Thank you for your loving reaction. Too often, I think, poetry is accepted, but not loved—or we editors try to be professional and think “professional” means “without feelings or opinions.” Your happiness and connection to the poems pleases me half to death.

 

Grammar seems like a cluster of happy accidents.  On a visit to see my in-laws a couple of summers ago, I found a copy of a 1946 grammar book entitled Drill for Skill on the bureau in the room where we stayed. I love to look through grammar books, and this one by C.C. Rickett charmed me with the voice of its friendly, formal introduction and elegant lessons and exercises. The chapter headings and subheadings were the best, though. My mother-in-law said I could have it. Shortly afterwards, when Jane & Paige or Sister Goose was finished and in the pipes, I felt lonely for a series to work on and thought I’d try write about grammar as a way of thinking about family. I started with “Gerunds”—maybe thinking about gerunds started the project, I’m not sure—the inherent sadness of actions converted to things, motion to stasis.  But the project branched into familial associations, like ideas of nation, and the appetites and impulses indicated in grammatical structures and uses. Christophe Casamassima, editor at Furniture Press Books, read the first three or four poems and asked if he could publish the series as a book. I’d decided by then to write fifty poems (inspired by Liana Quill’s Fifty Poems, a book I keep nearby), but after Christophe wrote me, I started thinking of the exercise as a book and not just a series to think and write on while thinking and writing about other things.

 

When did grammar come to life for you?

 

In graduate school, when I took Latin while studying French feminists. Language became visible to me in ways it hadn’t before, as well as invisible to me in ways it hadn’t before.

 

 

Oh, prepositions. Hands down.

 

 

The period—he has a brother who holds up the other guy. The fight would be rigged.

 

 

Present, and I feel very lucky that this is so.

What new poetry projects are you working on?

 

I’m roped up in writing details of Wallace Stevens’ “Woman Looking  at a Vase of Flowers”—kind of a study of a study. This poem has preoccupied me for years since I first read it. The poem seemed to make my heart pound and to describe my heart’s pounding, but it evaded me intellectually. This sequence is my effort to break into the poem and live there. So the short answer is that I’m a squatter in one of Wallace Stevens’ poems.

 

 

 

News is not all: it is difficult

to drink long from its flimsy

cup or for its inky ships to meet

the drowning, yet many a man is

making friends with misery

for lack of news alone.  Every day,

even as I speak (for I, too, am concerned:

hear me out), it is more difficult

to get love from poems that rise and sink

and rise again, gathering into gardens

of gentleness and goodness hot with memory

but offering at last no table cheer, no food

for lung or bone. It well may be,

but it is not the end of the world.

 

 

 

 

 

Prodigal arena: here is your door

hinged

by association

Lady pets tiger

she will not be

made to choose

 

 

 

 

 

Is the wish for peace merely affection

for the still life, the radio’s calm weather

report or white envelopes ordered

in a box.  Such clearings of simplicity

arrest the commonplace as conclusion

and so observable. The huddled

apple and fearless pears quiet us

over their good cloth draping a resolute

surface, an assurance of flesh, motion

having put aside function in favor

of the dove, not flame, curled

in the belly.

 

 

 

 

 

Lest you be understood as the world

divided by light and darkness

or rounded up to the nearest

 

category of gray

consider yourself

 

singled out from rough numbers

your name figured from the population

crunched under emphasis

 

When you’ve sorted resident

from neighbor, block from burb

citizen from the unpublished

listing, meet my eye

 

over the mended wall

stone on earth on stone

 

what names we may place

together where our orchards tilt

into the rain

 

 

 

 

 

Champagne taste unbecoming

an economical personality

 

A paratactic appetite

packed in a little black dress

 

Let some air into

the conversation

Let down your hair

 

froth or foe

my parallel Virgo

a rose goes

 

before a clause

like the pause

before

applause

 

Thorns in threes may

see or be

the defects of design

 

Be pleased by what you leave

& all you will pass by