Photography courtesy of Natalie Shapero.

Natalie Shapero’s poem “The Top of Hell,” which appears in our new Fall issue, no. 257, is nominally about the top of Hell, but it is also implicitly about the bottom, the background bits that its inhabitants don’t see. “It’s weird that Hades, when he dropped,” she writes, “dropped only to the top of Hell. That he didn’t / plunge all the way down.” This is also, more or less, the basic impulse behind our series Making of a Poem, where we ask poets to lift the hood on a poem they’ve contributed to our pages. In this installment, Shapero talks about some of the unseen parts of her process, from watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies to “the physical properties of Hell.”

How did “The Top of Hell” start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

Greek mythology does not appear frequently in my writing—usually, I don’t think about it at all. But there was a concentrated period in my life when it was very much on my mind. This was last year, when I was preparing to be a contestant on Jeopardy!

Mythology was an area I had identified as a personal weak point, along with world currencies, college athletics, contemporary Broadway, and a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting, so I was reading about those gods as much as I could. Like many soon-to-be contestants, I also spent a good chunk of run-up time consulting the exhaustive website j-archive, which chronicles past games. My partner was helping me prepare, reading from the website and prompting me. He gave me something like “This memoir by Arnold Schwarzenegger shares its title with one of the films in which he starred.”

I proceeded to guess about ten different Schwarzenegger movies, none of which were correct, and I felt like a real goofball for not getting it right. It was, of course, Total Recall. Then I thought of the idea for this poem. The poem isn’t about that particular moment, but it did come out of it.

Courtesy of Natalie Shapero.

Where did you write this poem? Can you share photos of your workspace, or workspaces?

I live in Southern California and write outside as much as I can. I use a standing desk in my backyard and am often joined out there by my dog, who likes to bliss out in the sun.

What was the challenge of this particular poem?

This week I have been helping my daughter with her seventh-grade science homework, and so we’ve been saying “Matter is something that has mass and volume” a lot. I guess one challenge of this poem was actually this question of mass and volume—to what extent and in what way should the poem conceptualize the physical properties of Hell?

I went back and forth a lot between plunge all the way down and sink all the way down. I felt like plunge was faster and sink was slower—is entering the underworld like falling into a manhole, or like falling into the ocean? Is there any resistance down there, any drag?

Along these lines, I also had a very helpful email exchange during the production process with the editors, Chicu Reddy and Oriana Ullman, about the question of whether to use farther versus further at the end. They pointed out that farther is more conventionally used for literal distance, while further more often means figurative distance. Ultimately, we agreed on farther but also acknowledged it could go either way.

I’m interested in the idea of describing someone falling through Hell in the way that movies depict an untethered astronaut getting sucked out into space—the guy just getting incrementally smaller forever.

I also made a note at the time in my notebook to write a follow-up poem about the idea that going the distance in a very deep hell is like going on a Mars mission—in that you have to acknowledge at the beginning that you won’t return.

Natalie Shapero’s most recent book is Stay Dead.