Michael Marberry: Dan, we’re so very excited to feature three of your poems (from Romanticisms) in this Spring issue of The Journal! And such memorable, peculiar little sound-image creatures they are! Tell me: Where in the world did these particular poems come from? What inspired them, if anything, in particular? How would you describe the larger project of which these poems are a part? Am I wrong in assuming—based on the title, the tone, and the form—that there’s an homage to the great Romantic poets at work here?

Dan Beachy-Quick: The poems are an homage—and an offering and a plea and some kind of apology and maybe a repair. Well, I think of them in odd and manifold ways.

I spent most of the past year-and-a-half working on a book on John Keats—a book that might best be described as a biography of the poetic imagination. Somehow, I couldn’t start writing that book until I wrote these sonnets—of which, in total, there are fourteen. I felt as if I must apprentice myself to the form Keats did: the sonnet. I felt I must do so according to his own principles, his own strivings, and so the sonnets became a way for me to ask permission to think about Keats’s work in the ways that felt most valid to me: not to find a distance to judge from but, as Keats says about the truth of proverbs, to prove them upon my own pulse. I wrote them so as to add myself in, to participate, to diminish the distance between my mind and his—and as audacious as it sounds, I felt it an act of humility, of seeking entrance by asking to be worthy of thinking within the work of a poet I so deeply love.

It is a trespass, thinking. And to do it, perhaps one must apologize to the one being thought about. I couldn’t write the prose until I’d finished the poems. Now all are done, and the book on Keats—A Brighter Word than Bright: Keats at Work—will appear in the University of Iowa Press’s Muse Books Series this coming fall.

MM: What was it that compelled you to write a critical study about Keats specifically, as opposed to any other poet that you could’ve conceivably written about? In writing your study, in writing these sonnets, and in the process of, as you say, diminishing the distance between Keats’s mind and your own, what new things did you discover about this long-admired poet? And what new things did you discover about yourself as an artist?

DBQ: I encountered Keats late—not until graduate school. The experience was odd—a thrill of finding myself in the presence of a poem whose beauty felt so real as to be nearly threatening but also one that came to me without—so it felt—much hope for my understanding it. Some years later, working in Chicago, I read the letters bit by bit on the train in the morning. Those letters brought back to me that initial sense of beauty’s complications by seeing Keats’s own struggle with forming a poetics that refuses to step away from beauty as some essential quality a poem works toward or works within.

When I was asked if I might write a book for the Muse Books Series, I said, simply enough: “Yes, if Keats.” I wanted to hold myself closer to his thinking, to think through it, so to speak, for myself. What I discovered was something I suspected: a poet in the deep thrall of finding a way to write poems that is never reducible to a system and yet which must offer some explanation for its own method. There is a conversation between the audacity of the poems in the midst of their nearly palpable discovery and the letters that try to comprehend what the poems have opened—and yet, at times, the letters seem foremost, and the poems take a thread of thought and weave it back into the whole vision. It is—“it” assuming we can consider the poems and letters as a single project—the most moving, humane document I know of what it is to be involved in the making of poems.

What did I discover about myself? I had no real sense of how deeply formed I am by Keats, but I am. I feel as if I were a waxen seal that wakes up to its own shape and sees so intensely that sight becomes a feeling, what it is that had pressed down upon me and shaped my thoughts in the way they’re shaped. I suppose—strange as it is to say—that from Keats I have inherited my sensibility.

MM: I’m absolutely fascinated by the aural elements of your poems in our spring issue, their undeniable and captivating sense of “voice”—which, to my mind, is a defining characteristic of your work going all the way back to Spell. And your recordings of the poems only increase my appreciation for their sonics and the care that has seemingly gone into each and every line. But I wonder: Just how important is sound and voice to you as you’re writing? Are these aspects that you focus on deliberately, or do you find them to be intuitive byproducts of your process? How important is it for us to hear these poems (or any poems) as we read them?

DBQ: Essential, I think, to read so as to hear them—and perhaps so of any poem or almost any. Gerard Manley Hopkins broke my sense apart and taught me that the music of a poem is in itself a philosophic work, a kind of faith, a trust the poem makes its own meaning, inscribed within the words of the poem but not attributable merely to any lexical sense.

I feel sometimes as if the words of the poem are only there to allow access to a kind of music that the words in their certain pattern reveal, and that the mind is distracted by these words so that the music can play itself within the mind, unfettered by reason’s rigor. Poems come to meaning in such dark ways, almost occult. They trick the intelligence with itself so another work can happen in the blind spot.

For me, music is that other work. I might call it the unconscious of the poem, informing the words it is also not reducible to. It is, I think, some quality of Keats’s “fine excess,” for the music in the poem is what exceeds the language of it, and that to me is a primary aspect of poetry’s beauty: that it exceeds itself, over-brims its own fullness, and in doing so, leaves us with the wondrous remnants in mind.

As for my own process, I write when I can hear the music in the lines—a music of ear and a music of thought—and when I can’t hear it, I don’t write. The same holds true for prose, for it has its music too.

MM: It’s very interesting to hear your thoughts about the musicality of both poetry and prose and how your own creative process is often guided and dictated by how well you can hear that music at any particular point in time. One thing that I love about your work is how it often challenges my expectations of what a poem or prose-piece can (or should) be/do and, moreover, what a poem or a prose-piece can (or should) sound like.

To what extent does the music of poetry and prose sound similar and/or different to you? In the spirit of Keats and Hopkins (two wonderful examples), who are some contemporary poets and prose writers whose music you particularly admire? Lastly, as someone who often blurs those expectations surrounding poetry and prose, at what point in your creative process do you know whether what you’re writing is (or ought to be) poetry or prose?

DBQ: In perhaps a too-quick way, I hope not glib, I want to say that poetry has a music of feeling that becomes thoughtful, and prose has a music of thought that becomes feeling. There is a kind of agonized frustration I hope each art opens up to, a point at which certainty and uncertainty confound one another and intermix. Each music, I hope, allows a reader to clarify complexity without reducing it and, in doing so, gives us not the habit of thinking but the music that complicates that habit back into actual experience.

What is the experience of the page? This question matters to me, and it matters to me that one could ask that question reading a poem or an essay I worked on. Of contemporaries, I think few poets have captured this music in the way I’m trying to describe as has Susan Howe. Lyn Hejinian’s efforts have long been a model for the joys that thinking opens. And I think poets such as Brian Teare and Pam Rehm possess a lyric sensibility of deep, genuine reach.

As for the last question, the only time intent seems to keep hold of its nature is in that distinction between poetry and prose. I seem to know which I’m working on before I sit down to begin the work—as if, I guess, the work has decided for itself what it will be.

MM: The natural world and humanity’s relationship with that natural world seem to play such a strong part in much of your work, these poems included. Would you care to comment on the role that nature (or “Nature” perhaps) plays in your poetry—thematically, philosophically, creatively?

DBQ: At the most basic level, I cannot help but feel that the world is all we have by which to imagine the world. For many years, I’ve been quite taken with Emerson’s thought that the Delphic Oracle’s know thyself was the same as the Stoic principle to study nature. Adding mystery to the equation is Heraclitus: “Nature loves to hide.”

I feel deeply this work of self-investigation as worldly discovery and vice-versa—am convinced, perhaps in naïve ways, that the microcosm and the macrocosm maintain a connection, and that perhaps the poem is one of the places in which that collision of opposites maintains its difficult integrity. In this way, I don’t know how a poem can be other than a nature poem. It’s just that nature has a different boundary than we normally accept—a boundary as hazy and inter-penetrable as any concept, a place of drift and gesture. What is there? I ask myself. There is the world.

The winner in each genre will receive a $500 prize and will have his/her work featured in the Winter 2014 print issue of The Journal. All entries will be considered for publication. This year’s contest judges are Claire Vaye Watkins (fiction), Ira Sukrungruang(nonfiction), and Aimee Nezhukumatathil (poetry).

Fiction and nonfiction entries should include one story or one essay.  Poetry entries should include 1-5 poems. Simultaneous submissions are allowed; however, submitters must notify The Journal immediately via email if their work is accepted elsewhere.

Contest entries will only be accepted via The Journal’s online Submittable submissions manager. Submitters should include their name, contact information, etc. in the Submittable submissions form. The title of the contest submission should be the title of the piece(s) submitted. Do NOT include your name or any other identifying information in the submissions title or in the manuscript itself. Submissions that fail to adhere to these guidelines will not be considered.

Each contest submission must be accompanied by a $15 entry fee, which includes a one-year subscription to The Journal. Multiple submissions are permitted for the contest; however, each additional submission must be accompanied by a new entry fee. Close friends, family, and former students of the judges are prohibited from entering. The contest entry deadline is now May 15.

Nick White: Where were you in your career/work when “Sketching Firestorm” came out?

Christopher Coake: I was actually living about two miles away from The Journal office when the story was published. Donald Ray Pollock and I had a similar experience, in that The Journal gave us our first professional publications—and then Michelle Herman found out our personal stories, learned that we were both aspiring and serious writers, and began trying to talk us into getting our MFAs at Ohio State. She was successful, too—so my story came out just a few months before I began the program.

I’d submitted this story to something like twelve other journals, on and off over four years. It was literally the only publishable work of fiction I’d ever produced, and I’d been clinging to it as proof to myself that I could be a writer. If The Journal hadn’t taken it, I’m not sure what my path would have been. I can say that the validation I got—and Michelle’s ongoing interest in my work—made an enormous impact on me. I could imagine quitting, before that story was accepted. Afterward I couldn’t.

NW: If you could say something to your younger writer self who wrote this piece, what would you say?

CC: “That’s a good start, buddy, but this is the last story you’re going to write for a long time, if ever, while secretly wishing you were David Foster Wallace. Now relax, go to school with a clear conscience, and figure out what you really want to say. It’ll be all right.”

NW: How does “Sketching Firestorm” compare to the work you’re currently doing/planning to do in the future?

CC: As the previous answer suggests, “Sketching Firestorm” is much more postmodernly playful than a lot of the stuff with which I’ve been successful since. One of the things I learned about myself while at Ohio State is that I’m better at portraying complex emotional states than I am at wild formal experimentation. I love that sort of thing, and my first book, We’re in Trouble, experiments a lot in terms of structure and time. Lately, though, I’ve been much more interested in simply telling a good story—which, as it turns out, isn’t so simple after all.

NW: Did you learn anything about writing/yourself as an artist while writing this piece?

CC: Yes. This was the first story I wrote that really worked, on all the levels I was aiming for. And it works that way because I finally was able to get some of my personal disturbances on the page without feeling overly beholden to my own biography. In other words, I was in that state of composition where I was in the perfect balance between control and access to the subconscious. If that makes any sense. I suppose what I’m saying is that this was the first story I wrote that felt like good writing when I was writing it—and which was then confirmed for me as good by others. This story kinda calibrated me.

NW: Has your writing changed much (or any) since writing this story? How so?

CC: I can honestly say I’ve written very little like “Sketching Firestorm” since it appeared. But it’s a story about love under threat, about the inevitable loss that comes along with love, so thematically it’s right in line with everything I’ve written since.

Fiction and nonfiction entries should include one story or one essay.  Poetry entries should include 1-5 poems. Simultaneous submissions are allowed; however, submitters must notify The Journal immediately via email if their work is accepted elsewhere.

Contest entries will only be accepted via The Journal’s online Submittable submissions manager. Submitters should include their name, contact information, etc. in the Submittable submissions form. The title of the contest submission should be the title of the piece(s) submitted. Do NOT include your name or any other identifying information in the submissions title or in the manuscript itself. Submissions that fail to adhere to these guidelines will not be considered.

Each contest submission must be accompanied by a $15 entry fee, which includes a one-year subscription to The Journal. Multiple submissions are permitted for the contest; however, each additional submission must be accompanied by a new entry fee. Close friends, family, and former students of the judges are prohibited from entering. The contest entry deadline is May 1.

Also, if you’re free Friday, March 8, at 10 in the PM, then come to suite 2309 in the Sheraton Boston for The Journal’s offsite reading in honor of our little magazine’s 40^th Anniversary. We’re going to hear readings by former contributors including the famous and fabulous Lee Martin, Emilia Phillips, Antonio Elefano, Suzanne Richardson, Marcus Wicker, and Leslie Parry. Free food and drink will be provided as long as supplies last, or until our stores are devoured by a herd of starving, alcoholic zombie-writers.

Alex Fabrizio: Can you tell me a little bit about “Steller’s Jay,” published in our Winter 2013 anniversary issue? It’s a gorgeous, rich poem—where did it come from? Is it part of a project you’re currently working on? (I had to Google Georg Steller, I’ll admit. Did you hear about him or his jay first?)

Linda Bierds: I heard about his jay first. Then my family gave me Dean Littlepage’s book, Steller’s Island, which looks at Georg Steller’s sea journey to North America in the late 1700s. During that voyage, two ships sailed together, the St. Peter and the St. Paul—Steller was on the St. Peter—and I was fascinated by the intricate signal codes the crew used to communicate with one another: the “pennants, jacks, drums, bells, lanterns, guns and speaking horns” that “delivered a language precise as script.”

The poem is part of my next book, Roget’s Illusion, which will be out early in 2014. Language is its central subject.

AF: I’m fascinated to hear you characterize the new book as centered on language. When I think of your poems—both in and out of our pages—I think of vividness of image, textured description, emotional heart and resonance. Is the focus on language a new project? A recontextualizing of a love of language that’s always been present in your work?

LB: Not a departure, more of an extension of the interests I’ve had throughout my writing life. In this case, I’m thinking of language in terms of its limitations. To back up a bit: Peter Roget was fascinated by the striking patterns a spoked wheel makes when it rolls behind a picket fence—the spokes often appear to be turning backward, or curving downward, or sending out luminous lines. These visual deceptions became known as Roget’s Illusion.

Roget’s decades-long project, the thesaurus, represented another kind of illusion to me, an ever-changing, increasingly-nuanced projection of idea and synonym. I think of him through the years gathering those words—thousands of synonyms and antonyms aligning as the concept of

Sensation or Volition or Space emerged and constantly shifted. It must have been like looking through a kaleidoscope of sand.

I have a number of characters in the new book who work with language—Henry James, Virginia Woolf—but also those interested in illusion in its broadest sense, including the scientist Michael Faraday.

AF: Roget’s Thesaurus is one of the many volumes on shelves of The Journal office! As you know, The Journal is celebrating our fortieth anniversary in 2013. It looks like your poems first appeared in our pages in 1990 and 1991. What was your writing life like back then? Is there anything that you would say to your 1990s-era writer self? Any words of encouragement? Admonishment?

LB: Let’s see, my writing life in 1990. I was working part-time at the University of Washington, teaching a few classes and editing. I worked about twenty hours a week, always in the afternoons, which left lots of time for writing. I had converted a shed in my backyard into a studio—no phone—and I’d go there each morning from about nine until noon. I loved that time, tried never to sacrifice it, never to let other “work” take me away. In looking back, though, I realize that I sold short the value of less lengthy writing sessions; I didn’t take enough advantage of them. I realize now how important even thirty quiet minutes with a poem can be.

AF: How do you think your work has changed or remained constant since these poems we published (more than two decades ago!): “The Helmet of Mambrino,” “Nancy Hanks Lincoln in Autumn: 1818,” “The Running-Machines,” “Winterreise, for Three Voices”?

LB: The sources of my work have remained fairly constant over the years; that is, I’m inspired by history and biography more than by contemporary events and autobiography. But the vision within the work is frequently darker. Each of the earlier poems that you published, even the Nancy Hanks Lincoln poem, began from a moment of visual or factual wonder that I associate with awe. The Steller poem began from a wonder that I associate with skepticism—or at least an extended questioning.

AF: Wonder—I like that, and it feels right. Can you attribute this “darker vision” to anything in particular? I like that the wonder you suggest isn’t necessarily a positive thing; wonder seems to me almost twin to horror.

LB: Awe always will be a generative response for me, I hope, but as I get older, skepticism joins it more often.

Nick White: Where were you in your career/work when this piece came out?

Nancy Zafris: I’d won the Flannery O’Connor award for my first book, a collection of stories titled The People I Know. I was in the midst of trying to get my first novel, The Metal Shredders, published.

NW: If you could say something to your younger writer self who wrote this piece, what would you say?

NZ: Smile more. Don’t be afraid to say hi to Lee K. Abbott. Good idea about having a kid. Write more thank-you notes, especially to Buddy Nordan and Andre Dubus.

NW: How does this piece compare to the work you’re currently doing/planning to do in the future?

NZ: I don’t think I would write those pieces today. Phones don’t ring in the den anymore, for one thing. The cell phone has been great for TV soap operas, not so great for the short story. It takes out oft-needed small obstacles. Flat tire on a deserted road? No problem. The writer would now have to account for no reception, dead battery, or no cell phone at all, which might unfairly present a character as a Luddite.

NW: Did you learn anything about writing/yourself as an artist while writing this piece?

NZ: In the story “Furgus” [published in Issue 22.2 (Autumn 1998) as “Furgus Welcomes You”] I realized I was trying to write a story out of a premise and that’s why it gave me trouble: false starts and different incarnations and characters. It’s better for me if I just start with a sentence or paragraph and discover the story, and then I can go back and shape it.

NW: Has your writing changed much (or any) since writing these stories? How so?

NZ: What one gains in technique can lead to deforestation in the writing that is both good and bad. Keep the energy and the willingness to proceed stupidly.

Alex Fabrizio: We’re just delighted to feature you in our anniversary contributor series, and pleased to report that your first book, Open Winter, was published by Bellday Books in 2011 to rave reviews and a profusion of prizes. Tell us a little bit about the book. How long have you been working on it? What inspired its themes and major concerns?

Rae Gouirand: Thanks, Alex, for the welcome. Since The Journal was one of the first journals to publish my work, it’s awfully nice to talk with you guys at this point in time. I’m not sure there are satisfying, definitive answers for those questions when the book in question is a first collection, and on top of that, I have a hard time separating the idea of working on the book from the project of being, honestly. If you’re a maker of things, there’s huge overlap between the project of living and one’s creative work. What I can say about the work that was published as “the book” is that the oldest poem in it was written in my first year of grad school, in 2000, and that the newest one (which was, unfortunately, pulled from the manuscript at the last minute because of space issues) was written just a few months before the manuscript was accepted in 2011. Open Winter was finalisted for a great number of first book and open competitions during the two and a half years it was circulating, and went through a few different incarnations on its way out into the world: it was at one point a collection in two acts, then ordered almost backwards, then, finally, arranged into four sections titled for fragments within those sections.

What inspired its themes and major concerns? …Can I just say “experience?” (Including my experience of others’ art?) All writing is both experiential and exploratory, regardless of its genre. In poetry, the line is the meeting edge of those two currents, and form is the border between the poem’s reality and its imagination—and just as faulty (think: earthquakes) as any argument we make about it. What the poems are “about” strikes me, always, as the wrong kind of question to ask, and I’ve always had a particularly hard time addressing that one: poems are about meaning. Not symbolism, but meaning, and how it can be made, acknowledged, or named. How sense can be communicated. A lot of the poems in Open Winter take the shape of meditations on continuity and interruption, or perpetuity and disruption, in the world and inside the self. The images and figures are seasonal, historical, hologram—and so was the process of writing the book. Poetry is, for me, perhaps a little more about white space than it might be for others: creating it, defending it, recognizing it, allowing it.

AF: Wow! It sounds like Open Winter went through a number of iterations before it found its current/final form. Do you have any advice for poets working on putting together their first manuscripts?

RG: Yes. I think it’s in the best interest of your poems that you are as far inside them as possible during the writing—that you engage what they are, and what they want from both you and the reader, entirely—but you need to be as far outside of them as possible during the manuscripting stage. The ideal time to work on a manuscript is when you’ve gained enough space from the work that the individual poems feel unfamiliar and surprising again. When they are just poems—not your poems. While it might seem more intuitive that you’d want to arrange your work so that it illuminates what you most want your reader to notice about it, and that that could best be achieved by mapping the most strategic or resolving arc for the individual pieces, I don’t think that those arcs necessarily serve to draw the reader into individual poems, to absorb them maximally. Engagement comes, I think, from there being enough room for readers to move, to realize the connections for themselves. And you want the reader to engage. That’s what will bring them back around for a second read. So many writers these days are challenging narrative tradition, its linear orientation, in fascinating ways. There’s no reason poets can’t look outside of beginning-middle-end, crisis-and-resolution, call-and-response, then-and-now, etc. templates for their manuscripts. I most want to read books that are like insane little art museums, or glimpses of mind itself. Books that behave the way that poetry itself behaves.

AF: As you know, The Journal is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2013. It looks like your poems first appeared in our pages in 2003, now an entire decade ago! What was your writing life like back then? What, if anything, has changed?

RG: It’s so hard to imagine that decade as a decade!—2003 was, coincidentally, a pretty transitional year for me both on and off the page. I left a (post-MFA) lectureship at the University of Michigan to move to California with my partner at the time, and spent that year (sort of) writing full-time on a post-graduate fellowship award I’d won at Michigan and deferred. On some level, I think I spent most of that year taking apart my poetics: more narrative impulses gave way to new modes, and for quite some time none of my work made any sense to me at all, except when I was actually in the flow of writing. I could not have described it coherently at the time, but I think a new part of my brain was opening up, possibly so suddenly because my life was suddenly so unfamiliar. I managed to keep working my way further in—falling further away from what I’d originally thought my project as a poet was—after I returned to teaching and came to feel more grounded in all the levels of uncertainty that have become facts of my life since exiting the MFA cocoon. The timeline for coming to feel at home in and deeply identified with California’s Central Valley runs parallel to the timeline on which I came to feel really secure in the degree of openness and abstraction that characterizes most of my more recent work. I think my life on the west coast has shown me what my headspace actually looks like, and therefore opened up my poetics pretty strikingly. (And I don’t just mean in verse. The west coast has also helped me figure out a lot of key things about how my prose wants to behave.)

AF: It’s interesting to hear you talk about how your relocation to the west coast has run parallel to these changes in your work. Can you tell us more about this process? What about California’s Central Valley has affected you, or made you more open to abstraction and uncertainty? Or do you think these changes are simply evolutions of you as a writer—could they have happened anywhere?

RG: The Central Valley feels right in my blood—like the place I’m supposed to wake up most mornings, though I have loved other places deeply while they were home and know I will have additional places I call home in this lifetime. The land is alive, the light is spectacular, the sky is enormous, and even after a decade I can’t get over the miracle of persimmon trees in autumn. Also, most of the people I’m close to in northern California are east coast natives who’ve chosen to make their homes far from their points of origin, which flavors day-to-day life with that island community phenomenon I love to experience on residencies (birds of a feather ending up in the same place, instantly cognizant of their kinship). Those two factors have a lot to do with it, but ultimately it’s impossible to explain. The fit has changed a lot of things in my life—not just in my work.

AF: Is there anything that you would say to your millennium-era writer self? Any words of encouragement? Admonishment?

RG: My millennium-era self was pretty nervous about making her way in the world outside of the contexts in which she already understood herself and had been told she fit. So many people tell you to follow your heart, or to follow your bliss: ha. If I could send a letter to myself ten years ago, I’d tell myself to head straight for what freaked me out the most—to just head straight there, both in life and on the page. Both art and life flow a lot more functionally when you stop avoiding the stuff that makes you anxious. Um, especially art maybe. The only explorations worth pursuing, after a certain point, are the ones that are difficult enough, slippery enough, steep enough, to keep teaching us what it is that we’re actually pursuing.

AF: How do you think your work has changed or remained constant since “Flaneuse, Excuses” and “The Lessons of Bird,” which we published in Issue 27.1, our Spring/Summer 2003 issue?

RG: Changes: of surface, of style, of statement. Constants: a kind of relentless fascination with the line as both tradition and idea, an attention to space and light and time.

Silas Hansen: When “The Names” was published in our Spring 1999 issue, where were you in terms of your writing career?

Brenda Miller: I was very early in my writing career then. I was in my final year in a PhD program at the University of Utah, and had just received my job offer at Western Washington University. My first book, Season of the Body, was still in its infant stage as my PhD dissertation, and “The Names” was an anchoring essay of that collection, as it touches on the foundations of my heritage, both physically and metaphysically.

SH: If you could say anything to the younger self who wrote this piece, what would you say?

BM: To trust. To let go. To not hold on too tightly to what you thought you wanted to write about. To be a little more playful in general!

SH: How does this piece compare to the work you’re doing right now?

BM: I think “The Names” is much more directly autobiographical and earnest than my more recent work. I was experimenting with form in the repeating chant, and now I let form dictate my work much more strongly. I tend to now look outward before I look inward.

SH: What projects are you working on right now, or do you hope to work on in the near future?

BM: I’ve just completed a chapbook of linked short-short essays, called “Altered Fruit.” In these essays, I sometime experiment with applying the rules of formal poetry (sestina, villanelle, etc.) to prose, and it’s immensely fun!

SH: I’m exited to hear about this future project! I know that you have written many short-short essays, including one of my favorites, “Swerve,” from Brevity 31. How do you decide whether to write a longer piece, such as “The Names,” or a short-short/flash piece? What do you see flash nonfiction pieces accomplishing that longer pieces cannot—or perhaps that longer pieces accomplish in a different way?

BM: That’s a good question, Silas, and I’m not sure I have an answer! I do a lot of my writing in timed segments in groups, and so that is why much of my work lately is coming out in short bursts that seem self-contained. It feels like a flash piece when I can come around full circle pretty quickly with an image that “rings the bell” at the end. I think flash nonfiction acts as a microcosm of experience, and as such it needs to contain all the elements of that experience, but it concentrates them. When I think of “concentrate” I think of those cans of frozen orange juice—“just add water.” If one were to “just add water” to a short-short essay, an entire memoir should gush forth.

Michael Marberry: We’re so excited to have two of your poems (“Moralia” and “Rockabye”) in our special 40^th Anniversary Issue of The Journal! Tell me: what inspired these two wonderful poems? To what extent do you see them being in conversation with or against one another? Are they from an upcoming project?

Carl Phillips: I’ve never been a writer who has a project or agenda from the start, so I have no idea where these poems are leading or whether, in fact, they will ever end up being in a book. I just write, and eventually – usually after about fifty poems or so – I think I may have reached a point where something is finished. There’s a sense of needing to stop. And I go through the poems, figure out which ones are speaking to one another, in which ways, etc., and I go from there.

About the two poems in The Journal, I’m already alarmed that there is a stag in both of them…

MM: That’s true: there are stags in both those poems, and they’re “broken” and “bloated” stags to boot! Oddly enough, I once had a conversation with a colleague about recurring poetic imagery; and he insisted that deer (of various shapes and sizes) seem to be a hallmark of many poems – especially work by contemporary gay poets. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but it does make me wonder: are there images, symbols, allusions, subject matter, etc. that you feel personally drawn and redrawn to as a writer? If so, what are those images and why do you think you’re drawn to them specifically? Conversely, are there images, symbols, allusions, etc. that you try to avoid? Is everything “fair game” at any time in your work?

CP: I don’t think deer are particularly linked to gay poetry, as they appear in many people’s poems. But as for why they – and raptor birds, the ocean, certain trees like sycamores, pines, and bamboo – appear in my poems, they happen to be the things that figure into my daily life.

I think that I write from my life, which of course has to include the things that constitute a world for me. It’s not uncommon, even in a city like St. Louis, to watch a hawk swoop down and destroy a mourning dove in mid-air. It happened twice in my backyard last winter. Similarly, on Cape Cod, where I spend time in the summer, deer emerge from the woods, and the ocean is everywhere.

I also will say that I’m drawn to animal life in general because I’m always thinking about the lack of self-consciousness that animals have, along with what I think is a lack of morality – as opposed to humans, who are always wrestling with such issues.

MM: You’ve been a great contributor for The Journal for many years. From what I can tell, your first appearance in The Journal was way back in issue 17.1, published in 1993. Think back for a moment: what was your writing life like back in the early to mid-1990s? How would you characterize your writing from that time period? How has your writing evolved from then until now? Is there anything that you wish you could tell your younger, 1990s-era self about writing, life, love, etc.?

CP: My writing life back then was a lot more regimented, I suppose. I wrote almost every day at some point, but I also made a point of reserving Sundays for writing – the entire day, if necessary. I’m not necessarily busier now. But I do have more responsibilities – most of them to do with day-to-day home life – which means that I don’t have regular writing time anymore.

I am more likely to come up with an idea around midnight on the sofa with the dog, and I run with that idea for an hour or so. And then I hope in the morning that I caught something that might equal a poem eventually.

MM: It’s very interesting to hear you talk so candidly about your writing process. The evolution of your own writing process makes me think of a topic that is important to a lot of writers: the tension surrounding “inspiration.” Should one wait to be inspired to write? Or does one create his/her own inspiration, so to speak, by willing the poem into existence? What advice do you give to your own students regarding this “problem” of inspiration?

CP: I believe that each person should write in whatever way works for him or her. It’s funny: I hardly ever think about all of these things that so many people – including my students – spend time talking about!

I’m not able to write to assignment. I’m not able to force inspiration. So I just live my life, waiting for a line to float into my head, often triggered by something I’ve seen in the world, which is the reason for spending a lot of time outdoors, trying new things, and taking chances.  I feel that’s a boring answer, but it’s an honest one.

MM: Last question: as I said, we’re celebrating our 40^th Anniversary this year at The Journal, which obviously gives us a good opportunity to look back at last 40 years of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction writing. But let’s look forward too! Let’s speculate (wildly?)! You’re in a unique position in that you not only write some wonderful poetry but, as judge of the Yale Younger Series and the Tufts Awards, you also get to read lots of wonderful poetry written by up-and-comers and experienced poets alike each year. Where do you see poetry heading in the next 40 years? What excites you about where we’re going as a writing community? What concerns or distresses you? Where would you like to see us go, moving forward?

CP: What I hope, as we go forward, is that poets will never lose sight of the fact that we are vulnerable, feeling creatures with not only the ability but the need to give meaningful expression to those feelings. Love is real, as is the loss of it. The fact of feeling doesn’t have to be somehow made distant by easy irony.