June 26, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Leopoldine Core on “Ex-Stewardess” By Leopoldine Core Leopoldine Core’s aura photo, courtesy of the author. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Leopoldine Core’s “Ex-Stewardess” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? Often a poem begins wordlessly. It’s as if the text is a reply to some cryptic spot in the back of my brain that I have become attracted to. I’m alerted to the presence of something that isn’t solid. It has more to do with feeling, tempo, scale, and temperature. I’m so focused on that emanating region that, even though I’m using words, my experience—the start of it—is wordless and meditative. How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? (Are there hard and easy poems?) Some poems come quick and others take a while. But maybe the one that took years was easier in the end—I don’t know. Certain poems require many rounds of rewording. When this happens I will rewrite one line forty or more times, then narrow it down to thirty, then fifteen, then five, then choose. Read More
June 14, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Richie Hofmann on “Armed Cavalier” By Richie Hofmann A draft of the first two pages of “Armed Cavalier.” Courtesy of Richie Hofmann. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Richie Hofmann’s “Armed Cavalier” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? As is so often the case for me, the poem began as another poem entirely. I was working on a poetic sequence that interposed my translations of Michelangelo’s homoerotic sonnets with several short, original haiku-like poems inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids. Both artists were interested in beauty and torture. Mapplethorpe’s photographs are experiments in self-portraiture and bondage. In one of Michelangelo’s sonnets, the speaker confesses that, in order to be happy, he must be conquered and chained, a prisoner of an “armed cavalier” (the phrase puns on the name of the object of Michelangelo’s infatuation, Tommaso dei Cavalieri). Upon reading that phrase, I instantly wanted it to be the title for a new poem that would express the extremity of sexuality and the extremity of making art. From the sonnets of Michelangelo, I wanted to import a kind of violence of rhetoric (not unlike the dramatic conceits we find again and again in Petrarch). The poems are so desperate. Their pain is sculptural. From the photographs of Mapplethorpe, I wanted to import a violence of image. And the sense that everything—flowers in a vase, classical sculpture, BDSM—is part of a landscape of embodied beauty. Ultimately, as I revised the poem, and reworked it into “Armed Cavalier,” I wanted to express the ferocity of feeling in both artists’ works, but without any overt ekphrastic framing. Read More
May 11, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Michael Bazzett on “Autobiography of a Poet” By Michael Bazzett For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Michael Bazzett’s “Autobiography of a Poet” appears in our Spring issue, no. 243. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? It was a phrase. I was sitting in my backyard, with a legal pad and a few books, including Fady Joudah’s Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance and After Ikkyu by Jim Harrison, which contains the line “I was born a baby, / what are these hundred suits of clothes I’m wearing?” I was thinking about dislocation and baby-logic, and object permanence, and the idea of first encountering something through a sense other than sight. Hearing a bird before you see it, for instance. Or how a visual stimulus like a leaf-shadow fluttering in the wind moves on the wall above a crib. In my baby-mind, I imagine that light-flicker as something animate, moving of its own accord. When does a baby stop engaging with stimuli as pure image or pure sound and begin to imagine what caused it? I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be able to reexperience the dreams we dream in utero, or in the first months of life before language, before we consciously encounter words and narrative structure. How would they be ordered? Where would the images come from? Do we bring anything with us from the other side? Are there things already written into us? Read More
March 30, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Kyra Wilder on “John Wick Is So Tired” By Kyra Wilder Photograph courtesy of Kyra Wilder. For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Kyra Wilder’s “John Wick Is So Tired” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 243. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase? With the first line. It was something I’d thought a lot about—I run marathons, and in those tense few days before the race, when I’m drinking water and carb loading and meditating on what’s going to happen, I watch John Wick, specifically because of the way Keanu Reeves runs. He looks so tired, but he’s winning. In the fall of 2021, I was tapering for a marathon and then I had to go to a funeral, and suddenly my John Wick time got invaded by real grief. And John Wick was good for that, too. What were you reading while you were writing the poem? I was reading a lot of Ian Fleming that fall. I got pretty obsessed with the fact that he included a recipe for scrambled eggs in a James Bond story. In that story, Bond is completing some kind of mission in New York but also being really whiny about the poor quality of American eggs—to the point that he’s wandering around the city going into bodegas and criticizing them. So, it was either going to be “John Wick Is So Tired” or “James Bond Could Make You Some Pretty Good Eggs.” Read More
March 16, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Timmy Straw on “Brezhnev” By Timmy Straw Courtesy of Timmy Straw. For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Timmy Straw’s “Brezhnev” appears in our Winter issue, no. 242. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase? There’s a scene I used to picture a lot as a little kid in the eighties—two people dancing slowly, closely, their bodies seeming to know and anticipate each other, only they are also separated by a screen, so that neither has ever seen the other’s face. This was, I think, one way I understood the world at that time. This dance (so I imagined) is what formed reality itself—Reagan’s America, Gorbachev’s Soviet Union—and the dancers’ mutually blind position was like an engine, driving the world on. This made-up scene, and my adult memory of it, was certainly a major goad to the poem. So was a weird little detail—one of my older brothers could never understand that my one-year-old self was not, in fact, a teenager like himself, and so would read to me from The Annals of Imperial Rome and the most turgid high school astronomy textbooks. Because of his mania for geopolitics, he also taught me how to say “Brezhnev”—so that, awkwardly, the Soviet general secretary’s surname was one of my first words. Read More
February 22, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Peter Mishler on “My Blockchain” By Peter Mishler All images courtesy of Peter Mishler. For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Peter Mishler’s “My Blockchain” appears in our Winter issue, no. 242. How did you come up with the title for this poem? Were there other titles you thought about? When “What even is a blockchain/an NFT?” was the subject of conversation everywhere you went, I got interested in the technology’s claim that it creates an “immutable record” of each transaction along the chain of a digital asset’s ownership. I wanted to write a series of personal statements that could not erase what preceded them. Then I noticed this idea was also connected to a certain type of statement—made by a certain type of man—that we’ve seen often, recently: a public apology by someone whose behavior grossly outweighs their supposed contrition. No matter how much they try to distance themselves from themselves, the mea culpa still contains something that can’t be undone: it’s an “immutable record” of all the actions that preceded their apologies, which sound far more like launching an asset than sincerity. So, I thought I would write in the voice of a corrupted consciousness that mirrors the workings of this new bro-corrupted mechanism of capitalism. I often save my drafts under file names that function as little code words or reminders about a feeling I was having during that day’s writing. “My Blockchain,” though, remained the official title, even as I played with other ways of reminding myself what I was writing. Read More