October 11, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Mark Leidner on “Sissy Spacek” By Mark Leidner An early draft of “Sissy Spacek.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to 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. Read More
September 25, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Sara Gilmore on “Safe camp” By Sara Gilmore 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 contributed to 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. Read More
July 24, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Patty Nash on “Metropolitan” By Patty Nash Anton Mauve, The Return to the Fold, 1978. Public domain. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Patty Nash’s poem “Metropolitan” appears in the new Summer issue of the Review, no. 248. Do you have photos of different drafts of this poem? I do not write in “drafts.” I just continue to write or tinker on the same poem until I can’t anymore. This means that it is hard to see earlier iterations of the poem—the earliest one I have access to is one that I sent to my friends, so it was somewhat presentable already. There are small line differences, however, and sometimes major ones. For example, I changed the gender of the protagonist in this section—here is a screenshot of an earlier version: I also slimmed down the ending, thank goodness. Earlier version here as well: Read More
July 8, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Kim Hyesoon and Cindy Juyoung Ok on “Person Walking Backward” By Kim Hyesoon and Cindy Juyoung Ok Achat1999, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Kim Hyesoon’s poem “Person Walking Backward,” translated by Cindy Juyoung Ok, appears in our new Summer issue, no. 248. Here, we asked Kim and Ok to reflect on their work. 1. Kim Hyesoon How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? This poem began during an interview. The poet who came to interview me asked, “What do you think about Korean poetry these days?” I answered, “I think Korean poetry these days is like a dog running on the highway.” There is a dog inside my poem. This dog living in “Person Walking Backward” is eternally digging through the “pile of garbage” of the present. The poem is a poem about time, two types of time. Continuous time and frozen time. The dog’s time and my life’s time. The poem’s time and my time. Dying’s time and living’s time. Each is the possibility of being to one another. Read More
April 25, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Maureen N. McLane on “Haptographic Interface” By Maureen N. McLane The poem begins. Photograph courtesy of Maureen McLane. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Maureen N. McLane’s poem “Haptographic Interface” appears in the new Spring issue of the Review. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? This poem took wing, or distilled itself, during a conference on “Writing Practice” at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf in September 2022. I started writing while listening to the closing remarks. The scholar Andrew Bennett had given a talk on Keats vis-à-vis haptographics, a term I hadn’t heard before—that was one spur. Keats is someone I’ve read and thought about for a long time (in one wing of my life I work on Romantic-era poetry). Bennett had spoken about Keats’s handwriting—how moving it can be to encounter it—and his letters, and the matter of “literary remains.” Some months after the conference, I looked up haptographics—one of the first hits on Google tells you that “haptographic technology involves highly sensorized handheld tools”—is a pen such? Haptography is a technique for “capturing the feel of real objects”—is this what Keats was up to, capturing the feel of things (experiences, emotions, movements of thought)? I think so. Is this still poetry’s aim? These are questions the poem implicitly pursues, but I can only say that having written the poem. There was no thesis-in-advance. Read More
April 4, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Eliot Weinberger on “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees” By Eliot Weinberger Anne Noble, The Dead Bee Portraits #2. Courtesy of the artist. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Eliot Weinberger’s “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 247. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? First, I doubt it qualifies as a poem. It starts out as a simulacrum of a poem and then turns into an essay—or at least what I consider to be an essay, which is sometimes mistaken for a poem or a prose poem. Its origin was a letter I received out of the blue from a photographer in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Anne Noble, whose work includes portraits of dead bees, some done with such devices as electron microscopes and 3D printers. She knew my collaboration with the Maori painter Shane Cotton (the essay “The Ghosts of Birds”) and asked me to write a text for a catalog of her photographs she was preparing. At the time I wasn’t able to help, but a few years later—long after the catalog had been published—I found it was finally the moment to get to the bees. Read More