An early draft of “Sissy Spacek.”

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Mark Leidner’s poem “Sissy Spacek” appears in the new Fall issue of the Review, no. 249.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

When the novel Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner came out, I thought about how weird it would be to be a man whose name was “Mann.” I thought about how arbitrary names are, and how strange it would be to be assigned such an empty template. I tried to write a poem made up of people with Man or Mann in their names, but the only three I could think of (Michael Mann, Aimee Mann, and Man Ray) weren’t enough for a poem. I added “Al Michaels,” which is an odd name for different reasons: he seems to have two first names, and both are extremely ordinary.

Maybe insecurity about my own relatively ordinary first name fueled these concerns.

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From Ernst Lehner’s Symbols, Signs and Signets.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Sara Gilmore’s poems “Mad as only an angel can be” and “Knowing constraint” appear in the new Fall issue of the Review, no. 249. The poem she discusses here, “Safe camp,” is published on the Daily.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

Originally this poem began with the lines “Delay and pressed the reeling available / Would-be constant down this inhabited suddenness.” It never troubled me that the words together didn’t make sense or that I didn’t yet know what they were pointing to—I thought of them as an assembly of beautiful raw material to work with.

As I continued to work on the poem, the image that rose to mind was a ditch along a narrow country road I often strolled down with my son near Mairena del Aljarafe when we lived in Spain. It was filled with trash and reels of unwound VHS tapes. We walked by it hundreds of times. The poem began to grow around the word “reeling”—the “real” along with everything the real is not, the dizzying motion of “reeling,” Anne Carson’s notion “under this day the reel of another day.” This figure of reeling gave into the poem’s circuitry as a whole—the way it shorts out as if its webbing could open to reveal layers underneath, suggesting a kind of sinkhole that either delivers us from or constricts us into a frame of reality that runs along our lives eternally. For me, these sinkholes are dangerous and fascinating.

This is one of the poem’s anxieties—the possibility of a circularity of circumstance or time in which what I’m living today could be the actual present, or a day I lived long ago, or a day I haven’t lived yet at all.

The poem surfaced into clarity in the lines that, in the version published here, appear first. “I was still but tried, in a burst it’s all lit up by.” I like to think the original lines are still there—what my friend Timmy calls the rungs of the ladder that we’re no longer standing on but got us here.

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