*This feature was first published on January 12, 2018.
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? To begin with, I think of myself as primarily a nature writer or spiritual writer, not a political one. Recently, I had three poems chosen for The Poetry of Presence: an Anthology of Mindfulness Poems (Grayson Books), which speaks to my intent in poetry.
And yet, since the 2016 election, despite my best efforts not to do so, I seem to be ending up writing political poems. Which are tricky little devils, both to write, and then to place, because hot button topics turn into yesterday’s ho-hum news stories pretty darned quickly.
This one found a home in Not Our President (Third World Press) and I’ve placed others, but I suspect the rest of them may linger in my “unplaced” folder forever and ever. And these won’t be poems I’ll consider for my next book manuscript, because who knows where we’ll be (At war with Korea? With a new administration after impeachment/resignation/criminal indictments? (Oh, please, oh please!)) by the time I finish sending the manuscript around (3-5 years), then a couple of more years before it comes out. So these are “poems of the moment,” but I can’t seem to stop writing them.
Another problem, of course, with political/topical poems is that they can very easily tip into polemic or diatribe, something I’m hoping doesn’t happen here. Because above all, a poem should be a poem, an object crafted with as much skill as I can muster.
With this one, I started with the color, the peculiar shade he seems to be choosing on the tanning bed. I’ve been fascinated with the word “orange” for years, because of the inability of the English language to come up with an exact rhyme. Rhyme, whether exact or slant, and sound are important to me in a poem, so here I get to play with orange/ deranged/ strange/ borage/ porringer.
I like poems that take some leaps, so after fooling around with sound, I hip-hopped over to a familiar knock-knock joke, then referenced the tweetstorm of last September.
At that time, I’d been blessed with a writing residency at the Moulin à Nef, a studio owned by The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in Auvillar, France, near Toulouse.
I spend a lot of time writing outdoors (en plein air, like the painters), so what was in front of me, a Great Blue Heron (heron cendré ) fishing in the river, popped into the poem. A couple of lines meditating on the bird and our place in human history, and I’m back off on a rant about us teetering on the edge of a nuclear holocaust.
So I end with a prayer, or an invocation, going back to color and the visual. (I strongly believe in writing through the body, writing through the senses.) But it does conclude with a hint of menace—is that flickering light merely the sunset, or does it harken to something more sinister?
Auden tells us “poetry makes nothing happen,” and in the most literal sense, I’m sure he’s right. But to not write anything about these times feels like complicity, and so, wielding a pen instead of a weapon, I keep writing the Resistance. . . .
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?) Four drafts, two in longhand, two typed.
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? Initially, I over-wrote the ending: “Let us not go up (or detonate) in flames.” Most of the other edits were word choices and other bits of grammar.
Why did you NOT mention CHEETOS in the poem? Because I didn’t think of it! Genius suggestion!
Contact info?
bcrooker@ptd.net,
www.barbaracrooker.com
Anything you would like to add? I’ll let the poem speak for itself. . . .
Barbara Crooker’s poems have appeared in magazines such as The Green Mountains Review, Poet Lore, The Potomac Review, The Hollins Critic, The Christian Science Monitor, Smartish Pace, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, The Denver Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Poetry International, The Christian Century, America, and anthologies such as The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Good Poems for Hard Times (Garrison Keillor, editor), and Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania. She is the recipient of the Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the “April Is the Cruelest Month” Award from Poets & Writers, the New Millenium Writing’s Y2K competition, the 1997 Karamu Poetry Award, and others, including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, eighteen residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; two residencies at the Moulin à Nef, Auvillar, France; and two residencies at The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. A forty-four time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and five time nominee for Best of the Net, she was nominated for the 1997 Grammy Awards for her part in the audio version of the popular anthology, Grow Old Along With Me—The Best is Yet to Be (Papier Mache Press). Her books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance (Word Press 2008), which won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; More (C&R Press 2010); Gold (Cascade Books, a division of Wipf and Stock, in their Poeima Poetry Series, 2013); Small Rain (Purple Flag, an imprint of the Virtual Artists Collective, 2014); Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015); Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017); and The Book of Kells (Cascade Books, a division of Wipf and Stock, in their Poeima Poetry Series, 2019). Her poetry has been read on the BBC, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company), and by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac, and in Ted Kooser’s column, American Life in Poetry. She has read her poems in the Poetry at Noon series at the Library of Congress, in Auvillar, France, at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the SoCal Poetry Festival, the Festival of Faith and Writing, Poetry by the Sea, and in many other venues.
www.barbaracrooker.com
http://graysonbooks.com/index.html
http://thirdworldpressfoundation.com/books/not-our-president