Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? “Salt” came easily—so easily that I have very little memory of how it turned into a poem! But its roots lie in the fairy tale “The Dirty Shepherdess” by Paul Sébillot, in the version that appeared in The Green Fairy Book edited by Andrew Lang (1892), which I read over and over as a child. A vain king asks his daughter to tell him how much she loves him, and she says she loves him as much as the salt in her food. Deeply offended, the king disowns then daughter and forces her to flee his kingdom but, after a series of plot twists, is forced to admit that salt is indeed the best thing in life. A good metaphor for love, in other words.
The Dirty Shepherdess
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dirty_Shepherdess
The Green Fairy Book available at Amazon
Andrew Lang
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lang
What month and year did you start writing this poem? I don’t have a handwritten draft of this poem, which is unusual for me. But I do have a dated first draft on my computer: 8 September 2009.
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) In addition to the first draft, I have at least three drafts of this poem, each one making very slight changes. But the overall flow and content of the poem changed very little from first draft to published poem. Perhaps the biggest change came in the formatting—the poem started as three couplets of very long lines. I eventually rearranged them into nine couplets of very short lines.
Alan Squire Publishing published Woman Drinking Absinthe
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? A few nouns and adjectives changed during the writing, but the overall structure of the poem follows the first draft. That draft was a bit wordy, though, and I removed the overwrought phrase “not like wind scurling in root-gnarled / trees” from the poem after the first draft. I also reworded the phrase “seasoning without which life has no savor” for the simpler, more direct “seasoning that gives life its savor.”
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? It’s a love poem, pure and simple—I hope it speaks in a kind of universal way about a very specific thing. Composer Jane Kozhevnikova has already set it to music, and I’m really eager to hear how people respond to it in that incarnation.
Jane Kozhevnikova
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? It’s a short poem, so I wouldn’t really say one part involved more emotion than any other. I did worry a great deal about the “o love” at the end, a deliberate archaism that I hope can be forgiven in a love poem.
Has this poem been published before? And if so where? “Salt” appears in my most recent collection, Woman Drinking Absinthe, which includes a number of allusions to French culture, including visual art and fairy tales.
Woman Drinking Absinthe was published by Alan Squire Publishing in 20201.
Katherine E. Young is the author of Woman Drinking Absinthe, Day of the Border Guards (2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist) and two chapbooks. She is the editor of Written in Arlington and curator of Spoken in Arlington. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, Subtropics, and many others. She is the translator of Look at Him by Anna Starobinets, Farewell, Aylis by Azerbaijani political prisoner Akram Aylisli, and two poetry collections by Inna Kabysh. Young’s translations of contemporary Russian-language poetry and prose have won international awards; several translations have been made into short films. Young was named a 2020 Arlington County (Virginia) Individual Artist Grant recipient, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow, and a 2015 Hawthornden Fellow (Scotland). From 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural poet laureate for Arlington, Virginia.
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