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? This poem emerged from a writing class unlike any other I have ever taken. It was taught by the unique Christopher Bursk, beloved teacher, mentor to so many poets, especially on the vibrant poetry scene in and around Philadelphia, who passed away on June 21 2021.
Christopher Bursk Obituary – Langhorne, Pennsylvania – Dunn-Givnish Funeral Home (tributes.com)
I was new to the class but many participants had been taking it for years. They had become a close, supportive community, held together by Chris’s immense kindness.
Every week Chris arrived pushing a cart piled high with handouts and packets of photocopied poetry including the work of poets from Darwish to Hugo to Williams to Wordsworth. He handed out party favors such as mini-Slinkies, balloons and Frisbees. We took turns reading aloud, we shared snacks, we sang, we rode this wild roller coaster of a class, punctuated by Chris’s inimical cries of “Holy s—t!” and “Arrrgh!” his hands clasped around his cheeks. No class ever laughed so hard.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mahmoud-darwish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth
I’m not a teacher and I don’t have an MFA. But if someone were to ask me the pedagogical philosophy around this class, I would say it seemed designed to break us out of our usual habits of thought and language, so that we could write something fresh and true. It was so different from all the classes and workshops I’d known I was uncomfortable at first – but I think maybe that was the idea.
Each week there were multiple readings and many possibilities for assignments. Each student could submit any number of poems per week and Chris read them all. He was always encouraging and his suggestions were spot-on. Each week Chris’s handouts included poems by students in the class.
This poem started with one of Chris’s assignments and took me through a journey I describe below.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I have a day job, but poetry is my passion since childhood. I make time for it wherever and whenever I can. I freewrite the first draft by hand, any place I can, my dining room table when the house is quiet, or a corner someplace when it’s not. I sometimes grab some free moments at my desk at work.
One week as I prepared for Chris’s class, I chose this homework option: Choose a line by one of the poets in the class and build your poem around it.
I sat down at my dining room table and pored over the handouts. Paging through the poems by classmates, these lines popped out at me.
“I wanted to write a poem about a flower
but the only flower I could bring myself to pen
was the bloom of subcutaneous blood pooling
around the neck of the Syrian man hanging
in one of Assad’s many underground prisons.” — Steve Nolan
The lines were written by Steve Nolan. Steve is a poet and Licensed Clinical Social Worker who spent 25 years as a therapist and 30 years in the military, culminating his career as the Chief of Combat Stress for Paktika Province in Afghanistan. He ran a PTSD clinic for the VA for five years before moving to Newtown, Pennsylvania in 2015.
Steve’s work is grittier, edgier than mine. Often inspired by his experiences in Afghanistan or events in the news, he looks unflinchingly at the pain and injustice in a world he has seen much more of than I have.
I was moved by the sudden shift between Steve’s second and third lines – the shift from the flower and the pen to the brutal specificity of that “bloom of subcutaneous blood.” The idea of the wound as a flower — I just had to take than jarring image further.
BASE CAMP by Steve Nolan
AMERICAN CARNAGE by Steve Nolan
What month and year did you start writing this poem? I started writing this poem on April 6, 2017.
Most of my poems grow slowly. I start out by tapping into a wild place inside and freewrite mostly from instinct, without judging. Often I don’t know where I’m going. When I feel ready to start typing on my laptop, I struggle to decipher my own scribbles. I lose myself in the process, reading the poem out loud over and over, playing with sound, stanzas and line breaks, sometimes form.
This poem, however, was different. It poured out of me almost fully developed. Steve’s striking, almost sacramental transformation of the blood of suffering and injustice “blooming” inspired me to take that image as far as I could. I used a loose form of anaphora (“Write about… Write about…”) to build upon the image. In this case the litany became the poem.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/litany
By channeling images I’d seen in the news, photos of refugees and migrants, reports of war and oppression, it felt like a little bit of grace to metaphorically place a different flower on each.
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 was previously published in a slightly different version in a collection QuillsEdge 50/50 Poems & Translations by Womxn over 50, edited by Ann Davenport.
After that version was published, I changed the title so that the title flows into the poem itself. This is sometimes called an enjambed title, running title, or first line enjambment, or – and this name seems to fit my poem perfectly – a “bleeding” title.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? This is a brutal poem. It confronts images of death, blood and poison, and transforms each image into a specific flower – a violet, a chrysanthemum, a white rose. A memorial, something alive and fertile. I hope readers take from this poem a sense of empathy that does not sugarcoat but finds grace in suffering.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? I have struggled to find a way to write about world events that deeply trouble me, knowing how fortunate I have been by accident of birth. I’ve been searching for ways to “let in” people and experiences I need to write about that are outside the scope of my own narrow everyday lens.
This image helped me find my “way in” to write about suffering with empathy. In this poem, I found one way I can “write about” the world, placing myself in a wider context.
And maybe also an instruction, from poets such as Chris Bursk and Steve Nolan, to “write about” the things that matter.
Has this poem been published before? And if so where? As mentioned above, this poem was previously published in a slightly different version in a collection QuillsEdge 50/50 Poems & Translations by Womxn over 50.
This poem also appears in my chapbook “We Marry, We Bury, We Sing or We Weep,” which was a runner-up in the Moonstone Arts Chapbook Contest 2021 (Moonstone Press, 2021).
Faith Paulsen’s second poetry chapbook “We Marry, We Bury, We Sing or We Weep,” is a Runner-up in Moonstone Arts’ 2021 Chapbook Contest. Her poetry and prose have appeared in many venues including Ghost City Press, Book of Matches, Thimble Literary Magazine, Evansville Review, Mantis, Psaltery and Lyre, and Terra Preta.
Her work has also been anthologized in collections such as 50/50: Poems & Translations by Womxn over 50 (QuillsEdge). She has been nominated for a Pushcart.
Her chapbook A Color Called Harvest (Finishing Line Press) was published in 2016. A third chapbook, Cyanometer, is now available for pre-sales for publication in October 2021.
Faith Paulson’s webpage
https://www.faithpaulsenpoet.com/
A Color Called Harvest
https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/a-color-called-harvest-by-faith-paulsen/
Cyanometer
https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/cyanometer-by-faith-paulsen/