This poem developed over time. It started off exploring how manual labor can give more pleasure than something that you trained for years to do. At some point, the idea of the father came into the poem. I often have imaginary discussions and arguments with people as I walk or work. And some people occupy a space in our minds and imaginations; we feel them watching us, perhaps judging us, and we want to explain ourselves.

 

One of the things that I appreciate about manual tasks is the clarity. You know what you need to do, and you know when you have done it. There was a sink of dirty dishes, and now the dishes are clean. There was a full truck of compost, and now it’s empty. That’s gratifying.

 

Grading papers (and teaching) can be much more nebulous. You often don’t know if you’re having an effect. Writing poems is similar. You can work on them and worry them and never know if you’re done. Paul Valery said that a poem wasn’t finished but abandoned.

 

So, on the one hand, there is a sense of wondering if you’re accomplishing anything. There also is, as with much labor, a sense of repetition. You did it; now tomorrow you need to do it again. You clean the kitchen, but hours later, you eat and the dishes are dirty again. I feel great when I’ve drafted a poem, and then the next morning, the feeling has dissipated, and I’m wrestling with anxieties again. On the other hand, I’ve never regretted spending time writing just as I’ve never regretted spending time outside either walking or in the yard.

 

 

If you ask adults about poetry, a number of them will say that they don’t like it or understand it. Some might even say they hate it. Since most kids love wordplay and poetry, what happened? I think partly it’s the way poetry is taught. In wanting to emphasize the importance of concentration – how when the longer you look the more connections you see – we have introduced the idea of hidden meanings and obscure interpretations. Consequently, people feel they aren’t “getting it.” It’s not poetry that they fear, but feeling and looking stupid.

 

After all, when you listen to ESPN or sports announcers, they’re using all kinds of poetic techniques – alliteration, rhythm, rhyme, metaphors – and they fit these into a tight form. No one fears them (although they may be disliked). Poetic techniques surround us in ads, headlines, and signs, but when something is called “poetry,” it evokes different expectations and even fear.

 

And, frankly, when poetry is badly taught, it may turn people off for the rest of their lives. I’m a fan of Billy Collins “Introduction to Poetry,” but students are not to blame for not knowing how to enjoy poetry and for focusing too much on “what it means.” That’s what they’re taught to do.

 

However, there also may be good reasons to fear poetry. As Emily Dickinson says, “Tell the truth/but tell it slant.” Poetry allows things to be said obliquely. It’s subversive which is why E.B. White said, “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom – he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.” Poetry has a way of getting through our defenses, and “taking hold,” and that too may scare people.

 

As for the poem itself being a hero in “Soporific,” I hadn’t thought of that. My titles often set up a context, and sometimes complicate the poems. In this case, the reassurance of the voice may be a sedative which usually means that something is wrong.

 

 

When my children arrived, I immediately became intensely aware of my mortality because, as you suggest, I could see the past and the future in them. I imagine them looking back on the moments that we’re having right now and thinking “We used to have this dog when we were growing up.” Or, “I remember how my dad would…” Today will be an old photograph (or digital image) to them. And, as they get older, they become palimpsests. I see their younger selves underneath.

 

In much of my work, I hope to find a moment that stands for something larger, if not the “world in a grain of sand” as Blake says, then at least something more than the moment itself. I have sketched out plenty of poems that end up being anecdotes or solely descriptive, and I usually shelve them. There needs to be a couple things going on that resonate against one another. Poetry is an act of compression.

 

 

I would define it as being a type of estuary. It’s a transition zone where poetry and prose meet. Go in one direction and you’re clearly in poetry. In the other, you’re in prose. But, there’s a delta of prose poetry, flash fiction, mini-fiction, etc.

 

 

I’m polishing a collection called “Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet” that will be released in the spring of 2012.

 

I was never going to get married, have kids, own a house, work a five-day-a-week job, or wear black socks. And I absolutely was never going to write self-indulgent, naval-gazing poems about writing poems. However, I met a woman, fell in love, and married her. We have two kids, and they’re funny and fascinating. We live in an old house that we try to take care of, and, yes, I teach five days a week and often wear black socks. All of this has worked out so well for me that it wore down my other prejudices, and it probably became inevitable that I would start writing about writing. So “Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet” contains poems about writing, teaching, books, and reading.

 

For those who consider it narcissistic or gimmicky, at least it’s short. That’s one advantage of poetry. If you don’t like it, it’s over quickly.

 

 

 

 

A man in the shape of my father sits

in my peripheral vision, drinking beer

and watching me shift around the truck bed

as I try to figure out how best to shovel a load

of manure into the yard.  I can hear him

muttering, I thought I sent you to college

When I insist that it’s more rewarding

than grading papers, he shakes his head,

I resist saying he did a pretty good job

demonstrating how to fling crap around

when we were young; it would be a dig

he would laugh at then mull over later

until it enraged him.  We can’t ever seem

to let some things stay buried.  Instead

I suggest, It’s nice to have it be a choice.

Say what you want, he shrugs.  Shit is shit.

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t worry.

This poem isn’t difficult.

There are no hidden meanings

that make you feel stupid

when someone points them out.

It capitalizes the letters you expect,

it doesn’t use punctuation in weird ways,

and the spacing between words is uniform.

The line breaks aren’t significant;

they’re only here to reassure you

this really is a poem

(and not one of those paragraphs

that some people insist are poems

but you can’t figure out why).

Most importantly, this poem isn’t long.

It’s not even a page.

It’ll be over soon.  Like a shot or a pill.

It’s not one of those unbearable poems

that go on and on sometimes

as much as three or four pages

until you have to scan ahead to see

when it will finally be over.

No, this one is short.

In fact, you were done a little bit ago,

and this part here is just hand-holding

to make sure you don’t

suffer from any ill effects.

 

 

 

 

 

Most of these I’ve never used

although each time I bought one

I was convinced that I would

just as I thought I would read

the parenting books in the stack

that now spills under the bed,

and the texts on physics,

stars, and string theory

piled next to my office desk.

I used to check out hundreds

of library books, hoping somewhere

in the pages would be the advice

I needed to make something

with the ingredients of my life,

and yet each day ends up being

another hasty improvisation

with nothing measured cleanly

and no clear sequence to the steps.

Still, I continue to believe

in the idea of simple solutions,

ones as elegant as a wheel.

I remember how someone said

the best Italian dishes have no more

than four ingredients with the key

being freshness and quality,

how Archimedes claimed you could

move the world with a long enough lever

and a solid place to stand,

how the most powerful sentence

in the Bible is “Jesus wept.”

So later, after dinner, whatever it is,

I will navigate the dark bedrooms

of my children, past the bookshelves

I’ve filled for them, the baskets

of toys, the drawers of clothes,

until I stand before them

the daughter and the son,

each asleep, wrapped in sheets

like loaves of fresh bread,

and I will murmur a kind of prayer

together.  May you have a life as

 

 

 

 

 

She says she wonders what has happened to the Book of Names and the Book of Life now that everything’s gone digital.  It’s hard to imagine God swiping a Kindle or that maitre-d St. Peter at the Gates, looking up arrivals on his iPad.  But why, he asks, do these seem any stranger than vellum, or parchment, or paper?  We have always been told this world is virtual, a simulation of another.  At this she starts to cry, and when he places a hand on her new leg, she pushes it off, saying, This is not real.  Her tone is hard to read, and he doesn’t know if she means the limb, the crying, the empathy, the room, the world.  Maybe not, he says, but it’s what we have.

 

 

 

 

 

At the baby shower, her mother passed around a photo of when she had sang and played lead guitar in The More Deceived.  Someone said, Say goodbye to ever fitting into leather pants like that again.  The picture had been taken the last night of the town’s summer festival, the one that was cancelled a few years later, and it had been the only time, she had sang “Larkin Was Right” to people who had seen her grow up, ones who had smiled at her as she sat in timeout on the curb outside of the Big Boy and who had pretended not to be checking her out after she got breasts.  She had screamed the lines, They fuck you up your mom and dad.  They may not mean to but they do, and, for once, the sound system had been clear.  She imagined they could hear her twenty miles away in Greenville.  She sang better than she ever had or would again since the band would break up a month later when Katie decided to go to college after all.  When she had finished that song, holding the last note as long as she could, then standing defiantly at the stage’s edge, ready for their scorn and hatred, everyone had applauded, some even prying themselves out of their blue folding chairs to stand, and she had been appalled.  Now, someone was asking if she meant to name the baby Ophelia, and her mother was smiling, but she found herself unable to answer, disconcerted by a growing realization of just how much someone can be deceived.