In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: J. D. Debris
In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: J. D. Debris
Your poem, “Song of Solomon” in Volume 26, brings to life vivid images. What sparked the creation of this piece?
Appreciate that comment. The poem takes its title from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, as well as her novel’s biblical namesake, both of which did pretty well for themselves in terms of character and story. That freed me up to write something fully lyric—to not stress over narrative and go all in for the incantatory. So, it wasn’t so much about bringing images to life as it was singing them to life. Just trusting the logic of The Song—that mythic, inexplicable, titular thing—even as I put it on the examining table and dissected it.
The poem is in couplets, and many of the lines land on a word or phrase that only gets completed with the next line, so the reader switches images in the middle. What is your process when crafting a piece like this—how do you find the breaks? Do those cliffhangers come as you write, or are they edited in later?
Yeah, you’re onto it, couplets and cliffhangers: the enjambment is a direct result of the form. You could probably reverse-engineer those line breaks, but that’s—no shade—a more free-verse way of thinking, whereas I’m constantly, as a half-musician, framing my thinking via form.
Since I gravitate toward simple forms—in this case, AA BB rhyming couplets—pushing against the constraints of such forms is a must. The form of this poem is as predictable as it gets—you know exactly where the rhymes are going to hit, and, like Derek Walcott said about the ocean, its meter never changes—so the challenge is decalcifying the couplets, decentering them, imbuing them with a little bit of the shimmer, the weirdness, of being alive.
With enjambment, you’re embodying astonishment in the text. That’s what, in poetry as in fiction, suspense does, or should aim to do: to put into words (and into the spaces between the words) a moment-to-moment uncertainty. That way, we might capture a fraction, a flash, of consciousness, and what it feels like to have it.
What themes do you find that you return to in your work?
Bravery and cowardice, certainty and doubt.
You are also a musician. What was your instrument of choice? How does your knowledge of music influence your poetry, and vice versa?
Years ago, Yusef Komunyakaa asked me, Have you ever tried singing your poems? That question clicked on a light for me, though it took me a while to figure out. But when I heard Arthur Flowers read his work to the hypnotic beat of the Array Mbira, that gave me a model to emulate. I basically owe my whole performance style to Arthur Flowers.
Now, when I perform, I cross poetry and live instrumentation, accompanying myself on guitar and alternating between speaking and singing. Since my stuff is jazzy and adaptable, I love to bring other musicians into the mix whenever possible.
To be honest, I’ve heard some cornball shit that fits the above description. So I just do my best to make it sound smooth, and not fussy or dusty whatsoever, and to keep the faith that the role of the griot, or the lyric poet (i.e. poet with a lyre), or however you want to refer to a poet shameless enough to think he can sing, is as relevant as ever.
What stories or texts inspire you? What authors helped shape the writer you are today?
Two formative experiences from my teens. One: my younger sister (the best reader I know) handing me her copy of Yusef Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular and telling me You Need To Read This Right Now. And two: stumbling on Roberto Bolaño’s The Romantic Dogs in the public library.
One of the many upsides of reading Komunyakaa and Bolaño young was that, through their allusions and bibliomanias, I wound up with whole constellations of writers and artists to check out. A truant, angry, autodidactic, mutt-ass misfit couldn’t have asked for a better syllabus. Through those two books, I found my way to Vallejo, Césaire, Cortázar, and Mingus.
Now, if you’ll allow me a brief indulgence in dorkiness, I’d like to shine a light on some other writers slotting (roughly) into my parents’ generation, some—but not all—of the literary aunts and uncles who’ve been formative to me, whom I hope to do right by:
John Edgar Wideman, Jay Wright, Lyonel Trouillot, Marcia Douglas, Marcial Gala, Derek Walcott, Kathleen Collins, George Elliot Clarke, Ai, Percival Everett, Adonis, Lynda Hull, Dambudzo Marechera, Franketiénne, Cornelius Eady, Larry Levis, Oscar Hijuelos, Ni Kuang, Gil Scott-Heron, Joy Harjo, Patrick Chamoiseau.
You can divide every generation of young writers into two camps: those who want to burn down everything their parents’ generation did (always easier—and faster—to burn books than it is to read them) and those who want to build on it. I’m old at heart—not in the sentimental way, in the arteriosclerotic way—and as such, I’m ten toes in the latter camp.
What writing or projects are you working on now?
Novels, ya heard? Voice-driven shit. Trying to smuggle poetry into fiction the way many of my heroes have. That, plus getting back into the mic booth ASAP.
J. D. Debris is the author of The Scorpion’s Question Mark (Autumn House Press, 2023) winner of the 2022 Donald Justice Prize. His work has received fellowships and awards from New York University, DISQUIET, Narrative, and Ploughshares.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Robert Grunst
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Robert Grunst
There’s a beautiful peace in your poem “Blue Aster Seeds” that draws the reader into this moment of watching seeds whirl. I love how it takes a moment—a breath of air and seeds—and creates an entire world. Where did this poem start? What was the process in creating this piece?
The poem began in a moment’s disorientation. Walking along a path near Lilydale’s Pickerel Lake, I found myself beset by a swarm of gnats and responded with the normal tactlessness—flaying to wave the gnats off. The gnats did not respond like gnats though; then, I noticed the blue aster stalks either side of the way and a revelatory puff of wind disclosed the truth of the matter. Cause and effect. Aster umbels/seeds spewed off the dried-out flower heads: that brief moment of confusion; that realization. The light was right: reminiscent, perhaps, of one of Wordsworth’s spots of time.
The poem went through a couple dozen revisions. At least. Maybe every poem is a path, and some paths meander, disappear, turn up again, meander further, and end up where you never could have imagined, or where only transactions between the poet and the motive figures and sounds of the poem lead. And if the end isn’t a surprise—both for the reader and the writer—then the poem is not a poem: not quite or not by a long shot.
This poem has a warm feeling, as if the narrator is taking the speaker by the arm and showing them another world. Where did this persona come from? What was the inspiration for melding the seeds’ flight with galaxies?
I’m interested in your allusion to ‘this persona,’ as for many years I have written with something of a practiced aversion to the use of the first person pronoun in my work. This has to do with a penchant for elusiveness maybe, while I frequently find myself cringing, reading poems which strike me as so self-occupied—performative as to trip the panic / flight alarm. I love Walt Whitman’s poetry, his spider, for instance; though, Emily Dickinson’s ‘I’m nobody! Who are you?’ pairs better with my natural inclinations. Take away the ‘I’, still, there is an ‘I’. There’s the language. The music. The measures. The poem comes through me then. Before me. I don’t want to get in the poem’s way. But provide ways for the poem to be.
As for the seeds’ flights and galaxies, my rough comprehension of chaos theory and Lorenz’s butterfly effect underlay whatever inspiration there was: everything is integrally connected. This ought to be a perfectly familiar and well-accepted matter by now, but too much evidence suggests otherwise.
I’m reminded of Suzanne Simard’s The Mother Tree. Simard’s early findings in the realm of old forest ecology were systematically poo-pooed by forestry science insiders, while the forestry industry was horrified by the implications of her work. Simard discovered astonishing relationships between old forest microbial communities, and fungi, and Douglas firs; you take it from there. There are galaxies of galaxies, and if we don’t pay attention to the complexities, the interrelationships, our lives are akin to laminated particle board. No warm feeling in that product.
What made you evoke gnats at the beginning of the poem?
The gnats were gnats at first. Then they transformed themselves into aster umbels, aster seeds. Ovid, you know.
There’s the historic meaning of flowers. Do you ever think about symbolism when writing pieces like this?
Symbolism. Gertrude Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose”? “The Ramount of the Rose.” On and on go the roses. Lilacs. And daffodils. Robert Herrick; Wordsworth; Natasha Trethewey. I used to tell creative writing students that you cannot use the word apple in a poem (or in a story or essay) without some remnant harkening to the Genesis apple. Pomme. Manzana. Whatever apple is in Finnish. Words are legacies. Words are loaded.
From the Greek through Latin aster = star of course. So charting the path from aster seeds parachuting beneath their umbels to aural and etymological connections is not too difficult.
I think of symbolism, yes; failure to comes at one’s peril. An ill-appraised or accidental ‘symbol’ can morph into a load unsuited for any umbel to hoist aloft.
What draws you to write about nature? What themes do you find yourself returning to in your work?
Nature’s where we live. Nature’s what we are. Where we are and how we live in the natural settings we have been so lucky to be inheritors, and should be respectful stewards of, have been sustaining occupations of my poems and essays for many years. Years ago I worked for a few seasons as a commercial fisherman on Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. There was a day on Lake Michigan, pulling chub nets aboard the Shirley B. after a lot of heavy current. The current had rolled lots of bottom mud / clay into the lead line twine. The lifting deck was alive, that soup squirming gyrating curlicuing—worms and tiny shrimp-like forms and spinets—not tiny pianos but almost microscopic steps up from amoebas. Deepwater particles of energy. There were sticklebacks. There were what the boat skipper, Alex, called cockanannwii. There were lake chubs, bloaters, the target species. There was the same kind of wild communal intricacy as is figured in The Mother Tree. Everything’s connected. Take away the spinets, the whole system implodes. The galaxy goes dark.
Which authors inspire or influence your writing? What are some of your favorite texts or books?
There’s not enough space for this one. But John Clare; Olav Hauge; Rae Armantrout; Gary Snyder; Jane Hirshfield; Richard Powers; Barry Lopez; Elizabeth Bishop; Diane Seuss; David Baker; Jorie Graham; Tomas Transtromer come readily to mind. And so many others. I try to reread Melville’s Moby Dick or, The White Whale every couple of years, partly for the irreverent—wild jokes and for the dignities and indignities vested in Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck, and Pip. I reread Stevenson’s Treasure Island too for the fantasy—to revisit what it was like to have been thirteen and to believe in a character like Jim Hawkins. Then there’s Jussi Adler-Olsen for odd visits to Denmark. I have many poet friends going back to Iowa City days and have taken much inspiration from their work. To each of them I own a deep debt of gratitude.
You’ve written the books, The Smallest Bird in North America and Blue Orange. What are you working on now?
‘Blue Aster Seeds” is included in a manuscript currently flying under the title, ‘Cries of Kittiwakes,’ circulating now among the several contests. Meanwhile I am at work building fifty chickadee houses for research slated to begin this autumn in collaboration with undergraduate and graduate Biology students at Indiana State University: to be directed by my daughters. I am also minding two apple trees; two apricot trees; and Edelweiss and Swenson Red grape vines.
And new poems. New essays. More essential is the business of awakening to each morning. I strike the singing bowl from Rishikesh. Cross the Ganga on the swinging bridge, Lakshman Jhula, and give free way to the cow making her way from the opposite side.
Robert Grunst currently resides in Nieul-sur-Mer, France, and is a professor emeritus of English at St. Catherine University. His two books of poems are The Smallest Bird in North America (New Issues Press) and Blue Orange (McGovern Prize Winner, Ashland Poetry Press). “Blue Aster Seed” is included in a manuscript titled BECOMING AS.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—DeMisty Bellinger
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—DeMisty Bellinger
Your poem, “Ode to That Turquoise Bra,” has a whimsical feel, yet also carries the gravity of honoring and thanking this piece of clothing. What inspired this poem?
Firstly, thank you for inviting me to do this interview!
It was a real bra that I had. It was probably the sexiest bra I owned as an adult, so it was a little disappointing to get rid of it. I think I wrote the first draft in a writing group, and I forget what the prompt was (something about odes), but the bra immediately came to mind.
I haven’t found a bra as sexy but useful as that one, but I refuse to go back to wires. And I no longer own anything lacy for underwear! Sigh. Looks like I have to go shopping and stop being so utilitarian.
It was a really cute bra.
Odes are quite reverential, and within honoring the bra, I also felt that this poem honored the body that the bra helped carry. Did you find that thought in your mind as you wrote?
As much as it is an ode to a bra, it is also a celebration of my own body, and what it has endured and how much it has changed. It is also an ode to other women who have carried extra weight in the form of children, and who have aged, and who have learned to be grateful for all that their bodies have allowed. So, yes, I’m trying to honor and thank my body for bringing me through so much, including bringing my twin kids into this world.
There’s a heightened language you use (“sheath,” “pristine”) that makes this poem feel grandiose—this language adds both to the gravity and comedy of the piece. What was your process for creation and revision with the language?
There is a definite nod to the antiquity of the ode. Even when it’s not serious, it is a serious poem. And the form kind of requires a formal language. I can think of many contemporary odes that employ similar language, including Ellen Bass’ “Ode to Fat,” but I think I was really thinking about Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks,” which I have always loved. It’s not so much that his diction is heightened, but he did elevate the ideal of the socks, which is what I tried to do. I wanted to take something as mundane as a bra and raise it to something worthy of glory.
Plus, it’s a little absurd to talk about a dead bra like that, and absurdity is always fun!
You are a prolific writer, and write across poetry, fiction, nonfiction. How does your work in each genre inform the others? Do you ever start a piece in one genre that transforms into another?
For that second question, yes! For instance, I tried to write a short story about Typhoid Mary, but instead of Typhoid, I wanted it to be a lovesick waitress. It wasn’t working for years, so I tried it as a poem and I loved it immediately. It didn’t need an entire story! Oftentimes, revision is rewriting it in a different genre. Maybe you’ll have an epiphany about how to revise in that original genre, or, of course, you’ll find that the topic works better in another genre. I suppose it’s all what you want from the writing, who you want it to reach. I wish I had a more definitive answer there.
As far as whether the genres inform each other, yes, they do! Firstly, I think all writing should have a rhythm, and sometimes that rhythm may be aural but as I learn and grow, especially in the arenas of accessibility, I’ve learned that there are other ways to satisfy rhythm in writing, and that includes visual rhythm. And there are other ways to add musicality to both poetry and prose.
Nonfiction is difficult to me, and honestly, if I have to write an essay, I avoid it for as long as I can. Sometimes, though, the topic demands an essay or an article.
I would like to get into more hybridity, but I wouldn’t know what to do with it. The hybrid work usually stays in a notebook or in a digital file.
Do you return to certain themes in your work?
Probably too often, yes, I do. I’m always afraid that I’m going to write the same thing. Animals as escapism or animals as truth happen quite often in my writing. A student pointed out a theme of animals in my fiction, which took me by surprise; I never noticed the menagerie before! Since then, I can’t unsee the beasts.
But yes, I do have favorite themes, such as equity and class issues.
Do you have favorite novels or authors you credit with being influential in your creation process?
I think everything we read informs our writing somehow, so I never know how to answer this question. There are writers I return to time and again, and I try to consume all of their writing. These include Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Patricia Smith, Edwidge Danticat, Ha Jin, Lucille Clifton, Susan Orlean, Gish Jen, Colson Whitehead, Camille T. Dungy, and Stephen King, among many others. Lately, my fun-reads writer is Grady Hendrix. Great horror humor writer and also a good thinker. I suggest his essay “Beloved: The Best Horror Novel the Horror Genre Has Never Claimed,” which encouraged me to read his fiction. There’s no great epiphany in it for many, but it was refreshing to see a white male horror writer include Morrison’s Beloved as a book that should be celebrated as slipstream horror. Also, since it’s written for a general audience, it’s a very accessible essay.
What are you writing now?
I just finished writing a novel (which is in submission) and my first collection of short stories, All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere, is coming out this fall with the University of Nebraska Press. As a break from longform, I am returning to my experimental roots with funky poems and flash fiction just for fun. I am reading a lot, too.
DeMisty D. Bellinger is the author of the novel New to Liberty and of the poetry collection Peculiar Heritage. Her work can be found in various journals and anthologies, in print and online. Bellinger is a creative writing professor in the middle of Massachusetts.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—A. K. Herman
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—A. K. Herman
Your story, “Love,” which appears in Volume 26 of Water~Stone, is a chapter of a longer work. What inspired this piece? Where does this chapter fall in the story? What made you choose this section to share with us?
“Love” is inspired by the generations of powerful matriarchs in my family, women from Tobago, Trinidad, Africa, India, who presided over people, places, and things. I grew up with women like this and heard stories about my grandmothers and great grandmother all my life. In “Love” I focus on rural Tobago in the post WWII period. There is a prevailing idea that people in rural settings, black and brown women, people without large sums of money are without power. Power is everywhere, even among those thought to be on the periphery. In much of my writing I show that power operates in ways people don’t expect.
I’m working on a historical novel told from three different points of view across three generations. As I write this, “Love” is the first chapter in the last section, where we visit the past, and meet Beatrice, who started it all.
What made me choose to share? I was workshopping a novel chapter and the workshop lead suggested I publish it as a novel excerpt, as it was able to stand on its own. I was also encouraged because other writers in the workshop liked the piece and were curious about my characters.
It wouldn’t have occurred to me to publish the excerpt, as the novel was in early stages. The leader of the workshop shared published novel excerpts by prominent authors and basically said—You can do this too. You’re just as good. I want to stress here the importance of having a community. I submitted the chapter excerpt with the support of a community.
There are complicated relationships in this piece—between Betty and Ann; Betty and Leo; and even between Betty and the women she works with. What draws you to write about these tense relationships?
“Love” is written from Betty’s point of view, and because of who she is—beautiful, grand, bold, superstitious, pretentious—she’ll have what many might describe as a ‘tense” relationship with many people. On the other hand, from Betty’s point of view, these relationships are not tense at all. This is how she is in the world. It’s natural, normal for her to interact with the other washerwomen this way. Except for a few fleeting moments, Betty is hardly concerned about how her actions affect others.
In most societies, women especially, are raised to be likable. This cultural value is so powerful that in writing workshops, other writers, no matter their demographic, have an immediate, viscerally negative response to female characters who don’t seek to be liked. This makes me want to laugh and cry. I laugh as not even writers, those charged with holding a mirror up our society so we may see it more clearly, can escape biased cultural values. I cry for the same reason.
I write about these kinds of relationships because I’ve witnessed really complex relationships between people, where the truth is stranger than any fiction I’ve read. I think that most relationships are complex, once you get beyond the surface. Two people love each other, but there is a seed of jealousy growing between them. Two people loathe each other, yet have much in common. There is inherent conflict in complexity, necessary for good storytelling.
Your characters are distinct and true to themselves. What is your goal when crafting and developing characters? What made you choose first person point of view over third?
Since I was writing a novel, I created a character profile for Betty, so I could begin to understand her. I did the usual stuff about her appearance, age, what she does for a living, key relationships etc. I also added details about her beliefs and her negative traits, as this is the source of conflict, the driving force of narrative. Notice that I said ‘begin to understand,’ because I understand characters as I write the story. For most of my short stories there is no advance character profile. It is through writing that I get to understand a character, so much so, that sometimes they surprise me.
I chose first person because I want to get to the core of the characters, see them in the raw. My characters (spoiler) have tons of secrets and do some outrageous stuff—adultery, lies, threatening to put curses on others—to get what they want, so they must entrust the reader with their innermost thoughts, without judgment. First person was also important as I sought to understand what motivates my characters to do the things they do. Third person was too distant from the characters’ inner selves. In “Love,” the challenge was to write in first person and craft a tale, where the reader can imagine, with some certainty, the world beyond the main character’s point of view. Betty gives her version of events, but there are hints in conversation, setting, pauses, that suggest the world isn’t quite as Betty sees it.
This story is set in 1926. How much research went into this piece?
I collect oral histories from my family about how people lived in the recent and distant past, especially the way people spoke, dressed, cooked, and religious and medicinal practices. At the Heritage Library in Scarborough, Tobago, I researched maps, word use, and cultural practices in Tobago. Thanks to the librarians there, who were knowledgeable, kind and thoughtful. I have visited the National Archives in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, to read newspapers from the early 20th century to get a feel for everyday life. Also a great experience with the amazing team there. I’m reading books on Tobago, watching videos on linguistics and ethnomusicology. Lots of research. The real work was knowing tons of details then becoming Betty, a woman living in 1926, who knows and understands the world she’s in but doesn’t need to explain it.
You’ve been published in Shenandoah, Doek!, and other magazines. What have been some challenges—whether exciting or difficult—that you have had while working on a novel, and how does that differ from writing shorter stories?
There are characters or events that occur in the novel’s world that don’t form part of the main story. It’s exciting to explore these characters or parallel stories from the novel through short stories or poetry. These literary escapades, as I call them, keep me prickly with anticipation to understand new characters, new settings. They’re short enough for me to explore an idea or feeling. But, they can be distracting too. I sometimes write short stories from various points of view to explore voice and polish and polish before I think it’s ready for other eyes. I can’t do this with a novel, so it’s a change in writing practice for me. My friend and fellow writer, Mubanga Kalimamukwento, who has published novels and poetry collections, said something that has helped to chasten this tendency. I wrote it on a Post-it and put it above my writing desk: The first draft is garbage. Utter garbage.
What themes do you find that you return to when you write?
Love. I believe all acts are born of love. Love of self. Love of a person. Money. Power.
Interpersonal relationships. I want to understand the nature of people and why we are the way we are to each other, to ourselves.
Spiritual and religious beliefs. How do our beliefs shape us?
Caribbean people, their beliefs and customs.
The unseen. The unheard. The unimaginable.
The periphery. There’s a singer on stage, bathed in a perfect round spotlight that shows the contours of her face and makes her dress glitter like a starry sky over a forest. I want to understand the person who aims the spotlight at the singer.
You write fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. How does writing in one genre inform the others?
I like telling stories, so no matter what I write, there’s narrative there. My poems are often prose poems or some…work that I can’t really name. Imagery in my prose is vivid, strong, like poetry. I describe my imagery as “indigenous” to the characters and the setting in a story or poem. This makes for interesting, inventive imagery that isn’t created by me, but by the story I’m telling. At times, I’m surprised by the imagery and literally end up having to agree with it after it’s written, as in… “yeah, I could see how character X might describe a sunset that way.”
What authors inspire you? What texts do you return to?
How much space do we have? Lol!
I’ve read, re-read, and I’m inspired by V. S. Naipaul, Jeet Thayil, Chinua Achebe, Homer (The Odyssey), Octavia Butler, Derek Walcott, Anthony Doerr, Ursula Le Guin, I Ching, J. R. R. Tolkein, Ryszard Kapuściński, Zadie Smith, The Bible. Salman Rushdie, and more. All for different reasons. The prose. Format. Style. Characters. World building. Imagery. Audacity.
I admire Narcopolis, a novel written by poet, Jeet Thayil. Anything written by Ryszard Kapuściński. The spareness, you know. Things Fall Apart still commands my attention. Walcott’s imagery is indigenous to the Caribbean and I admire it greatly. I own most of his collections and read them when I’m unable to write. The Silmarillion is excellent world building.
This is what I’m feeling right now. At this time and place. Ask me next month and the list will likely be different.
What else are you working on now?
I’m working on a group of poems, based on the world of my novel (it’s an illness with no cure, apparently). I am also in the midst of the novel, from which “Love” is a chapter. I’m making progress ‘cause the draft is quite rubbish. Ha!
A. K. HERMAN is a Caribbean poet and fiction writer, born in Scarborough, Tobago. She has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and her writing has appeared in Doek! Literary Journal, Lolwe, The Water~Stone Review, Shenandoah Literary Journal, and others. A. K.’s debut story collection, The Believers: Stories, will be published in Fall 2024. A. K. lives in New York.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Dan Albergotti
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Dan Albergotti
Your poem, “On the Third Stanza of a Poem by F. S. Key,” blends today’s history of the last election with the beginning of our country. What caused you to weave these two events together? What brought Key’s song to the forefront of your mind?
I can’t recall exactly when it was, but I remember being surprised to learn that Francis Scott Key’s poem/song “The Defense of Fort M’Henry” was written not at the very beginning of the United States, but about three decades into the nation’s history, during the War of 1812. He composed it to the tune of a popular drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” and now we sing the first stanza of his poem to that tune and call it “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I think it’s really poignant that our national anthem presents not an assertion of confidence or certainty, but a timid question about the country’s existence. “Tell me—does that flag still wave?” it asks. “Or have we been defeated?” That was an immediately urgent question for Key; he wrote the poem less than a month after the British had sacked Washington, burning the President’s home and the Capitol. But the viability of this audacious American experiment in democracy is always tenuous, so the question is always relevant.
About 24 years after Key wrote his poem, a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in which he asserted that no foreign power could ever destroy America, but that it could be destroyed by forces from within—forces that do not respect its laws, courts, and institutions. “As a nation of freemen,” said Lincoln, “we must live through all time or die by suicide.” I thought about all of this on January 6, 2021.
Ever since I first learned of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar,” I’ve been a bit obsessed with long-range perspective. In that piece, Sagan scales everything we know of time—via astronomy, geology, etc.—down to a single calendar year. On that scale, the Big Bang occurs at the first second of January 1 and the birth of Jesus of Nazareth occurs at 12:59:56pm on December 31. So from a cosmic perspective all of what we call “A.D.” has taken up only the last four seconds of a year. (That will teach you some humility!) “Ancient history” begins to feel not so ancient. Sometimes it feels nearly contemporaneous. While to some it might feel like a stretch to think of Francis Scott Key in relation to January 6 and our fractious political present, to me it feels perfectly natural. “Do we still exist, or are we dying by suicide?”
We sing the first stanza of Key’s poem at sporting events and graduations, and the words feel innocuously patriotic. But the final three stanzas have some fairly gruesome stuff in them. That’s especially true of stanza three. Early in 2021, I wrote a series of three poems, one on each of these final stanzas. My formal challenge for each poem was to include as many words from Key’s stanza as I could. In addition to the phrases that I explicitly quote in this poem published in Water~Stone Review, I also lift the following words from Key’s third stanza: band, swore, havoc, war, battle, country, confusion, blood, wash, footsteps, foul, pollution, home.
This all feels like a too-long answer to your question. Apologies for rambling!
This brief scene with the porter and the children leaves a lasting impression. What made you choose this scene particularly to include? What scenes were you thinking of adding that you left out?
Well, that scene is something that I actually witnessed. I was in Washington in early 2022, and I saw this happen outside the hotel where I was staying. A bus pulled up, and a group of children who all appeared to be between the ages of 8 and 12—all of them wearing red “Trump 2024” hats and all of them, of course, lily white—exited and filed straight into the hotel, guided by their parents. An older African-American man held the door open for them. I couldn’t shake that scene from my mind. So when you say that the scene in the poem “leaves a lasting impression,” it makes me feel like I perhaps succeeded in conveying the power of the moment from life to page. I hope so.
But to your question of why I “chose” to include it in the poem, I have to say that when I’m writing I’m never very conscious of making deliberate decisions about what to include and what to leave out. It’s a much more intuitive process than that. I remember an interview with a poet—it may have been Jack Gilbert—who said “I want to think the way poetry thinks” (or something to that effect). That’s what I want too. To let the poem lead me to associations and connections, and not to be in complete control of where things go. Robert Frost says, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” It’s hard to surprise yourself if you don’t relinquish a good bit of control in the process.
You address the reader directly from the sixth stanza to the end. What was the driving force to include us in that manner?
I honestly don’t know. Maybe it comes from an urge to connect and find camaraderie with others in our shared predicament. Clearly the speaker is specifically reaching out to other Americans, those who know the first stanza of Key’s poem “by heart.” As if to say, “Hey, you can see this too, right? You and I are in the same boat here, facing something really dire.”
Maybe it’s equally an urge to confront fellow Americans who don’t think January 6 was a significant crisis, to shake complacent people by the shoulders in our fraught political moment. Robert Frost (again!) says that poetry is “a way of taking life by the throat.” And sometimes poems can take the reader by the throat and say, “Listen! This is important!”
Of course, believing that a poem could ever shake anyone out of complacency might be foolish. But recognizing that does little to quell the urge. Especially these days.
You utilize internal rhyme within this piece—”war,” “door,” “floor.” When you craft poetry, what sort of intentionality do you find yourself using with rhyme? When do you strive to leave it in, and do you ever work to remove it?
I’m sure I wasn’t deliberately thinking about incorporating rhyme in this poem. But that doesn’t mean I’m not pleased to find it there. Such occasional internal rhymes in a free verse poem are often evidence that the poet’s ear was alive to the sonic pleasures and possibilities of language. The only reason I’d ever revise to remove rhymes is if upon reading the poem aloud I thought they created an awkward sound or suggested a too-self-conscious “poetic flourish” (that is, as if the poet was reaching for rhyme for its own sake).
And, for the record, I write in both formal and free verse, so I don’t see any innate virtue in removing rhyme from a poem. I know that some people see formal verse as an outdated mode only employed by politically retrograde “traditionalists,” but I very much disagree with that view. I think there’s still a place for rhyme and meter in the 21st century.
Do you find that you often write about political topics in your writing? What other themes do you return to?
I think there’s always been a certain political strain in my work, but it seems to have become more pronounced since November of 2016 for some reason. Enough said about that.
I also think that poems are often “political” without being “about political topics.” In his book How to Read a Poem, Edward Hirsch says, “The poet wants justice. The poet wants art. In poetry there can’t be one without the other.” I’ve always loved that, how it suggests that aesthetic concerns are inextricably—even if mysteriously—linked to political ones, to the questions of what’s right and what’s wrong. Poetry demands that readers think and feel deeply, and you’ve got to believe that if we think and feel deeply we’ll advocate for the best, the most just, policies for everyone. A lot of politicians (all too many) encourage people not to think and feel deeply. Many these days encourage them not to think at all. Maybe that’s one reason politicians of a certain wing frequently vote to cut funding for the arts and for education.
Are there books or authors that inspire or delight you? What are some of your favorites? You’ve written several poetry collections, including The Boatloads (BOA Editions), Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press), Of Air and Earth (Unicorn Press). What do you focus on when creating poetry collections? What are you writing now?
There are far too many books and authors to list in response to the first part of your question. I’ll offer that John Keats is my all-time favorite poet, and Jack Gilbert is my favorite American poet. Gilbert’s The Great Fires is a touchstone for me.
I couldn’t begin to name the poets writing today who inspire and delight me. I’d give you 20 names and then be chagrined to realize I’d forgotten to mention 20 other obvious choices the day after this interview appeared. Suffice it to say that it’s a great time for American poetry. Iron sharpening iron, as the saying goes.
As to the latter part of your question, I only assemble poetry collections after the poems have been written. I never have a book-length project in mind beforehand. So I’m always just “writing poems,” trying to “honor my obsessions,” as Natasha Trethewey advises. That usually results in a body of work that can be arranged meaningfully in a book manuscript.
My third full-length collection, Candy, has just been published by LSU Press:
Thank you for your questions and your interest in my work.
Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatlads (BOA Editions, 2008) and Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), as well as the chapbooks Of Air and Earth and Circa MMXX (Unicorn Press, 2019 and 2022, respectively). His third full-length collection, Candy, is forthcoming from LSU Press in fall 2024. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Southern Review, The Best American Poetry, and Pushcart Prize, as well as other journals and anthologies. He is a professor of English at Coastal Carolina University.