Compiled by Poetry Center Staff

 

Stephanie Balzer is the author of two recently published chapbooks, Revenant (Kore Press) and F a s t e r, F a s t e r (Cue Editions).

A lot of my writing time is squandered by attempting to determine whether I can do this well and if there’s any point to it: does it matter to me or to anyone? But most days I renew my commitment to poetry because no other art form inspires me more.

I read a Robert Frost quote on Facebook that says poetry is a condition, not a profession. Jason [Zuzga] said something about poetry being a way to see the world sideways.

I’m fortunate that my career has always been creative. After college I worked as a journalist covering business. Today I am Executive Director of VOICES, Inc., a nonprofit that mentors youth age 14 to 21 in the documentary arts. We share a space and programs with City High School, a progressive charter in downtown Tucson.

It is June 9th, a Wednesday, and the air conditioning is broken on the first floor of our building (the former Cele Peterson department store established in 1931). As a result I’m upstairs in a science classroom overlooking Pennington Street. By Tucson standards, crazy things happen on Pennington. A few months ago, a truck caught fire outside of our storefront windows and burned up entirely. Another day elephants marched down the street. Elephants.

To write I spend lots of time alone but in public places that are friendly to squatters. I’ve set up makeshift offices at The B Line, Raging Sage, Hotel Congress, Time Market, and even Starbucks on occasion, depending on what kind of energy I want to feel. (And thank you to these fine establishments!) I collect ideas or bits of information from various sources that pique my interest. I read nonfiction or fiction or theory or poetry and magazine and newspaper articles and book reviews. I eavesdrop on conversations. Also I write journal-like entries that frequently become meta-dialogues about why I’m doing this.

Jane [Miller] says do not write unless you have to.

After collecting a good amount of material I circle back to my home office—which currently sustains the growth of two succulents—and begin organizing thoughts and developing the connective tissue of prose poems. I check what’s in the refrigerator and on Facebook. The outline sums up like this: poem, refrigerator, Internet, poem, TV, Blackberry, email, Facebook. Writing is like working on a crossword puzzle in which you reach for knowledge or insight that’s familiar but just beyond your comprehension or memory. It is a magical process in which you believe richer, more satisfying food will appear in your refrigerator if you keep returning to it. On a great day, surprising things happen as I fiddle and re-order and play with language, and if I sit long enough...

At the grocery store I buy fruit that’s in season and force myself not to waste it. I buy entire mesh bags of Cuties and must eat four or more tangerines per day lest they get moldy. I try not to buy candy.

Sometimes I write about the desert, or rather elements of the landscape that are contained within the city. I write about absence, compromise, defeat, what I watch on TV and what my friends say, even without asking their permission. The world is not within our control. It is, all of it, problematic. We surrender, because what else is there.

 

 

Jefferson Carter on his most recent book, My Kind of Animal, Chax Press.

I’m not a writer who has "projects." I bumble from poem to poem, obsessing over each piece until I can’t improve it further. Then I wait for inspiration to strike again. Usually, I compose about two poems a month, 12 of which might be keepers at the end of the year. After three years or so, I take my two best poems, place one at the beginning of the ms. and one at the end, arrange the other pieces so they don’t jar from one poem to the next, and voila! a book! This is how My Kind of Animal, my latest collection, grew.

I don’t like discussing my process, partly because I don’t really have a coherent one and partly because I remember Woody Allen’s advice from Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Sex: if you analyze how an erection happens, you may never have another one. However, I’ll man up and describe how one recent poem evolved.

I volunteer with Sky Island Alliance, a locally based environmental organization. I’ve been entering data from expeditions to Mexico, listing the number and kinds of birds observed. When I googled “mockingbird,” trying to find the range of an unclearly identified bird, I read this bit of information: “Thomas Jefferson had a pet mockingbird named Dick.” Boom! What a great first line for a poem. Biking home from work, I began thinking about Thomas Jefferson and the fact that seven of our first eight presidents were slave-owners. Superintendent Horne’s assault on ethnic study classes was also on my mind, how the sanitized, whitebread, pro-imperialist American history I was force-fed in secondary school could be resurrected. When I got home, I sat down and wrote the following lines in my notebook. After playing around with the concluding image (though I don’t share Yeats’s enthusiasm for an image/symbol finale) so that the sounds weren’t overtly musical, voila! a poem!

Mockingbird

Our third President owned
a pet mockingbird named Dick.
Let’s not mention what else
he owned. Dick dug Monticello,
that big white layer cake.
He’d click & chatter. He’d mimic
the field slaves’ hosannahs
until he’d almost faint, wobbling
on his perch like a double
handful of dirty cotton.

 

Arianna Zwartjes is the author of The Surfacing of Excess, which was awarded the Eastern Washington University Press poetry prize for 2009.

The Surfacing of Excess came out in March of 2010, but it was written several years before that, during a period when I had the good fortune to put aside five hours every day to read and write, and was being very disciplined about turning off phones, Internet, etc. I find the reading time is at least as important as the writing time, when I'm working on a new project, and I probably spent three of those hours each day just reading—it's so important to be entering fertile matter into my brain at the same time as I am attempting to alchemize and process that matter to produce some kind of cohesive piece.

Each time I work on a writing project (and I should say here, I'm drawn to pieces that in some way are book-length projects, that accrue as a whole, rather than simply as individual poems), I find I have a "short stack" of books which become crucial to that project—to which I turn again and again, for inspiration, or to "borrow" or lean on the voice or style they've created, using it to push me a little farther outside what I might normally craft, or looking at it as an example of something I've never done before. For example, in Surfacing, I wanted to write a set of longer personal poems, which I'd never written before, and I turned to the work of authors such as Frank Bidart, D.A. Powell, Jelaluddin Rumi, and Jane Miller to help me push into voices that were different from the voice in the rest of the book, by imitating things such as their line length, timing, and diction.

The emergence—and I can't really think of any better word to describe the project—of Surfacing was really surprising to me, I hadn't really planned it in advance, I just sat down to write each day and suddenly the project started to really flow, seemingly out of nowhere—I wrote the numbered poems first, using Margaret Wertheim's A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space as a model for the number of lines in each numbered poem, and sometimes borrowing part or even the whole of a first line from her project to start each poem off. The project was written following an emotionally tumultuous period for me, the dissolution of a significant relationship, and the emotion I'd been processing for a number of months by then really underlies the whole project—exploring despair, loss, a heightened awareness of mortality, and the deep deep sense of loneliness that can sometimes engulf us in this world. To me, the emotion that runs beneath the project is in constant tension with the precise mathematical language of many of the poems, fighting to break through in moments of more emotion-based language or detail.

I discovered as I was writing the project that I really need three elements to come together in order for the chemistry to be right for something to "spontaneously" begin to emerge: first, a language-set (in this case, the language and framework of hyperbolic geometry); second, a driving theme of some sort (in Surfacing, this was the exploration of mortality, loss, and human spirituality, particularly through the exploration of the ideas of Simone Weil and Plato, but also those of Heidegger, Sartre, and Carson); and third, an underlying personal narrative (which, in this case, is thin, fragmented, emerges only through tiny pieces, and is probably fairly hard to piece together—but is in some way the drive behind the entire project, nonetheless).

This project—in contrast to the one I'm working on now—required little revision... it seemed to emerge in a precise form which I found resistant to change after the initial writing. The book has had a bit of a journey already; initially released by EWU Press, it is now under the auspices of Carnegie Mellon University Press following Eastern Washington University's closing of its press.

 

Shelly Taylor's Black Eyed-Heifer was published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2010. Shelly Taylor has also authored two poetry chapbooks—Peaches the yes girl (Portable Press at YoYo Labs, 2008) and Land Wide to Get a Hold Lost In (Dancing Girl Press, 2009).

I write because I've never figured out any other way to be in the world. How very serious of me!—but it's quite true. I write to put the world—I guess I'm saying my world really—in order, to set things right almost in the same way I obsess over cleaning the house even when it doesn't need it, or anything that's second nature to a personality. Process is a weird thing to try to discuss. It took me like four-odd years to make a book I named Black-Eyed Heifer which is just out from Tarpaulin Sky Press. Relooking at the book now, I can tell you exactly what I was reading during the times of writing the poems, or where I was living, what sort of life ordeal played into the writing thereof. Everything around my body/my life is in the poems. Like “Keylight”: I was heavily obsessed with Mrs. Dalloway & had freshly moved to NYC in the middle of summer when the drummer Max Roach had just passed away setting radio stations ablaze—all that energy I felt from all those & many sources are in that poem. “In subtropic” was written during monsoon Tucson & huge life-changing stuff—& I think you get the feeling of that when reading the poem; the smells of the rain, at least, & life being cut off from old becoming new—the way the almost-never rain can make you feel.

I'm attempting to write a second book now & the process is much the same. I recently turned on the TV to VH1 where they were airing a 2010 Dirty South Hip Hop Awards show & a lot of the feel of that music (which is where I'm from) & the language got appropriated. Later on that day I was thinking about weight, which somehow made me think of Karen Carpenter which made me Google her, & then I found Todd Haynes' Barbie Doll reenactment (now something of a cult classic) of her life called “Superstar” which is so dern interesting, & from there I found out Carpenter sang that song “A Song for You” which I just love & have on a Willie Nelson Honeysuckle Rose record that I've played over & over the last couple months 'cause it's meaningful to my life right now, & yes, all of this is in one poem (which is not very long as you might think), which I have yet to finish, which I'm sure will pick up a million more things around me until I call it ready. Texture, layering, & density I do enjoy. You see this everywhere in other media as well—whether fashion or via painting, a thick layering of the unlike is best in my mind at this juncture in life, though I need a crispness as well—variation being most important. I am into religious text here lately, so a couple recent poems picked up language from the Bible (I don't relegate to just this Christian text—I use various sources), in order to integrate from it that which is pertinent to my life. A writer can steal, borrow, or use anything. That's it for me. It's second skin is what I guess I'm saying, & everything is fair game if it speaks to you.

 

Simmons B. Buntin lives in the community of Civano in southeast Tucson. He is the founding editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments and has published two books of poetry: Riverfall (Salmon Poetry, 2005) and Bloom (Salmon Poetry, 2010). 

Of the many landscapes in which I've lived—from the scarps of the Colorado Front Range to the subtropical forests of central Florida, from the hardwood hills of Maryland to the dense greenery of Alabama—none has inspired me as much as the Sonoran Desert. I've lived in Tucson for the past decade. But I first fell for the harsh beauty of this prickly landscape as a boy, when I wandered the washes of the Catalina foothills off of River Road, then later explored the ruins of Fort Lowell Park when we moved "in town." It's a cliché but one worth its weight in gold to say that the desert gets in your blood, and I don't mean Valley Fever, though there's that dark side of the desert, too. In fact, the beautiful and often treacherous line between light and dark is what makes the desert most compelling for me.

The poems in my newest collection of poetry, Bloom, are both set in and inspired by the light and dark moods of the Arizona/Sonora borderlands. They are likewise inspired by community and family—mostly my two daughters, Ann-Elise and Juliet, who despite their occasional complaints play starring roles. I find myself most intrigued by the intersection between desert and daughters—the interaction of wildlife and arroyo, neighborhood and mountain, and how we move through and so are moved by these elements. For example, the poem "Shine" traces an evening with my daughters at the Arizona/Sonora Desert Museum tracking scorpions with an ultraviolet light. We return home to find a dead coral snake on the dimly lit street next to our house. We find "eyes open and shining, jaw heavy / with venom, the coral snake's body / is bent upon itself, rolled tight from the quick black / wheels of the day." The realization is that even the sharpest and most venomous of creatures is exposed in one way or another in this harsh landscape. Indeed, aren't we all?

But exposure is not the role, at least not the sole role, of poetry. Beyond revealing, there's the revelation, and what I strive for in the 37 poems of Bloom is what Alison Hawthorne Deming praises in the book as a "celebration of nature, family, and the healing power of beauty." As the editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, I've come to find that our built and natural worlds are not separate, just as an individual person is never truly separate from community. Nature informs family, family informs community, community informs nature. In the end, when we are lucky or perhaps of a higher grace, we find (from the poem "Shower") what my daughter discovered when she released an afternoon's gathering of ladybugs into our house: the open room of your heart, too, will be filled with the bloom of "pure red joy."