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? I chose “Parting Gift,” a poem from my collection, Welcome to Midland. I can actually trace different iterations of this poem all the way back to 2006. Welcome to Midland is, in part, a coming-of-age story. I started writing about the moment depicted in this poem when the memory was new, and images from the first prose poem I wrote about it have found their way into various pieces over many years.
https://poets.org/glossary/prose-poem
The version that appears in Welcome to Midland came about when I was a few years into working on the manuscript. I went to an artist residency in North Carolina called Wildacres during the summer of 2015. While I was there, I drafted a number of the more difficult pieces I planned for the collection, including this one. The writing from my little cabin is more of a journal entry—it is written in prose and sort of rambles and searches, recalls some of those recurring images. The more poem-like drafts were composed a full year later.
The whole manuscript underwent serious revisions before Deep Vellum Publishing picked it up, including shifting the point of view from second person to first person. That transition with this particular poem was interesting—second person creates some narrative distance, I think, and that really wasn’t serving this piece. It’s better in first.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. Wildacres Retreat is up in the mountains off the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. I stayed in a little cabin by myself called the Owl’s Nest, pictured here. It had a large standing desk that I spread paper all over. It rained all day one of the days I was there. Most of my luggage was books, because I had research to do and no internet or cell service. I shared my cabin with mice, who didn’t fear me at all. It was actually pretty amazing to only have a landline phone and no other demands on my time apart from reading and writing. I think about it all the time, even still.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? I was at Wildacres in June 2015. I took this selfie (Below) outside the book shop in the nearby village of Little Switzerland, where I drove to get WiFi.
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? This poem has a few recurring images that have appeared in different iterations of this moment—leaves opening, the drumming rain, crossing from a desolate landscape into this lush, dreamy place. Early versions, including a draft pictured here, included a closing detail about carrying a photograph of the beloved. That didn’t make it into the final draft. Ultimately, I chose to keep the poem in the moment at hand, versus allowing the speaker to comment on what happened after that. But I think a lot about those lost lines, and what it means to carry someone’s photograph. Perhaps that is for another poem someday.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? This is a love poem. The collection is a novel-in-verse, and this poem closes one of the arcs within the narrative. This moment is fraught and sad, but it’s also profoundly hopeful. The story, like the landscape in which it is set, is sometimes bleak. This poem is a relief, and it plays an important part in the overall message of the book.
https://poets.org/glossary/verse-novel
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? You know, this whole poem is just super emotional for me. I read it live at a queer poetry reading in a gorgeous theater space in Dallas in fall of 2016, not long after I wrote the draft pictured above, but long before I knew the book would come into the world. You can feel it at a reading when the audience is with you, and this poem was that kind of moment. People said such lovely things to me about it afterward. I felt like I’d finally written the poem I meant to write, which was at once scary and satisfying.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? It has not, apart from the book itself. I didn’t send it out much, honestly.
https://bookshop.org/books/welcome-to-midland/9781646050697
Logen Cure is a queer poet and professor. She curates Inner Moonlight, a monthly podcast reading series for The Wild Detectives in Dallas. She’s an editor for Voicemail Poems. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her debut full-length poetry collection is Welcome to Midland, released from Deep Vellum Publishing in 2021. She lives in Texas.
All Backstory of the Poem LIVE LINKS can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html
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