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 wrote the above sonnet, the fourth in my new chapbook, Hand Signs from Eternity’s Yurt, when, as usual, I was feeling frustrated by the workings of power in America.
Click on the link below to purchase Hand Sings from Eternity’s Yurt from Kelsay Books.
https://kelsaybooks.com/collections/all/hand-signs-from-eternity-s-yurt#MainContent
As you see, and in keeping with all the sonnets in the collection, it springs from a quotation by the British moral philosopher whom I very much admire, Mary Midgley. I view writing poetry as a kind of balancing act between recitation and resistance, music and meaning, singing and keening. Many of my poems are born from these sites of tension and possibility. I lean on other writers and thinkers to help shape my work, and I am pleased that I was able to bring Midgley into conversation with two of my most beloved thinkers and visionaries, Thomas Merton and Malcom X. I tried to do so in a playfully serious manner:
Click on the link below to view Mary Midgley argue that the self is not an illusion
Click on the link below to view Thomas Merton speak about his spiritual philosophy and prayer
Click on the link below to view an excerpt of Malcolm X’s final speech on February 14, 1965, at the Ford Auditorium in Detroit, Michigan. This was his last public appearance. One week later he was assassinated in Harlem, New York as he was preparing to give another speech.
It was fun to suggest the possibility of naming “each day Che” in honor of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, and I wanted to free myself, and by extension, all selves, by naming my “brand of brindled defiance Extreme Thomas Merton. Again, serious fun. I wanted to write a poem to help honor a righteous anger about the status quo, which traffics in so much cruelty. I wanted to reach out to honor others’ daily braveries. So, too, I wanted to sing about the healing properties of the sonnet itself, which feels simultaneously to me as if it is both activist and monastic.
Click on the link below to view Che Guevara’s Imperialism Speech on 1965
As Salman Rushdie describes it, A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. In this poem—and probably in all of my poems—I aimed to follow these recommendations
Click on the below link to view Salman Rushdie talk about what it means to being a writer.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I was sittingin my study looking out at a group of aspen trees. A stand or group of aspen trees is considered a singular organism with the main life force underground in the extensive root system. Aspen trees remind me of the fact that we are all one—a democracy of species, a series of interlinked and interdependent organisms. They remind me that the point of being an earthling is to care, to contemplate, to call out wrongs.
On the left wall of my study is a tapestry of photographs of all my relatives, living and dead. With every breath and poem, I hope to honor my ancestors, past, present and future.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I want readers to take from this poem whatever they find most soothing, enraging or enlarging. I want readers to know that I “christen the monk in [them] a peer outlaw.” I want them to know how much we all need each other, even in our monkish solitude, where we best consider how to navigate this difficult world, where we sit in quiet conversation with the situation of existence.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The anaphoric, or repeated lines that begin with “Because” build the most emotional power. The technique of anaphora is magical and powerful for how it builds a sense of tension and release. The best example of this is probably these lines:
. . . . Because vowels sip
blood just for the o’s in it.Because please just
put your cell phone into contemplative mode.
Because couplet is coup, the sonnet monastic.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? Again, this sonnet is the fourth in my new chapbook, Hand Signs from Eternity’s Yurt, released by Kelsay Books (June 2022).
Click on the below link to purchase Hand Signs from Eternity’s Yurt from Amazon.
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