Poet Q & A: Ada Limón on Sharks in the Rivers

Limón, Ada. Sharks in the Rivers. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2010.

As was the case with Trey Moody's Climate Reply, I asked Ada Limón, author of Sharks in the Rivers, to answer a few questions about the book we will be reading, as well as some questions about poetry and the writing of poetry in general. Below you will find her responses:

1) Tell us about when you first became interested in poetry. Who were your first poetic influences? When did you begin writing poetry? What do you think poetry does or can do for us today and does this differ from your earliest conceptions of what poetry is/does?

I first became interested in poetry when I was a kid, probably 8 or 9. I wrote songs all the time and fell in love with rhymes. Then, of course came many years of bad songs and bad poetry where I had no idea what I was doing, but I wanted very much to be doing something poetic. I began writing in earnest in college. I took three poetry workshops at the University of Washington and suddenly decided to become a poet. I was totally addicted. It was as if someone pointed out to me a trap door to a hidden city that I always suspected was there, but couldn’t quite find my way in. Once I found it, I never wanted to leave. I still don’t.

In the beginning, I thought poetry was a wonderful translation of the world. I had no idea that the power of it was in the mystery is held. When I first became good at “reading” poetry and therefore, “got” the meaning of many more poems, I fell into that familiar trap of solving poems. As if they were puzzles. Now, I find so much more joy in what cannot be figured out, or what can be read many ways. I find so much more delight and power in the mystery.

My first real poetic influences were Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Levine, and Sharon Olds. I read them all in high school and later, studied with both Levine and Olds in graduate school at New York University. It was a real gift to finally get to study with your poetic heroes. I was in awe, and completely over my head. I think that’s a good way to really start to learn the craft.

2) Give us some background on the creation, development, and gestation of Sharks in the Rivers. How does this collection differ from your previous collections or current projects?

Sharks in the Rivers was in the works for about four years before it was released by Milkweed Editions just one year ago. I spent a lot of time making sure this book, and each individual poem, was as solid, and as expansive, as possible. This book was different from the others in the sense that the poems needed to really speak to each other in order for the whole book to work. I wanted to work with repetition in a way that I hadn’t tried before. I wanted to focus on the natural imagery in with juxtaposition the man-made world. With this in mind, I was prepared to repeat many images, such as birds, fish, rivers, water, rocks, sharks, etc. Each poem had to be strong enough to hold up to the big bully of repeated lines, and the book as whole needed to feel like it had one big, powerful river was running through it, moving it forward.

3) What is your favorite or most memorable poem from the collection we're reading? What about the poem, its process, or its inspiration makes it particularly remarkable for you?

True confession: all the poems in the book are my favorite. I just need different ones at different times. I feel tremendously close to it. It was both a very personal process and a very alarmingly expansive process. The poem that feels like it’s the anchor, or crux, of the book is, “Fifteen Balls of Feathers.” I feel like this poem was unstoppable. And I mean that literally. I wrote it in one sitting, albeit, it was a 9 hour stint. Still, the words came, the images came, the story came, all of it in one frenzied and yet calculated wave. It was a remarkable personal event. I could barely move. It was the most marvelous torture I have ever experienced.

4) What was the most difficult poem for you to write? Why? How did you overcome or think through these challenges?

The most difficult poem for me was probably, “The Crossing,” and that has a lot to do with the fact that my step-mom was dying when I wrote it. It was a very honest poem about a very intimate moment between the two of us. She really did ask if I thought she would come back. She had only a few years left to live. It was hard to imagine that sort of long death. The kind you can attempt to prepare for, the wondering, the hoping, the questioning about what is next. The only way I could get through it was to focus on the rhythm and the structure of the poem, and in that way, the poem held me in its arms and made me keep going.

5) What, to your mind, is the overriding concern of Sharks in the Rivers? How do specific craft or poetic elements contribute to, intensify, or complicate to this concern?

The singular goal of all my work is to help people, and myself, constantly recommit to the world. To stay in it. To be in it. To rejoice in all its weird pain and weird happiness. I wanted Sharks in the Rivers to keep doing that, to keep pushing the idea of being open to the flood of everything that’s alive around us and in us. The river, the animals, all those images that repeat are trying to hammer in the idea of what we take in, all that is coming at us, how brilliant and how messy it all is. How, how we’re in the river together, it’s going to keep going, we’re just supposed to ride it as long as we can without letting go. No drowning allowed. You can go under, but you must come back. All our want and all our desire and all our agony are part of it, so we swallow it like water.

I never wanted to complicate the theme, I wanted to clarify it always, but sometimes the strange images that came to me had to be written just as they came, the demanded to be written as their true selves. Sharks are demanding. Fish are demanding. Birds are demanding. They want to be written right. Like love, and death, and all the big ticket stuff in between.

UPDATE: 09.16.11

In addition to re-writing the poems we worked on during our last class session, you are to write a 250 to 300 word prose meditation that will function as the first-draft of another poem. As I mentioned, after writing your prose, you are to read the Kinzie chapter titled "Syntax and Whole Meaning" before turning that prose into verse. To wit, you should focus on the manner in which line and syntax produce a tension between one another within a poem when employed effectively; or stated differently:

the line of verse cannot be discussed, let alone produced, without attention to the form of speech it contains. In fact, syntax—or the way the sentence is organized—is one necessary defining principle of the poetic line. All lines of verse either coincide with the phrase, clause, or sentence, or diverge from the phrase clause, or sentence, thus splitting the phrasal units and causing tension between line and syntax. (75)

Obviously, to understand how to produce tension (via coincidence or divergence), you'll need to comprehend what Kinzie means when she refers to the terms clause, phrase, and sentence (and each subsequent permutation or type of a sentence she writes about in the chapter).

Of course, a few cautionary words about the relation between line and syntax need to be re-stated. First, the "thresholds of invention in poetry are closely bound up with thematic suggestion"; in this sense, "form should follow theme" (87), at least while you're initially exploring the art of poetry. Second, remember that none of the techniques that Kinzie mentions in "Syntax and Whole Meaning" function or operate in one specific manner within all contexts. As she states late in the chapter: "None of these effects is univocal or unchanging" (107). Finally, when considering the use of syntax within a poem, using a variety of structures "can provide interest" for the reader by adding an element of "complexity" (108). Too rigidly adhering to a singular technique "can be...tiring" (93). It is important, as I mentioned before, to understand, at least conceptually, all the syntactical variants Kinzie outlines and have some sense of how they can intensify the thematic concerns of your work.

Please email me the second-draft of your newest poem no later than 10PM on Sunday, September 18th in addition to bringing a hard-copy to class. Also, be prepared to discuss in an in-depth and rigorous manner the Kinzie chapter we read. If you did not understand particular concepts, be prepared to ask highly-specific questions (i.e. No general questions or statements like: "I didn't understand what Kinzie was talking about.") during our Monday session.

Poet Q & A: Trey Moody on Climate Reply

Moody, Trey. Climate Reply. Tuscon, AZ: New Michigan Press, 2010.

I've asked the authors of each collection we will read this semester to answer a few general questions about their books in an effort to introduce us to their writing. Our first book, Climate Reply, was written by Trey Moody who, in addition to this collection, is the author of the forthcoming Once Was a Weather (Greying Ghost Press). His poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2009, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and Washington Square; his fiction is forthcoming in Sonora Review. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he co-curates The Clean Part Reading Series.

1) Tell us about when you first became interested in poetry. Who were your first poetic influences? When did you begin writing poetry? What do you think poetry does or can do for us today and does this differ from your earliest conceptions of what poetry is/does? etc.

I was in college, about 20, in my first creative writing workshop when I realized I enjoyed writing poetry—at that time much more than fiction or nonfiction. That year I remember being introduced to T. S. Eliot (particularly “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land”) and Ezra Pound (“In a Station of the Metro”), which were very different from my pre-conceived notions of poetry, as I hated reading anything, including poetry, before my second year of college. Thus the love story began, and continues. Although I couldn’t have articulated this then (I got a “B” in my first workshop), what first drew me to poetry such as this was how it taxed my imagination, forcing me to feel like I had never felt—that is to say, uncomfortable, wary, unsure of everything I had convinced myself I believed in. This isn’t so much specific to poetry but rather to all art, and for me it still holds true. As Emily Dickinson remarked: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

2) Give us some background on the creation, development, and gestation of Climate Reply. How does this collection differ from your previous collections or current projects? etc.

I don’t write book-length projects, which is to say I write mainly individual lyrics or shorter sequences. So Climate Reply really began to take shape after looking through some of my favorite poems I had written during MFA school and my first semester of PhD school. After messing with about six other sequences of the same manuscript for a year or two, I finally began recognizing some consistent themes in certain poems, culminating in the final version of the chapbook. So far, this process hasn’t changed in any significant way with other projects.

3) What is your favorite or most memorable poem from the collection we're reading? What about the poem, its process, or its inspiration makes it particularly remarkable for you?

My favorite poem is probably “We Use Spoons Mostly,” mostly because composing that poem—first a notebook entry, then multiple revisions on the computer—taught me many of the things I value in the poetry I’m still writing (and in the poetry I admire). Namely, letting what happens during the act of revision—literally or imaginatively—become a part of the poem.

The most memorable poem is “Climate Reply,” because it was the first time I felt like I had written a poem I would want to read. Here’s the original paragraph from which “Climate Reply” grew and took shape, in a tiny notebook of mine: “Weather as if to recite a speech. Weather as if to read a name. To ask a question, weather to ride the train, to feed the cats, to sleep. Weather to go inside, to weep.” In isolation, kind of awful, right? But like “We Use Spoons Mostly,” this poem, written years earlier, taught me more basic, yet valuable, lessons in regard to revision and the poem’s life.

4) What was the most difficult poem for you to write? Why? How did you overcome or think through these challenges?

Probably “A Feather Protruding from the Mouth.” This thing began as a prose poem, was revised and revised, then lineated, revised, revised, etc. I’m still not entirely happy with it, so I haven’t overcome any challenges, really. I like the “idea” in the poem more than I like the “experience” of the poem—to my mind, a sure recipe for a horrible poem. Hopefully the poem at least works in the context of its surrounding neighbors.

5) What, to your mind, is the overriding concern of Climate Reply? How do specific craft or poetic elements contribute to, intensify, or complicate to this concern?

In an email from a couple of years ago, your gifted teacher, Mr. Ware, put it better than I could have: “this manuscript explores the nature/culture binary and ways in which that binary crumbles when interrogated thoroughly.” The funny—and not-so-funny—thing about that email exchange is that at the time I hadn’t thought about Climate Reply in terms anywhere near as complex or well said as his. As for the second part of the question, I’d say precision—of the word, the line, the sentence, the image, everything—is the element that contributes most to this concern, for me. I want potential readers to be able to comprehend and enter the poem. I don’t want to scare them off right away. But honestly, no matter what I’m writing, I’m obsessed with precision (though, like anything, “precision” is problematic because it’s relative).

UPDATE: 09.01.11

As the previous post mentions, you will need to write a review of Trey Moody's Climate Reply for our next class session, which will be on September 12th. While you will want to address elements of craft and technique for the entire collection, I want all of you to particularly focus on individual poems. Below, I've created a list that assigns specific poems for each of you:

Miranada: "What We First Said"
Kelly: "The Listener, The Land"
Matthew Carter: "Climate Reply"
Matthew Chanlynn: "Dear, Ghosts (1 and 2)"
Kimberly: "Dear,Ghosts (3 and 4)"
Katlin: "This Forest Isn't a Room"
Samual and Alyssa: "The Book of Flattened Hands"
David: "One Question"
Taylor: "The Seating"
Jennifer: "Dear, Ghosts (5 and 6)"
Jessica: "Dear, Ghosts (7 and 8)"
Ashley: "We Didn't Believe"
Rachel: "Birdsong"
Hailey: "A Feather Protruding from the Mouth"
Lindsay: "Dear, Ghosts (9 and 10)"
Hanna: "Island of Sanity"
Luke: "We Used Spoons Mostly"
Joseph: "Remembering the Original"

Also, I want you all to come up with three questions about Trey Moody's Climate Reply, at least one of which addresses some element of poetics that we've read in Kinzie's A Poet's Guide to Poetry. While the other two can also derive from this source, you can ask more general questions about the his writing, if you wish, as well. Please, email me your question on or before Thursday, September 8th.

Finally, I'm adding an additional caveat to the composition process of your new poem for our upcoming class. Not only do I want you to write your first-draft as a 250 to 300 word prose meditation (although, if you'll remember, the revised and lineated second-draft is the version you'll be emailing to me), I want your poems to be composed in "the style of Trey Moody." Why, you may ask? As Kinzie writes, as a writer learning how to create poems, "Your goal should be to sound like others rather than create a completely original composition" (4); this need to create a poem that "sounds" like someone else's poetry derives from the fact that, especially as novice writers/poets, you need understand that a poem is not "a mere wildcat product of will, but rather a rescue, within the horizon suggested by convention, of a sequence of new turnings" (2). Or, as Kinzie states elsewhere: "Without tradition, there can be no sense of what the outer limit" (26). As such, think about the images you find within Climate Reply, as well as the line breaks, diction (i.e. word choice), and half-meanings.

UPDATE: 08.29.11

Now that we've read the introduction and first section in Kinzie's A Poet's Guide to Poetry, you should have some sense of what it takes to both begin a poem and think through some of the concepts behind line breaks, etc.

At this juncture, then, I want you to focus on four specific elements while you're composing your poems. First, as I mentioned during our first class session, you should be mindful of the fact that poetry uses "language--words and sentences," to the extent that "plots and ideas are produced by and constantly dependent on language" (8). As such, I want you to focus on the language that you employ within your poems, always placing primacy upon the sounds your piece makes instead of what it actually says. This does not mean that you should ignore aspects such as "plot and idea," but they should always be subservient to the auditory capacities of your poem.

Second, as Kinzie mentions, your poem's "mental and emotional content must depend on objective counters and local embodiments" (17). Stated differently, whatever abstract feelings or ideas your poem conveys should manifest themselves, primarily, within concrete language and images. To this extent, attempt, as much as possible, to ground your reader in sensory perceptions that are highly detailed and specific. The often employed example of image-use in modern poetry, one you may have read before, is William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow":

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

This is not to say that your writing has to be as sparse as Williams' poem, but your work should, first and foremost, deal directly with images. Another well-cited example is Ezra Pound's "In a station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in a crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The third consideration I want you to keep at the forefront of your minds while you compose your poems during the first portion of the semester is the manner in which line breaks function within your work, specifically with relation to half-meaning. How does the "radical splitting apart of phrases create provisional meanings in the orphaned line"(59)? Moreover, remember that "An enjambed lines always creates half-meaning in addition to the 'whole' meaning of the sentence." To this extent, you'll want to develop a nuanced system of tension and release with regard to line and syntax. Take, for example, the opening to "Right of Assembly (New Mexico, 1939)" by John Chavez, the entirety of which can be found online at the Notre Dame Review. Notice tension builds, then is released as line and syntax work with and against one another:

A pointillist canvas of waving grass,

each leaf, each man is a black, brown, or damp colored

overcoat, a flannel shirt

or double breasted suit, an indifferent

skyward or trained stare. From afar the crowd

of men shift to mimic a fist of clouds,

reveal Stalin, Roosevelt or Churchill’s steadfast bust,

the apparent disassembly of women.

Of the twelve in the crowd of hundreds,

I imagine one is the mother of two soon to be killed sons,

another becoming more and more spouseless

with the passing days. Still another,

What is important to remember, of course, is that "half-meaning, which introduces such an interesting threshold of uncertainty at which we waver, depends on a solid background of lines that assert more or less whole meanings. Constant use of tension leads in time to no tension" (61). Simply put: don't over use the enjambed line; let some lines end-stop so as to keep the poem most dynamic. Kinzie later refers to this technique (not just with line breaks, but with every aspect of the poem) as "juxtaposition" (65).

And finally, as both Kinzie states in her text, and I mentioned in the previous class session: "You are moving through uncertainties," or a text that is "not yet finished, still growing" (6). In other words, if you "know" what you're going to write before you start writing, your poem will necessarily be worse off for it. Make sure that the poem, both in its construction and in its final form, offers writer and reader alike an intensely surprising, uncertain, and mysterious experience.

I would also like you to pay close attention to the way Kinzie writes about poems. When writing about Trey Moody's Climate Reply for next class period, I want you to mimic Kinzie's engagement with other poets' poems. While there are a plethora of examples that can be found within the 75 pages we've already read, check out her analysis of Robert Frost's "On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep" on pages 21-23 and Robert Lowell's "Mr. Edwards and the Spider" on pages 60-62.

HOMEWORK: For next class (09.12.11), please have the rough draft of your second poem. From here on out, the first draft of every poem you write should be as follows: draft "a preliminary 250- to 300-word creative meditation in prose" (8), then revise, edit, pare-down, and lineate your writing into a second draft. While you should keep a record of every draft, it's just the second draft you'll need to send me the night before class. Additionally, you'll need to write a single-spaced, one-page response to Trey Moody's Climate Reply. I will assign each of you a specific poem for your response. When writing this piece, make sure you are engaging the poem with concepts we've read in Kinzie, quoting both the poem and Kinzie when appropriate.