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? I can’t go through the step-by-step process of writing the poem because writing is not a step-by-step process for me. It might be for some people but not me. As I remember, it took me a while to hit upon the idea that I was writing a poem that would be a sonnet, and a sonnet in which every line would end with “me” (or at least thirteen of the lines would). For me, writing is exploratory. I have no idea where a poem is going when I start it. If I’m lucky I have a whole line or possibly even a whole sentence. I write to discover what I have to say. During the process of writing that “what I have to say” usually begins to make itself known.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I wrote the poem in my writing studio, in the forest on the south slope of Moscow Mountain, in Latah County, not far from Moscow, Idaho, where the University of Idaho is located and from which I retired as a professor in 2016. The studio is small, 12 by 16 feet, wired but not plumbed. Heated with wood. Filled with books (about 3000 at last count). To the south I have a view of around a hundred miles. Close by I see deer, moose, bears, and all manner of other wild animals, especially birds. We live, my wife and I, among a remarkable population of birds. Thus, the title of my new book: The True Account of Myself as a Bird. It will be published by Penguin Random House in June, 2022.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? Sometime in April, 2019. I’m not sure of the exact date.
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? The opening four or five lines are original. Subsequent lines went through dozens of drafts. I number all my drafts, this poem went through 28.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I don’t have any requirements for readers beyond those I have for myself when I read the work of other writers. Attention, good will. Intelligence. But this is also a very serious poem, a very serious poem with a couple of jokes, or at least playful passages.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The poem, rather obviously, I think, is about a biopsy. Undergoing a biopsy, especially knowing what the results of such a procedure might mean—well, a lot of people have had this experience and I wish them all the best in the world. That said, poems may mean to provoke emotion (I don’t think there’s a higher aim for a poet than to aspire to break a reader’s heart, for example), but emotion doesn’t get the poem written. That takes skill, imagination, and resourcefulness. Or in James Joyce’s words, “silence, exile, cunning.” Writing well is hard work. Writing poetry well is crazy difficult. You have to take the art very seriously, but not yourself.
Then again, I am a cancer survivor. This poem is also autobiography.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? The poem was originally published in the December, 2019, issue of Poetry magazine.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine
The poem was published in The True Account of Myself as a Bird by Penguin Books which will bereleased on June 7, 2022. Available for pre order on Amazon.
It’s been picked up by a number of young people for memorization and recitation in the Poetry Out Loud competitions, and that fact delights me. Several of these recitations are on YouTube, if you search Robert Wrigley “figure.”
ROBERT WRIGLEY was born in 1951 in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up not far away in Collinsville, a coal mining town. He was the first member of his family to graduate from college and the first male in many generations–in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wales, and Germany–never to have worked in a coal mine. In 1971, with a draft lottery number of 66, he was inducted into the U.S. Army. After four months of training and duties, he successfully filed for discharge on the grounds of conscientious objection.
Wrigley attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana, where he studied with Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and John Haines. It was in Montana that he developed an abiding love for the western wilderness. He has lived and taught in Idaho since 1977 and is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho.
His collections of poetry include Box (Penguin, 2017); Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems (Penguin, 2013), winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award; Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010); Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (2006); Lives of the Animals (2003), winner of the Poets Prize; Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; and In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Nemerov’s Door, published by Tupelo Press.
Wrigley’s honors include the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, Poetry magazine’s Frederick Bock Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Celia B. Wagner Award, Poetry Northwest’s Theodore Roethke Award, and five Pushcart Prizes. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts. His poems have been widely anthologized, twice included in Best American Poetry, and featured on NPR’s “The Writer’s Almanac.” From 1986 to 1988, he served as Idaho Writer-in-Residence.
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