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? Where and when did you start the poem? Usually, poems come to me in a dream state, often after reading poetry in the morning. I begin with lines scratched in whatever notebook is current. Sometime later, I go back to the notebook, transcribe my notes and see which words/ideas/lines speak to each other. That’s what I usually do. Not with this poem.
The idea for this poem came whole, after a poetry workshop the summer of 2000 At Round Top, Texas. Naomi Shihab Nye (BELOW), one of my first teachers, was there with her son, Madison, who had just turned thirteen. He was shooting hoops as the sun went down on a hot afternoon.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/111824517810/
He reminded me of my boys, grown men by then, and I recalled with no little sentimental gloss, what they had been like at that age. In the Texas a basketball, a cracked court, evoked my wrenching knowledge of how quickly boys become men.
Where were you when you actually started to write the poem? Describe. I wrote the poem at home in Texarkana, Texas, September, 2001. (BOTTOM LEFT) I wrote then, in a narrow room at the top of the house with a window that looked out on the neighborhood. My view was a white wall with various quotes printed out and posted. That version had 19 wordy lines. In the fall of 2021 (BOTTOM RIGHT), I added it to Packet #2, and sent it to my advisor in the Vermont MFA program, Jack Myers.
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? Some, but it was mostly a question of language. Words that I sharpened and made more taut. In general, I harnessed the poem’s sentiment a bit. But, as I said, it had bubbled in my head for a while by then.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I always want readers to see my poems as an entry to their own memories and emotions.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The ending of the poem as it was published in Is This Forever Or What :Poems & Paintings from Texas (Greenwillow Books, 2004.) This portion of the poem encapsulates the theme of motherhood, and its inevitable waning from a necessary to an ancillary part of a child’s life.
Before he goes out,
the boy puts on his Spurs jersey.
His Mother has washed it
until it is thin as milk.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle was born in Manhattan, raised in Bermuda, Connecticut and Ft Lauderdale, Florida and lives now in the Arkansas Ozarks in a house she built in 1980. She has an MA from The University of Arkansas and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
She is the author of The Mercy of Traffic (Unlikely Books, 2019), Discount Fireworks (Jacaranda Press, 2008) and Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Press, 2000.)