What is your first memory of writing poetry? I didn’t write poetry until I was in college. I kind of hated poetry for a long time. I had a really awesome Creative Writing teacher at Alabama who got me into it. She was fantastic: Molly Brayman.
https://www.facebook.com/molly.brayman
When did you know you were a poet? I thought that Creative Writing class (Molly Brayman as teacher) was just an easy grade, but we started off reading poetry that had been published that same month, and it blew my mind.
High school had only exposed me to Donne and Shakespeare and Milton and, while there’s nothing wrong with those guys at all, it is really difficult for a high school student to embrace poetry when the only stuff she or he sees are these untouchable dusty masterpieces. Contemporary poetry should be interspersed with that stuff, too
.How was the poem “BODY OF FDR” first conceived in your brain? For whatever reason, Presidents have always fascinated me, and I can’t keep them out of my poems. Both Roosevelts, Jackson, Nixon, Jefferson, and Taft have all appeared in poems. Each one was completely by accident.
Can you explain the process of writing “BODY OF FDR” from the moment you first conceived of it to the final product on paper? I think it started off with a throwaway line at one point– the dime across the floor. The rest of the poem just grew around that. There were easily 10 revisions mixed in.
Did you write the poem with pen and paper or directly onto the computer? I always start with paper and move to the screen for the second revision. There’s so much change that happens in that step. For whatever reason, that’s what has worked best for me.
Do you have a fascination with FDR? Absolutely. FDR may be my favorite President. The way he dealt with the media and Congress to how he presented himself to the American public. From the New Deal to the end of the War, there was so much going on.
What is your day-to-day routine when it comes to writing? If I spend less than an hour day writing, I feel like I failed. It doesn’t just have to be poetry, though. I just need to write. I have to be at a desk with no distractions. Jazz or classical music really work.
Editor Note:
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage on April 12, 1945 in Warm Springs, Georgia.
The next day, on April 13, 1945, a funeral train carried President Roosevelt’s body from Warm Springs, Georgia to Washington, D.C.
President Roosevelt’s body was embalmed, but with some difficulty: the morticians could barely inject the embalming fluid into his body because his arteries were so hard.
On April 14, 1945 President Roosevelt’s body was laid in
state in the East Room of the White House.
On April 15, 1945 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was buried in the garden of his estate Hyde Park, located on the Hudson River in New York.
This feature was first published on the Chris Rice Cooper Blog Spot Dot Com on April 15, 2014
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