In anticipation of the 2011 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 20–22. BOMB is excited to be able to share the next interview in this series, a conversation with Matthew Dickman.

Poets.org How do you begin a poem?

Matthew Dickman Most of the poems I write begin with a simple word or idea. I’ll be drinking coffee and think “I like coffee!” and then I’ll start writing about how much I like coffee. It sounds pretty basic, I know. I suppose it’s the “like” that moves me to begin writing a poem—some sort of celebration in my chest wanting some words to understand itself, some sort of grief needing a body.

Poets.org What poets do you continually go back to?

MD I am always returning to Diane Wakoski, Bob Kaufman, Barbara Ras, Aimé Césaire—poets that have big, messy, hearts.

Poets.org Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poems?

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In anticipation of the 2011 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 20–22. BOMB is excited to be able to share the next interview in this series, a conversation with Evie Shockley.

Poets.org How do you begin a poem?

Evie Shockley There is a fullness in my mind, a crowding and jostling and rumbling of ideas, outrages, phrases, and images, reaching as far as my mind’s eye can “see” in any direction, and I begin wading into the crowd and trying to make a space from which to think about what some (or all) of the things in it have in common or what they might have to say to each other— if I could only create an arena where that analysis or conversation could happen.

There is an emptiness on a page, a vacuum represented and magnified by the whiteness of the space, that goes until it ends but even in ending implies an endless continuation of that blank refusal of inscription, and I begin to muss it up, to get it dirty, to bring it into contact with the world in which it exists, to pollute it with laughter, injustice, loss, ambiguity, laundry, and any other thing that goes into the human experience of life.

Poets.org What books do you continually go back to?

ES Gwendolyn Brooks’s Blacks (which is to say her entire oeuvre, including her novel, Maud Martha); Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar,” (not a book but a mind-blowing essay); Toni Morrison’s Paradise; Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia and Sleeping With the Dictionary; Ed Roberson’s Atmosphere Conditions and City Eclogue, among others of his; Brenda Hillman’s Bright Existence and Cascadia, among others of hers; C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sowers and Wild Seed, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette; American Women Poets in the 21st Century, ed. Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr; Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy; Shakespeare’s Sonnets; Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of my Name and Sister Outsider: Essays (especially “Uses of the Erotic”); Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette; and Sawako Nakayasu’s Texture Notes.

Despite the length of this list, by the time I see it in print (or possibly by time it has left my e-mailbox) I will be horrified by the absolutely essential books that I’ve forgotten to include—I just know it. This is one of the dangers of having had a lifelong love affair with reading. When it comes to books, I am wantonly and passionately polyamorous.

Poets.org Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poems?

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In anticipation of the 2011 Poets Forum next month, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event next month, October 20–22. BOMB is excited to be able to share the second interview in this series, a conversation with Cate Marvin.

Poets.org How do you begin a poem?

Cate Marvin All poems, for me, are rooted in either a title or a line. I fall in love with a phrase I’ve read somewhere, overheard, or come up with on my own, and can’t let it go, ever, until I’ve done it justice by encrypting it into a poem as a title or a line.

I like to think of poets as moving through the world with their minds poised like nets, intent on capturing scraps of language, resonant images. Thinking as a poet means viewing the world as a poem; thus, the poet is prone to existing in real space and time in a most vulnerable manner. This means being super-observant wherever your physical self takes your mind, as it requires being terribly receptive to light, images, movement, conversations between others, oddities many might be inclined to overlook in newspaper headlines, heatedly intimate conflicts overheard in public places, disingenuous directions offered by advertisements and street signs, etc.

Sometimes a poem comes over me like weather, feels like an itch or impulse. It’s a near physical sensation. At that moment, there is nothing else to do but move to the typewriter or computer to pound the thing out.

More often, the poem has lived in my head for a long while, and I’ve battled with the entire idea of it. It insists on being made. I resist. I try to will it away. It won’t go away. This is the Real Poem. The poem not born simply out of anger, or from a fit of lyrical bliss—no, this kind of poem has a real agenda. And it happens to me. When I begin this poem, I must be humble. Because this kind of poem, which usually has a big idea in its back pocket, is prepared to duke it out with me for years until I get it right. (By which I mean, one has to write a great many very bad poems to get this kind of poem started.) This kind of poem takes a lot of time. Sitting down. Beginning it again and again. By the point you’ve started it, it’s taken so long to get there, you can’t honestly explain to anyone how you began it. It began with you. In you. And it won’t quit until you’ve got it right, by which point it bears no resemblance to the poem you “began.”

Poets.org What poets do you continually go back to?

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In anticipation of the 2011 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 20–22. BOMB is excited to be able to share the next interview in this series, a conversation with Ilya Kaminsky.

Poets.org How do you begin a poem?

Ilya Kaminsky I write in lines. So the lines find their way on paper whether I overhear two boys insulting each other at the gas station, or see a gull cleaning her feet, or two old men playing dominoes on a hood of a car, or two young women kissing at the fish market. They become lines on receipts, on my hands, on a water bottle, on other people’s poems. Lines collect for years, but once in a while they discover that other lines are sexy and, well, the poems may come from that sort of a relationship. If I am lucky. Which isn’t often. But one has to have faith.

Poets.org What poets do you continually go back to?

IK I am hopelessly in love with Shakespeare, mostly plays: The Tempest, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, of course, but also less famous ones, King John, for instance. My wife and I used to have Shakespeare parties at our place, which was great fun. We would provide everyone with lots of wine, copies of the book, and pencils; they drank and underlined their favorite passages in plays. So, after the party there was this great harvest of other people’s Shakespeare, which was a hunter-gatherer’s paradise.

My first Shakespeare, though, was in Russian. The poets of my generation got quite lucky since Pasternak translated many of Shakespeare’s plays and also much of Goethe—and he did a supreme job. Because Russian literature is much younger than English (so we don’t have much of a sense of 17th century literary Russian), one gets the feeling that one isn’t reading a translation but instead reading Shakespeare as if he wrote in the 1950s, at the time Pasternak was translating him en masse.

Lyric poets I go back to a lot are Catullus, Dickinson, Mandelstam, Celan, Vallejo. I love these poets because they reinvented the language, the syntax, in a way that showed me their love/hate relationship with it. I love how Mandelstam isn’t always grammatically correct in Russian (of course he simply sees new grammar), how Dickinson wants to grasp from one line to another, skipping the politesse, using dashes as stairs to jump between floors, or how Celan combines words because German vocabulary didn’t make the right ones for the grasp of human despair. I love, too, the three dots in the middle of lines in Vallejo, who knew that language wasn’t enough—this is probably the case, at one moment in her or his life, with any lyric poet.

And, I go back to Herrick and Donne and Stevens and Crane because they are great teachers of English music. In recent years I went back to Whitman’s “The Sleepers” and his wartime poems quite a bit as well. Longer poems I like to go back to or teach are Herbert Mason’s “Gilgamesh” and Christopher Logue’s versions of Homer. Those are great fun.

Poets.org Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poems?

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In anticipation of the 2011 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 20–22. BOMB is excited to be able to share the next interview in this series, a conversation with Cathy Park Hong.

Poets.org How do you begin a poem?

Cathy Park Hong 1. I read a lot, procrastinating from actually writing with “research.”

2. I go to the New York Public Library, fill out requests for books, retrieve books, read, and take copious notes in the Rose Room.

3. Sometimes, I force myself to write a sonnet a day, where I just empty my head.

4. I go to museums, films, galleries, where I steal images.

5. I unload most of this raw material into my unlined black notebook that I always buy at a tiny stationery store on 12th Street. The notebook may consist of information, data, “free writing,” stabs at stanzas, to do lists, directions to places (I don’t have an iPhone).

6. I transfer the mess to a computer and twiddle with it.

Poets.org What poets do you continually go back to?

CPH Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harryette Mullen, John Berryman, Wallace Stevens, Inger Christensen, Lyn Hejinian, Fernando Pessoa, John Ashbery (and to add some nonpoets who I like to return to: Hernandez Brothers, Roberto Bolaño, Susan Sontag, Mike Davis, David Mitchell, Paul Chan, Bong Joon-Ho).

Poets.org Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poems?

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In anticipation of the 2012 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 18–20. BOMB is excited to be able to share the first interview in this series, a conversation with Mary Jo Bang.

Poets.org How do you know when you’ve finished writing a poem?

Mary Jo Bang For me, the poem is finished when I feel the gestures it makes to the thoughts that went through my mind as I wrote it are sufficient, and when the sound patterning of the language I’ve used for those gestures satisfies me. Form also does some poetic work, so as I write I keep taking the measure of what the form is doing. That includes the appearance of the poem on the page. This can sometimes take a very long time.

I suppose you could say that I decide the poem is finished when I resign myself to the limits of what can be done with language, sound, and form. I don’t pretend it’s possible to find an exact equivalence between the poem and my mind, because language is never identical to thought; it’s merely language.

There’s an element of play involved in manipulating this tangential relationship between language and thought. All elements of poetry are play to me and I’m sure part of the sense of resignation comes from the fact that I can tire of these obsessive games I set up for myself. When I reach that point, I abandon the game and invent a new one.

Poets.org What word are you proud of sneaking into a poem? What word would you never put in a poem?

MJB I wanted to put a culturally taboo word in a poem but my friend Timothy Donnelly said I couldn’t. It was a persona poem in which I was going to have Cleopatra use the word to say that’s how people thought of her. I thought that might be an acceptable usage, but I now see that I’ll never put that word in a poem. I don’t think I’ve sneaked any words into a poem, although you might say I snuck the word “table” into this sentence: “I thought that might be an acceptable usage, but I now see that I’ll never put that word in a poem.” But I don’t think that’s what you meant.

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In anticipation of the 2012 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 18–20. BOMB is excited to be able to share the next interview in this series, a conversation with Mark Bibbins.

Poets.org How do you know when you’ve finished writing a poem?

Mark Bibbins When I no longer feel the need to tinker with it, which might take days or years. The components click into place in a way that I can’t explain, but reading aloud is always crucial to the process. Joy Katz compares figuring out where to end a poem to bending a piece of asparagus to see where it snaps; ending and finishing are not synonymous here, but I like what the analogy says about ceding some control to the thing that’s being made.

A person recently reported having written two or three poems one morning and submitting them to journals or wherever the very same afternoon. I would advise anyone who is not Eileen Myles not to do this (I say so not knowing if she does this).

Poets.org What word are you proud of sneaking into a poem? What word would you never put in a poem?

MB Not sure how one would sneak a word in—acrostic? French? Sometimes I have to sneak them out: I didn’t realize I had used the word “subsist” three times in my last book until just before it went to the print factory. I don’t mess too much with pride.

Any word I would never put in a poem is also hideous enough for me not to broadcast here, but there are plenty of poetry moves that should be retired—like saying a mouth is shaped like a letter O. I’d be happy never to see that in anyone’s poem again, let alone use it.

Poets.org What do you see as the role of the poet in today’s culture?

MB To point out that today’s culture has spinach in its teeth and egg on its face.

The question chafes a little, partly because of the definite article lurking in front of “poet,” but I also understand why you wouldn’t ask it of the cellist or the tree surgeon. It reminds us that you can’t “just” be a poet—which when rent is due is absolutely true—therefore we get pretend titles like Ambassador and Legislator and Seer. The upside is that we are free (or, downside, forced) to find or invent roles for ourselves (and our poems) that engage differently with the material demands of our culture.

So do I want to make and/or read poems that act like doilies or smoke alarms? It’s reassuring to know a vase isn’t leaving rings on the credenza, but I’d also like something to wake me up if the place is on fire, which it is.

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In anticipation of the 2012 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 18–20. BOMB is excited to be able to share the next interview in this series, a conversation with Timothy Donnelly.

Poets.org How do you know when you’ve finished writing a poem?

Timothy Donnelly People love to repeat the famous Paul Valéry quote, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” and I don’t blame them. I just quoted it myself. It’s snappy, and memorable, and there’s truth to it, too—in the author’s lifetime, no poem is ever finished the way a race is finished when the time runs out, or the way a bottle of champagne is when the last drop is drunk. A poem has no temporal or material fixity like that—the author can always dive right back into it if he or she decides to do something differently, or thinks of something to add or to take away. After the author dies, however, his or her poems are all finished, like it or not. Even the unfinished ones.

But at some point during our lifetime we have to learn to let our poems be. One aspect of the beauty of almost all art has to do with the fact that it didn’t have to be, by necessity, the way it is, but had instead the liberty of being pretty much however, or whatever, the artist desired it to be. So that no matter what the artwork would seem to represent or intend, if anything, it is always also a record of that liberty, that desire. We have to become content with the fact that a poem seldom clicks into place with mechanical perfection, and we have to remind ourselves that when a poem does strike us as impeccable in its construction, we often experience less liberty and desire in it. I think the very best poems aim for a perfection that they wisely let themselves surpass by missing. They veer off in favor of something more sensuous, flawed, complicated, and exciting.

And we have to become content, too, with the fact that a poem won’t be all pulsating and bright like radium when we get it exactly right, indicating we’re ready now to advance to the next poem. There isn’t a science to it, and if there were, it wouldn’t be an art.

That said, to answer the question, I know that I’m finished writing a poem when I feel that I am. After two decades of experience I have come to trust that feeling, almost entirely. Or I know that I’m finished when I can read the poem from beginning to end and it feels in my head the way it feels in my gut and arms and chest. Or when I can look at the poem typed out in front of me and my limbic system approves. I don’t mind error or irrationality if they capture the morphology of feeling and thought in a fresh, distinctive way. For example, I just now realize that a footrace isn’t finished when the time runs out, but when the first person crosses the finish line. Or is it when the last person crosses it? Or maybe the race starts only once, when the gun goes off, and then it ends as many times as there are racers.

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In anticipation of the 2012 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 18–20. BOMB is excited to be able to share the first interview in this series, a conversation with Ben Mirov.

Poets.org How do you know when you’ve finished writing a poem?

Ben Mirov I usually get a vertiginous feeling followed by nausea.

Poets.org What word are you proud of sneaking into a poem? What word would you never put in a poem?

Mirov I once used the word “exsanguinate” in a poem. That felt pretty good.

I can’t think of a word I’d never put in a poem. Poetry has contexts and mutations for even the clunkiest of words. If I were to think of a word I’d never put in a poem, poetry would prove me wrong.

That being said, I kind of hate the word “heart.”

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In anticipation of the 2012 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 18–20. BOMB is excited to be able to share the first interview in this series, a conversation with Randall Mann.

Poets.org How do you know when you’ve finished writing a poem?

Randall Mann A poem is finished, I guess, when each successive stanza, line, word, and punctuation mark adds up to an argument—for lack of a better word—that is clear yet compellingly elusive.

Poets.org What word are you proud of sneaking into a poem? What word would you never put in a poem?

Mann I snuck the word “snuggle,” one of the most appalling in the language, into a recent poem. I like that. I don’t think I can afford to ban words.

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