In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Carla Panciera

Your poem “Smart Girls Always Have a Plan” blends math and myth in one of my favorite lines, “Math, after all, is one letter removed / from stories of the gods.” Where did this poem come from? What inspired it?

Speaking of myths, this is a bit of a long story. Sometime during my extended maternity leave from my job teaching high school English, I read an article in American Scholar Magazine about an educator who set up a poetry stand where his students wrote poems on the spot, for free. Today, we see these stands pop up at various events, but this was pre-2006. I’d never heard of anything like that and thought: Wouldn’t it be great if I could actually convince kids to do this? The idea seemed impossible. But I was fortunate to return to work in a school where arts are prioritized, and my students loved the idea. By the time I retired, over 200 students had staffed the stand at venues from literary fests to Boston’s Financial District to Whole Foods Valentine chocolate buffet (our personal favorite). As a writer, I’d never asked my students to do something I hadn’t done—until they staffed the stand. So, when I returned to writing poetry after a few years of writing prose, I decided to have people order poems from me, except I cheated in that I asked friends and acquaintances. The idea for “Smart Girls” came from a close friend and colleague who felt trapped in a difficult marriage. She also happened to be a brilliant and innovative math teacher. I considered the different ways in which she and I went about teaching problem solving in our classrooms.Then, because having to write a poem that didn’t derive from my own impulse, I did what all of these requests forced me to do: I began with research. I had never started poems this way before but this did open me up to ideas and subjects I’d never tackled. I looked up “math” and (full confession) read the Wikipedia entry where I came upon Galileo’s quote about the labyrinth, and where I also kept coming across the idea of math being connected to the arts. In fact, no one seemed to be able to say for certain whether math was art or science or both. Math, for me, had always seemed impossible, very much other. It made me feel trapped and filled me with dread and I admired anyone who could find their way through such a traitorous alphabet. But the research showed me the connections between my friend’s world and mine, and I had a place to start.

Ariadne, the daughter of the King of Crete and Theseus’ scorned lover, features heavily in this poem. What made you center her story of the labyrinth?

Once I had the idea of the labyrinth from Galileo’s quote, I felt the earth under my feet! Mythology! A subject, unlike trigonometry, that I LOVED in school! It was an easy jump to Ariadne, an early problem-solver. Theseus has no chance of defeating the minotaur if she doesn’t come up with a plan. At the time my friend requested this poem, she wrote that one of the things she wondered about was, if she did divorce her husband, would she find happiness on the other side? Ariadne’s myth has two possible endings. The more common one is that Theseus abandoned her, an unforgivable transgression. Yet, even in this version, she is rescued by Dionysus who loves her so much that, when she dies, he takes the crown he had given her and sets it among the stars. But there is another version of the myth where Theseus puts Ariadne ashore because she’s seasick and then returns to tend to the boat. When a storm erupts, he’s separated from her, and, in his heartbreak, forgets to unfurl his sails and dies. That’s another great thing about stories. They can have different endings. They have that over math. If Ariadne’s story had only had one tragic solution, I could not have offered it here. 

Can you talk about the beginning of the poem’s lament that teachers didn’t teach how they should have?

I’ll start with fourth grade where we did self-paced math. In other words, ten-year-olds sat at desks with our books open and talked with our friends. Every week or so, we’d take a chapter test and, if we didn’t pass, we took it over, our seatmates conveniently keeping their books open to a page with an example on it. Our teacher never even stood up from her desk. In sixth grade, we started the math lesson by correcting our homework according to what the teacher told us the answers were and calling our grade out loud. If you received a “C” or below, you had to re-do the assignment. Thus, I had two assignments each night and succeeded in understanding at least one mathematical truth: Most of the class was smarter than I was. But those experiences seemed borderline effective compared to trigonometry class, sophomore year in high school, which was, by far, my worst experience in academics, not only because the subject matter was so difficult, but because I had a teacher who believed (he admitted it at the end of the year) that shaming us would motivate us to work harder. He would, for example, call us up to the front of the class to sign our “deficiencies”, those hellish slips of paper (you had to really press down because of all the carbons) that alerted your family and, now, all of your classmates, that you were in danger of failing the class. One girl got excused from class to take her tests because she got so anxious, she passed out. This was 1979 when accommodations for students were unheard of. But one day, the teacher said, “Tomorrow, I have a story for you,” and, impossibly, I felt a surge of hope. The story was about Renee Descartes. I don’t remember what he said, only that it ended up being very brief and not particularly inspiring. Yet, when he promised a story, I considered it a lifeline. Something, finally, I could grasp. Obviously, this is my bias, but my math teachers never used enough words. Everything was a formula, a theorem, a symbol. They also didn’t seem to understand how some of us just could not get it. Good teaching can be defined as the ability to break complex tasks into manageable chunks. Oh, and not humiliating your students. Ironically, one of the ways in which the friend who requested this poem distinguishes herself as a math teacher is that she incorporates discussion into her class. She asks students to talk through problems. Teaching methods have come a long way since I was in high school. My former math colleagues often acknowledge some kids’ fear of their subject. Their classrooms and their approaches are much less intimidating than some of the experiences I had in school. I only wish they’d been my instructors.

What was the editing process for this poem? How did you end up with the couplets for formatting?

Here’s a little window into my (very drawn out) process. I began writing this poem in 2014. The content has remained relatively the same, but the initial form contained random lines and stanza lengths. It was messy, but I usually try to let the poem dictate what it’s going to look like on the page. Then, six years later, I turned it into couplets. I don’t remember the initial impulse, but my guess is that I wanted to neaten it and, at least on a craft level, to force myself to make some difficult choices for what material to cut. I grew up on a farm and, every spring, my dad would have to go into the same fields and clear out the rocks. It was as if they grew there. In the fall, the fields had been fertilized and planted with winter rye to protect the topsoil. Later that summer, they would produce acres of corn and alfalfa, but each spring, it was nothing but heavy, tedious work. The moving rocks part of writing poetry happens when the material is there but it needs to be picked up and moved, no matter how laborious. I will say that the poem in its original form must have, once I started playing with it, allowed for couplets. I just hadn’t seen them before. However, I’d like to think that, at play in any poem, are more subconscious impulses. There are dualities here: Male and female, tragedy and romance, math and English, numbers and words—even my friend and I. Finally, the idea of two ways towards a solution: unicursal and multicursal. Sometimes, you think you’re controlling the poem; more often the poem reminds you who’s really in charge. 

What themes do you return to in your writing?

The publisher of my first book once described my work as deeply personal. That was a couple of decades ago, but that still strikes me as true. When I’m not writing based on a request, I’m more apt to be inspired by the stages of my own life or by the natural world. I’ve always lived near the ocean. I grew up on a farm and spent my childhood roaming through woods. I love birds. I take long walks where I come upon stranded snapping turtles, flocks of turkeys, baby snakes newly hatched and struggling to cross the road—so many things to wonder about. I also write about my loved ones and, quite often, their names appear in my poems. 

Who are some of your favorite authors? Do you have texts that you return to, or that have shaped you as a writer?

I’m a prose writer who took a poetry class on the advice of a friend during my final year in college and was surprised how much I loved the genre, so my biggest inspirations for writing are actually the essayists, Joan Didion and E.B. White, especially his collection, One Man’s Meat. Their work taught me a great deal about the absolute necessity of the best details. I re-read their pieces often and am still awestruck at the lessons they impart. 

I’ve always struggled to name my favorite color, my favorite song, my favorite anything, but I do have some things that I love and return to. Poems: Robert Hass’s “The Apple Trees at Olema”; “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly; Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Collections: Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec; Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf; William Dickey’s The Rainbow Grocery (the first poetry book I read); Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude; Poets: Jane Kenyon, Stephen Dunn, David Berman, Keats, Shelley, Byron. I’m sure I’ve left hundreds of poems and poets and collections out. Another miraculous thing about poetry is how often it is possible to fall in love with a poem. Unlike novels, even short stories, it only takes readers a few seconds to find a poem that can blow them away. 

What are you currently working on?

I just sent the final edits of my third poetry manuscript to the publisher for a fall 2025 release date. (You might recognize the book’s title: One Trail of Longing, Another of String). I’m happy to say that, obviously, “Smart Girls Always Have a Plan” will appear in it. I am also awaiting notes from my agent on a novel-in-progress and will spend the bulk of my summer revising that book. 

Carla Panciera‘s latest book is Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (Loom Press). She has published two poetry collections: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera). Her short-story collection, Bewildered, received AWP’s Grace Paley Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts. A retired high school English teacher, Panciera lives in Rowley, Massachusetts.