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 began drafting this poem in my head, the yin and yang of it, while navigating a particularly beautiful but totally harrowing roadway, alone, in a country where I didn’t speak the language very well. I had spent two weeks at a writing retreat in a remote village in the Languedoc region of France, and chose a route back to Barcelona, where I started, a roadway that would take me along the coast, with a stop along the way. Somehow, I didn’t register that those thick RED lines on the printed map, and the name of the region, the Costa Brava, signaled more than just a scenic route from France into Spain. The name of this notorious and stunning roadway, one favored by intrepid cyclists, overlooking the Mediterranean, translates to mean “wild” or “rough coast,” and that pretty much describes this trip.
The hairpin turns, and dips, and slow, slow going, made me really take stock of my life, and account for how I spend time, of the physical space my body occupies, all of which later became the foundation of this poem, and later, my new book, Drive.
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https://www.grid-books.org/elaine-sexton
Travelling alone, for hours, where cell phone service was spotty, at best, I imagined how long it would take for someone to know I was missing if something happened to me. Or how I would be able to communicate. One sudden stop, or swerve off the road, in either direction, with no breakdown lane, could mean smashing into the inflexible rock face to one side, or a dramatic drop into the rugged rock-and-seascape below. This was going on in my head when a truck, about twenty cars in front of me, broke down, and both lanes of the two-lane roadway shut down for an unknowable amount of time. Someone was walking from car to car explaining, in French, what was going on. I pulled out my notebook and started to write. And the first words I wrote down were words I saw on the side of the truck ahead: “KAFKA TRANSPORT S.A.” When I found my way to the seedy town that appears at the end of the poem, the one “I backed/all the way down to,” I parked the tiny rental car, found a seat in a crowded café, and sketched out an accounting of where I was, how I got there, and the voices in my head that accompanied me.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. After that mid-trip pit stop, after the jack-knifed truck straightened out, I got back on the road and made my way into Spain. What looked like a short route, in terms of kilometers, was a much longer drive than I planned for, because of the winding roads. I was still a two-hours away from Cadaqués, and a modest hotel where I would spend a few nights. This town was famous for its proximity to Salvador Dalí’s birthplace and the museum he designed, and not far from Barcelona.
Click on the below link to visit Salvador Dali’s website
Exhausted, shattered, really, my body was buzzing from this experience and exposure to something I could only try to put into words. I spent a long night in a quiet restaurant re-reading and writing, and scratching things out, working from notes I started earlier in that café.
The next day, on the terrace of my hotel I typed up my notes on a small portable Hermes Rocket typewriter, one I schlepped all the way from New York to use on my writing retreat. I knew, in advance, I wouldn’t have easy access to a printer there, so my solution to be able to still work and revise on paper, was to type the poems I was working on the old-fashioned way, directly on paper. So the first full draft of this poem I typed out was by hand in my hotel room in the middle of the day, at noon, when my fellow guests would be less bothered by the sound. I revised early in the morning, and late at night, when typing and retyping would have been too rude. Later, back in New York, I transcribed these typewritten pages, revising and refining, in my usual way.
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’d completely forgotten, until you asked, and I looked back, that the original title for “Transport,” was “Kafka’s Transport.” Other than that, the most significant changes I made to this poem, in revision, were in the shape, deciding on stanzas, and the length of the lines.
While the accident of the truck and its name were the triggering events, I realized that keeping that company’s name, with its nod to the writer, while intriguing, would have been misleading. The transport, or transformation, that takes place in the poem was not Kafka’s as that might suggest.
Click on the below link to visit Franz Kafka’s website
https://www.franzkafkaworld.com/en/
Originally, I tested the text out in several different shapes––first in couplets, then tercets, then trying out longer lines, then shorter ones. At one point I took all the line breaks out to see how the text might read as prose. Each time, shaping, really sculpting the lines. I cut, and refined, and re-chose a few words. So the revision was mostly trimming. And moving stanzas around. I settled on a shape that seemed to suit the movement between images and ideas, best, allowing the reader time to absorb and experience the road trip for themselves, and also in a way close to how I re-imagined and re-experienced it.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I’d like to think readers will be willing to go on this journey and maybe find themselves as a driver or passenger, recalling or planning a trip of their own, and asking their own questions about the choices they make in the process. “Transport” is the literal and figurative centerpiece of Drive. And, while not all the poems in the book take place in a car, or are about a road trip, or even driving, this one represents a kind of out of body experience. The poem asks the reader to go along for the ride.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional for you to write and why? Good question. The ecstatic part of the poem, really, in the writing of it, comes in that moment, sitting there in that seedy café, when it is clear to the driver that she hasn’t wrecked the car, in that moment she realizes that her trip isn’t ruined by the delay, that her body isn’t going to be found in the sea or on the rocks, that she is only able to see what she sees, and feel the “tangle” of what she has made of her life as keenly as she does, in this poem, because of the breakdowns that came before that moment, because of this bare-knuckles drive, her poor choice of roadways, the naïve idea that a clearly-marked rough drive could have been, would have been a pleasure, that was, then wasn’t, but, then, was.
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Has this poem been published? And if so where? “Transport,” is a long poem. I never tried to publish this in a journal after writing it. And, it didn’t seem to fit into the book I was working on, at the time, Prospect/Refuge, which came out in 2015, two years later. I set it aside, and only when this new book started to take shape, did I go back to it. And it turned out to be a poem, as I said, central to the shape of this fourth book. This poem has been waiting for just the right time and place to make an appearance. And here it is, nine years later, in Drive, just out this spring, 2022.
Click on the below link to purchase Drive from Amazon
Elaine Sexton’s fourth book of poetry is Drive (Grid Books, 2022). Her poems and reviews are frequently anthologized, and have appeared widely in journals, magazines, and sites including Five Points, Poetry, Plume, Poetry Daily, O! the Oprah Magazine, American Poetry Review, and Art in America. She teaches poetry and text and image at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute. elainesexton.org
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