about. I have a kind of image in my head, something I might like to paint, if I were a painter, or a thought, but not something entirely thought through. If I intended a Shakespearean sonnet, and it’s not working out, I change to a Petrarchan sonnet, and if that doesn’t work out, I turn to a nonce form, something I can make up. It’s NOT about sticking to a form. It’s about balance and flexibility. I depend on my unconscious because the unconscious is always interconnected and full of correspondences. I don’t worry about it being present there for me. It’s always present there for me, whether I like it or not! Form and content are working together; it’s both planned and surprising. I’m working, engaged, intent, over-focused, as if I had to plant a lot of seedlings while the soil was wet and the sun not too high. I’m enjoying myself. Sailing on the lake of it. The outside world is nothing to me. And the poem is forming under my hands, my whole body over it, around it.

Check out more poetry-related interviews, reviews and guest posts at Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour.

Joanne Merriam: What is your writing process?

Kate Buckley: Like many writers, I write best when I disengage my self-censor or ego-mind. I often find that meditative or repetitive activity (walking, yoga, gardening) assists in clearing my head before approaching the page. And once there, I tend to approach poems as puzzles. Even after several drafts have been written, I still work at fitting together the pieces, playing with sound, word choice, line breaks and arrangement till I feel the poem has achieved both structure and surprise. I work quite a lot in form so I often try a poem in several different forms to see which structure or “body” suits the soul of the poem. And often I’ll abandon the strict form all together, but it’s nonetheless present in the making of the poem—just as a scaffolding is used in the construction of a building then removed once it can stand alone.

Joanne Merriam: As a Southerner who has until recently been living in California, how does geography (or any other sense of place) inform your work?

Kate Buckley: You’ve hit on one of my pet topics here! Geography or landscape (whether that of my native Kentucky or my adopted land of California) plays a tremendous role in my work. I think landscape acts as an interrogator; meaning that there are many times when a particular landscape will bring up a sensation or idea, something that compels a response. And memory looms large in that equation—where was I when I last saw a leaf so moth-eaten? When did I last see the snow? What happened the summer there was no rain? I now divide my time between Nashville and Newport Beach and I value the variety in their landscapes—and climes. When I’m in Southern California, I miss autumn with a vengeance, as well as attics and basements. Whatever would Freud have done had he been raised in Oceanside? But then I walk by the reckless ocean, run my fingers through tide pools and then the kaleidoscope of the world shifts yet again.

I’ve also the theory that Southerners are more connected to the ideas of landscape and home than others, or certainly more inclined to write about place. The South has endured so much—and caused so many to endure so much more—that perhaps the very soil is imbued with pathos, echoes, reverberations of the cries of those that died in its grasp. There is a pretty fascinating theory about energetic transference as applies to land or objects (when something awful or tragic has occurred, the imprint of that energy remains). I don’t know why that wouldn’t apply to the South, more than almost anywhere else in the United States.

Joanne Merriam: Do you think writing poetry helps you to understand more about yourself and the world, or is advancing as a poet more about learning how to communicate the things you already know?

Kate Buckley: I think both are true. Muriel Rukeyser said, “One writes in order to feel.” Katherine Hepburn said, “Just write the best you can about the things that concern you most.” I agree with both sentiments. I try to write through deep feeling to attempt stabs at universal truths. I also try to write about the things that concern me most, both as an artist and as a human being.

Joanne Merriam: How do you decide how to structure your books, so that your poems work together to support each other, or create interesting tensions, or a narrative? Has your process changed at all since your first two books?

Kate Buckley: I read widely to learn from others. When I was putting together A Wild Region and Follow Me Down , I’d pull titles from shelves and study how poets whose work I particularly valued had structured their books. I’d look at different ways of ordering and creating structure, movement and dynamism: biographical, thematic, circular, etc. And the books came together differently. For instance, the poems in my first book, A Wild Region, seem particularly visual and imagistic to me so I made the decision to include artwork alongside the poems (I’m also a visual artist). From there, it seemed appropriate to display the poems side-by-side with the particular paintings that I felt spoke to the thematic content in these poems, moving toward a narrative arc. Follow Me Down came together thematically in three distinct sections—the entire book is concerned with the nature of memory and the sections came to be: “Inventing Memory,” “Fugue States,” and “The Ghosts of Houses.” And with both books there was a lot of spreading poems all over the dining room table, floor, corridors, playing hopscotch with their pages, searching for intersections, relationships, shapes, architecture—interlocking angles of the structure I was trying to build.

I’m now working on my third book—a book of sonnets, or “ghosts” of sonnets; my attempt to, in the kind words of my MFA mentor, Molly Peacock, “put a 21st-century California spin on the sonnet.” I don’t know that my structuring process has changed dramatically since I put together my first two books, but I’m looking forward to learning all I can from this process.

Check out more poetry-related interviews, reviews and guest posts at Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour.

• “Wonder Woman Goes Grocery Shopping as Diana Prince and Discovers that Evil Doesn’t Always Carry a Gun or Wear a Goofy Costume“
• “How It Came to Be Revealed that Wonder Woman Carried a Flame for Norrin Radd, a.k.a. The Silver Surfer“
• “Going Against Habit and Wisdom, Wonder Woman Lives Momentarily in Memory, Back with Norrin on the Moon“
• “When Wonder Woman Decided to Try Dating“
• “Wonder Woman Hauls the Laundry to the Wash-o-Matic“

Joanne Merriam: What is your writing process?

Wendy Babiak: Oh, this is complicated. Where does the process begin? On one level, it’s simple: I might hear in my head a line that feels like poetry, and scribble it in a notebook. Later, when I’m ready to actually sit down and work, I’ll take the notebook, look through and find one or two lines I want to work with, and go from there. My poem “Bitter in New Orleans” happened like that: while we were driving through New Orleans, back for a visit after moving away, I scribbled in my notebook a brief description of a sign for St. Joe’s Bar, and also the line “church spires rise above the shops on Magazine Street like hollyhocks growing among herbs.” Weeks later, back at home, taking a break from maternal duties, I took my notebook to the tub with me, drew a nice bubble bath, and while soaking in it opened the notebook and found those two things. And the poem came from them almost entire. The only thing that changed in the editing process was a bit at the end. (This is not usually the case: most times I make significant changes in the revision process, adding, subtracting, rearranging.)

With the Wonder Woman sonnets it’s only slightly different: the title is what comes first. Something will strike me as an appropriate situation for her, a title will occur to me, (e.g., “Wonder Woman Lassos the CEO”), and I’ll write that down on an index card, which I keep handy around the house. Then, when I’m at my desk, I’ll write the title at the top of the page, the schema along the right margin, and then plug through it, rhyming dictionary in hand, letting the available words lead me along to see what happens, often choosing for a rhyme the least expected word, so that the poem ends up twisting in a direction I didn’t anticipate.

Or sometimes I’ll use an exercise, some kind of prompt or something, just to get things going. It can be fun to have someone else give me a list of words, and, say, make a sentence with each one, then put them together, like a collage. There are fantastic exercises in the book The Practice of Poetry. Or I might decide that I want to have a go at a particular form, with varying degrees of success. I have yet to write a successful pantoum.

No matter how a poem starts, though, I’ll keep it around for a long time, reading it out loud, playing with line breaks, with word choices, trying to make sure the music works. I’m not a slave to meter but I like things to be fun in the mouth and ear, to play with sound and rhythm.

But a significant part of the process takes place away from the page. I don’t think my poetry would exist without it, and that’s a sort of engagement with the world, the material world and the world of ideas. I do a lot of cogitating, while walking, gardening, encountering my fellow humans. I ask myself questions, about identity and the self, about right and wrong, about what it means to be a human, a woman, an American, an earthling. Questions about responsibility. About beauty and its role in all of this. Because really, sometimes, walking about in the world, which is really quite arresting, your perception is practically pummeled out there with one stunning image after another; it’s hard to understand what people get so crazy about, hatefreaks and such, surrounded by all this. That’s the impetus that brings me to the page; the process itself is something I enjoy, but I don’t think I’d do it without the wondering, the awe, and, frankly, the frustration that people aren’t nicer to each other and the place that supports us. Well, I’d still do it without that last crap, but I’d probably have volumes of odes rather than long nonce forms pushing boundaries of what a poem can include and endeavor to accomplish.

Joanne Merriam: What is some writing advice you’ve received, that works for you?

Wendy Babiak: Always read the work out loud. Hang on to poems for a long time before you send them out. Put them away for a few months so that when you take them out to revise they’re new to you, and the rotten spots will be more obvious. Don’t be afraid to push boundaries or say something that might offend someone; edit later. The only way to get to the good stuff is by telling your internal critic to sit down and stfu.

Joanne Merriam: Have you had to sacrifice anything to write your poetry?

Wendy Babiak: Well, on the one hand, no, I didn’t have to sacrifice anything. I’m a kept woman: I don’t have to worry about making money (anymore), which is a good thing since there’s no real living to be made writing poems. Also, office life drives me absolutely insane, and the only marketable skills I really have involve office work, so staying home to write poems and raise kids is no sacrifice (more like salvation). On the other hand, there’s not a whole lot of respect for us poets in the wider world (I’m leaving the mother question out of it so I don’t go into an anti-capitalist rant regarding the lip service spent extolling women’s unpaid work), either, and not just because we don’t make a lot of money at it. We’re generally seen as narcissistic, opium-addled folks of questionable moral fiber. So I don’t sacrifice anything to write my poems, but to publish them, to put myself out there as a poet, requires that I surrender that natural desire to be respected. I went on one of those winery tours with some fellow mothers in my community about a year ago, and was asked by someone who was a scientist, a professor who had recently given up teaching to raise her kids, what I “did.” I said I was a poet, and her eyebrows went up. “Wow,” she said, “You’re the first person I’ve met willing to own that.” There’s also the issue of privacy. I’m not exactly a confessional poet; mostly I engage the world in my work, but I can’t help but do it through the lens of my own experience, my perspective; even when I create a persona, or tell a story, it’s all dripping with me. This is unavoidable with any creative writing. I gave a copy of Conspiracy to my neighbor, figuring that was a good way to give her a crash course in getting to know me (since she seemed interested). After reading it, she commented that the poems were “revealing.” And while I’m happy to make friends this way, the idea of having the book out there among strangers is a strange feeling, indeed.

Joanne Merriam: Do you think writing poetry helps you to understand more about yourself and the world, or is advancing as a poet more about learning how to communicate the things you already know?

Wendy Babiak: Both. Sometimes I do discover what I think or feel about something through the act of making a poem, especially when using the more associative processes I mentioned above. Anger bubbles up spontaneously and unexpectedly, often relating to issues of gender. But some things I know I feel strongly about, and haven’t changed my mind about in twenty years, like the power of love and the unity of everything and the sanctity of the natural world, that will take me a lifetime to get across, if I ever manage it at all.

Check out more poetry-related interviews, reviews and guest posts at Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour.

Today’s Couplets interview is with Sue Goyette, Nova Scotian author of the poetry collections The True Names of Birds, Undone and outskirts, and the novel Lures. Goyette is a 2011 winner of the Province of Nova Scotia’s Established Artist Recognition award. Her work has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a woman writer and the National Magazine Awards, and won the 2008 CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the 2010 Earle Birney Prize and the 2011 Bliss Carman Award.

Joanne Merriam: I remember when The True Names of Birds [actually, it was Undone - Ed.] was shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize [which is administered by the Writers' Federation, where I worked at the time], at dinner after the award ceremony, we talked a little about process. I’ve forgotten most of the conversation now, but what I retained, and often repeat to poet friends, was your admonition to “figure out what your own process is, and then always trust your process.” What is your writing process? Any words on your evolving thinking about process?

Sue Goyette: My writing practice involves a specific writing time each day that I clear of internet and phone access. I sit in my room and ruminate. I wait and try to ride out that awful hurry-up, anxious feeling. I think of the words, the ideas or images that have snagged lately in my brain. I think of the stories I’ve heard myself repeat. I comb my memory for articles, facts, curiosities that I’ve noticed. I try to stay present and not sink into making lists of things to do once this time is done. I try not to manage my Word.doc files or do any other ‘meaningful’ tidying. I’ve realized that I do things fast. Too fast. I walk fast. I talk fast. I eat fast. And I write fast. I’ve been trying to adjust my writing practice so I come to it with a slower pace. As Frost said, I try to ride out the melt of the poem. I think that our process or practice should serve our writing and can be adjusted to do so. One of our jobs as writers is to get out of the way of writing the poem. As long as we’re vigilantly heading towards what the ecosystem of the poem needs and not towards what we think it needs, then our practice is serving us. The thing I’ve learned is that it’s really great to challenge or adjust a familiar way I do things so that I feel refortified somehow, reinvigorated.

Joanne Merriam: I notice that you have multi-part poems in outskirts, something I don’t think I’d seen you do before. What led you to start writing poems in parts and what attracts you about that approach? Does it have any disadvantages?

Sue Goyette: I like multi-part poems for lots of reasons. I like the space and silence the sections imply and how that helps pace the reading of them. I like the long look and attention they give to a theme or subject. The vista of them. The opportunity they offer to play, to improvise between sections. The subterranean root systems of them. I like the expansion of them. They’re just a longer walk with someone or something interesting. I’m not sure it’s a disadvantage but the thing I’ve had to be careful of is not pulling the poem out for so long it loses its shape or becomes diluted, pale. You’ve got to know when to stop or when an idea can’t maintain that kind of marathon pace or long look. Some poems resist that kind of expansion and, really, each poem demands its own form.

Joanne Merriam: How has writing fiction informed your poetry (if it has)? Sue Goyette: I wrote fiction like I would a poem. I learned to trust the headlight of its narrative path. Any exercise that flexes that trust, that intuition, informs my writing. Writing fiction also helped me develop a keen ear for silence, for what’s not being said that is so important in writing poems. A proper respect for the space between and around the poem as well as in the actual poem is so necessary if participation between the reader and the work is going to have any kind of lasting meaning.

Check out more poetry-related interviews, reviews and guest posts at Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour.

Photo taken by Peg Duthie, August 2009, “at my parents’ interment. Text written after finally tossing out the brush in question, October 2011.”

Check out more poetry-related interviews, reviews and guest posts at Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour.

Joanne Merriam: What is your writing process?

Jeff Hardin: I keep a notebook with me at all times and try to write in it every day. In my teaching of creative writing, I stress what I call the calisthenics of writing. I do several exercises that I think, as habits, improve how the mind works in regards to crafting poems. In the same way that a baseball player, for instance, practices laying down a bunt so that, when a bunt is needed in a game, he will be prepared to do so, I think that certain practices, certain exercises, prepare the mind for what a poem might need at any given moment. Some days I write lists: objects, memories, titles, questions, opening lines, aphorisms, and similes. I tell my students (and myself) that we are writing for now, and we are writing for later. That’s my process: now and later. Sometime now for later. If I have five or ten minutes waiting on a class, I will sit and write as many titles as I can generate in that time frame. I’m not committing to any of them yet. I’m just imagining what might be possible. Or I place myself somewhere (at a campsite where I grew up, for instance) and list every object there. Why? Doing so teaches me to think concretely, to imagine specifically, to ground myself in details. Other times, I will sit for twenty minutes and write as many questions as I can think of. Think of how many great questions exist in poems: “What did I know, what did I know/Of love’s austere and lonely offices?” Think of Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions. Think of how many poems you love that begin with a question or that turn on a question. Questions can be central to poems, and if I’m writing my own poems, I want to have the history of questions at my fingertips, all of my own and everyone else’s. Sometimes items from these lists make their way into my poems, but more importantly I think they exercise the mind to think in these ways. Yes, everything begins in my journal. Sometimes I even write whole poems in there. These are sometimes typed up on one of the three manual typewriters I still use, with revisions occurring during the process. Eventually, some of these poems are typed again on my computer, inevitably revised again.

Writing, of course, is really about revision, about examining possibilities and coming to an ever sharper understanding of how everything in the space of a text works to shape or illuminate the text. One draft turns into another draft and into another draft until I have the draft I can take no farther. Even my published poems are no more than drafts because they are just versions of what might have been, incomplete and partial—they are glimpses of glimpses. I doubt my process is any different than it has been for any other writer. I love the process, though. I’m still smitten with sitting down each day with a sense of expectation, of a word leading to a phrase leading to line break leading to a thought I’ve never had before. A poem feels like some kind of unexplainable wholeness set down into my life. My poems may never gather a wide audience, even among poets, but I am not the same person I used to be because of my daily encounter with language.

Joanne Merriam: Have you had to sacrifice anything in the rest of your life to write poetry?

Jeff Hardin: I like to think that I’ve sacrificed many useless selves, many parts of who I once was, in order to write poems. The part of me that thinks that things don’t matter, that events in my life don’t add up or lead to a larger design, I’ve sacrificed in order to write some poems. The part of me that leans in the direction of despair and futility, in the direction of arrogance and envy, in the direction of what I’m sure I know instead of what I don’t know, can’t know, may never know; I’ve sacrificed in order to write some poems.

I used to sacrifice sleep in order to write. In my twenties and thirties, I often stayed up very late, especially if I had not written anything that day. I’ve always been a determined and driven person. I refuse to give up my quiet time. I decided a long time ago that there must be a lot of power in that quiet space for there to be an all-out onslaught against it in our culture. More and more, we are able to spend our days totally submerged in noise and gadgetry, in email and Facebook, in one more episode of Criminal Minds. I just keep remembering that there is a word for “a clearing space in the middle of being.” I’m trying to make that space my permanent address.

Joanne Merriam: Southern writers often seem to get lumped together into a single category, as though geography were all that’s needed to understand their work. Can you comment on what it means to you to be located in Tennessee, both for your own work, and for its reception outside the region?

Jeff Hardin: Like anyone else, I am a product of my upbringing, and of course I had no say in this placement. I was born into my specific circumstances, into my place and age, and I have been shaped by my environment. My childhood was spent mostly in the woods, near creeks and rivers, near fields and front porches and old people with minds that reached back into the previous century. I knew people who worked menial jobs, who lost fingers in mill accidents, who never had enough money, who drank and raised hell and sang hymns and shot guns, and who seemed bent near the earth under the weight of their lives. I think, even as a child, I knew I was both part of, and separate from, the people I loved. There was just simply something else going on inside my mind unrelated to my geography, and I could not explain these thoughts to anyone. Resonate moments in poems, stories, movies, and songs seemed to point me toward another existence. They had everything to do with some “truth” outside of my experience, outside of my geography. When I was sixteen, I used to go into Wal-Mart and find the same album, The Unforgettable Fire by U2, and read the lyrics on the back cover. The song was “A Sort of Homecoming”:

And you know it’s time to go
Through the sleet and driving snow
Across the fields of mourning,
Lights in the distance.
And you hunger for the time,
Time to heal, desire, time,
And your earth moves beneath
Your own dream landscape.

I used to stand there and read those words like they were another one of the Psalms. I realize now those words were like poetry to me. Later in life, in graduate school in 1990, I used to read and reread the passage on the back cover of Czeslaw Milosz’s Collected Poems: “To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.” I may be southern by birth, but like so many other writers in the south, my influences are far-ranging, from Milosz and Szymborska to Transtromer and Neruda. I’m as influenced by Dave Smith’s Cuba Night as I am by Basho and Issa, by Merwin and Heaney, by Simic, Bly, Grennan, Hirshfield, Valentine, Saramago, Stafford and countless others.

I have no allegiance to a southern tradition per se. I have an allegiance to what Saramago’s philosophical sentences produce in me when I read them aloud. I have an allegiance to the meditative mind of Charles Wright sitting in his backyard in Virginia or to the evocations of failed towns in Richard Hugo’s northwest or to the empathetic sensibility of James Wright looking at his beautiful Ohio. I have an allegiance to the space that opens up in me when I read Stafford’s “Thinking for Berky” or “Serving with Gideon.” I love the novels and stories of Lewis Nordan and the southern landscapes and characters that inhabit my life now because of his words, but I’m just as enamored with the poems of Albert Goldbarth, whose mind sometimes makes me want to shake my head with wonder and disbelief. The ending refrain of Coldplay’s “Politik” exerts as much pressure on my work as do certain passages in Flannery O’Connor. U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” is a kind of Acts 17:28 (“For in Him we live and move and have our being…”) set to music for me, a kind of “Amazing Grace” amped up to fill a stadium and capture the soaring, internal feeling that sometimes overwhelms me. I guess I don’t believe in a region, except as a place the mind can inhabit as a conversation down through the centuries and across the cultures, from Odysseus to the Misfit to Thoreau to Sophocles to Milton to Ritsos to Amichai to Ghalib. My poems, for good or bad, have entered into a conversation with voices outside the south.

I don’t know any other way to approach my own poems except within the context of everything I’ve read, which does, of course, include southern writers, many of whom I find central to my life. Tennessee has produced many splendid poets, among them George Scarbrough, Bill Brown, Lisa Coffman, Katherine Smith, Danny Marion, Linda Marion, Wyatt Prunty, and Bobby Rogers, to name only a few. My friend Wilmer Mills who died in July 2011, though not originally from Tennessee, spent more than half his life here, so I claim his work too. I can’t imagine my life without his poems or his friendship, and our twenty-one year conversation creates a context through which I still perceive the world and language. Even the absence of the poems he will never write creates a context for me.

As for how my poems are received outside the region? I suppose one measure might be the number of journals that have published my poems for the past 25 years, ranging from The North American Review to Poetry Northwest to the Hudson Review to Hayden’s Ferry Review to Ploughshares to the Café Review. These journals are not in the south. My first chapbook was published by GreenTower Press (Missouri), my second chapbook by Pudding House (Ohio), and my first book by Story Line Press (Oregon). I haven’t made a study of my publication history, but I suspect my poems have appeared as often outside my region as they have within my region. I suspect most poets find this reality to be true.

Joanne Merriam: What’s some writing advice you’ve received, that works for you?

Jeff Hardin: Poet Dave Etter once wrote me a letter where he said that writing poems was closer to inchworms than to cheetahs. I think he meant that the process is slow and straightforward, that a writer builds toward a vision slowly, that a writer mustn’t be in any hurry, even that success (however one measures success) doesn’t come quickly but through diligence. I think I’ve always been drawn to that model. When I was a child, I saw the movie The Pride of the Yankees, starring Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig. What I took from the movie, or what I valued as a message in the movie—aside from Gehrig’s humility and gratitude—was this idea that through one’s indefatigable work ethic greatness was within reach. Babe Ruth might have been the better player, the more natural talent, but Gehrig put up worthy stats. He became my hero, my measure of what a man might aspire to be. His famous speech I count as an abiding advice in my life. I’ve never been too sure about my own talent, but I’ve always dug down and persisted, and the idea of being thankful, no matter what happens, has been central to my thinking.

Michael Stipe, the lead singer for R.E.M., said in an interview one time that a hit song is just the song you write that day. That idea has been important to me. I figure that if I just show up and write each day, then one of those days a “hit” poem will be there. I certainly can’t will a good poem into existence; I just have to be faithful to the process and do the work. Besides, who can tell which poem will matter to another person, much less matter to a journal or anthology editor? I’ve written probably 2000-3000 poems in the last decade. I’ve had five entirely separate manuscripts place in book competitions, not including my book Fall Sanctuary, which received the Nicholas Roerich Prize and appeared in 2005. The poems I think are “hits” sometimes take years to find acceptance. Back in 2004 I wrote an abecedarian (“How Many Lives Do You Have?”) using authors’ last names to begin each of the poem’s 26 lines. As far as I knew, no one had ever published such a poem. I thought the idea was one of the most inventive I’d ever had. The poem was rejected for five years by ten or more journals until it found a home at the Hudson Review. Was the poem a “hit”? Well, it appeared in a prominent journal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it found a reader even among the other poets in the same issue. I’ve received more feedback regarding what I consider to be “lesser” poems that appeared in so-called “lesser” journals. For that matter, I’ve received more feedback from audiences hearing poems that have never appeared in print. My point, I suppose, is that I shouldn’t be overly concerned with whether a poem is a “hit” or not. The poem just is. Once upon a time, it did not exist, but now here it is in the sound of my own voice, which sounds like a voice I don’t quite know in full. If a poem finds a readership, then I can’t really escape the fact that the poem is simply the poem I wrote one day, nothing more, nothing less. The day, though, at least for me because I wrote the poem, was definitely a “hit.” What a cool day it was. I was alive, I thought about my existence, I entered the rhythm and immensity of language, and I put a few words down on a page. Sometimes that simple fact astounds me. To quote Gehrig, “I consider myself the luckiest person on the face of the earth.”

I know this example is probably corny, but several years ago I saw the remake of the movie Sabrina, with Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond. I was struck by the moment when Harrison Ford is at the airport, finally on his way to pursue Sabrina after she has left for Paris. The woman at the airport counter asks him if this is his first time in Paris. He says, “It’s my first everything.” When I am writing, I want that feeling of experiencing language and life as if for the first time, in newness. Edmond Jabes tells us that a word has a meaning which leads to another which leads to another, which makes us finally realize that we are only at the threshold of the word. Neruda, at the end of “I Ask for Silence,” says, “Let me alone with the day./I ask leave to be born.” In the original version of the song “Mercy,” Bono repeats, “Love is come again. I’m alive again. Alive. I am alive. I’m born again and again and again and again and again…” Isn’t that a kind of advice, an aspiration, an acceptance, a celebration of who and what my poems might be, who I might be or become? I am born, and I am born again, and I am continually born again, seeing the world around me at the level of love. I am alive. Again and again.

Check out more poetry-related interviews, reviews and guest posts at Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour.

Joanne Merriam: I understand your new chapbook, Ballroom – a love story (Flutter Press), was written during NaPoWriMo last year. Can you tell us a little about how your writing process worked in such a compressed time period, versus how you would usually work?

Christine Klocek-Lim: When I began writing poetry, as most teens do, I only wrote when inspiration struck. Sometimes that meant I’d go days, months, and even years without writing a poem. That didn’t work out particularly well, as you can imagine. Sometime around 1999 I began writing more regularly, working on a poem at least once a week. Sometimes I’d work on the same poem for days or months. This was great for a while, but I still wasn’t writing enough. I’d read what I wrote and think: “This is drivel. I hate it.” A few years ago I discovered NaPoWriMo (begun by Maureen Thorson) and decided to give it a try. I posted a poem-a-day on my blog and at Poets.org (where I Admin the discussion forums). At first I found it overwhelming. I wrote a lot of truly bad poems, but I kept going. The more I wrote, the more my creativity seemed to blossom. I think pressure and daily practice exercises the mind. Instead of exhausting myself, I got better and better at dipping my psyche into the zone, the flow, whatever you want to call it when an artist finds that perfect balance between thought and dreaming.

These days I don’t write poetry any other time of the year except in April. This year I’m planning on writing the poems that will be part of a new book, the sequel to The Quantum Archives. That collection of poems (written during NaPoWriMo 2009) was a semi-finalist in the Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook competition which I later expanded into a sci-fi novel. I’d originally planned on writing a poetic memoir this year, but I changed my mind late one night last week. I couldn’t sleep and my brain kept turning over ideas about the daughter of my main character from The Quantum Archives. I couldn’t get her out of my head. I wrote an outline in the middle of the night on my iPhone. I have to tell her story.

Poems that I’ve written during various NaPoWriMo’s have grown into several collections: my Dark Matter full-length poetry manuscript (poems from this won the Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in Poetry 2009), The book of small treasures (Seven Kitchens Press), Cloud Studies: a sonnet sequence (Whale Sound Audio Chapbooks), and of course, Ballroom – a love story (Flutter Press). I adore NaPoWriMo!

Joanne Merriam: Are your poetry and your dancing connected in any way? Christine Klocek-Lim: Nope. My husband and I started dancing in 2008. We thought it would be fun, which it was but it was also physically exhausting. It was difficult. Demanding. We were hooked. Now we dance at least three times a week, sometimes more. Ballroom dance has reinforced what I know about art: it requires practice, a lot of it. I’ll never be a professional dancer. I might never be particularly good at it, simply because dancing three or four hours a week just isn’t enough time to master it. Writing is the same way. I write at least three to four hours five or so days out of every week, on average, and sometimes more. I’m willing to put that time in and hopefully someday I will write something brilliant.

Joanne Merriam: Do you think writing poetry helps you to understand more about yourself and the world, or is advancing as a poet more about learning how to communicate the things you already know? Christine Klocek-Lim: I honestly never thought about poetry as therapy. I write because I love to play with words. I write because I’m interested in expressing an emotion that draws a reader inside the world I’ve created. I don’t think I’ve learned anything about myself or the world through the act of writing a poem. However, what I have learned in my life over the years has taught me a lot about people, work, suffering, joy, etc. I struggle to communicate those things in my work. For me, advancing as a poet definitely means learning to communicate the things I already know.

Joanne Merriam: What’s some writing advice you’ve received, that works for you? Christine Klocek-Lim: I went to Carnegie Mellon as an undergraduate in their writing program which meant I attended a lot of workshops. I was exposed to poetry readings. I’ve also read a ton of books over the years about writing. I loved Ted Kooser’s book, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, because he was the first person who explained what it means to communicate to a reader. The idea that you can’t be too radical or the reader will be pushed out of the poem’s world was illuminating. However, the most recent piece of advice I’ve heard that I find useful is what Ira Glass had to say on storytelling. He explained that when you first begin creating, your taste is great but your work is not. No one who is just starting out in an art can create something brilliant, unless it’s by accident. The only way to bring your work up to the level of your taste is to just keep going. Eventually you’ll get there. Just keep going is my mantra. Along with “I’m not dead yet” (i.e., I still have time to keep writing, to try again and again). Rejections letters and terrible reviews suck but I just keep going. My writing will get better. I can picture myself at age ninety still saying, I’m not dead yet!

Check out more poetry-related interviews, reviews and guest posts at Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour.