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 worked on this poem for years. In writing poetry, I initially draft out ideas in a notebook. Then I transfer those to a computer where I do revisions, print a hard copy, revise with a pen, enter the revisions, print another hard copy. It can be a long process. And with this particular poem, there were so many charged elements – guns, homophobia, children, fear — and so many ways that I could make a misstep that it was difficult to sort out the tone and approach. I didn’t want to “make a point.” I didn’t want to pretend that I had an answer or even that I had fully processed the experience. I don’t write because I have “something to say.” Rather I write to record and consider and figure things out.
Click on the below link to view the photos and biographies of each of the 49 victims
https://people.com/crime/orlando-pulse-shooting-tributes-to-49-victims/
I worked on the poem for a while and felt that it had become too unwieldy and I wasn’t seeing it clearly, so I set it aside. A few years later, I began to put together a manuscript of poems about dance which came to be Bodies in Motion, (published by Press 53) and I knew that I wanted to include it. So, I returned to it. In the collection, it’s probably one of the first poems that I started and it was definitely one of the last to be finished. I was still making changes on the proofs that the publisher sent right before it went to press.
Click to pre-order Bodies In Motion from Press 53 available on April 14, 2022
https://www.press53.com/poetry-collections/bodies-in-motion-by-joseph-mills
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I write a great deal in coffeeshops, particularly the café in Whole Foods because it’s around the corner from my children’s school. I work for a couple hours before picking them up. The pandemic then changed this routine, so I ended up writing on picnic tables and park benches. I have an office at home, and I have an office where I teach. There are both good places to write emails, but not poems. Because I started this poem so long ago, I honestly can’t tell you exactly where I was, but the odds are pretty good I was at a coffeeshop table.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? April, 2017.
Click on the below link to visit Joseph Mills website
https://www.josephrobertmills.com/
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? This poem went through many drafts, and, as often happens with my work, it expanded and contracted. The initial draft was fewer than a dozen lines. In an early draft, I was connecting various shootings and also how news of them circulates so rapidly. With smart phones (or what are just phones now), information can’t be filtered out from our children, so there were the lines:
“... Once again she heard
about the shooting before I could tell her,
just like the year before when, as we walked the dog,
I had said gingerly, “Something has happened in Paris,”
and she had replied, “I know. It’s all over Instagram.”
Click on the below link to read Paris massacre: At least 128 killed in gunfire and blasts, French officials say
https://www.cnn.com/2015/11/13/world/paris-shooting/index.html
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? Ummmmmmm. I suspect some might be dissatisfied with my response to my children. They might know exactly what they would have done or said and what I should have done and said. Perhaps, they’ll think we shouldn’t have danced at all or they’ll be upset that I didn’t comfort or reassure or make it a “teaching/learning” moment. Kids so often want surety. They want to know, or at least they want to think that we know. And often we don’t — how do we explain hate and violence? – but we’re tempted to act as if we do. Most of us parent as best we can with many days and moments being improvised.
I’m not sure that I want readers to “take” anything from this poem or any of my work other than “life is complicated, isn’t it? Beautiful and complicated. And poetry, the reading and the writing of it, is one way to respond to it.”
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? Frankly the entire poem was a sorting through of emotions for me. To parent and to love is to be afraid. So many stories are Icarus/Daedelus stories. Most think of that narrative as a warning about flying too close to the sun, but it’s also a parenting story. Daedelus crafts the wings that help them both escape the labyrinth. What are we giving to our children that we think will liberate them, but that may also destroy them? Car keys? A passion that takes them to a dangerous venue? What will we regret? We cannot know the future.
Click on the below link to read The Icarus and Daedalus Full Story
https://www.rental-center-crete.com/blog/icarus-and-daedalus/
Has this poem been published? And if so where? It first appeared in Snapdragon: a Journal of Art and Healing. It’s also in my collection Bodies in Motion.
And in Bodies In Motion, published by Press 53.
Click to pre-order Bodies In Motion from Amazon available on April 14, 2022
A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds holds the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities and was honored with a 2017 UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. His work includes poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism. He has published seven volumes of poetry with Press 53: Bodies in Motion; Exit, pursued by a bear; This Miraculous Turning, Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet; Love and Other Collisions; Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers, and Somewhere During the Spin Cycle .
With his wife, Danielle Tarmey, he researched and wrote two editions of A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries (John F. Blair, Publisher). He has also edited a collection of film criticism entitled A Century of the Marx Brothers (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He won the 2017 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition sponsored by the North Carolina Writers Network for his essay, “On Hearing My Daughter Trying to Sing Dixie.” In 2015, he won the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for This Miraculous Turning.
He has degrees in literature from the University of Chicago (B.A.), the University of New Mexico (M.A.), and the University of California-Davis (Ph.D). As he was working on his third one, his mother asked, “Don’t you know that stuff yet?”
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