In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Christopher Citro

Your poem, “Why Our Bathtub Sparkles,” is about a couple preparing to have guests over—but deeper than that, about connection and community in a shifting world. What inspired this poem?

Thank you for this opportunity to respond to your questions and for your reading my poem with a sense for its deeper life, for its theme of “connection and community in a shifting world.” My poem and I are purring with gratitude.

The inspiration for “Why Our Bathtub Sparkles,” was something my partner said while were we housecleaning in anticipation of her brother and his wife coming for a 4th of July visit. I’m standing in the upstairs bathroom holding a toilet brush, facing a wall, talking loudly to Sarah in the kitchen, about how having houseguests is great but we always have to do tons of cleaning ahead of time. She switched off the garbage disposal’s growl and replied, ”Well, at least it makes us clean.” That unexpected sentence stuck me, standing brush in hand above a bowl full of blue water, and I thought, Well, true, it does do that.

It might sound strange, but I don’t much care what my poems are about. I’m more interested in trying to make language dance. I never think of themes or topics ahead of time. I’m generally surprised by what comes out. It’s not usually the big deal experiences of life, things about which friends might say, “Oh, you’re probably going to write a poem about that.” It’s mostly the mundane moments and memories of everyday life. Which is fine because that’s the kind of life we all live most of the time. And more importantly, I don’t want my poems to be about experiences and emotions. Instead, I want them to be experiences in and of themselves which will cause emotions in the reader. 

This housecleaning moment came back to me a few days later as I sat down at the patio table to do my morning writing. After a diary entry about barbequing swordfish and playing ukelele, I wrote a not very good draft of a poem titled, “A Field Trip Is Many Things,” about visiting the Cleveland Natural History Museum when I was a kid. I remembered climbing on an 18-foot-long, 8-foot-tall stegosaurus statue on the front lawn. It was made of fiberglass but it was awesome. I recalled the feeling of trying to fold my legs in between the vertical plates on its back. 

Then out came the first draft of “Why Our Bathtub Sparkles.” It’s got the housecleaning in it, the recent barbequing, and memories of what usually happens whenever we have houseguests, the lovely during and the even lovelier after. Then I wrote a “to do” list for the day and the draft of a new stir fry recipe. 

I waited years before I typed up and revised the draft. I usually do that. Letting time pass between initial composition and revision helps me see the poem better.

Food is a recurring theme throughout this piece. Can you talk about how food plays such a pivotal role, and how that developed?

When I was an undergraduate, in the mid 1990s, I put together my first photocopied, saddle-stapled book of my own poetry. I called it Two Notions of Apples. For the cover image I used a 1930 photograph by Anton Stankowski of a spoon and fork tucked up in what looks like a little bed, ready for a cozy night’s sleep together.

I gave the book to a friend who read it and observed that so many of the poems were about food. This came as a complete surprise to me. I reread it and sure enough he was right. And that’s never gone away. I never decided to write about food so often. It just comes out. And without knowing it, for my first little homemade book, I’d chosen a cover image that combined what would be two of the biggest themes of my writing life so far, food and love.

Some of my later photocopied books had titles such as: Melon Balls, Drive Thru: Confessions of a Fast Food Daddy, and Bellyaches.

I’m thankful for all of my writing obsessions, because they get me actually putting pen to paper instead of staring at a blank page hoping one of my cats will come into the room and write some poems for me. I know they would do this if I asked them, but [a] they charge too much money, and [b] their poems are usually full of swears, and who needs that?

The poem ends with the exhale of relief when the guests leave, but it began with this feeling of waiting through the winter for this moment. Can you talk about how the piece is bookended?

Here in Syracuse the winters last about 20 years each, so by late April we’re chewing at the walls waiting for the ice-time to end, dreaming of how great spring will be. Sometimes it is actually great, and sometimes it’s just a soggier, muddier, slightly sunnier version of winter. Oh well. There’s a tension and release structure to experiences like this, which is probably one of the little rivers running deep inside the poem. The tension of anticipation and the release of outcome.

Bookending is a lovely way for a poem to find its form, isn’t it? Sometimes I’m conscious about doing it, but usually it happens intuitively. I suppose one could say that one of the themes of this poem is the difference between the anticipation of an event and the aftermath of that actual event. So revisiting the poem’s opening feels right for its ending. 

While I’m swirling that blue water with my toilet brush, not having the best of times, maybe resenting slightly the approaching houseguests necessitating this chore, I console myself remembering the excited lovemaking my partner and I usually enjoy once the front door clicks shut behind our beloved guests pulling out of the driveway. A reliable version of tension of release, more reliable than a Syracuse spring.

Did this poem go through different formats before you decided on this one?

Sure did. Most of my poems do. 

I write all of my drafts by hand in prose. I write too fast to think about line breaks, but I only bother writing anything in the first place if it arrives with a pulse, with a rhythm. After I get a first draft more or less completed, I type it up and try to feel for the heartbeat inside the sentences. Those determine the basic length of the lines. The actual line breaks are another matter.

“Why Our Bathtub Sparkles” has, in my idiosyncratic scansion, a five-beat line. It’s a length in which I often end up writing. Five beats are long enough for me to get a bunch of stuff going on inside the line, so they don’t feel too linear or thin. But again, I don’t choose this consciously. It’s the rhythm that the first draft spontaneously came out with, and I try to listen for it as I shape the sentences into verse.

Sometimes as I do this I discover that there is no verse rhythm inside the sentences. In that case, I allow the temporary lineated version to help me find words to trim out and other changes to make, and then I turn the piece back into a prose poem. I love prose poetry!

What themes do you find that you write about?

Readers of my poems are probably the best people to respond to this question. Just as it took me by surprise that the poems I was writing as an undergraduate were so often about food, I probably can’t see all of the themes in my poetry today. Which is fine. Which is beautiful actually. I endeavor to write my poetry from a place other than my silly old thinky brain.

Having said that, I know I often write about, well, food and love. Plus grocery shopping, gardening, science news, friendships, death, sex, bugs, cats, anxiety, the sky, my backyard, birds, the Big Bang, my parents, trees, and rivers. But mostly food and love.

What authors or books do you find you return to?

These days, I keep closest to my writing journal poetry books by Charles Wright, John Ashbery, Vievee Francis, Mary Ruefle, Arthur Sze, and C.D. Wright.

Only slightly further away on my desk, but always within arm’s reach, are James Tate, Russell Edson, Lynn Emanuel, Charles Simic, Laura Kasischke, Diane Seuss, Michael Earl Craig, Kimiko Hahn, John Berryman, Dorianne Laux, Richard Hugo, Ross Gay, T.S. Eliot, and Franz Wright. 

What are you working on currently?

That’s such a generous thing to ask. Thank you! And thank you again for this opportunity to talk.

I’m finalizing the manuscript of what I hope will be my third book of poetry, whose working title right now is The New Avenues the Only Avenues We Have. “Why Our Bathtub Sparkles” is in this manuscript.

I’m working on the remaining lyric essays for a full-length manuscript of creative nonfiction. Currently I’m knee-deep in an essay about the junky old brook that runs behind a strip mall near my house, inspired by reading Robert Macfarlane’s new book Is a River Alive? 

My friend Dustin Nightingale and I are finalizing our full-length manuscript of collaborative prose poetry, whose working title is I Am the Owner of a Small Punctured Tire. 

And on top of everything else, as always, I try to start most mornings by writing new poems in my journal, before the day begins with its many impingements, including those good old household chores. 

Christopher Citro is the author of two full-length poetry books: If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). In 2025 he had two collaborative poetry chapbooks published: The Box We Put the World in to Keep a Corner from Shattering (Aureole Press), co-written with Steve Castro and Dustin Pearson, and I Wear a Top Hat When I Go into the Forest (Ghost City Press), co-written with Dustin Nightingale. Christopher lives in sunny Syracuse, New York.