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? It started a few years ago when I organized a marathon Ginsberg reading, “Howl-A-Thon,” and heard Kral Majales (King of May) wherein Ginsberg is paraded through Prague in 1965 before being deported. That poem led me to “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” a novel so rich I did, indeed, start making margin notes – some because I too had been adrift during the time of Prague Spring. It was 1968, and I was dropping out of college to work in the peace movement, taking far too much acid, thinking it a Buddhist shortcut. My first drafts of this poem pretty much followed what actually happened after the air gauge/pen mix up – I always try to start with a joke. And from there it was just trying to hone the story-telling and not get in the way of where the poem wanted to go.
Click to hear Allen Ginsberg read his poem “Howl” in 1959
Click to read about Kral Majales (King of May)
https://allenginsberg.org/2018/05/may-day-kral-majales/
Click to order Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being from Amazon
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I was on our front porch here in Clarkston, Georgia, a noted refugee resettlement town outside Atlanta. On the one hand our street is very southern with magnolias, huge water oaks and cicadas on summer nights, but there’s also constant foot traffic from the newly-arrived to this country – women in full hijab, tall Sudanese men, Syrian families, Bhutanese. Not that I try to appropriate their stories, it’s just where I usually am after dinner, tapping notes into my phone so I’ll have some starting lines the next day on my laptop instead of just staring at a blank doc.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? I think it was the summer of 2018. I tend to let drafts sit in that metaphoric drawer for a good while before getting back to them with serious edits. You really see more that way. Stephen Dunn suggested that approach during a series of conference workshops many years ago.
Click to visit Rupert Fike’s Facebook Page
https://www.facebook.com/rupert.fike
Click to visit Stephen Dunn’s Website
https://www.stephendunnpoet.com/
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? Originally,at the Eritrean tire place, I was ” . . . waiting outside on his half wall fanning away at the grilled-goat-for-lunch smoke.” This detail survived several revisions, but you know, how much does that line really contribute to the poem’s movement down the page? Which is so important. My tendency to chew scenery needs to be reined in. Plus, the grilled goat line messed up the blank verse rhythm I was shooting for.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? Hopefully they’ll be blindsided a bit – that’s the best we can ever hope for. But this ending does connect back to the originating idea which isn’t my usual MO. I tend to write “straight line” poems – that is, a series of digressions that don’t necessarily circle back to the start. Better to take the reader to an unexpected place.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The way straight men try to express affection for each other – how it’s often disguised as an insult or dig. It took a while for me to realize that this was important to the poem. I guess I blindsided myself with that one. Didn’t see it coming at all. Our man-crushes are likely little changed from those of Plato’s world – 2500 years barely a nano-blink in human evolution.
Click to read about Plato on Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato
Has this poem been published? And if so where? Near the End of the Famous Czech Novel appears in Kestrel, Winter 2021-2022, Issue 46 – from Fairmont State University. It’s part of my 3rd collection, Among the Furies, that’s still being tweaked.
Rupert Fike’s work has been published in Rosebud, The Georgetown Review, storySouth, Borderlands, Texas Review of Poetry, The Cumberland Review, The Cortland Review, Natural Bridge (University of Missouri at St Louis), Atlanta Review, Snake Nation Review, Backwards City Review, FutureCycle, Dark Sky Magazine, A Celebration of Southern Poets (Kennesaw University Press) and others. He has been nominated for a Pushcart prize in poetry (Java Monkey Speaks) and short fiction (Rosebud). A poem of his is inscribed in a downtown Atlanta plaza, and he has had several one act plays produced by the Alliance Theatre Interns for Theatre Emory. His non-fiction book, Voices from the Farm, edited accounts of life on this country’s largest spiritual community, The Farm, is now available in paperback. Lotus Buffet, his first poetry collection, was a finalist in the Brick Road Poetry Contest 2010. Rupert Fike reads his poems and conducts workshops at high schools and middle schools in the Atlanta area. He lives with his wife, Kathy, in Clarkston, Georgia not far from their daughters and grandchildren. Kathy and Rupert spent eight years on The Farm, a spiritual community in middle Tennessee which they helped found in 1971 after several years in the bay area. He is working on a book of poems based on The Farm experience.
Most of the BACKSTORY OF THE POEM 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