Profiles – Page 11 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 65: Matt Bell

About Matt Bell

Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found, forthcoming in Fall 2010 from Keyhole Press, as well as a novella, The Collectors, and a chapbook of short fiction, How the Broken Lead the Blind. His fiction appears or is upcoming in magazines such as Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, and Unsaid. He is also the editor of the online journal The Collagist.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “The Receiving Tower”

“The Receiving Tower” is a story set in a vague future but written in a diction and syntax meant to seem older, a stylistic pattern in my work which may have originated with this story but which has followed me throughout much of this past year’s writing. Once the language of the piece was underway—once the first sentences were written well enough that they could start pointing me toward what the next progression of sentences would look and sound like—then other supporting choices followed.

For instance, by the end of the first day’s writing I had decided on using Scottish names for all the characters, in an attempt to make the story feel foreign and estranged from our own day-to-day America (an idea I got from reading Brian Evenson, who often uses wonderfully disorienting character names, although I wouldn’t necessarily claim he picks his for the same reasons as me). The captain is the only character who remains nameless, both to distance him and to again make him seem like a character from an older tale—I wanted him and the other soldiers to feel like American civil war types, and so I set them in the harsh arctic setting, populated their days with a distant commander, a far-off war, a preoccupation with rations and coded messengers and constant accusations of treason. Even though they’re on land, trapped in their tower surrounded by expanses of ice and snow, I meant for the story to always feel confined, the far north setting framing Maon and his fellow soldiers like a band of would-be mutineers stuck aboard a ship lost at sea.

I also divided the story into small, numbered sections to add a journal-like feel to the story, even though the first person narratives within aren’t journal entries. I hoped this (very slight) confusion of forms would somehow complicate the ground truth of the narration by letting this diary-like sense make the story seem “true” even as Maon’s failing memories in the body of the story simultaneously make his telling of the story seem increasingly false.

Most of this I didn’t know about until I’d been working on this story for weeks, long after it already had a beginning, middle, and end. This was a story that started with a single image—the meteors falling through the northern lights over the tower—and absolutely nothing else. Discovering the rest of the story required dozens of iterations of key scenes and images and individual sentences, all of which required a lot of meticulous attention combined with an openness to revision and rewriting.

Notes on Reading

I get haunted by books, by novels and collections and poems and stories in magazines and snippets of fact or fiction that I pick up from web sites. For instance, a certain story will need to be read over and over, like Matthew Derby’s “The Sound Gun,” which “The Receiving Tower” certainly owes some debt to. Similarly, a certain book might need to stay close at hand, not necessarily to be read again in full but rather dipped into, as if to resample whatever it was in the book that affected me so much. I’ve reread Michael Kimball’s How Much of Us There Was and Robert Lopez’s Kamby Bolongo Mean River over and over this past year, not in a linear fashion but in a quicker, partial fashion. Last year I did the same with Evenson’s The Open Curtain, and the year before that it was Ander Monson’s essay collection Neck Deep and Other Predicaments and Charles Jensen’s chapbook of poetry The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon. I’ve read Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land every year since it came out, as I have with Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son for as long as I’ve known about it. Dennis Cooper’s Guide is so ingrained in my being that I can right now reach for my copy of it and open it directly to my favorite sentence, there on page 77, just before the halfway point of the page.

These are some of the ways in which my reading makes me the writer I am: The best words and sentences and paragraphs and even whole fictions tunnel inside me, and only the fever of making something new—of making the right something new—can get them back out. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Issue 65: Melissa Kwasny

About Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny is the author of four books of poetry: The Nine Senses (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming in early 2011), Reading Novalis in Montana, Thistle, and The Archival Birds. Sheis editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950, and co-editor, with M.L. Smoker, of the recently released I Go To the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. She is currently working on her fifth book of poems and completing a book of literary essays on the image, provisionally titled “The Imaginary Book of Cave Paintings.” She lives in western Montana.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Two Poems”

Gaston Bachelard, in his book The Poetics of Space, writes that a true image is one that, in order for it to speak to us, must engage our imagination and thus allow us to “think and dream at the same time.” It is not the image we “look at” which stays on the surface of the page or the wall or the mind, but the one that penetrates into our lives, reverberates like a voice in a cave, radiates out and into us. For two years, I have been visiting petroglyph and pictograph sites in Montana and Canada, reading the research on them conducted in the Americas and worldwide, and consulting with an archaeologist in order to better hear what these images, painted and etched on rocks and inside caves, have to say. As is evident in this selection, I am not interested in creating poems that are discursive or even narrative. Rather, I want to experiment with the image—whether encountered as visionary record on limestone; as dream figure; or as physical animal, bird, or cloud in the mountains where I live. I am trying to learn how to converse with the Image itself.

Notes on Reading

“Writing continues reading, returning action to the labors and delights of the day,” poet Donald Revell writes in his book of essays Invisible Green. Continues reading. To me, this is a marvelous way to describe the act of reading as an ongoing experience, one that doesn’t end when one closes the book or, as a writer, lifts the pen. The poem, Revell seems to be saying, is not a means to an end, an end-stop to one’s reading, or, as he says, an “obstacle to the energies,” but a moving discourse.

I used to work in a used bookstore. I became fascinated with the way people engaged with the text, most predominately in the margins. It was a private place to argue (how many times have we seen exclamation points denouncing something the author said right next to it), to underline, to check, to star, to make notes for further inquiry. In fact, it is a visual notation of the kind of responses we might make in conversation. As I got older—and tired of erasing all these marks in library books or embarrassing myself in ones I loaned—I made fainter marks and returned to them to copy them into my writing notebook, which has evolved over the years into a record of dreams, images from the day, emotional and spiritual questions, and a record of my reading. I add to it extended meditations on those quotes, which sometimes become poems, sometimes inhabit poems invisibly, like a soul of sorts, and lists of books I’ve read along lists of poems I’ve written during that time period. I copy paragraphs from letters, which are often regarding books my correspondents and I have read, and the reading continues.

Regarding underrated books, I agree with Paisley Rekdal that most poetry nowadays is underrated, given the fact that it is rarely reviewed and that many non-poets don’t have access to it, don’t know how to find what they would love. Most women’s work is underrated, or perhaps under-absorbed.

Two Poems by Melissa Kwasny

Found in Willow Springs 65 Back to Author Profile Pictograph: Bizarre Anthropomorph, Often with Interior Body Decorations Note left foot with interior spiral. Note the torso, storehouse of resins and gums. … Read more

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About Heather Brittian Bergstrom

Heather Brittain Bergstrom has won four awards from Narrative Magazine, most recently first place in the Fall 2010 Story Contest. She has also won fiction awards from The Chicago Tribune and The Atlantic Monthly, as well as other places. One of her stories was a notable in The Best American Short Stories 2010. Leslie Marmon Silko chose her story, “All Sorts of Hunger,” to win the Kore Press 2010 Short Fiction Award. She has published work in various literary journals and in the anthology Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing.

Bergstrom was born and raised in Moses Lake, Washington. As an eastern Washington native, she was thrilled to have won the Willow Springs Fiction Prize. She currently lives in the Sacramento Valley, where she is putting the finishing touches on her first novel.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Slackwater”

Many contemporary Western short stories take place in motel rooms or on the road or in rented houses—as if the West has yet to be fully settled. My story is no exception. The protagonist in “Slackwater” returns to her hometown to visit her family, but winds up checking into a motel room instead of making contact. For three days, Jill longs for a sense of connection with her parents and with the dusty sage-covered land. In a last ditch effort to belong, she has an affair with the proprietor’s son, Clayton, who dreams of becoming a farmer. As a writer, I am interested in characters who grow up in farming towns but whose families do not own land. Does landlessness, especially in the wide open West, lead to restlessness? And how does this restlessness affect family and other relationships?

My protagonist used her body to get out of her hometown at a young age. I think the West (at least the Interior West) is a more isolating place for women and girls than for men and boys—who often enjoy hunting and fishing. This is a discrepancy I address in many of my stories. Much in the same way male characters partake in the mining, damming and intense agriculture that have partially destroyed the West, my female characters destroy their bodies.

I grew up in a small farming town in eastern Washington. The lake around which my hometown was built is at the tail end of an enormous reclamation project that begins at Grand Coulee Dam. I learned to swim in this slackwater lake and cooled off in irrigation canals. While growing up, my protagonist, Jill, liked to imagine the canals she swam in were actually the Columbia River. Though she supposedly hates the constant clicking of irrigation sprinklers, the sound helps her sleep better than she has in years. In the end, she forces herself to hear the river in the canal—and, in doing so, briefly reclaims her Western heritage.

I am intrigued by how landscape (place) shapes character. My often-wandering characters no longer seek furs or gold or large parcels of land, though their desires, in some ways, are just as unattainable: sleep, warmth, food, forgiveness, family, and clarity.

On a side note: after writing “Slackwater,” the proprietor’s son, Clayton, wouldn’t leave me be. He demanded I write his story, which is called “Farm-in-a-Day” and is available to read online at Narrative Magazine, Winter 2010.

Notes on Reading

I have been deeply influenced by Western writers like Richard Ford, Ray Carver, Jean Stafford, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and William Kittredge. Just as influential were Southern writers like Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and more contemporary Southern poets like Dave Smith, C.D. Wright, Judy Jordan and Nicole Cooley. A sense of place is a key element in the work of all the above mentioned writers. Alice Munro is the god of short stories. Of her, I am in total awe. Also, Jhumpa Lahiri writes stunning short stories. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” however, is my absolute favorite short story. According to Baldwin, “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

To Kill A Mockingbird is perhaps the most brilliant contemporary novel. All that being said, the writers I read over and over are much older ones—Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Leo Tolstoy. I am a sucker for thick old-fashioned novels, and these three men write the opposite sex with such compassion and depth. And then there is George Orwell. He’s not so good with women but I absolutely love him—his essays and his novels.

A contemporary novel I have recently enjoyed: The Last Station by Jay Parini. Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood is a fantastic new story collection. And as for books on the craft of short story writing, I recommend Narrative Design by Madison Smartt Bell.

“Slackwater” by Heather Brittain Bergstrom

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile Winner of the Willow Springs Fiction Prize Jill checks in to the Pioneer Inn under a fake name, shaking her head in … Read more

About Kim Chinquee

Kim Chinquee resides in New York. Her work has appeared in Mississippi Review, South Carolina Review, Sou’wester, and many other publications. Her book, Oh Baby, was published by Ravenna Press in 2008. She also won a Pushcart Prize in 2007. Her collection, Pretty, is due out in April from White Pine Press.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “The Waves Were Low”

This piece developed out of a set of prompt words: catfish, surgery, polo shirt, Elizabethan collar, and stitches. I think only a few of the words stayed after revision. “Catfish” was the word that prompted the guts of the story, reminding me of my days in Biloxi by the water, seeing kids catching catfish. I was trying to write a piece to complement “Labor.” I chose some of the same characters from “Labor” and put them in this setting. In this piece, I wanted the narrator to want something. In the end, I intended the rocking to soothe, sort of like the maternal hint of the fisherman’s wife as “as if she was a mother to all of us.” I wanted to imply, in the title, that this was a calm time compared to others, that the waves came and went. My biggest challenge is re-working the ending, trying to hit the right note.

“Labor” by Kim Chinquee

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile I got off at four, he’d come on at three, we overlapped a bit, but he’d be there until eleven. He worked … Read more

“The Waves Were Low” by Kim Chinquee

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile My neighbor chartered out his boat, catching shark in his net. Days before, he’d taken out my husband. Now the neighbor’s boys … Read more

“Goose” by Kim Chinquee

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile He said he’d gone to the dump to find a cheap ignition. But no luck and now the baby was crying. Duck, … Read more

About Blake Butler

Blake Butler is the author of the novella EVER (Calamari Press) and the novel in stories Scorch Atlas (forthcoming 09/09/09 from Featherproof Books). He edits “the internet literature magazine blog of the future” HTMLGIANT, as well as two journals of innovative text: Lamination Colony, and concurrently with co-editor Ken Baumann, No Colony. His other writing has appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, etc. He lives in Atlanta and has recently completed, in addition to the 50 lists of 50, work on 3 novels.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Hair Loop”

These lists began at random as a way to kill time at work, launched one day when early one morning I got pissed off about a coworker telling me, “Good morning,” one of my least favorite expressions in the world, especially on the premises of a shitty desk job. I sat down then and typed out a list of 50 thoughts, mostly associative and containing leaps of logic based on my constant interruptions at that shitty desk job. Immediately after finishing that first list of 50, I committed myself to do a series of them, not knowing how long it would take me to do so, especially after getting fired during the writing of list 13, thus changing the entire nature of the creative environment.

These two lists, then, come rather deep into the project, numbers 28 (‘Hair Loop’) and 47 (‘Word Count’) respectively, at which point I was having long periods between each list, rather than how early on I would write 1 or even 2 a day. The process of challenging myself to not repeat myself in the format, and yet to continue exploring its limitations and the spaces peculiar to it that would make it not only justify its form, but make it work as new: this became more and more difficult, and yet also more and more enlivening when I felt I could bring it home. Looking back now that I have completed at least drafts of all 50 lists, I’ve begun to realize how much realizing the form really helped me learn a lot about myself as a writer, especially the use of form restraints, unusual modes of diction or speech, and ways of putting thoughts on paper that I likely never would have broached otherwise. Lists are fun.

Notes on Reading

I honestly think the most underrated book of the last 5 years is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. This might seem like a strange claim, considering how widely known and well regarded it is, but I’ve found that even among claimed Wallace fans, his masterpiece often remains avoided or placed aside (every time I hear a person say how much they love his nonfiction over his fiction, I cringe: yes, he’s a brilliant essayist, but dude…). It’s the nature of the doorstop-sized epic novel that it will be avoided by the majority, but what that books contains is multitudes far beyond even its mammoth size. Wallace gets consciousness, the movement of time, and intricately rendered real-time human thought processes and emotions more perfectlty than any other author you can name. That is a claim I’ll stand by to the end. Doesn’t hurt either that that is the book that made me want to be a writer. “Oh holy shit, this is what a book can do. My god.”

The same claim of underrated while seemingly overrated could be applied to Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Gass’s The Tunnel, two books which supremely affected my want to write and understanding of the power of text as object. I got to those early, and could not get them out, and never will.

Reading is everything to me as a writer: without the reading, the consumption of new light, you are hobbling yourself, crossed in the dark. Anyone that would go to try to write a viable text without the consciousness and understanding grown from imbibing not only your own personal old or modern masters, but the continually recreating new heads, the feed, well, good luck Jack. Reading comes first: your own babble is for later.

Two Lists by Blake Butler

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile Hair Loop My father used to tell me that he’d gone bald from holding the hair dryer too close to his head. … Read more

Issue 71: A Conversation with Blake Butler

Interview in Willow Springs 71 Works in Willow Spring 64 and 61 March 2, 2012 Samuel Ligon, Robert Lopez, Joseph Salvatore A CONVERSATION WITH BLAKE BUTLER Photo Credit: believermag.com In … Read more

About Denver Butson

Denver Butson is author of three books of poetry: triptych (The Commoner Press, 1999), Mechanical Birds (St. Andrews Press, 2000), and illegible address (Luquer Street Press, 2004). His poems have appeared in dozens of journals , anthologies, blogs, websites, and the likes, and have been praised by such figures as WS Merwin, Tomaz Salamun, Thom Gunn, Theodore Enslin, Jim Harrison, Agha Shahid Ali, Ned Rorem, and Billy Collins, and regularly appear on Writer’s Almanac on National Public Radio. He is at work on several children’s books, a cookbook with no recipes, captions for photographs that haven’t been taken yet, and a series of poems for the VIEWMASTER.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “The Drowning Ghazals”

I started writing drowning ghazals, once upon a time, before I moved from Richmond, Virginia, to New York, before I married, before the towers fell outside our kitchen window, before we had a baby, before I gave up teaching so I could do something that would potentially be more lucrative and closer to home and my daughter and allow me to write more without the conversations from the classroom and the struggles of my students stepping into the quiet of my writing studio. I was teaching a creative writing workshop to a mixed bag of writing students and non-writing students, to a self-proclaimed “manifest genius” and reincarnation of Mayakovsky and a charismatic “Jazz Poet” who clicked his fingers and pronounced every word, no matter how banal, as if it were his gift to whoever was listening, and trying to excite the rest with the possibilities of sound and form and image and not just personality and bombast.

We read poems aloud, we took them apart and imitated them; we did exercises in image and form. One such exercise was to write a ghazal with instructions in a craft book from the esteemed Persian poet Agha Shahid Ali. I explained the form, heard the groans, and went home, only to realize that I had asked my students to do something that I myself had never done. While I had been experimenting with form (after a failed attempt to shake my writing up and write traditional sonnets, I started writing 14-word poems, followed by 28-word poems, and then by 42 and 56-word poems), culminating in my first invented form, I believe, the textual marriage, in which I alternated lines from two different texts, unedited, to create a new “poem,” but I hadn’t really written in any prescribed and traditional forms.

The next morning, I decided I would write a ghazal. I read Ali’s instructions and started, but I couldn’t hold myself to the general form he outlined (I remembered the freedom of Jim Harrisons Ghazals and felt restricted) but I did like the music that was happening with the repetition. Still, I wanted to do something different with them, instead of simply writing 5 unrelated couplets, the second line of which ended with the same word as the first line of the poem—with the author’s name or signature in the last couplet. So, I decided to steal that first line from another source, giving me something to work off of. And, I decided because I was writing a lot of poems with drowning in them at the time (perhaps partly because of seeing Magritte’s painting of the woman washed up on the beach that summer in Chicago) to add the concept of, an allusion to, or the word drowning itself to the middle couplet.

It wasn’t until two or three years and dozens, possibly a hundred, drowning ghazals later (and even crafting a section of my first book, triptych) later that I realized that my ghazals were incomplete, even wrong. My wife and I went to a dinner party at Edmund White’s apartment in Chelsea with the likes of Peter Carey and other well-known literati, and I had the pleasure of meeting Agha Shahid Ali there. Edmund had given him some of my ghazals, and Shahid declared himself a “big fan” of them. However, he informed me, even though they were more faithful to the form than most American poets’ version of the ghazal, I was doing them wrong—I was leaving out the rhyme before the refrain. We walked him to Penn Station and he told me that I had to write more ghazals, that I had to do the refrain.

Shahid and my wife and I became good friends, in the couple years before Shahid died way too young, and he remained a strong supporter of my now more correct ghazals, even putting a few of them in his anthology Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English. Rather than struggle more with this new requirement, I was even more thrilled by the possibilities and music inherent in the refrain followed by the rhyme. I went back and “fixed” some of the older ones and wrote hundreds more. Now, seven or eight years later, I’m not writing as many as I once was, but I still find myself returning to them—reading a poem or a snatch of fiction and realizing that there’s an excellent first line there that could open a ghazal. There’s still the drowning in the third couplet. There’s still my name or a reference to it in the final couplet. It’s getting harder for them to feel fresh to me, but I still return, like a musician returning to the ballad long after he has stopped writing or singing ballads. Or, as Sonny Rollins says about melody, it’s a nice place to land from time to time to remind yourself (and your listeners) where you are.

Notes on Reading

Right now I’m mesmerized by Paul Harding’s Tinkers and Gary Young’s poems. After my mother died, I read a bunch of James Wright’s poems to my brother in his kitchen and was stunned by them all over again. I also regularly return to Anne Carson, Michael Ondaatje, Russell Edson, Charles Simic, and Vicente Huidobro. I can’t stop reading John Yau and Claire Malroux and Federico Garcia Lorca. I don’t read nearly as much as I used to—hard to with a child in the house—but I am reading a lot of great children’s books (and am especially in love with the simple straightforward and decidedly modern ones by Esphyr Slobodkina and Ruth Krauss and Arnold Lobel in the 1950s and 1960s and the more recent ones by Remy Charlip), and I read in my studio when I’m writing, pulling out books and reading whatever line my eye falls on.

Two Poems by Denver Butson

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile drowning ghazal first line by Vicente Huidobro I am absent but deep in this absence asleep but asleep in this absence glass … Read more

About Todd Boss

Todd Boss’s best-selling debut poetry collection, Yellowrocket (Norton, 2008), has enjoyed widespread critical acclaim. Todd’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded him the Emily Clark Balch Prize this year. His work has been syndicated on public radio’s The Splendid Table and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. His MFA is from the University of Alaska-Anchorage.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “O’Brian”

This poem started with a photo on flickr. I was randomly looking at photos one night (I never do that!) and came across a photo (it’s still there) of a sidewalk on which was written “WEREN’T YOU A KID ONCE O’BRIEN?” and without reading the caption (it actually turns out to be a protest against Ottawa’s mayor), I moved on. But that scrawl stayed in my head, and when I woke up the next morning, I started writing my own caption, which turned out to be this poem.

This rather chatty poem is very unusual for me (I tend toward shorter lines, simpler constructions, a breezier tone, and a lot fewer words!) and so it’s difficult for me to account for it entirely. It’s part of a new manuscript of poems called Overtures On An Overturned Piano, which explores the oft-forgotten music of the past. A father of two small children, I’m very taken with the notion that there’s a kid in every adult, and lately I’m exploring in my poems the various implications of that idea.

Notes on Reading

I’ll admit right now that I don’t read enough. I love to read, but I tend to do so only at night, before bed, and then I don’t get very far, so it’ll take me months to get through a novel. At that pace, I often lose momentum, which means my stack of unfinished novels is probably about twice as deep as my stack of finished ones. Poetry I read in daylight, usually in the morning to kickstart me, and then just a poem or two at a sitting.

Reading serves my process by lying very lightly on my consciousness. I value silence more than language, to be honest, because my poetry tends to take shape only in the long quiet spaces between whatever books I may be reading.

Two Poems by Todd Boss

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile Still We Like to Imagine that behind the front desk of every Quality Inn and Cracker Barrel in every hamlet in America … Read more

About John Hodgen

John Hodgen is married, with two daughters. He is Visiting Professor of English at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. He is the author of Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), winner of the 2005 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry; Bread Without Sorrow (Eastern Washington University Press, 2001), winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize; and In My Father’s House (Emporia State University Press, 1993), winner of the Bluestem Award from Emporia State University in Kansas. He is the winner of the 2005 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize from Hunger Mountain (Vermont College), and the 2005 Foley Poetry Prize from America Magazine. He also won the Chad Walsh Prize in Poetry for the best poems submitted to Beloit Poetry Journal in 2008, and author of Heaven and Earth, to be published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2010.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Witness”

“Witness” grew out of a trip to New Orleans a year after Katrina. A good place for poets. There was that extra element in everything that happened, something alive and conflicted in every gesture and smell and sound, that cultural crossroad resonating with the reverberations of deep tragedy and that need to heal and find how to move on. Each busker, preacher and street dancer seemed aware that death was still in the air, as it always is, lingering somehow. Each song was a little more needed, each drink tasted just a bit better, and each word seemed a little more desperate and necessary.

The moment was just what it was, a bright, angry college kid suddenly erupting at a preacher in the French Quarter, just snapping, unable to contain himself, seeing in the man with the bullhorn a target for all his wrath. It seemed to occur in slow motion, a boozy explosion that might have gone unseen at first, yet filled with that sudden rippling violence as his friends dove in to pull him away. It was all there, the street a tableau, a modern morality play, the French Quarter, the place we go to lose ourselves, suddenly peopled with a preacher reminding us that we shouldn’t be doing that, and a young man saying that that’s the exact reason we come there. Each espoused his own religion, each saw his own deep truth, and each stirred up emotions and visions of the world as he saw it. For a moment it was possible to see each one as Jesus.

Notes on Reading

If Katrina were coming again, I’d grab the following: everything by Shakespeare; everything by Keats, including the letters; everything by John Donne; James Agee’s A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with the unforgettable Walker Evans photographs; Willis Barnstone’s Modern European Poetry, where I discovered Lorca and Machado, and the Russians Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, and Voznesensky; Hayden Carruth’s anthology of 20th century American poets, The Voice That is Great Within Us; Bly’s edition of Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems; two books by Frank Stanford, who loved Lucinda Williams and then shot himself, You and Crib Death, both out of print now from Lost Roads Press; Anne Sexton’s The Awful Rowing Toward God (which I let someone borrow and never got back); Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us, just for “The Colonel,” which I still teach every year; Philip Larkin’s High Windows; Billy Collins’ Picnic, Lightning; anything by Chris Howell; and B. H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe. Great book.

Then I’d go back, water up to my neck, for Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories. I’d grab Huck Finn, Sound and the Fury, Waiting for Godot, Gatsby, Farewell to Arms, To the Lighthouse, my daughter’s Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw, and Hello, I Must Be Going, and the collected screenplays of Charles Bogle, a.k.a. W. C. Fields. Then I’d climb Frost’s birch tree and wait for FEMA, happy as A. Pismo Clam.

“Witness” by John Hodgen

Found in Willow Springs 64 Back to Author Profile Predictable to some degree that a man with a red and white striped stick-on umbrella hat and a portable public address system … Read more

About Dorianne Laux

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake (1990) What We Carry (1994) Smoke (2000) and Superman: The Chapbook (2008). Co-author of The Poet’s Companion, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Best American Erotic Poems Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The NEA and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Best of APR, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and many others.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “S Sgt. Metz”

I began the poem in the airport on my way to Spokane to read at Get Lit. I saw this beautiful man, not overly handsome, not sexually attractive to me, just a perfect specimen of the human figure, well-proportioned, easy in his body, a sculpture of a man. That struck me, and the fact that he was a serviceman. His uniform seemed to intensify his perfection. Neat lines, clean, precision-pressed, well-fitted. I stood behind him at the Starbucks and as soon as I got my coffee I made a beeline for the door to have a smoke. I began writing about him in the notebook I carry with me everywhere, just making a sketch, a quick portrait of him, as an artist would. When I looked up from my notebook I saw him standing there, right in front of me, waiting for a bus. I just kept writing. I showed the poem to my husband and he gave me a few suggestions for changes, which I made, and then I read the poem a few evenings later at the festival.

I often write as things happen, and I’m especially drawn to strangers. But it’s unusual to get a poem so quickly. The poem seemed to unfold before me as I wrote. As you can see from my answer to the previous question, it felt almost too easy to write. It seemed as if Metz just gave me the poem, and I guess he did. Without him, it would not have been written.

It’s not a departure, as I’ve written war-related poems before, though not often. It’s difficult to write poems on the subject without being polemical. I write them, I just don’t seem to finish them and I don’t publish many that I finish. If this one works at all, I think it’s because I felt stripped down by the moment, seeing Metz in the flesh, so strong and confident, and knowing what I know of the Vietnam war, how he might return, broken, fearful, confused—it was a powerful vision. I can’t see men in uniform without thinking of my own brother, a Vietnam vet who was a casualty of that war, my first boyfriend. I write about that era because it haunts me. I was a young girl, watching images of war flicker in black and white across the television screen, opening newspapers and magazines to naked human bodies in ditches, men knee-deep in mud, children covered in napalm, flag-draped coffins. The poem was trying to figure out who I was in the face of my history, my country’s history. The poem was as intimate as a private journal entry. Later, I put the pressure of form on it, and revised it back a bit, getting rid of any dross, but the poem is me, thinking out loud, trying to understand how I feel and what it means.

Notes on Reading

In keeping with the Metz poem, I don’t think I could have written it without the early influence of Neruda’s work. Also Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us, which includes poems about the war in El Salvador, and Doug Anderson’s The Moon Reflected Fire, a very under-read book about the Vietnam war and Yusef Kommunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau. I re-read those books often as I teach them to my young students who often don’t know about either of those wars.

My experience of these poems is heightened when I see them through my students’ eyes, when I hear them get up in front of the classroom and recite them. One of my students read Anderson’s book and went to the Library of Congress online and found original drawings by Vietnam vets and made a broadside of the poem using one of the drawings. Another researched the French-Indonesian war to deepen his understanding of the poems. I didn’t ask them to do this. The poems engendered a curiosity in them, compelled them to know more. The poems became their teachers.

Forche’s book was written in 1982, and 26 years later the poems hold up. She’s a gifted writer. Dien Cai Dau was written in 1988 and again, the poems are just as fresh and moving as they were when it first arrived. Anderson’s book is newer, published in 2002 by Alice James Books, but it’s one of the most harrowingly spare and powerful books about war I have ever read. Anderson is coming out with a memoir about his service as a medic during the Vietnam war. W.W. Norton will publish it this year. I hope it brings more attention to his poetry.

I have been shaped by the books I read as a child and a young adult: Mother Goose, The Childcraft Books, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, novelists and poets of the period, Frost, Sandburg, cummings. Dickenson and Whitman. Later, I plunged into the work of women poets: Sexton, Plath, Rich, Levertov, Olds. They led me to Anna Akmatova, Ruth Stone, Lucille Clifton. They were my poetry mothers. All of these women spoke with a clear, direct voice of difficult and hidden things. I hope to speak clearly and directly, to try, at all times, to say what I mean, and mean what I say. There is no book I want to write, only one poem that’s fully true, that’s worthy of the world it was born from and into. And maybe another. And another. For a poet, that’s almost too much to hope for. As I tell my students, writing poems is difficult. Writing a good poem, a true poem, even a line that reaches out from the page and grabs a reader’s heart, shifts perceptions, is almost impossible. So much can go wrong. I have few thoughts of the future beyond writing more poems. I take it like an addict: one day at a time.

“S. Sgt. Metz” by Dorianne Laux

Found in Willow Springs 63 Back to Author Profile Metz is alive for now, standing in line at the airport Starbucks in his camo gear and buzz cut, his beautiful new … Read more

Issue 64: A Conversation with Dorianne Laux

Interview in Willow Springs 64 Works in Willow Springs 78 and 63 April 19, 2008 Terrance Owens, Shira Richman, and Tana Young A CONVERSATION WITH DORIANNE LAUX Photo Credit: divedapper.com Dorianne … Read more

About Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio is the author of five books of poetry including Tell Me, which was a National Book Award Finalist. She has also published two novels, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street, and a book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure. She co-authored The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. With poet Susan Browne, she collaborated on a word/music CD, Swearing, Smoking, Drinking & Kissing, available from cdbaby.com. Addonizio’s latest book is Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, from W.W. Norton. Norton will also be releasing Lucifer at the Starlite in October 2009. Addonizio is currently at work on new poems and essays.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Long-Distance”

I wrote this after a guy I’d known many years ago found me on the Internet. He came back from the Vietnam war and then got a black belt in karate with a prosthetic leg. They really were wood back then. For a long time I had a few lines in the poem about the land mine he had stepped on and the guys who had hauled him out of the rice paddy. I kept trying to make a connection between them carrying him and the speaker “carrying” him in a different sense. Finally I gave up and decided the poem didn’t really need that idea, especially since I couldn’t say it in a way that wasn’t trite. And it focused the poem too much on the speaker. I wanted it to be about this man’s survival. Once I had the thought that the leg had an amputated man, just as the man had an amputated leg, I had a seed for the ending. I’ve never been wholly satisfied with this poem, but it has personal meaning for me. It’s more narrative than a lot of my work these days and I wish it made more surprising moves than it does. I think the ending may be worth it, though, and I really wanted the note the poem sounds to be in my next book, Lucifer at the Starlite, and I had a deadline. So there it is.

Notes on Reading

Everything I’ve read has either excited me as a model, a way of putting language and thought and emotion together–or shown me what I want to avoid. I don’t reread much. A couple of books I have gone back to more than once are Lewis Hyde’s The Gift and Denis Johnson’s first novel, Angels. I’m also reading a lot of Dean Young’s poetry right now. When I read him, I want to write, and odd phrases occur to me– like “God is a mental doll.” Words just start floating around my brain, like goldfish. I’m trying to work with that God line right now. It’s hard to strive to write the last book, so I’m usually striving to write the next one, which I always hope is going to be better. With every book, I want it to find its own voice and sense of self. And I want to be proud of it when it grows up.

Two Poems by Kim Addonizo

By Donhiser, Fiona | September 25, 2023

Found in Willow Springs 86 Back to Author Profile Long-Distance Your wooden leg stood beside the bed in its tennis shoe & sock, trailing its fasteners, its amputated man leaning invisibly against the wall. You pulled back the sheet so I could touch your stump, the small hole in your left foot. I touched everything. I … Read more

Issue 76: A Conversation with Kim Addonizio

By Jennings, Brittany | October 8, 2021

July 16, 2014 JEFF COREY, KRISTEN GOTCH, AILEEN KEOWN VAUX A CONVERSATION WITH KIM ADDONIZIO .. .I’m saying in the beginning was the word and it was good, it meant one human entering another and it’s still what I love, the word made flesh . Fuck me, I say co the one whose lovely body … Read more