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? The poem began as an exploration of a friend’s preoccupation with a relationship of which he was never able to let go even though it ended years ago. I was fascinated by the intensity of obsession over a lost love and the devotion he put into holding on to it. Although the poem was originally written in the 3rd person, after a dozen or so drafts, I realized that I couldn’t get close enough to the psychic state I was trying to capture and decided to see what would happen if I shifted to 1st person. My husband and I have been together for forty years and trying to access the emotional undercurrent was an on-going exercise in contemplating my friend’s suffering. I looked back over my life to remember, in a more palpable way, how wrenching it’s been when I’ve lost an intimate relationship and then tried to imagine where I’d be if I had never been able to find release from those thought patterns.
From the beginning, I knew that I wanted to strip the poem of narrative content but provide only enough detail for the reader to follow the arc of the poem. I wanted to protect my friend’s privacy, although as time went on, I realized that what had started as a poem imagining one person’s story had morphed into a poem about the universality of this experience for anyone who has had difficulty letting go of a previous relationship.
It would be impossible to go through the step-by-step process of writing the poem since I’ve revised the poem two dozen times or more and have even lost track of some of the drafts. The process overall, however, has been one of deepening, focusing, distilling, and sometimes amplifying. I got together with two poet friends to share a poem in progress, and that discussion led me to re-look at the arrangement of a few of the sections, which led to more sections, more rearrangements. Aside from that, I’ve simply tried to follow the flow and progress of the poem instinctively. Earlier this year when I came back to it after 7 or 8 months, I realized that my treatment of the poem was not so different than my friend’s preoccupation, i.e., as long as you continue adding fuel to the fire, the fire will simply keep burning.
Where were you when you started to write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. The idea for the poem began in Los Angeles when I was visiting my daughter for Christmas. Her husband had built a cozy fire, and as I was happily ensconced with loved ones all around me, I thought of my friend who was spending Christmas alone. The image of the fire was forever paired with the poem that was to come. I did not begin writing the poem there and didn’t even know that there was a poem to be written, but after I returned home to Minnesota, a poem started to coalesce a couple of months later.
My writing space is in my living room, and the poem began on my sofa with a Burmese cat on my lap and a Rhodesian Ridgeback at my side. The room is typical of our eclectic taste. Across from me is my husband’s grandfather’s leather Morris chair, flanked by a small marble table from India on one side and an antique, wooden, pedestal table on the other, which holds my mother’s photo, a brass clock, and a ruby-colored glass vase. The large picture window behind it looks out over several bird feeders, a stand of trees—black willow, plum, pine, poplar. The room has a television and a sound system on one end and on the other, my desk, which is always overrun with books and papers and files, as well as a desktop computer across from it. On the northern end of the room is a fireplace flanked on either side by shelves of poetry books. In addition, the room is scattered with items my husband and I brought home from our travels—a wooden bowl from Australia, a “Saturday” Buddha from Thailand, a beaded jaguar from Mexico, a multi-colored wooden statue of a woman holding a condor on her arm from Peru as well as a thangka of Vajrasattva, a painting my Bhutanese son did of Avalokiteśvara, the thousand-armed god of compassion, a seven-metal singing bowl, and an exceptional Kālachakra mandala.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? I began the poem in February or March of 2016.
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? As I stated earlier, I have done at least two dozen revisions of this poem and acknowledge that this may not be the final version. I do, however, consider it as my most recent final draft. As Ellen Bryant Voigt famously said, “It’s all a draft until you die.”
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? Here is a section that was abandoned about a quarter of the way through the revision process:
torpid
till hot metal holds it
Perseus’s shield
and the scissors that flew
straight toward the buckler
it’s a fairy tale
forged in childhood
it’s the story of the hero
clipping Eros’s wings
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? Two quotations could serve as epigraphs to this poem:
- This heart which like a covered flame
sings as it is consumed . . .
–Paul-Jean Toulet
- To make it burn, you have to throw yourself in . . .
–Galway Kinnell
Which part of the poem was the most emotional for you to write and why? The penultimate section, beginning with “when vision dances like a human flame,” was the most moving as well as the most satisfying section for me to write.
There is a classical Tantric practice that rehearses the burning away of one’s constructed sense of self, and it was this practice that inspired me and allowed me to find a way out of the poem that felt satisfying to me. The act of leaping into the fire motivated me to imagine a release from suffering for the narrator of the poem. Fixation on memory or on projections of the future or on stories we create about any given situation causes us unnecessary and overwhelming pain. The moment I was able to shift the fire from a largely hellish realm to one of surrender and compassion provided welcome relief and a sense of catharsis for me.
https://viewonbuddhism.org/tantra_practice.html
Has the poem been published before? And if so where? The poem is unpublished.
