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 is part of What Shot Did You Ever Take, the book of poems I co-wrote with Brian Oliu.
This book of poems is inspired by the Rocky series of movies. It was Brian’s idea to write poems about the movies because we’re both huge fans of the movies, and we’ve spent more than a few lunches and dinners talking about our favorite scenes or tropes from the series.
Our idea was to try to write a few poems about every movie. As the title says, this poem is about Rocky II, and one of the things I wanted to focus on was how Rocky II establishes a lot of the tropes and routines of the series. Rocky II is about repetition. The match is a rematch. The training montage becomes established as a necessary part of any Rocky movie.
However, Rocky II also establishes that the magic of the first movie is gone. In Rocky II, Rocky doesn’t want to fight again. Apollo only wants the rematch because he’s tired of receiving hate mail and accusations that he played along to make the white guy look good. It’s only the second movie in the series, but you can already see the main characters (Rocky, Apollo, and Adrian) are breaking or being broken by the thankless repetition of their lives. The daily grind of work. The daily grind of fighting.
I wanted to capture that in the poem. I wanted to capture that this movie isn’t about anything glamourous. It’s about being able to stand up one more time. I wanted to create the idea of the grinding repetition through the anaphora in the poem. The repeated “If” statements are meant to build on top of each other.
That’s also why I used the couplet form at the beginning of the poem. The couplets are a reference to the sequel, but couplets, by nature, are fragile. By the end of the poem, the couplets have been worn down to tercets. When I was working on the poem, I had George Herbert’s poem “Denial” in the back of my head. I often use that poem in classes to show how form can reflect the content of a poem. In “Denial,” Herbert breaks the rhyme scheme to show how the speaker’s harmony with God is broken, and the rhyme scheme cannot be healed until the speaker’s relationship with God is healed. In my poem, the fatigue has worn down the discipline of the poem. Whenever I change the stanza length in my poems, I want there to be a reason for it. Often, my stanza breaks reflect a certain turn or transition. But here, the transition from couplets to tercets was meant to show a breakdown.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50696/denial
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I started this poem during April 2019. Brian and I started working on these poems as a fun way to participate in National Poetry Month. I had never tried to do National Poetry Month. One of the best and worst things for me as a writer is that I’ve never needed prompts or schedules to keep me writing. It’s a good thing because I can write anywhere at any time if I want to. But it’s a bad thing because I can go months without writing and not feel any guilt or pressure about it. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, really.
When I started to write the poem, I was in a place where I was willing to experiment because I had the room to experiment. I was working with Brian, who’s a great friend, so I knew that our friendship wouldn’t be ruined if the project fizzled out or if we didn’t like the poems we put together. And I was in a place where I could afford to experiment with a poem and see what happened. I had just started my new teaching position, so I wasn’t chasing publications the way some of us have to to make sure we have publications in the right places before the next hiring cycle comes around. Writing about Rocky II was its own risk because some people think of the movies as just a string of cheesy cliches, and they are, but those cliches are successful because they speak to a lot of universal anxieties and pressures.
https://poets.org/national-poetry-month
That’s another reason I’m really happy that The Hunger Press was willing to take a chance on this poem and this book. It means a lot to know that there are publishers and presses that are willing to take chances on a book that some people might think of as lowbrow or too accessible to be considered literary.
https://www.thehungerjournal.com/store/what-shot
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? I can show you better than I can tell you (I love that silly phrase). In the pictures, you can see my handwritten first draft. For poetry, I always write the first draft by hand in a 70-sheet, college-ruled notebook. It’s the closest thing I have to a writing ritual. By the time I decide the poem is worth typing/revising, it becomes a second or third draft of the poem. In the pictures, you can see a few parentheses where I couldn’t decide on a word or phrase, but I didn’t want that to slow the process for me. For example, at the end of stanza four in the final draft of the poem, the god is a “blood-mad” god, but I wasn’t sure what type of god should be there in the initial draft. The form of the poem hadn’t been decided yet, either. Often, I can’t really feel the shape of a poem until I start to move it from the written draft to a typed draft.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I want readers to know that all of their interests are legitimate interests. I grew up on the Rocky movies. Rocky III is one of my favorite movies of all time because It has Rocky, Apollo, Hulk Hogan (as Thunderlips) and Mr. T (as Clubber Lang) in one movie. Who needs an Avengers movie when you have all of those guys in one movie? But really, I want readers to know that all of us are a nerd or superfan about something, and we don’t have to hide that when we come to the page.
Homer’s Iliad will always be my favorite piece of writing. The second poem I ever wrote was an extended metaphor about how I saw myself as Aeneas loitering in Carthage when I didn’t live up to my potential. I was 14 when I wrote that poem. I was a Trojan War junkie at 14, but I was also a professional wrestling junkie. I was also a Dragon Ball Z junkie. I was also a Gundam Wing junkie, but I didn’t think of those things as things that were meant to be the subjects or inspirations of poems. It took me a while to figure out that all of my interests could have a place in my writing, and I hope this poem, and the entire book, helps readers see how they can find creative inspiration from their own interests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? That probably goes back to stanza four. The stanza “If you haven’t reached over your lover’s dying body / to sign a contract with a blood-mad god” was inspired by some of the compromises and deals I had to make with myself and with the world when I had to cope with some of the people closest to me suffering from health problems. In Rocky II, Rocky tries to support his family with endorsement deals. He tries to support his family by working in a meat packing plant. Eventually, he has to go back to fighting to support his family even though he knows that fighting has already ruined his body. A lot of us ruin ourselves to support the people we love. The best parts of me are gone; I sold them off to help me support the people who needed my support more than I needed the best parts of me. The hardest part of that stanza doesn’t really relate to the imagery, the “lover’s dying body”; the hardest part of the stanza relates to the contract and the recognition and resignation that goes into the contract. A lot of us sign up for labor that we know is bad for us. A lot of us sign horrible contracts because the only thing worse than the contract is the prospect of life without what the contract can provide for us.
